And I’m not kidding. On one hand I’m juggling teaching, some awesome freelance projects that I can’t talk about just yet, and a big piece of news that I’ll unleash in the near future. In the other I’ve got Neoncon and my wife’s Vegas birthday celebration this coming weekend. It’s an exciting time for this NeoGrog.
Because of that, I’m taking this week off…well from this site anyway. I’ll be back next week with news, stories, and game commentary. Until then, chew on these little nuggets and what they mean for the RPG industry.
- While some on EN World wonder whether or not there will be layoffs at WotC this December (ah…the one-year anniversary of my own WotC booting approaches! What should I do to celebrate?), Wizards hired a new marketing VP—Jerome Lalin who was the VP of Marketing at Turbine. For all my friends that work at WotC I hope this is the start of a robust hiring trend. Here’s to no one getting laid off over there!
- According to ICv2, D&D and Pathfinder were tied in the top RPG spot in Q3 2010. That’s huge! And it fits some anecdotal evidence I’ve seen locally. Personally, I love it. I worked on D&D and Pathfinder products that saw release in Q3 (Advanced Player’s Guide on the Pathfinder side, and the Dark Sun books, Tomb of Horrors, Demonomicon, and Psionic Power on the 4e side). It’s nice to see them well received, well-loved, and hopefully well-played. No edition wars folks—just play the game you love.
- Gamma World seems to be a big hit. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. I was going to playtest it for the first time the day I was laid off, and I’ve been too busy playing 1e D&D with a couple of groups to get a game together. I think I need to do that.
If you’re going to be at NeonCon, feel free to look me up. I’ll be doing a talk titled “The Two Rules of RPG Growth” on Friday at 11 a.m. in Montecristo 1, hanging out with other ex-WotC folks attending the show (T’ed Stark, Chris Pramas, Sean Reynolds, Stan!, and Owen Stephens) and probably causing trouble with Jason Bulmahn, the man with the RPG plan over at Paizo.
At least that’s what I will be doing when I’m not celebrating with my wife… oh and my mother-in-law.