Ronin Round Table: Nicole Lindroos

If you’ve been following along with our installments of the Ronin Round Table, you’ve gotten a glimpse at what several of our creative staffers do on a day-to-day basis and how we go about moving ideas into rules, stories, and pictures that fire the imaginations of our fans. Today I’m here to reveal a little more about what goes on behind the scenes of a company like Green Ronin that functions without a central office and spans several time zones. My name is Nicole Lindroos and I am Green Ronin’s General Manager.

In a larger company a General Manager might oversee a lot of other people and coordinate between different departments while tossing off industrial-strength buzzwords but, thankfully, Green Ronin isn’t that kind of a company. My duties can best be described as taking on those inspiration-dampening tasks that might weigh down our creative staff, keeping an eye on strategic development and greasing the cogs and wheels of the business.

One of my favorite duties, and one that is particularly on my mind at this time of year, is convention planning. This is the season of convention deadlines, many of which overlap and it’s my responsibility to make certain they don’t get overlooked lest we find ourselves without a booth or locked out of the hotel reservation system for an out of town show. The king of convention appearances for Green Ronin has always been Gen Con because we bring in every employee (and some of our most trusted freelancers) and believe it or not, deadlines for the show in August are already flying past by the time January rolls around. Booth payments are due, badge request deadlines are coming up, event registration is open, reservations for hotels will have to be made in the next few weeks and to meet those deadlines I need to have answers to questions. Since we have to pay for the booth, we must decide how big a space we’re going to need. That means we have to have an idea of how much product we’re going to have on hand, how many tables we’re going to want for demonstrations and which games we’ll be demonstrating in the booth. Will we have company-sponsored games listed in the program book? If so, we need to know which games and who will run them. What will our slate of seminars be and which staff members will be participating? For Gen Con in particular there are a lot of little pieces that all need to be fit together to make sure the whole thing comes off as planned but we’ll have to do essentially the same thing for several events on our schedule every year.

In the same way that our creative staff puzzles over the right stats for The Joker or whether those new Dragon Age backgrounds unbalance character creation, I’m the Ronin you’ll generally find hiding out behind the scenes “statting out” our convention attendance. And making sure payroll is covered. And helping track down that mail order that never made it to Norway. And banning spammers from our message boards. And adjusting the inventory reports to account for products damaged in shipment. And… well, you get the idea.