Anticip…ation

This month’s Director’s Briefing suggested that there could be special printed materials for the organised play games at GenCon, should the con go ahead.

I have been lurking on the fringes of many discord servers and the feeling is probably 50/50 that it won’t happen and equally 50/50 as to whether people will attend even if it does run.

I saw the build up to GaryCon and right now the build up to Con of Champions [CoC].

CoC is significant, Tabletop.events who is organising it provides all the software and support for many smaller cons and they are in trouble. CoC is a fund raising initiative to keep the company alive.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/con-of-champions

GenCon, is 80 days away. Is that a long time in pandemic terms? It is my guess that Americans will be free to go to a mass gathering in 80 day’s time, but there will be no exhibitors or visitors from Europe.

Indiana’s roadmap for reopening the state economy only extends to July 4th but it doesn’t seem to me that you could run a con under those guidelines.

https://backontrack.in.gov/files/BackOnTrack-IN_WhatsOpen-Closed-stage5.pdf

But the Good News Is…

The very idea that there could be something of RMu that is ready to ‘show and tell’ at a major con is great news. We have all been wildly speculating and my bet was for an RMu GMs screen. It would give the Con GMs all the updated tables in one place, and the outside is a great place to show off branding and art.

You can get a GM four-fold GM screen with full-colour inserts printed and under $30, including a profit margin if you put them on sale!

My mind is ever commercial. If I am right and the screen is the ‘special thing’ then I can see diehard RMu fans clamouring to get them. That on its own could start the RMu product line and feed funds into finishing the books.

Another interesting bit of positive news is that there have been so many posts on this blog since the lockdown has been going on that I have struggled to find a day when someone else hasn’t already posted something.

A thriving and active community is a good thing!

Last week I highlighted the ICE RPG discord server. At the time of writing it had 51 users. It now has 64. I am in the UK and I am used to discord being all tumbleweed and silence before midday and America wakes up. Even now there are 20 people online.

Yesterday, Terry Amthor joined the server!

If you have any time to kill, get on to discord and give it a try.

https://discord.gg/YBrepAB

4 Replies to “Anticip…ation”

  1. I’m not sure how much I can say, but I will stick to what was in the ICE briefing, since that is public knowledge: ICE is working on an RMU Convention/Preview package, that combines a condensed version of the basic RMU rules (enough to run a scenario) with a brief scenario itself. I know because I wrote the scenario.

    I plan to run this at GenCon, if GenCon happens. I know Tbigness was also planning to go to GenCon and run a scenario, though I believe he had a different one than me. All of that is up in the air of course due to the virus.

    One thing I am thinking though is that if GenCon doesn’t happen, I will run the scenario on a VTT, most likely Roll20 (since that is the one I am most familiar with). It might also be fun to run it for the RMBlog crowd — would anyone be interested in that? It would be very rough around the edges, since no VTT has an RMU character sheet, and my VTT skills are very basic because I have just started using Roll20 in the last couple of months. But if there is enough interest, it should not be very hard.

  2. Hey Hurin Glad to hear you got the same information that I got about the GenCon material. I had contact with Collin of ICE and provided my information and scenario to get something together for running it. I am on Discord ICERPGS and on Rolemaster Facebook Group to keep up with everything. Check it out, the link is on this Blog.

    1. Is that you Tbigness? Good to hear your scenario is shaping up. I just got up on Discord and am still figuring things out, but will check out the ICERPGS server soon. Thanks for the info!

  3. It’s too bad ICE doesn’t sponsor VTT play. Maybe in the form of some kind of coupon for VTT assets, or limited licenses to a given VTT. Never looked into it, and have no idea how the VTT providers would/could handle this kind of thing, but it’d be a cheap way to gin up interest. After all, VTT’s eat up Token packs like tabletop RPG games eat erasers. =D

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