GenCon50!(exclamation MARK) [Monday Meeting Notes]

Monday Meeting, News

This is going to be a short one, as this is very much a postGenCon, OMG I’m so tired but we had such a great convention, sort of post.

Kudos to our whole team: Magic Matt McElroy who coordinated the whole furshlinger thing, and Bouncy Bill Bodden who ran the booth, who both made this the most seamless and effective GenCon booth experience ever. Congrats to both of them for their efforts paying off!

Mike Hollywood pulled together our in-booth demos, and ran a bunch once he got there after his new day job, and I believe we had more demos than ever before. One of those doing demos was Naughty Neall Raemonn Price, who had an experience I suggested we share with all of you:

“The first hour at Gen Con in the exhibitor’s hall is an absolute madhouse. From somewhere in the swarm emerged a middle-aged gentleman and his two daughters, each in their very early teens. At length they told me about their characters and their experiences with Scion, but I couldn’t stay for a demo, so I asked they come back later that day. I missed my appointment with them, but they returned the next day and the day after until I finally had the time.

Seeing young players instantly pick up and grow excited by the possibilities of the system (“Dad! Rolling bad means you get Momentum! See, you’re helping the whole group!”) was immensely heartening. Both daughters demanded pictures with me and Scion posters and told me how much mythology (and myth fiction) they’d been reading just from playing Scion, and how their characters made them feel like true heroes in a world that badly needs heroism.

It struck me that, beyond anything else, this was why my colleagues and I make games – so we can see the sheer joy of players and how much our products change lives. As I’ve said to many of my colleagues, we sometimes have to be reminded that these aren’t just games – they’re an important means for people to speak to their own stories and their own lives, to have a safe place to explore a dangerous world. The demo I ran for that man and his daughters made the entire con for me.”

Also demoing in the booth was Fast Eddy Webb. The game he was demoing, Pugmire, also premiered as a physical book available to non-backers at GenCon50 and sold out mid-Friday, so we borrowed some more from our sales partners at Studio2, and I asked Lovely LisaT to Fedex me a case from home. We sold out both batches mid Saturday, and had to pull out our hidden stash for Sunday.

Which sold out.

Monica Valentinelli, Rollickin’ Rose Bailey, Mirthful Mike Chaney, and Impish Ian Watson were all instrumental in the long months of planning and creating the new backdrop, pins, brochures, and booth video, and much thanks goes to them.

Special thanks to Matthew Dawkins, Dixie Cochran, Danielle Lauzon Harper, and Meghan Fitzgerald, all of whom pitched in either at the booth and in panels, or both. You were all incredibly helpful! (That’s an exclamation mark there, Matthew tells me.)

Matthew could also be found next door to us at the WW booth where they were playtesting his latest work, the V5 Alpha Playtest also written by our friend Jason Andrew. We spent a lot of time sending interested playtesters over to them, chatting, and even squeezed a very interesting lunch meeting out of our respective crazy schedules. More on that in later weeks. Surprising no one, really, WW also announced that Mark Rein Hagen was joining the V5 team. Go get ’em, Mark! (That’s an exclamation mark-post-Mark).

And with that awful payoff to a joke set-up from this blog’s title, I leave you now. You’ll be hearing plenty more about all that happened at the con in the weeks to come.

Note that we are skipping the BLURBS! section this week as most of our creators were very busy at the convention. Keep an eye out for Wednesday when something will go on sale, like always. I’m just too tired to read my own notes and decipher what it is….