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A brief rundown of last weekend’s trek to Seattle for SteamCon:

I ran two tabletop Clockworks games.  My plan was to run the same scenario twice, but after Friday’s game, a couple of the players had so much fun they wanted to play again on Sunday, so I made up a direct sequel for the same characters.  This is one advantage of having a system as easy to make stuff up for as Savage Worlds and knowing the setting backwards and forwards.

I ran a Clockworks LARP Friday night, which was fairly small and low key but still fun.   Set in the Free Islands, it featured lots of politics and some intrigue and hidden agendas.

Met Shane Hensley again, played in a great Space:1889 game.  Also briefly met Phil and Kaja Foglio.

Spoke on the Webcomics panel with David Malki.  Sadly, it was Friday evening and people were still filling in to the con, so we spoke to like 10 people.  Still, those 10 people seemed to enjoy it.

Spoke on the Everyday Steampunk panel with Michelle Black and Anthony Hicks, to a completely full room.  Tons of great questions and suggestions from the audience, and people even laughed at my dumb jokes.

I didn’t take any pictures, but fortunately Flickr has  you covered.  SteamCon was seriously the best looking con I’ve ever attended.

A handful of Clockworks fans came up to me over the weekend, and you guys were all incredibly cool and polite and awesome.

I got to meet some great people that I’ve only known online, like the incredibly talented Lex Machina and Dimitri from Twisted Artifacts.

I got to meet some incredibly talented and cool people I’ve never met or heard of before, like the Gypsy Nomads and the folks who make Rise of Aester.

All in all, I’d say it was a triumph.  Huge success.  I mentioned it to the organizers, but SteamCon was easily the best run Con I’ve ever attended, as a fancy pants guest or a regular attendee.  They really went above and beyond to treat us panelists/GMs/whatever incredibly well.  If you create any sort of Steampunkery and get the chance to go and yap to people, I highly suggest doing so.

Finances willing and if they’ll have me, I’ll be back next year.  I already have some ideas.

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The other big news this week: I’m opening up Clockworks with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  What’s this mean to you?

It means you can share or alter the comic in any way you see fit, so long as you allow others to do the same with whatever you’ve created and you’re not making any money off of it.  If you’d like to translate Clockworks in to Vietnamese or German, you can do so without seeking my permission.  If you’d like to download the entire archive and distribute it as a bitTorrent, you totally can.  If you’d like to take all of the comics and rewrite them so the dialog is nothing but dick and fart jokes and references to Jane Austen, you totally can.  If you want to write Clockworks slash fiction starring Toby, Agent Thorn, and a new character who looks mysteriously like you and everyone loves, you totally can.

As mentioned above, the only restrictions are as such: you have to note that I created Clockworks and your thing is based on my stuff, you can’t make any money off whatever you want, and you have to share your creations with this same license.

If you’d like to sell Toby t-shirts or compile your Swedish Clockworks translation in to a book for sale, you’ll still need my express permission.  Also note that this license does not extend to the Savage Worlds rules.  Fortunately, SW has a pretty open Fan License, so if you want to post stats for your new SuperMegaGiantClockbot, you’ll be fine so long as you follow their guidelines.

I’ll update the site to reflect the new license this week, and add a page explaining everything to the top menu nav.

If anyone’s curious as to why I’m adding the CC license, I’ll be happy to ramble in the comments.