Take the Rubies from the Demon's Eyes

Gen Con is, of course, massive--a brief Disneyland of gaming and of gamers.

However, if you ignore miniatures, boardgames, scenery shops, card game tournaments,"My other shirt is chainmail" merchshops and then run around just looking at and talking to people putting out tabletop RPGs, going to their parties and events, asking about their jobs, a strange thing quickly becomes clear:

While there is a pecking order in the industry, and there are people with and without power, and there are winners and losers, the actual aristocracy of the RPG industry (in addition to being demographically exactly what you'd expect) is:

-Tiny

-Slow

-Relatively powerless

and

-Not particularly internally cohesive

To take the Ennies as an example: Neither D&D nor Pathfinder got the most Ennies. Ken Hite and his co-writer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan won for Dracula Dossier--a sourcebook for a relatively unpopular game with by no means lavish production values or pictures. Why did it win? It's a smart concept, well-written, by a respected author. Next most Ennies was a tie between Robin Laws (for Greatest Hit Feng Shui getting a new edition) and us (with first-time publisher Satyr Press). Even the most bald-faced marketing-vulnerable fan vote award during a dramatic surge in D&D's popularity as a product recognizes that the mainstream is kinda meh. And the mainstream can't do anything about it.

Other indicators:

-There was not a single RPG bigwig I talked to who hadn't heard of Stacy's female-run auxiliary subCon, Contessa.

-Nobody this year has put out more extensively illustrated color RPGs than LotFP and Satyr.

-People working for the "larger" indies still had to reach out to people they barely knew to work their GenCon tables.

-Nobody with their name on anything is more than a degree of Kevin Bacon from anybody else.

-Freelancers working for major publishers kept saying they wished they could do the kind of stuff we do.

-Everything seriously competing with Maze had crews 3-4 times the size working on it.

-LotFP and Satyr are paying out-of-pocket and profiting off larger, more impressive products than shit more established companies have to run Kickstarters to put out.

-Magpie Games pissed off half the Indie establishment just before the con (including folks at the company that put out award-magnet Feng Shui) and still turned a tidy profit.

-I ran an ad hoc 9-person game of D&D for hours in a bar with the entirety of White Wolf's GenCon presence in attendance and happily rolling.

The bar for entry is as low as it's been since the wargame days, and DIY RPG output has never been better. In the past, I've pointed out that by DIYing it you can make more money than pretty much any RPG freelancer, right now I'm going to go farther:

If the DIY RPG scene wants to, in less than 5 years it can run this town.

Just by hanging out and talking games and not putting up with the usual bullshit, we have accidentally created a monster. We've always known we can out-write, out-design, and out-draw the mainstream, but what I'm telling you is folks like Stacy D and Kiel C and Raggi and Ken at Satyr are proving we can out-organize them and out-market them, too, and this pond is small enough that that's about all that matters. All the boxes are ticked.

The mainstream, with these full-timers whose lives depend on the next RPG paycheck, has dwindled down to such a consistent lowest-common-denominator aesthetic just to pay the bills it's getting sick of itself. Years chasing some elusive imaginary middlebrow customer have taken their toll on them. Yeah, they have licenses. And in 2016 that gets you fuck-all.

We can do this. There are three hurdles:

-You need to clear time on your calendar to make your thing.

-You need to coordinate with folks you probably already know or are 1 degree of Bacon away from to get the thing out there. Make sure it is written, illustrated and produced as well as can possibly be done. Do not half-ass any of those three elements.

-We all need to work together to recognize who is doing good work and cross-promote. Pool resources and exchange audiences.

Goodman Games, Mythmere, Hydra Collective, Lamentations, Gygax Magazine, Sine Nomine, people putting out indie products like Yoon-Suin, everybody: there is simply more substance and better, fresher, more excited personnel there than anywhere else.  The mainstream does not have the talent or the energy to get in your way.

D&D with Porn Stars will be throwing a party next Gen Con. It'll be big and it'll be loud and it'll be a year in the making and the paint will peel from the walls. If you can read this, you are invited. If you're going to put out a game thing, you're gonna show up and you're gonna help us. You have a year to plan.

The Bastille waits, and the guards are drunk.

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