We’re recruiting GMs to run our games at conventions in 2011 and beyond!

I will personally be attending Dreamation and GenCon next year, along with NYC games event Recess (probably several of these, they hold about four a year). Other conventions local to me include DexCon and Ubercon, and I will likely run games at these events as well.

That said, Galileo Games currently has two games on the market, Mortal Coil and How We Came to Live Here, and several more coming out next year, beginning with Kingdom of Nothing and followed by Bulldogs! and two other projects not authored by me. Jeff Himmelman will be doing some duty at Dreamation and probably GenCon, but he and I can’t run five or more sessions per con, so other volunteers willing to help out are needed.

Also, if you are attending a convention that I’m not personally going to, I’d love to have you run some Galileo games there as well.

To that end, I’m starting a convention GM organization, or street team as Rob Bohl terms it (stealing a page from indie music acts). If you don’t own a copy of a game you’d like to run, it can be provided, and some convention scenarios will be made available on this site for each game. If you want to develop your own materials, that’s great! Share them with me and I will post them with appropriate credits here along with the stuff I generate.

When you run a game at a con, let me know if I’m not there. Members of the Galileo GM organization will get some premiums as a thank you just for them. This will include early access to preorders and limited editions, some premium freebies like t-shirts, jackets, and plushes as these are produced, and free supplemental products like the Mortal Coil campaign frames.

If you’d like to sign on, send me your e-mail and contact info, as well as what conventions you’re interested in attending. Also let me know what games you are familiar with and are willing to run.

I’m heading off to NeonCon this week! NeonCon runs from November 4th through November 7th in Las Vegas. If you are nearby, I recommend it. The organizers have set up a good thing, especially in the event track they are calling CreativeU.

CreativeU is a series of lectures and workshops designed for anyone trying to make something. It’s mostly aimed at authors and game designers, but there are several events for artists as well. This is a cool idea. I think it’s great to have this sort of professional conference for creative types, and the events all look really helpful.

I’m running a few myself.

On Friday, starting at 10:00 am, I’ve got the Tabletop RPG Design Workshop. This runs all day, until 5:00 pm (with breaks, of course). The goal of this workshop is to create  a full, playable game, from start to finish, by the participants. I will lead everyone step by step through the conception and design of a role-playing game in the style of the Game Chef contest. All participants will work together on the game during the session. We’ll see if we can get it completed in the allotted time!

On Saturday at 10:00 am, I’m running another event called Going from Draft to Print: Self-Publishing Your Manuscript. You’ve got a finished manuscript. Now what? Learn about the steps you need to take to self-publish your game or book, from editing, to art, to layout, to print production. I’ll give you a look under the hood at Galileo Games’ publication process and discuss budgeting, finding editors, artists, and layout designers, and knowing when to do something yourself and when you need someone else to do the job.

The final event is a presentation at 4:00 pm on Saturday. This one is called A Fantasy Heartbreaker Story – Turning Failure into Success. In 1996,I published myfirst game, The Legend of Yore. This game, my first foray into self-publishing, was a massive flop. Many other small publishers have made the same mistakes, but this terrible result did not drive him out of business. I’ll tell the story of this failure, and go on to discuss how to take a potentially fatal mistake and draw lessons for future success.

I’m really excited about all of these events, and I hope you will register if you are attending NeonCon. I also hope to squeeze some gaming in while I am there. I’ll be bringing my new Fiasco playset, The Jersey Side, so if you see me try to get in on a game.