Gen Con Indy '04 Report

The big TGM news at Gen Con comes from the ENnie Award Ceremony. We were nominated in three categories and won awards in each.

Thieves' Quarter, the first book in our City Quarters series, won a gold award for Best Cartography (that'd be Christopher West's work) and a silver award for Best Setting Supplement, beaten only by Green Ronin's entry, Crooks for Mutants and Mastermind's Freedom City setting. If you'd like to get a copy of Thieves' Quarter, the PDF is still available on RPGNow.com and the print version can be found at most stores that carry Green Ronin's fantasy products, or on . JD and Christopher are currently working on the next book in the series, Temple Quarter.

Initiative Cards won a gold award as Best Free Product or Web Enhancement. We have modern and fantasy versions of the cards posted on our Freebies page, so you can try them out yourself if you still haven't seen them. The RPGA now uses these cards, too: They were printed up for the GMs in the Open at Gen Con.

We also ran a series of seminars over the 4-day weekend. "What I Learned at Wizards of the Coast", "Playtesting Professionally", "Starting an Electronic Publishing Company", and "Tools for d20 Design" were all updated versions of the well-attended seminars we held at Gen Con Indy '03. Aside from one scheduling snafu, all were well attended and feedback was good. We like to think this set of seminars can really help someone starting out in the hobby gaming industry, where most of the Mechanics have spent the last 10+ years.

We tried one new seminar this year: "Internet Piracy: Impact vs. Ethics". Steve Wieck (from DriveThruRPG.com) joined our panel on the "piracy is pretty bad" side, and Sean K. Reynolds (from SeanKReynolds.com) joined us on the "piracy isn't really bad" side. We had a broad audience, from admitted casual pirates to store owners who say they feel losses from piracy in their own stores. We really have to thank Steve and Sean for making the panel so good, especially Sean who basically roleplayed through most of the discussion, making an interesting argument from a side he only adopted after Steve's opening remarks. The important goal of the panel was to discuss the impact of piracy in our industry, and Steve and Sean were great at getting those views out. We also need to thank the attendees: Panels can be made or broken by the level and quality of the audience participation, and we thought this went very well.

In the showroom, the Green Ronin staff was really generous to us, letting us work out of their booth. Our books make up a small fraction of the Green Ronin catalog, yet they gave us table space to display our materials, talk to the crowd, review artist portfolios, and more. It seemed like a good show for them, and we're glad we could help at the booth and be a part of it. Our sincerest thanks go to Green Ronin for everything from helping us publish print versions of our books to being so generous to us at shows.

Finally, thanks to Peter Adkison, his Gen Con staff, and all the volunteers for another great show. We're really looking forward to Gen Con SoCal '04 and Indy '05.

We hope to see you there!