thread: 2008-10-02 : Fellow Publishers: Success? Failure?
On 2008-10-04, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
1. What's your name?
Eero Tuovinen
2. What's your publishing company?
Arkenstone Publishing
3. What game or games have you published?
A bunch of Finnish translations of American indie games
Zombie Cinema, my zombie storytelling game
Solar System, a rewrite of The Shadow of Yesterday by Clinton R. Nixon
A bunch of minor projects published in magazines, etc.
4. When you first started publishing, what success did you hope for?
I wanted to introduce the American independent rpg scene to the Finnish rpg hobbyists. I wanted to learn and demonstrate to use the new methods of desktop publishing, to open up the possibilities for new Finnish hobby game publishing.
5. Did you achieve it?
I guess so - nowadays "Forge style" games are rarely ignored when Finnish hobby activists list important styles and schools of thought in roleplaying. Several designers in Finland have taken influence from these games, and dozens of people around the country play them successfully.
6. What success do you hope for now?
To hone my skills in project management, game design and writing to higher levels. To create genuinely valuable art.
7. Have you achieved it?
Nope, still working on it.
8. If a hopeful new RPG publisher came to you and asked you for your wisdom, to help her set reasonable expectations for her own games' success, what would you tell her?
This happens to me surprisingly often, perhaps because folks hereabouts view me as some sort of warden of the indie rpg wisdom now and then. I usually focus on a dialogue process wherein we try to figure out what the hopeful new game designer/publisher would like to achieve; depending on the details, I then approach the topic on the operational level, trying to point out where one should go and what sort of risks one should expect to fulfill the particular dreams one has.
