It’s been a bit since GenCon closed off, and we want to cap off how grateful we are for such an awesome convention! Thank you to everyone who came by to the IGDN booth and said hi!
Here are some of our highlights:
Velvet Glove Sold Out!
Every year for GenCon we bring a game in ashcan form, meaning that it’s a playable, but not final, version of the game. In 2014, we brought Epyllion: the Drake Edition, and in 2015, we brought Cartel. This year, we brought the Notebook Edition of Sarah Richardson’s upcoming game, Velvet Glove.
As a brief summary: “Velvet Glove is a PbtA tabletop role-playing game where you play a teenage girl in a gang on the streets of 1970’s America. Take exploitation movies like Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! and Switchblade Sisters, plus a little exploration of coming-of-age movies like The Outsiders, add in a gender twist, and you get Velvet Glove.”
Everyone at Magpie knew Sarah had made something special from the get-go. The subject matter, the style, the ideas, the mechanics—all brilliantly assembled! So we were thrilled to be able to bring Velvet Glove to GenCon, especially in that awesome-looking book that Sarah put together.
But even so, none of us, Sarah least of all, expected to sell out every physical copy of the Velvet Glove: Notebook Edition that we brought to GenCon! We’re so grateful to everyone who bought a copy, and we’re so proud to have Sarah on Team Magpie!
For now, if you weren’t at GenCon, you can pick up a PDF of Velvet Glove: Notebook Edition on DTRPG , or a physical copy + pdf at our webstore , and keep your eyes peeled for more news about Velvet Glove down the line, daddi-o! (Sarah, did I use the slang right?)
Urban Shadows Won an ENnie!
Urban Shadows had been nominated for three ENnies—Best Game, Best Rules, and Product of the Year. It’s a cliche, but we were already pretty darn psyched to just be nominated—a big win for a smaller publisher like ours!
Ultimately, the Silver ENnie for Best Game went to the Feng Shui 2 Core Rulebook, and the Gold ENnie went to the Dragon Age Core Rulebook. The Silver and Gold ENnies for Product of the Year went to Curse of Strahd and Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook, respectively. All of those are awesome games/books, and you should check them out! Congratulations to all those awesome people at Atlas Games, Green Ronin Publishing, Wizards of the Coast, and Pelgrane Press!
But in the category of Best Rules, Urban Shadows won the Silver ENnie! We were so grateful for all the support of our fans, for everyone who played the game and voted for us in the ENnie polls! Mark Diaz Truman and Andrew Madeiros were rightfully incredibly proud of their work!
The Gold ENnie for Best Rules went to Feng Shui 2 Core Rulebook—a well-deserved win for Atlas Games! Seriously, you should check out that book! Congratulations to Feng Shui 2’s team, especially designer Robin D. Laws and developer Cam Banks!
Thank you again, to everyone who supported and voted for Urban Shadows. We couldn’t have made it here without you!
We Ran A Ton Of Games!
Thanks to a bevy of awesome GMs who came out to run for us, we managed to pull off 16 games across the length of the convention, ranging from Epyllion to Urban Shadows to Wicked Fate to Masks!
Huge thanks to every one of our GMs! Tara Zuber, Mike Myler, Charles Penn, Andrew Madeiros, Tracy Windeknecht, Todd Cash, and Michael Janney—you’re all amazing!
Here are some of our favorite highlights:
“In the first Masks game, they (Kid Awesome, an amnesiac named Reactor, an emo doomed character, and Protege the sidekick extraordinaire) chased around after Blood Opal, gradually stopping her from opening up portals to another world with a sword she stole from the museum. I think the high point there was when they visited an ancient chinese temple (talking to a dragon inside) and totally changed the life of the farmer who's land it was on. Ended with kaiju fight.” (Like it should.)
“The most fun scene for me during my session was the Hunter and Tainted teaming up to face a demon-blood-infused Vampire. It was a fun fusing of themes that brought them together in an unexpected way.”
“In the first Epyllion game, they explored an old bunker from the War of Shadows while a corrupted dragon locked them in. Inside they found terrible weapons, fantastic armor, wild animals and monsters (one kraken was still alive), solved clues, and managed to escape, confronting the older dragon and securing the bunker against any upcoming fights.”
“In the second Epyllion game...the Seer, in their backstory, had rollerskates built by the Crafter for each dragon in the clutch. This lead to the first instance of a library banning rollerskates inside. Then, a few members took up the sheep theme, with the Daredevil having valiantly killed one in her background, training on ‘Sheep Skull Mountain’ and ‘Cow Country’ as yet another dangerous area. Then they received their mission—the clutch had been sent off to collect a (hopefully) live specimen of the monsters known as sheep for study by an Elder librarian (for writing a book). Sailing toward the coast (where apparently a horde of sheep live), a few brave dragons captured a few sheep. On shaving them (having found from the scholar that they were more docile when shaved), they found that sheep had a mind link relating to exchanging wool or fur.” (And then it gets crazier from there...leading to what I understand was the beginning of a Sheep War.)
“In still another
Masks game, our heroes got into a squabble with an envoy of an incoming alien attack fleet—y’know, after they’d earlier destroyed one of these alien army’s ships, in direct contravention of Earth-Space protocol. Suffice to say, it led to them tearing open a portal in space, with a giant battleship on the other side and terrifying Zod-like Vanquish attacking...which they managed to stop via the use of the Nova’s Moment of Truth, a lot of lucky rolls, and action scenes which completely showed up the jerky Superman-alike.”
“In yet another Masks game, our heroes wound up splintering in anger at each other after they fought a bizarre monster, created out of a teenage bully imbued with nightmare magic. But ultimately, they managed to bring themselves back together in time to attack the evil, demonic Mayor in his own mansion, leading to an epic confrontation, another Moment of Truth, and a destroyed mansion (of course). All in all, well done.”
Thanks to everyone who played a Magpie game at GenCon, and thanks again to our awesome GMs!
We Sold a Ton of Games!
We had a whole bunch of books for sale at GenCon, including our hard copies of Epyllion, all three Chaos Worlds, Urban Shadows, two Fate Codex Anthologies, and of course, Velvet Glove! We loved meeting everyone who came into the booth and talking about games, and we wound up selling way more than we had hoped! Thank you all so much for your continued support! (And to everyone who came to the booth, saw a dragon plushie, wanted it so badly, but couldn’t quite convince themselves to pull the trigger—stay tuned!)
We Ate, Drank, and Slept Like Normal Human Beings!
Sometimes! Here and there! We managed to actually be human! This was a huge win for us! :)
One final time, thank you to everyone who made this GenCon so awesome—everyone who came to the booth, everyone who talked to us about games, everyone who ran or played in one of our games, everyone who congratulated us on the ENnie or on Velvet Glove’s awesome success—an absolute metric boatload of awesome people!
Thank you all so much! You’re the reasons we do this work!
