Thanks be to boxninja for snapping these photos of the IPR booth at GenCon 2009:





(Clickin' on 'em will get you biggers.)

EDIT: And some Hero 6th Edition stuff too. What's odd and wonderful about this is seeing physical manifestations of stuff I've worked on. (Steve Long hit the copy shop and got one-off printouts of the two books done up so folks can browse the new edition. Also, see the preorder CDs done up for the con!) These ones are thanks to gamera_spinning.

This is the front & back spread of flyer I did up for Hero Games at GenCon -- to be handed out by Hero GMs to their players, directing folks to the booth where they can preorder Hero 6th Edition and get the PDFs of the two books immediately on CD:

(clicky for the biggie)

We're pretty lazy here at the Hat, when it comes right down to it. Lazy -- and lucky. At many a convention, our games are represented not by Official Company Representatives, but instead by the fans. This is how we like it! (It's also more sustainable, and durable, in years like this one where finances and/or newborns are keeping most of us at home.)

If you're running an Evil Hat game at GenCon this year (or any other convention), we'd like to hear about it, so we can make sure other folks know to look for it as well. Comment here, and we can treat this post as a sort of "living bulletin board" of GenCon sessions of Evil Hat stuff.

Thanks!

My good buddy (longest-standing-gaming-friend) Matt Gandy is going to be running fully playable playtests of his game Seiyuu, a game that does for anime what Prime Time Adventures did for television, at GenCon. I've dipped my toe into the waters around his design a few times during its development, and he's got some interesting stuff going on there.

At any rate, he's taking "reservations" now so he can try to coordinate some times for folks while at GenCon. Here's the deets:

http://gandygames.com/blog/?p=21

Hello small press independent game publishers!

As I've noted before, Evil Hat is a sponsor of the Forge Booth this year, and we're looking to get folks signed up. Those sign-ups have been pretty anemic so far, though, and we'd like to see more.

Here's where the details are:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=26153.0

I know a bunch of y'all are striking out on your own in your own booths, and frankly more power to you if so. But for the rest of ya, in past years I have found the Forge booth to be a pretty economical way of finding a good presence at GenCon, in a way that gives me strong interactivity with my customers. Not to mention the degree to which you get a crash-course in running a solid booth demo is pretty indispensable.

What's most important about this is that the deadline for sign-ups is June 1st, a little over three weeks from now. So if you're interested, we need you to commit in May!

Come join us!

The Forge Booth is open for sign-ups for GenCon 2008. Evil Hat is one of the Primary Sponsors this year, though that'll mainly be my crew (Lenny, Rob, Chad) and less me, since I'll primarily be wearing my IPR hat and acting as the Advanced Brennan Substitute Mark VIII, what with Brennan not being able to attend.

Here are the details, according to Ron Edwards.

Hello,

Well, I ran a little bit behind schedule this year. Finally - here is the thread about signing up for the Forge booth this year.

1. The only eligible people are those who did this last year for the first time, and people who are doing it for the first time now. Actually, there are a couple of exceptions due to past investments, but that's not important for this thread.

2. Here's how it works, which is how it always worked. I and a few others have already secured a booth, which will serve both as the IPR store and as a promotion site for independent publishing - specifically your games. We've already paid for it. Publishers may then sign up as exhibitors, and be members of the booth. They will pay $65 for the badge fee, which goes straight to GenCon, and $125 or $250 to us, which helps offset the price of the booth. If it's your first time, it's the lower rate, and if it's your second, it's the higher.

3. Activities at the booth are mainly based on short promotional demos, more on the CCG model (a quick taste) than the traditional con scenario played over hours. Customers basically sit down and play, and then they buy stuff. All the publishers participate as well, and in many cases, they pick up enough to be able to demonstrate one another's games. (For instance, I often spend a full day demonstrating others' games, although that's a little extreme and not expected of others.) Every publisher should spend 1/2 the working day at the booth (10 to 6 the first three days, 10 to 4 on Sunday) as well as help to set up and clean up at start and end.

4. Arrival is a big deal. It's almost impossible to coordinate it precisely, but the basic fact is that we need as many people as possible to be there Wednesday afternoon, especially toward 4-6 PM, when certain heavy and crucial materials show up (shelves, flooring). You'll be able to pick up your badges at the Exhibitor Booth in the hall, to get in. I also suggest planning to stay through Monday morning, if you can, mainly because trying to check out on Sunday and still be an effective booth member is pretty hard.

5. Please do not register for GenCon. Do not register for GenCon. Doing so will result in a huge pain in the ass for me and also make the GenCon staff impatient with our whole endeavor.

6. The only way to sign up is to pay me, using Paypal, at sorcerer@sorcerer-rpg.com. If you're a really really nice person, then you'll put a teeny bit extra in to help offset Paypal's fee, but most people don't do that, so you don't actually have to. You do not have to tell me here that you're signing up or otherwise formalize things at all - the money will talk just fine.

7. Please keep the number of people minimal. If you have several people in your company, consider having only one be an actual exhibitor at the booth and the others simply sign up for GenCon as attendees. Spouses and best friends should not be exhibitors. So the fee is $65 per badge you're getting (I hope only one) and then either $125 or $250 as well. So let's say you actually have three people who are really and truly all part of the publishing company and everyone will just die if they're not full exhibitors at the booth - that'd be $195 for the three badges and $125 for the first-time buy-in, for a total of $320.

8. As far as hotel rooms go, your best bet is to have your friend or spouse or whoever secure a room as a regular GenCon attendee, and stay there. There really isn't much other option.

9. The deadline for signing up is June 1.

Other stuff that goes on - well, there's a lot, not necessarily all part of the Forge booth at this time, but having originated that way, and so the booth is still a hub of social networking and setting up games for the evenings. It's kind of a like an instant-community or perhaps theater troop type experience.

Questions? Questions! I know I probably missed about 100 key points, so let me know what you need to know.

Best, Ron

Respond to the above at the thread on the Forge if you're saying anything official, but I'm happy to yap about things conversationally here on this blog.

Some Dresden Files action is showing up on the GenCon 2008 Indie Games Explosion roster. I believe these are being run by none other than alpha playtester Scott Acker:

http://indiegamesexplosion.wordpress.com/

No, this does not mean that the DFRPG will be out for GenCon. See my State of the Hat posts to get a handle on how much is yet to be done. :)

Behold, An emergent history of the Forge Booth at GenCon.

(These are all from http://www.flickr.com/photos/8365266@N05/page42/ in case external links don't work.)

So, the Indie Games Passport event that I helped to produce was a big hit. We got a few hundred entries, I think, and even more consumption of the passport beyond that -- many of the passports I grabbed out of the box for the drawing also at least 9 or 10 of the 11 "full load" stamps, if not the full load.

Anyway, I'm reading through the GenCon Post-Mortem thread on the Forge, and here's some of my glowy bits vis a vis the passport:

Ron Edwards: "The real hero of this story is Fred Hicks. His Indie Passport was a dream come true - people seemd to think it was fun and tons of folks participated. The best thing, genius really, was that you only had to get one other booth stamp, not all of them. So it was transformed from annoying homework to "choose your own combo," and the net effect of course was for any one person to visit at least one more booth than they might have otherwise. Granted, a device of this kind will almost certainly include a few people showing up just for their stamp, and if that doesn't float a given person's boat on principle, that's how it is. But the genius feature I mentioned kept that to a minimum, and if one accepts that particular wrinkle, and observes that pound-for-pound, the Passport did drive sales and did build a better at-large understanding of what is happening here, then I think it can be called a success."

Gregor Hutton: "The Indie Passport was really useful to get people hooked up with where our booths were. The stamps were also really individual and cool, and that gave people a reason to go to the other booths too. The folks at Hollow Earth Expedition made me answer a question to get a stamp (which archetype from these 5 is your favourite) and I didn't mind that all. I thought that was a cool thing for other people to think about."

Justin Jacobson: "Passport was great. I think we can do a better job of incorporating it into the booth events. For example, maybe we could have a space on it for "bonus stamps". Since it's already a more-is-better proposition, we should figure out behavior we want to encourage and reward with a stamp. I also don't think we got the most functionality out of the well-designed menus either. I'd like to think of some way to incorporate them better. Maybe we could print up 20,000 more and stuff them in the swag bags? ;-)"