Michael back with our next Earthdawn developer’s blog. As is usual with these, I didn’t really have something preplanned to talk about before writing it. I can often fall back on some convention experiences or some recent progress on Legends of Barsaive, but things are a bit quiet for me at the moment after just getting back from vacation. However, one idea did come to me as I was following my post vacation ritual of cleaning out my wallet.
I sometimes collect random things in my wallet when away from home and try to clear it out once I return. One thing I noticed after my most recent trip was an old punch card from one of my frequently visited restaurants. I only made it about halfway through the card before forgetting about it and it has sat in my wallet until just a few days ago. Wanting to continue making progress towards that free lunch, I went back this week and discovered they no longer offer their “10th lunch free” promotion. Sitting here thinking about it now, I’m wondering if such a thing could be applied to convention play.
I’ve decided to start a little experiment to see if anything comes of it and you’re all coming with me on this adventure. Unless I’ve completely lost everyone’s interest at this point. For those that are still reading, you’ll find below a “Convention Voucher”. My offer to those who print out and bring this ticket to any Earthdawn game hosted by me is a bonus for the entire table of your choosing. Me in this context being “FASA Michael”, which I want to clearly state means that this offer is not endorsed by other FASA team members. This is something I’ve cooked up on my own and am solely offering to those in the community who end up at tables I am hosting.
How will this work? Simple, just print this out and hand it over at any Earthdawn game I host in the future. I’ll even accept a digital version of this dropped into the Discord chat of an online game I run (such as during another FASA Con event). Pick whichever bonus listed you wish to activate for all players at the table and that effect will remain active throughout the entirety of the adventure I am running. Do this for as many of my games as you like, though do note that I will only be allowing one ticket to be used during each individual game.
While I think the ticket itself is an interesting idea, I want to take it a step further by tempting people with an alternative “Frequent Player Incentive” option. In place of using your ticket at the start of a convention game, players can hold onto it until the end and have me “stamp” the voucher for future use. Each “stamp” entitles the bearer to select an additional bonus the next time they play at one of my tables. The longer you hold out turning in a ticket, the more benefits your table will receive when you decide to use it. I’ll even come up with an extra special in-game bonus (TBD) for anyone who holds onto a ticket long enough to collect a total of six “stamps”.
This turned out to be one of my wackier blog posts, but hopefully I’ve caught the interest of a few community members I hope to see at one of my future games. I’m curious to see if anyone will actually redeem a ticket at one of my tables. Like I said, this is an off the cuff experiment I came up with when thinking about what to write today and think it’s a fun thing to put out into the world. Origins Game Fair will be the first and (likely) only opportunity to use one of these tickets this year, so I’ll be sure to mention if that ends up happening in a future blog post. Keep an eye out here as well for announcements of other conventions where these tickets will be redeemable. Until next time, thanks for reading!