In Part 2, I continue my Q&A with Daniel Brakhage, company president of Tabletop Adventures, and Vicki Potter, their senior editor:
William: When deciding what new products to publish, what kinds of criteria do you use?
Tabletop Adventures: Our main focus is products to aid Game Masters in preparing and running games for their friends. Our “target customer” is a Game Master who still wants to participate in RPGs but has a job and/or a family, and no longer has as much time available for gaming as he or she did in prior years. We want to publish products that will be useful to many GMs, especially by saving them time in making preparations, adding creativity when the GMs may not have time to do that themselves, or by making things easier for them when they are actually running a game. We call this “Help for the Harried Game Master.”
William: Art is a big part of most games, especially for the cover. Do you have staff artists that work on your games, or do you hire freelancers to create art for a particular title?
Tabletop Adventures: We hire freelance artists for our work, both for cover artwork and for interior illustrations. When we find artists who are creative, skilled, reliable, and with whom we are able to communicate well, we give them preference in our art decisions. We have worked with artists from as far away as Madrid, Spain, and as close to home as Kansas City.
William: Tabletop Adventures is active on the convention circuit. What are some of the conventions your company will be attending in the coming months?
Tabletop Adventures: The next convention we will be attending will be the Kansas City Game Fair, Nov. 19-22 at the Intrigue Park Place Hotel. We’re excited about this new convention, which is the joint effort of several existing groups, and are looking forward to being a vendor at the convention and running several game sessions of our Against the Darkness horror game. At the beginning of October we attended Nuke-Con in Omaha/Council Bluffs, and we look forward to being back at that convention again next year. Also in 2010 we plan to again attend two national conventions, the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, in June, and GenCon in Indianapolis in August.
William: Are there any future products you’d like to discuss?
Tabletop Adventures: Well, we’d like to mention our most recent release, Into the Future: Derelict Starships. This is a book of descriptions which could be of use to anyone who plays a science fiction roleplaying game, and we have been very excited about how well it has been received. There seems to be a desire for more products along that line, and so we are looking into that. Meanwhile, we are working on a book of monsters for our Vatican horror game Against the Darkness, and finishing up a product in our fantasy line called Bits of Magicka: Weapons of Mayhem, which describes unique magical weapons.
For more information about Tabletop Adventures, visit their website at www.tabletopadventures.com.
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