It is not a consumer show but a place where manufacturers, distributors and retailers can interact and thereafter socialise.
As you may know Steve Jackson Games is now handling cons and things for Issaries and they were there with a full rack of Hero Wars and SJG stuff.
Steve was nice enough to give me a big handful of free goodies including Barbarian Adventures, Orlanth is Dead and the Imperial Lunar Handbook Volume One.
They are a huge improvement in a lot of ways and that bodes well for the upcoming Hero Quest game which I think is due in the summer. I just wish they would not have split the promised books in two pieces of 72 pages each but done them as one 8.5"x11" book at 144 pages.
Having 144 pages of Sartar Rising in ONE volume would be the one way to really improve things.
I also hope the Glorantha background is a lot easier to reference next time and that maps are actually useful in HeroQuest. Explaining things to my players was a real bugger, especially for online games when my players were far away.
I think Steve Jackson can do a lot more with Hero Quest partnering with Issaries than Greg Stafford could do alone and I believe they will do it without sking Greg Stafford to compromise any of his vision. I suspect they will be very hands off.
It is Stev Jackson Games that owns Warehouse 23 as is now being discussed so they should have no trouble working hard to get you hooked up with products.
Back to GTS news...
This GAMA Trade Show was the biggest ever with DOUBLE the projected attendance. Everyone was swamped with retailers.
I gave away all 336 complimentary copies of Scared Stiff: The B-Movie Horror RPG that i had brought in the first 2 and 1/2 hours of the first day. That is 135 copies per hour.
Because i can be sure Steve gave Issaries its fair share of the action (having seen their table space breakdown), Hero Wars is now exposed to 1200 more retailer reps at 600+ more stores than it had been before.
My tabel at GTS 2001 was near Greg Stafford's and despite the really cool duck skull he had, there just wasn't the attendance before that we had this year and there wasn't the retailer pull for his table that Steve Jackson gets.
I think when Hero Quest comes out in afew months or so we are going to see a lot of the mistakes of the past undone and a much healthier (if still niche) audience out there for Glorantha.
In addition to my own stuff (find it at www.playbmovie.com) I do plan to do freelance work and Hero Quest is one game that would be a bloody pleasure for me to do work for because it is my all time favourite game (not including those I write personally).
I hope that calms some concerns everyone may have.
Mike Demetro, Owner, The Guildhall Press, Canada
www.guildhallpress.com owner_at_...
www.playbmovie.com www.trythegame.com
Game Publishers Association (2001 Comm. Dir.)
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