The MACE Experience

I've just returned from my first Con experience as a dealer, and it's been an exausting but good time. I learned a lot, and it was definitely worth my time to go, especially in terms of meeting cool people. It was especially cool to meet the guys with Holistic Design, which publishes Fading Suns, and Ron and Veronica Blessing, who do 'The Game's the Thing', a well done podcast where they discuss new roleplaying games and interview their designers. Really interesting stuff, and they both turned out to be really cool people in person. (It turns out that Veronica and I share the hobby of staging epic battles with toy participants- only I made the participants myself)

And I learned what kinds of things are likely to sell. Since I am trying to wear both the hat of an artist, for the more elaborate sculptures, and the hat of the toymaker, for the simpler ones, this is probably the most important lesson of all for me.

I was able to donate a sculpture of Great Cthulhu to the charity auction (and the irony of using a cosmic evil to do good charity work has not escaped me) as well as a skeletal warrior to the World of Darkness LARP. Apparently he was used as the award for the 'Best Death'. Both are now in good homes.

This is my table- some figures that I am very proud of, and, to cover our bases, Angie painted some awesome dice boxes to go with some dice. These did well too. Angie's a beautiful painter. She's beautiful, and a painter. (A good one too!)

The only tragedy was that I was not able to play very much, since I was in the dealer's hall, and Angie was not able to either, since she was with the kids all day. I think we'll try bringing them again when at the kids are old enough to be participants in their own right. And that won't be too much longer- one of the DMs at MACE was a 9 year old girl, running a Fairy themed game. That's one awesome kid.

All that said, our kids still had a good time, and the MACE participants were very kind to them. One cool LARPer went so far as to accept a challenge from my daughter. (I should add that the boffer sword my girl is borrowing is by far the best made one I've ever seen. As soon as I track down some sort of link for the guy who made it, I'll post it, because he deserves some recognition. His stuff was amazing!) So my kids are definitely going to enjoy cons like these, once their attention spans stretch out to match the scopes of their imaginations.

MACE may have brought me some other interesting opportunities as well- I'll post about it if it materializes.

Next time I will be sure to give myself a chance to play.