We move from our last international blog in Ireland to a relatively new PFS lodge in Portugal. It was one of the countries that was not currently in the PFS fold and that I had targeted last year, especially after it was announced Paizo was looking to have Pathfinder Roleplaying Game published in Portuguese. I was extrememly lucky to find the awesome and talented Raul Moura da Silva that wanted to expose Portugal to Pathfinder Society and was motivated to spread it across the entire country.
Without further delay, I present to you Raul’s report on Pathfinder Society in Portugal.
Hello! I'm Raul da Silva, and I am the Venture-Captain for Portugal. I currently live in Porto. Helping me in the task of taking PFS to all corners of our country, I have two Venture-Lieutenants, Bruno Tamames in Porto, and Bruno Sequeira in Lisboa, along with a dedicated crew of nine GMs divided between both cities. We are a constantly growing group of gamers and are full of dedication.
First, I want to send a word of thanks must be given to those few, but helpful stores that help us make our community grow and thrive. These include Mundo Fantasma Porto, Kult Games Lisboa, Diver Coimbra, and our "unofficial sponsor" and regular venue, Tropical Burger Crystal Park Porto.
Next, I want to offer a few words for those of you who don't know about Portugal. Portuguese sailors were, the first true real Pathfinders of our World, at least exploration wise. They set sail for unknown lands and bravely charted the way for all that came after them in the 15th Century. The great Portuguese poet (and possibly Pathfinder Agent), Luis Vaz de Camões, wrote, "They made maps and revolutionized the way everyone sailed, and despite some errors in how they dealt with natives, brought almost all the continents together." Unfortunately, that proud and visionary past was lost through the ages, and despite still being one of the most friendly countries in the world, with wonderful people, food,weather and landscapes, is currently facing a serious financial crisis. This crisis, is also a big problem for the expansion of Pathfinder RPG in our country, both for hobby stores who are closing and/or afraid to invest in anything but card games, as well as players who lack the money to buy material.
Nevertheless, we at Portugal PFS are fighting against this!
The profile of the gaming community in Portugal, a country with a high level of education among the younger generations, the English language is almost a second natural language, with most of us speaking it or at least understanding it easily . This helps a lot when we are talking about RPG games in general, and Pathfinder in particular. Despite not having a lot of stores that sell RPG and boardgame materials, there are a few stores we are able to order from, and it's relatively cheap and fast to order online from outside of Portugal.
Traditionally there is a strong presence in our country of boardgaming players (mainly European style games), who organize big conventions across the country, and it's from this big community that most of our players comes from. We do have others joining us because due to their computer RPG games experience and knowledge. Fortunately, there is a growing and prolific RPG community across the country, playing mostly home games, but is very well informed and plays all kinds of RPG games, including Pathfinder.
The story behind Pathfinder Lodge Portugal all started with four players coming together in the summer of 2009 in Porto and deciding to organize a RPG gaming group to play regularly every week. We began at a local gaming store and then moved to the local "cultural gaming store", Tropical Burger. Thanks to their wise managers, it became the place where all the gaming groups in the city—boardgamers, wargamers, roleplayers and card gamers—gather almost every day of the week, at every hour of the day (the store is opened 23 hours a day, 7 days a week). I was onne of those four initial players. The others included Bruno Tamames, the local "GM Guru", who has been GMing for more than 20 years, and André Silva, one of my current GMs. We were later joined by one of the most reknown RPG enthusiast in the country, Rick "Ricardo" Danger, who helped us found Roleplayers Porto, and we began advertising our group and gaming sessions on internet sites and gaming stores. We established gaming days, events, and scheduling in conventions . This helped create similar groups in other cities, like Lisboa, where the players came together mainly at home. In the next few years, the Porto community has grown to more than 30 regular players. We have been lucky enough to have foreign players from Ireland, Scotland, Brazil, Estonia, and Russia come join us at some of our game days.
The Porto gaming groups played D&D for the first years, but, there came a time in early 2012, when Bruno Tamames and I started looking for something more appealing and challenging. We found Pathfinder! We continued coordinating game days for almost a year, and then in November 2012, Mike Brock sent us an email. After some questions about our game days and events, he offered me the honor of being Venture-Captain for Portugal. I had already registered some games but knew we needed a Venture-Captain to move forward with growing Pathfinder Society. I accepted the position, and in December, started scheduling regular public events in addition to our home games. This brought players to Pathfinder RPG, and more precisely to Pathfinder Society. From that moment on, my Venture-Lieutenant and I started advertising more Pathfinder and "campaigning" for Organized Play and it's advantage. We scheduled monthly public events and smaller weekly events. We also started a Facebook group to advertise our gaming sessions that we utilize for scheduling, news, and announcements. We created flyers and started distributing them throughout the city and stores and worked in making a unique graphic presentation for our group, that continues to be a constantly evolving process. I want to send a quick thanks to the designer, and local GM, Filipe Jensen.
We began our expansion across the country, first in Lisboa where we found Bruno Sequeira. He is an "old" D&D player who was looking for players and helped in the founding a regular group to play. He also came onboard as a Venture-Lieutenant and has been making doing excellent work in his region. He has mentored new GMs and his hard work is paying off . We are gaining a lot of new players.
We have a loyal group of players in Aveiro and we are looking to add a Venture-Lieutenant there in the near future. We have also turned our attention to Coimbra, where Ricardo Moreno and I have started a new regular event. Currently, with only four full months of activity, we have more than 70 players registered in four cities. We have monthly and weekly events happening regularly in Porto and Lisboa, suach as the monthly PFS RPG PORTO.
Finally we look to the future. We have many ideas of what we want, and how to do it, and we have high hopes everything with come together nicely. At the top of our priorities is the increase of gaming sessions in more venues, especially in Porto and Lisboa. Next, we are trying to schedule regular monthly events in Coimbra and Aveiro, as well as a few other cities we have yet to explore, but where we know other gaming groups exist. After that, we plan to try to reach new markets, with more advertising, and some interviews in local blogs and local television stations.
Also of note is the scheduled presence of Pathfinder Society at the upcoming major national conventions (where we hope to lure Mike Brock to one day), starting with this year’s Invictacon. It will be the first, officially supported Pathfinder Society event in Portugal, and we will be making the season finales a major event, for the current season, as well every season for the foreseeable future. Lisboacon in 2014 will also feature special events and we will have registered events in two other smaller conventions. These include Riacon next month and Leiriacon in 2014.
Finally, we will continue to try and find more stores that have interest in selling physical Pathfinder RPG books to showcase the awesome things from our favorite game.
I cannot finish without thanking Mike Brock and Paizo for their continued support.
If anyone is looking for a place that has good and and inexpensive vacations, to include wonderful food, weather and landscapes, consider Portugal. But, let us know ahead of time because we'd love to have you over for a game!
Raul "Wulfgars" Moura da Silva
Venture-Captain, Portugal
Thank you to all of the players, GMs, VC and VL for creating an awesome PFS Lodge in Portugal. Keep up the awesome work!
Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator
