Hello,
a late night first report from Spiel Essen.

To start with something you all like to hear: We have sold about thirty units, and sold out one game line on day one. Mortal Coil was a quick success, but the numbers are stunted because about half of it was booth-monkey sales. We expect some more on-booth sales on the other game lines - don't despair.

The runner-up was Matt's Covenant, which gained greatly from the fact that he is on the fair himself. We were still getting up to speed with the demos and had some organizazional issues with stuff on the booth. Most of us do this for the very first time, so we're fairly sure the booth will not be a failure.

We already put some ideas on the table to improve the booth performance tomorrow (adopting games, better organization). More reports will follow.

OK,
this is the report from day two. We did reasonably well, although we had less sales than on thursday. We did quite alot demos - todays main seller was Universalis. As the number of visitors grew we had some people at the booth that were not directly coming for the forge booth, and we could sell Dawning Star two times today.

There were a few journalists at the booth who interviewed Frank and Matt - we'll see what comes of it. Hot seller today was the trusty Universalis - mainly to Agatha's brilliant demoing! This shows that it is really important to know the game you try to sell. All the others did great jobs at demoing and telling people about the games, so sales today weren't bad.

Historically, saturdays are the busiest days at Spiel Essen, so a preliminary report will follow tomorrow

We're excited about all this, but we want to get better.

oliof wrote:
and we could sell Dawning Star two times today.

oliof wrote:
To start with something you all like to hear: We have sold about thirty units, and sold out one game line on day one. Mortal Coil was a quick success, but the numbers are stunted because about half of it was booth-monkey sales.

Brennan: I saw two copies of 'Legends of Yore' on the fair today. But 32€ a copy seemed to expensive to me for it, no?

Justin: We really push for Dawning Star and sold at least one other copy today! We pitch this mainly to people who tell us they are more interested in D&D than 'those strange games' - which generally works.

Today, we had some more sales than on thursday, selling all of Universalis, and a lot of copies of Covenant. Having Matt to demo his own game was a great help in this! All in all we sold about 80 copies over all 13 games. We expect sales to be strong tomorrow as well, since some people announced they'd come visit the booth on the last day at the fair.

Go Harald!!

Wonderful news, everyone.

Best, Ron

Yeah, this is great! Next year I will definitely send more games. Since this is our first time out, I think everybody was pretty conservative.

Regarding The Legend of Yore: those are all used resales. I sent out some samples to European stores about nine years ago, so some are still kicking around over there.

It was good to put some faces to a few names of Forge regulars. The several times I passed the booth on Friday/Saturday it looked like you were all keeping busy.

Special thanks to Frank for demoing Sorcerer and Barbaren to me. I never did get round to the Covenant demo as Matt looked pretty busy. Hopefully I'll catch it at one of the UK cons.

Martin

So, the short sunday report -

We were quite busy as Martin wrote, even at the last day. We sold out Breaking the Ice in the first hour of the fair, and sold quite a number of other games as well. Frank will provide exact numbers within the week, I guess. In terms of absolute copies sold, Matt had a blast, taking only a handful of stock back home for DragonMeet (that's your chance, Martin!), and demoing the game to loads and loads of people.

We were all pretty tired on sunday, but the nice folks from PrO helped out demoing and selling games as if their lives depended on it. In the end, booth wrap up and cleaning the premises went very quick. We put a nice little cherry on the sales cake with booth monkey sales and a considerable stack of books Daniela and Yvonne took for the Stuttgart Book Fair and their special exhibition.

An indication of the booth's success is that we were already discussing several strategies to improve the booth next year. This is not to say we had a bad booth, it was quite good given the short time for setting up all this. But a lot of us did this the first time, so we lived and learned.

More details (and a photo reel) after some time of rest.

Regards,
    Harald

Yay!  Thanks very much for taking the time and effort to do this.

yrs--
--Ben

I've been at the booth as a customer on friday, and I also have a good impression of it. The booth monkeys did a pretty well job of demoing the games and answering questions about them.

About these journalists... Could you keep us informed if any media coverage comes up? I'd be very interested in what is said and written about the Forge booth in the media.

Hi Stefan! Pleasant surprise to see you (of all people) at the Forge! :-)

The booth was covered in the "Trommel" newsletter (fair special no. 4). I found it interesting that the Forge was referred to as "something similar to PrO". Anyhow, that's much better than "the home of GNS" when it comes to publicity in Germany. Next time, we should inform Dogio (the author of Trommel) before the fair about our booth number. That would serve to get some Trommel readers to the booth.

I also talked to a guy from RPG-Radio and gave a short interview. Let's see what comes of that.

- Frank

Actually, Stefan, I mistook you for the other Stefan S. from GroFaFo (Thalamus) who also was at the booth. It's not so surprising to see you here, but anyway, thanks for visiting our booth and also for buying!

- Frank

To clarify this topic, I'm Stefan (Skyrock).

Anyway, is this Trommel issue covering the Forge booth available somewhere on the web? I searched a bit, but the newest newsletters I could dig up at the official homepage were from 2005, while there seems to be no other place where these newsletters are hosted.

I'm also really looking forward to see (or better said, hear) the interview at RPG-Radio.

Here's the quote from Trommel "Messe Guide 4", dated 21 October 2006:

_____________________________________________________________________________
\_______________________ Projekt Odyssee & The Forge _______________________/

Diesmal gibt es einen Kombistand zweier sehr ähnlicher Projekte, die sich
beide um den Austausch von Rollenspielautoren, die gegenseitige Unterstützung
und alle anderen potentiellen Sorgen des schreibenden Sektors kümmern.
Während das Projekt Odyssee sicherlich für deutsche Autoren und Kleinverleger
der richtige Anlaufpunkt ist, stellt The Forge das englischsprachige Pendant
dazu dar.
Aus beiden Projekten sind vorzeigbare Produkte entstanden, an die sich wohl
kein etablierter Verlag herantrauen würde... mal abgesehen von Mario Truant
vielleicht ;)

Ein Blick auf den Stand lohnt sich also, denn hier liegen einige Regelwerke
zur Einsichtnahme und auch teilweise zum Kauf bereit. Exoten, die man auch
nicht unbedingt im Rollenspielladen nebenan findet...

In Halle 6, fragt Euch durch.

_____________________________________________________________________________
\________________ Barbaren! Das ultimative Macho Rollenspiel _______________/

Eines der Rollenspiele, die man beim Projekt Odyssee einsehen kann, kaufen
leider noch nicht, ist das satirische Barbaren! Rollenspiel. Halbnackte
Frauen und muskelbepackte Helden mit Lendenschurz ist garantiert - und einen
besonderen intellektuellen Anspruch hat das Spiel sicherlich auch nicht...
aber lustig zu lesen und vermutlich auch zu Spielen, wird es sein - nicht
nur für "Barbaren!"
Erscheinungstermin soll Sommer 2007 sein.

Cool :) Since I'm sure that non-German-speakers are also interested in what is said about the Forge booth, a rough translation of the relevant part:

_____________________________________________________________________________
\_______________________ Projekt Odyssee & The Forge _______________________/

This time there's a combinated booth of two very similar projects, which are both inclined in exchange among RPG authors, mutual support and all other potential sorrows of the writing sector.
While Projekt Odyssee surely is the right venue for German authors and small presses, The Forge is it's English speaking counterpart.
From both projects respectable products have originated, which no established press would touch... maybe except Mario Truant ;) [Note for foreigners: Mario Truant is a RPG press which among other things translated In Nomine]

So, a look at the booth is worthwile, since there lay out some rule books for inspection and partially for buying. Exots, which you won't necessarily find at the gaming store next door...

It's in hall 6, so ask for directions on site.

More when I have the chance, but for now, I think my main takeaways are:

The Pro Indie, GroFaFo and Projeckt Odysee folks are a wonderfully enthusiastic and friendly crowd. That enthusiasm really comes across and sells games. They also made me feel like one of the team instantly.

Spiel isn't GenCon, so needs a slightly different approach. However the same method holds up, if you can demo it, you can sell it.

Thursday and Friday were comparatively quiet (apparently a scheduling issue we had no control over). They did give us a good run up to get used to how things worked and adapt. Saturday and Sunday were manic.

Spiel is a great chance to make contacts who can promote your game later. I talked to one PDF distributor and a couple of e-zine folks, all positive contacts that I wouldn't have otherwise made.

We needed more chairs.

-Matt

Congrats on the Project Odyssee / Forge booth at Essen! Great people, great demos, great vibe!

As always, I'm here to supply photographic evidence:
http://madmoses.livejournal.com/121545.html

more photos here and there.

Still a little bit hoarse and tired, but full of fair fever (which, forgetunatly I can act out the next four days on South Germany's biggest game fair in Stuttgart).

Most of the previous impressions pretty much resemble my experience: with most of the people, we had a hard job to catch them at the booth, but when we had them, the demos worked out very good thanks to the excellent material. Great job! (by the way: is that stuff available for download somewhere?)

What I exspecially liked was the idea of letting several people share a character in the demo: you have to explain less things if only one sheet is on the table, and they the discussions of the players were great -- like different personalities in the head of the character.

One little anecdote: in the MLWM demo, there where three prepared characters. Once, I had five players, so two characters where played by two players. They decided quickly that the babbling genius was talking ot himself all the time (the Gollum thing), and the crippled musician were actually siamese twins which turned out to be utterly hilarious in game.

From my lessons learned, the ideal booth for next year would be part of a new indie-/small publishers rpg alley (together with Lodland, Degenesis, Opus Anima, Prost, ...), which share a common play ground of tables in the middle. A big banner tells something like "New rpgs: Come in and try out", there are grafic artists and authors signing their work, and all is in the heart of hall 6.

Just dreaming :-)

  Daniela

Congrats to you all - super work. You rock!

As regards to the sales, I really don't see why you should be dissatisfied, quite the contrary. I went to SPIEL two times with Unknown Armies / Degenesis, two established lines with a decent fan base,  and let me teel you this: we didn't do that much better. In fact I think these sales are pretty striking. It's a LOT more than I would have guessed, really. If you then consider the fact that you had a somewhat unfortunate placement obviously and also weren't listed in the directories, I think you should be slapping each other's backs like maniacs, because you clearly superceded everyone's expectations. Folks, this is great. NO ONE I know of sells hundreds, let alone thousands, of copies at SPIEL ,except maybe Fanpro and MAYBE Feder& Schwert, but I'd doubt even that. So: no monkeys, no cry.  You came, you saw, you sold - and well.

Thanks for the photographs. This one is my favorite:

http://pics.mausdompteur.de/main.php/v/spiel2006/RIMG0062.JPG.html

Sais it all.

Frank, that's a great photo! Can I ask who's running that demo? The woman in the middle on the far side of the table looking down at her supplies?

Paul

Yeah, that's Agatha. I was really surprised by how professional and energetic her work on all her games was. I had this MLwM demo that I thought was great, but she had just read it through and made her own in German. As I understood it, it was about a French Master who collected brains.