Gencon Wrap: Part II

From the Dealer Hall
One of the many things going on at each Gencon is showcasing the new products each game producer has been working on the previous 11 months. There are three companies whose work really impressed me this past year, Chaosium, Goodman Games and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. There are a lot of other good products and excellent companies doing very fine work in our hobby, but these three stand out in my mind this Gencon.
At last year's Gencon I learned that a struggling giant in the hobby, Chaosium, publisher of Call of Cthulhu, was being reorganized with the return of company founder, Greg Stafford, CoC author, Sandy Petersen, and the Moon Design staff including Rick Meints. With the death of Lynn Willis, Chaosium had struggled to deliver the 7th edition Call of Cthulhu game and really had little else going for them as a company. This year has seemed like a complete turn-around for Chaosium. Under new leadership the company finished CoC 7th and it is now in the backers hands as well as for sale at the con in several stylish formats. Mr. Stafford brought the RuneQuest name back under Chaosium and a very successful kickstarter allowed Chaosium to republish the classic 2nd edition of that game as well as many of the original supplements. I am generally not a kickstarter backer, so I don't know much about this process, but from what I observed, the new Chaosium crew has done an excellent job in this regard, delivering a quality product on time and with great communication all along the way. I did buy much of the newly published material which was available at Gencon. It's all top quality.
Goodman Games continues to offer a wide selection of old school themed gaming goodness and their production schedule is hard for even an avid collector to keep up with. New original modules for their excellent DungeonCrawl Classics appeared at the rate of nearly one a month, including specials for the holidays and Free RPG Day. A regular fanzine, several dice sets and other fun accessories were also produced this year. Goodman Games recently released a new edition of the DCC RPG rulebook with a selection of two different covers and they reprinted three more of the Judges Guild classics, Caverns of Thracia, Dark Tower and the Book of Treasure Maps. More Metamorphosis Alpha and an ultimate collection of Grimtooth's Traps printed in three different grades and no doubt I am still missing something. The folks at Goodman Games are amazing!
I am also amazed at the almost single-handed job James Edward Raggi IV does with his Lamentations of the Flame Princess imprint. I have been collecting LotFP product since the GrindHouse Edition and this year I was pleased to add The Cursed Chateau, England Upturn'd, World of the Lost and Two Towers to my collection. These are all new products keeping with the weird fantasy tradition LotFP is renowned for. Basically a one-man show, Mr. Raggi publishes a lot of quality material for his brand of weird old-school gaming and shows no sign of slowing down. The default setting for LotFP has shifted somewhat over the years from a more traditional medieval to a renaissance or early baroque setting (gunpowder) and maybe that has helped the line stay fresh.
I will finish this post with a brief aside. Mr. Raggi has printed two of  Zak Sabbath's (Smith) books in the past, Vornheim and A Red And Pleasant Land. Both are works of art and have been well received in the hobby (awards and all that). This year Mr. Sabbath joined with Patrick Stuart to produce The Maze of the Blue Medusa under their own Satyr Press. The book is a systemless dungeon combining the near boundless creative talents of the two authors and I am sure I will have more to say about it once I have read it through. Although he didn't print the book himself, Mr. Raggi offered it for sale at his booth this Gencon so that eager fans like myself might acquire a copy. Team-play is a good thing!