Thick Skull Adventures at book signing

Posted by snake on Jul 10, 2011 in Inside the Thick Skull | 0 comments

Cat, Stephen and Tony

On July 9, 2011, we had the opportunity to do a promotional signing of the new adventure, “The Haunting of Larvik Island” at the Game Kastle in Santa Clara, CA. Game Kastle was holding one of their regular “Flea Market” events where folks come and sell old & new games, minifigs and other goodies; we setup a table to promote the new module. It was a really great experience and a great opportunity to meet with many of the local gaming fans here in San Jose/Santa Clara. It was a fun-filled day as friends, family and new fans came and met with us and learned about what we were doing.

There were several interesting tidbits about the day:

• Thick Skull Adventures in the same room – this was the first time that Cat, Stephen and Tony had actually been in the same room together since we started working on the module close to 18 months ago. I had worked with Tony exclusively through email, so it was especially nice to actually get to hang out as a team.
• In addition to being a fabulous graphic designer, Cat is also doing other types of media (check out Shut Your Five Hole for some more of her work ) so she created the “Haunting of Larvik Island” t-shirt you see me proudly wearing just for the event.
• Despite it being a “flea-market” event with folks looking for bargains, our booth received a good deal of traffic and there was plenty of interest in the module. Many of the folks I spoke to had not actually made the conversion to 4E Dungeons & Dragons  – many were still playing 3.5 and some were still playing AD&D.
• I met several other writers and designers that were hard at work at products of their own. They were all very curious as to my experiences going from concept to production with the adventure.
• As fate would have it, the car auto-body shop next door was having some sort of car auction on the same day. While this made parking for the event a bit of a hassle, it had the unexpected benefit of bringing a really tasty hot dog cart vendor into the parking lot! Everyone had “Jeannie’s Weenies” for lunch. (No, I’m not making that up.)
• Finally, while there was games of all types there at the flea market (D&D, Napoleonic minifig games, Carcassonne, etc.) if I had to guess what I saw was the most popular item being traded there (and again, I was busy with my activities so this is a very subjective opinion) I would have to say I saw more Warhammer 40K stuff being traded than anything else.