August? Don't you mean "in 3 weeks"? Or is there another one scheduled for then? Might be an idea to add the dates to the calendar here to make it clear there will be a CE presence.

Shevaun

Edit: Nice edit!

OK, slowly catching up with the posts. I could mail you some of the flyers over if you like? I can also send you the .indd files for the flyer too.

What interests me most is firing up the New Zealanders to create their own collective. They already have networks such as NZrag, right? For instance, to me, while it is great to hear about Soth, I would be triply pleased to have it developed in NZ by NZ gamers and then sold to me from NZ via the internet.

Getting the flyer and the indd files would be great, thanks.

There is a lot of good stuff be developed over here by a whole of people: Steve Hicky with Soth, Mike Sands with a whole bunch of stuff, Paul Wilson with Pack and (of course) Morgan Davie with his D20/M&M materials. There's a small segment devoted to this kind of thing on NZRAG, but it isn't hugely active. Things could really kick off though, as there is Games on Demand at KapCon, more people looking at the possibilities of self-publication and an increased interest in small-press stuff.

Promoting CE would, I think, be a positive thing to do and could very well encourage the development of a self-sustaining community with similar purpose, dedicated to NZ.

I'll ping a link to some of the local chaps and maybe we can get their opinions? There might be stuff out there that I am totally ignorant of.

Cheers
Malc

Contested Ground Studios

There are a few other people down here doing game development and writing - Mike Reeves-McMillan has some designs going and Marcus Bone in Auckland is revising Conspiracy X for re-release. There are others, I'm pretty sure, but I know few details about them.

That said, I'm not sure whether we have quite enough people to create a critical mass for a design community here... most of us seem to be using internet communities for that sort of support and feedback. On the other hand, I may be wrong about that, and a local group would be cool.

Mike and Steve are the most community-oriented of the game-writers. They have at various times tried to have a "Game Designer's Cabal", which used to run as part of a local rolelpaying club. Basically though, there were not enough regular attendees at the club as a whole to keep it alive, and definitely not enough people at the GDC to sustain it independently.

There are quite a few others, not previously named in this thread, who write gaming material that is published in one form or another. These tend though to be adventures and supplements rather than whole new games. The independent game movement, which seems well established in the UK, is still somewhat young and fresh here. While many of us dabble in playing these styles of games, I don't actually know of anyone using any of them in a sustained way. (i.e. they tend to get a 2 to 3 session run, then forever forgotten.)

The only counter-examples known to me were, at one time, 2 Truth and Justice games running in campaign mode, but both of these have now wound up.

There may be stuff going on in Dunedin and Christchurch that I'm not current on, but Wellington and Auckland have very fragmented gaming communities. Auckland's big annual gaming conventions are dominated by wargamers and the like.

Wellington's community really only interacts in a large-scale way once a year at KapCon. So if you are interested in getting people aware of the Collective Endeavour, that is your best chance. Period.

Well, my Monday group has been playing solely indie games for two or three years now, as does Hix's Tuesday group. I know plenty of others play them too. So I don't think it's quite as thin on the ground as you imply. Kapcon also seems to always have a strong lineup of non-mainstream games (not necessarily all indie).

There's also a pretty strong tradition at the NZ conventions of people running homebrew system games, something only one step away from a self-published game.

You run them, but each game only for a handful of sessions. Hix's group (from what I understand), had a sustained go at a Buffy hack for PTA, but otherwise also mostly dabbles rather than runs indie games for campaigns.

I suppose I should mention too, that I use a hack of Spirit of the Century for my planescape game; but again that's a limited-run game.

People tend to run nWOD/Exalted/D&D for long campaigns, and do the odd indie stuff in between. You're just in a really long break between campaigns? :p

Um, Mash, games don't have to be long term to count. Especially if they're more fun short.

But that's pretty much irrelevant to the topic at hand, so I'll say no more here.