Let me give a more cheery perspective. After Fabian and his crew ran Tentacles brilliantly for more than a decade, Pittel and a new group now run the yearly Gloranthacon at Bacharach.
Neither Tentacles nor Eternal Con lost money, but there are some important reasons why:
1. Limit your assumptions to how many people will attend, then build your costs accordingly. If you think you can get 120 people to a North American con, then budget for no more than that. And then find an accomodation that will hold them.
2. Cheap accomodations are better. Tentacles/Eternal Con is held at a youth hostel (that happens to be a castle on the Rhine). It is a good 45 minutes to an hour away from Frankfurt. Kraken was held in a relatively inexpensive old mansion (now convention center) in a very economically depressed rural area of Brandenburg.
3. Guests are a luxury unless they work for their status. Don't comp somebody to the Con just because they are a luminary of the Gloranthan community - make them work. And by work, I mean make them do something that brings people to the Con and keeps them entertained. Make them write a freeform, give multiple scenarios, and generally be at the beck and call of the Con committee. Otherwise they are a waste of money. For example, Eternal Con has no paid guests. Continuum's guests all work for their status.
4. Beer and food are important. Make sure people can easily get these two key components of a successful con. And onsite! Don't make people walk away from the Con location to get their food and booze.
Jeff
>
> Don't forget that conventions are, ultimately, a type of business venture. Someone has to put up money to get space, and hope that there will be sufficient paid attendance to recover the costs. The last NA Gloranthacon was in Toronto, because Jeff Kyer was willing to make it happen--but I'm pretty sure it was a non-trivial net loss for him.
>
> That was when Hero Wars was in print, and since then we've had HQ, HQ2, and the second age Runequest material, so one would hope that the pool of potential attendees has grown, and there may be locations with a better combination of facility costs and ease of attendance than Toronto, so I'm not saying that it is doomed to lose money....just that on top of the time commitment for the whole organizing committee, there is a financial commitment required as well.
>
> Good luck!
>
> --- In WorldofGlorantha_at_yahoogroups.com, "David" <millians.david@> wrote:
> >
> > I'd be happy to be part of any planning. I'm in Atlanta: big airport, lots of hotels....
> >
> > --- In WorldofGlorantha_at_yahoogroups.com, "Rick" <rmeints@> wrote:
> > >
> > > Based on the series of recent posts I feel this topic is worthy of its own thread with a much more precise subject line.
> > >
> > > For openers, the first step for getting the convention planning underway would be to get some volunteers to form an exploratory organizing committee. The committee can then start going through some initial discussion items like:
> > >
> > > Whether to be a program track at an existing convention or a stand-alone convention
> > > Where to hold the convention
> > > When to hold the convention
> > > How many attendees would we need to make it a success
> > >
> > > Most of my gloranthan convention experience has been with stand-alone Gloranthan conventions, like the various RQ/Gloranthacons in the US and Australia and with "gloranthan heavy" conventions like Convulsion/Continuum in the UK and Tentacles in Germany.
> > >
> > > Tentacles started out as a "German RQ Con" but over a decade it transformed quite successfully into a more general games convention with a heavy gloranthan and chaosium games focus. Eternalcon has pretty much continued that track of progression. Convulsion was basically a "UK Gloranthacon" when it started in 1992, but it too has transformed over the passing years into a more general games convention with a large gloranthan game track of events, and Continuum has continued that progression.
> > >
> > > Past RQ/Glorantha cons in the US/canada have largely stuck with a "95% glorantha" game focus, with the exception of Gloranthacon VII held in Los Angeles in 1998. That was the main time having the convention be program track at a larger games convention was tried that I know of. That approach had its good and bad points, but that was also 13 years ago, and many things in terms of conventions and gaming have probably changed since then.
> > >
> > > Without further digression on my part, is anyone interested in heading up the exploratory organizing committee for a future North American Gloranthacon?
> > >
> >
>