The Travel Report

Well, my friends, I am finally home (for at least a few days) from the chaos of the last month and a half.

The end of July was ComicCon in San Diego, which is always nuts. 160,000 people crammed into downtown San Diego with probably a quarter of them all on the exhibitor hall floor at any given time. Don't dare try and stop to look at anything – you may end up consumed by the mob. That isn't to say I didn't succumb. Dan Brereton was there and I am a sucker for the Nocturnals, so he got a couple of my hard earned dollars. But that's not why I was there. I was there to have meetings to make a CthulhuTech comic book real. It looks like we will be doing comic books sometime next year, the only question being our publisher. We have options and are pushing to have more options, so we'll see.

Then the final chaos of switching from Mongoose to Catalyst and getting our butts to Gen Con. I barely had time to get all the demos put together, amongst the other stuff we had to have for promotion. One red-eye flight later and I was in Indianapolis helping Catalyst set up. I have to say, it's nice to meet the people you're in business with face to face. Everyone at Catalyst is delightful – I didn't meet single person on their crew that I didn't genuinely like. Plus, they do good business and had a hell of a booth and a hell of a show. I would like to especially thank Loren, David, and Heather for giving us such a wonderful new home (or as I put it in the new Core Book, for finding us still pretty after the divorce). But I digress.

True to their word, Catalyst had 100 copies each of the Core Book and Vade Mecum for the show. They look just the way I always wanted them to look. The hard-covers are beautiful, the binding is perfect, the paper stock is awesome, everything is perfectly color-corrected, and even the spine bands match (that little piece of fabric that protects the top and bottom of the spine in a hardcover, if you look right down on the book). If there hadn't have been so many people poking me or asking me what I thought, I probably would have cried. Then came the opening of the exhibit hall on Thursday. We'd agreed to hold back 10 of each for key opinion makers (distributors, retailers, reviewers, etc.), while selling 25 of each on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with the remaining 15 on Sunday. On Thursday, most people didn't know we were with Catalyst, but came to the booth seeking out Shadowrun or Battletech. Then they saw the giant CthulhuTech banner above the booth and went "Oh!" It took about an hour for Vade Mecum to sell out for the day and about 90 minutes for the Core Book. The other days it averaged about 20 minutes for Vade Mecum and about 40 minutes for the Core Book. Needless to say, the buying public and fans are more than happy with the new editions and buzz about Vade Mecum is great. We even ended up selling six of each of the books we had held back on Sunday, because demand was so high. I don't even want to speculate how many we could have sold if we'd had a full print run at the show, but it would have been a lot.

We ran a bunch of in-booth demos just designed to get you familiar with the IP and the rules and a series of short storytelling games on the normal gaming track. The events were great and people really enjoyed them. In fact, everyone who played either had already bought the book or was ready to go and buy the books once they'd played.

We also had our first CthulhuTech seminar called Strange Aeon Talk. We had about eight people, which from what I've been told is a stellar turn-out for a first year seminar. We talked about all kinds of stuff, got feedback for what we should be producing next, and even revealed some secrets from upcoming books. If you want to find out more about that, you'll have to check out our forums to talk to the guys that were there.

It was incredibly rewarding to talk to our fans. I've spent as much time as I've spent bringing CthulhuTech to life because I wanted to give the game enthusiast something to be excited about again. Talking to you guys and hearing what you think is vital to what I do. Seeing the smiles on your face and hearing your excitement is the reason why I do it.

And then I was home for a few days before I went to Burning Man, for the eighth time. Some of you may have seen the news reports – we got pelted with a couple brutal dust storms. I hit the first one after I'd just set up camp, while I hadn't slept in like two days, and it lasted for more than 12 hours gusting up to 60 mph. The second hit on Saturday morning, same speeds, longer hours. My girlfriend and I slept in our rented cargo van, and for the first time in almost a decade I really got that you can die out there. Seriously.

Now I'm home again, for at least a few more days, and I'm working out the product release schedule for the next 18 months. Catalyst is keen we create something real and stick to it, which is encouraging. I'm sure I'll be talking more about that in days to come.