Books Almost in the USA and FnordCon5 Con Report

Just a few more miles…

Of course, the ship has been “almost there” for something like two days now, but

The official update says 5pm today, but we’ll see. I suspect that it both updates and slips late in real time. Even so: It’s right there!

FnordCon 5

This last weekend, I went down to Austin for FnordCon 5, the first live convention since the original one.

It was a very small show – I guess they had 50 to 55 folks registered.

Financials and Sales Activity

So let’s talk bottom line first, getting it out of the way.

It cost me about $650 for hotel and $350 for airfare. I probably spent another few hundred on shipping inventory down there, taxi/Uber, and a few meals.

I moved nearly $500 in product at the show, and $200 at the same time as the show, which may have been motivated by the grand re-opening sale (ending today!) or maybe “I don’t want to carry stuff home with me,” which given how heavy books are and how annoying traveling with overflow is, makes a lot of sense. There was one convention backer who traveled to and fro on a motorcycle, and he loved that he could by a “postcard” of his product at the con (more on that later) and have it shipped home to him.

So I wound up covering my hotel on sales from a mere 50 attendees, which in the grand scope of things is amazing. It bodes well for future FnordCons that are more thoroughly attended.

I was not terribly disappointed, as  my expectations were always “lose money.” In fact, this was the best sales performance of any convention I’ve ever attended.

The only “problem” I had was there’s just me. So when I was on a panel? No chance of sales. Running 5 hours worth of game, plus some prep time? No sales. Chatting with folks? No sales. Pee break?  You get it. So next time I really ought to recruit some help, and THAT means I need to do less ad-hoc work with stripe, though  with Square, and get my shopify store properly kitted up for online sales. There’s a point-of-sale device for it, and I’ll probably invest.

Panel!

I was on the RPG panel with Steve to kick off the show at 10am on Saturday. We both talked a bit about what was new with each company for a bit, and then opened it up to questions.

The panel is admittedly a bit of a blur. And it was COLD. They cranked up the AC in anticipation of body heat and this was the first event of the day, which is why I’m all huddled up in my fleece hoodie sweatshirt in the image. We talked about the importance of Kickstarter as a marketing and demand aggregator, with both companies having tried bypassing that vector with much less success than using it. We talked a bit about the process of creating games, and the sort of games that do well. I made a casual comment that SJ insisted I expand into a Hexagram article, so I wound up getting homework. Also discussed writing for games, the difference in writing game notes and games for publication, and the importance of making commercial products portable to any campaign, not just your own. That sort of panel discussion is my preferred format for interacting with folks. I love it, and would happily spend an entire day doing it.

MeatGrinder Sessions

I was not as well prepared heading into the Con as I’d have liked. I spent three hours at night, and two or three hours starting at 6am on Saturday, making pre-generated characters using Delvers to Grow and GURPS Character Sheet at 125 points so that folks could just sit down and play. I made maybe 30 characters in that time, an average of five or six per hour, meaning 10-15 minutes per character. That was on a laptop, too, so “click and drag” had to deal with a very recalcitrant touchpad and reduced monitor space, which legit slowed things down.

With some trepidation, I was going to run a Meatgrinder based on the siege of Skogurenda from Forest’s End. If you followed the Delvers Kickstarter, you’ll know that Exxar, who runs Lair of the Chaotic GM and is one of my Patreon subscribers, did some blind-testing for me with that same format. It was going to be theater of the mind, though, as I didn’t have any maps.

But when I walked into the game area, I saw this:

And all my careful and panicked thought went right out the window. Phil Reed had printed out some of the new HexScape 3D terrain. There’s also a bridge, a totally-not-Barad-Dur tower, and a pool with a skeleton in it. So…instantly I decided to scrap my plans and just fight on the terrain.

The first session was just a free-for-all. I sent them mostly against demons, starting with a few cultists and braðnuðu “melted people,” then some mantis demons. But I decided that the melted people were going to fling Demon Shot (from Dragons of Rosgarth), and when one landed THREE fiendlings popped out from each stone. In my past – and legit vs high-point delvers rather than 125-point journeymen – fiendlings were annoying speed bumps.

Um, no. That’s not how it worked out. They dogpiled. They are SM -3 so harder to hit. And they have a spiny punch and spiny grapple that does 1d (10). They absolutely murderated a few of the characters, though there was some very interesting back-and-forth as folks killed grappling-my-friend fiendlings, which had the side effect of reducing Control Points on the party member, which led to more ability to defend, etc. But I did not appreciate how a few of those guys, in close combat, would just shred lower-level party members. Basically it’s at least 1d injury per fiendling per turn due to their pointy spines, and that adds up fast. You have to either not let them grapple (party figured that out real fast) or have friends about to cut them off of you. They’re strong, too…annoyingly so (ST 12), so they’re not just slap-and-gone.

Some fun highlights included the scout (played by the young lady on the lower left of the image above, who also played with me in the first FnordCon) basically killing anything she shot at, earning her the nickname Dama Eittskot (Lady Oneshot). Also, the bard had bagpipes, which led to a imitation bagpipe duet. It was as bad in person as it probably would have been on the battlefield.

That pose was an old thing from camp: “McKinney is dead and McCormack don’t know it; McCormack is dead and McKinney don’t know it; they both are dead; and they’re lying in bed; and neither one knows that the other is dead!”

The second I knew more what I was doing (sort of), and so I rescoped it. The goal was to get off the map, starting on the other side and moving to the area where Game 1 started. If you did, you got to start over with a new character on the far end, goal to get as many out as possible.

I put them against a vaettr (wight) and about six vaettrhrogn (wight-spawn, or zombies) to start…and that was overmatch. The wight-spawn had always been speed-bumps for me in the past, but 125-points are not 250-points, and it really matters if you’re a thief, cleric, and wizard when it comes to foes that are usually destroyed by whacking the heck out of them. I also put a Eðlufolk Monitor (combat lacrosse, or staff-slinger) on Barad Dur, and that guy was BRUTAL. He probably killed 3-4 characters with 2d piercing shots to the torso and no one really made a concentrated effort to remove the harassing fire.

Eventually they fought off the wightspawn, and then it was lizard-folk warriors, which were easier foes.

The sessions were 2.5 hours, and in the end, the thief used Forced Entry to kick in the door at the bottom of the tower, run up the stairs, and critically succeeded a slam roll, shouldering the Monitor off the tower and Willhelm-screaming him to his death.

We ended there.

Other Highlights

Ate dinner on Day 1 with two old friends from Rice; Steve is also a Rice alum and he was delighted to find three others in the room, and was similarly amused that I had fond and personal memories of Denis Huston, who absolutely ruined movies for me for all time by noting that nothing appears on screen (except the occasional blooper) without the director of the film putting it there. This was in response to a RPG panel discussion on foreshadowing and doing non-combat challenges while eschewing railroading.

Also had dinner with Steve and John Kovalic at a lovely sushi restaurant. I had a salmon teriyaki bento box, we shared calamari, and some sake with what tasted like a bit of peppery flavor. I also got to ride in Steve’s Model S Tesla, license plate “FNORD,” or I think it was. Might not have been. It’s a bit blurry in my mind with the Orbital Lasers running interference.

Overall, there needed to be about two more of me to constantly mind the store, play games, and do panels.

The good times I had with the folks in my two game sessions were excellent, and I met some forumites, kickstarter backers, and old friends, which is really the point.