Failed Experiments, or, Slush Pile 09.22

Over the past year or two or three, I made and attempted to run a whole bucket of weird little experimental RPG projects. Most of them died. Here are some post-mortems.

#1: Harrowhame, aka "40-mile Dwarf Tunnel"

The pitch: I saw this old MERP map. Then I reread LOTR, which says that the Mines of Moria are about 40 miles long. You play the leaders of a dwarf expedition to reclaim Harrowhame, the totally-not-Mines-of-Moria. You start outside, work your way in, send out scouts, fight battles with the denizens, mine gold, build fortresses, and fix the train.

Sessions played: 4.

What went wrong: Two things: first, an overabundance of dungeon nodes. I was trying to run it like a huge pointcrawl megadungeon with hundreds of mundane nodes and a few spicy ones, when I should've taken a leaf from UVG's book and just had a few dozen really cool exciting nodes (some of which could be dungeons). Second, there was just too much management overhead from the players: they were tracking a dozen squads of 10 dwarves, their work assignments, resources (metal, gold, food, and fuel), and a bunch of other shit. It would be a sick videogame, but was basically untenable as a tabletop RPG.

What's worth salvaging: The pitch. That's about it, really. The idea's really cool but basically every mechanical angle I took with the project sucked.

#2: Ten Thousand Miles

The pitch: You play mailmen (of the "Special Mail Service") going on a 10,000-mile delivery most of the way across the world. Every month, me and kahva release another 500 × 500-mile topographical map (on patreon, maybe?), which knit together into one contiguous 500 × 10,000 mile map. (And then release it eventually on a fucking scroll, or something?)

Sessions played: 5.

What went wrong: Again, two things: first, it just took a lot of coordination and effort and work ahead of time for me and kahva, which is difficult to muster in the best of circumstances. Second, and possibly more damning, is that these were maps basically devoid of content. A big topograpical map is very fun and cool, but you gotta have things to do there besides just walking, and a big map (even with some weather and random encounter tables) just doesn't really provide that.

What's worth salvaging: The map-a-month subscription model. I also wrote a little language system that's kinda fun and will eventually go in its own post. Oh, also, I came up with this three-point Mail Service Code of Honor, which I love (as well as the idea of delivering the mail as a campaign pitch):

1. The mail must go through.
2. Never open the mail.
3. Always hold yourself to highest standards of decency.

#3: Beowulf-3, aka "Mars Colony"

The pitch: An almost entirely rules-free (we used one basic PbtA-ish 2d6 resolution roll and nothing else) system set on an alternate-history '90s Martian colony (the mission you're on is called Beowulf-3). You're some of the first permanent colonists on Mars, and have to deal with the competing interests of NASA, the Clinton Administration, corporate executives, and the aftershocks of the Cold War. 

Sessions played: 1. 

What went wrong: Turns out that a lot of the problems Martian colonists face are extremely boring but also pretty relevant. Like, maintaining water filtration pipes is very necessary but hard to really grapple with in an engaging way without having a chemical engineering degree. You can kinda just skip from dramatic moment to dramatic moment, but we wanted more structural mechanisms for all the boring shit that's still important. 

What's worth salvaging: A very light core ruleset actually works super well for these kinds of community-drama focused games. With a little bit of tactical rules elision, I think this could really shine.

#4: PbtA Mutable Moves

The pitch: A Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset where every move follows the "10+: all three, 7-9: choose two, 6-: choose one" model (pioneered by moves like Read a Sitch). Every time you make a move, you cross out one of the options and replace it with one of your own design. Here's a version I made for a kind of Biblical-mythical Bronze Age-type setting.

Sessions played: 1.

What went wrong: Turns out game design is hard, kids. Even with a load of examples, coming up with new move options on the fly takes a lot of time and effort, so my players often ended up just resorting to shafting over other players or writing precisely what they wanted. Which was allowed and I sort of saw coming, but ended up being more an issue than I expected.

What's worth salvaging: Letting players modify existing moves—or write new ones—is an extremely potent tool. It's an amazing way to let them modify the game how they want, to literally rewrite the rules to better fit your game. I think as a playbook capstone, for example, or a once-every-5-sessions kind of move, it could work really well. 

#5: Downtime Grunge Heroes

The pitch: You play, like, a bunch of shitty college students living in a house together, but you also all have superpowers. Deal with your life. Here's the draft I started writing. One of my big-brain ideas for this was to reverse the downtime-mission emphasis: in lots of games, you play out the mission in detail, then roll to see what happens in downtime. What if it was the reverse here? You roll to see what happened on your mission ("ah fuck, I got blinded for two weeks by acid," "ah fuck, I totaled my car"), then play out what actually happens in the rest of your life in detail.

Sessions played: 0.

What went wrong: What do you actually do in this game? What happens? If I don't want to write a whole bunch of weird emotional-tracker systems (a la Masks), what mechanics are there actually? Do I really want to play a game where you say "yeah I spend 3 hours of my sleep tonight to finish my homework" ??

What's worth salvaging: I think basically everything in that draft is actually pretty okay. Like, it's reasonably good, reasonably-gameable content. I dunno.

#6: PbtA Communal Cyberpunk

The pitch: Apocalpyse World, the original Powered by the Apocalypse game, is really interesting in that you-the-PCs essentially play the pillars of a community. Not the leaders, necessarily, but certainly the important people. Gang bosses, cult icons, weird freaks, all the movers and shakers in a given apocalyptic commune. It's something almost no PbtA game since has managed to replicate. What if it was cyberpunk?

Sessions played: 1.

What went wrong: It's just... Apocalpyse World but cyberpunk. It's fine. It's bland. (Also, my players didn't really seem to get the cool things I was trying to do with rules-lite cybernetics because they were all poisoned by storygames, but that's okay.)

What's worth salvaging: This was the start of my "holy shit god fuck I never want to write a system again" arc. Here's the existing rules draft (NSFW?), it'd probably be playable with a good 3 hours of work to fill out the classes. 

#7: Maximalist Ritual Spells

The pitch: What if spells were actually complex things you needed to learn? What if they were serious rituals that required study and time and effort? What if a wizard was not somebody who has four 1st-level spells per day and a Spell Save DC of 17 and whatever else, but somebody who was actually wise and knowledgeable? The idea was to write a whole bunch of complex ritual spells that could be hugely powerful but had tons of complex requirements. A wizard who knew one spell would be dangerous; a wizard who knew five spells would be immensely powerful.

Sessions played: 4 (as part of another campaign).

What went wrong: It's kind of a pain in the ass, honestly. There's like a million things to keep track of as the GM, and I didn't have a good way to do that. It's also just a huge barrier to entry for the players. Turns out making magic really complicated means that magic is really complicated. It's also just an absolute fuckload of legwork on the part of the designer. 

What's worth salvaging: Here's what the Sleep spell might look like. Here's what a pyromancy spell list might look like (scroll down a bit). Despite the issues, I do think these might kind of work, and I may well return to them at some point. They're also just a fantastic way to do a lot of sneaky cool backdoor worldbuilding. In the meantime, check out Luke Gearing's much more usable version of basically this same idea (for the already-amazing Wolves Upon the Coast).

#8: Cyberpunk Lady Blackbird

The pitch: Lady Blackbird, John Harper's landmark focused-but-open narrative game, but done up in a cyberpunk style. The tentative name was "Blackbird Protocol," about escorting a revolutionary cell leader ("Blackbird") through the city to a corporate tower.

Sessions played: 0.

What went wrong: Turns out Lady Blackbird actually just kind of sucks? It's a very fun concept and pitch, but there's just... nothing there? It gives you one macro map and a bunch of vague hooks, then says "go." If there was an actual adventure to it, more maps and NPCs and challenges and details, I think it'd be great. As is, it's a complete ruleset and barebones adventure masquerading as an entire world. If you're willing to improv the entire thing it's pretty fun, but that's true of just about any game.

What's worth salvaging: The... pitch? Honestly I'm not sure.

#9: Back Alley Razor Gangs, aka "Blades in the Dark but actually good this time"

The pitch: Take Blades in the Dark, another landmark John Harper joint, but add some actual backbone and procedure and content to it. Blades, as is, has the weird storygame problem of saying "here's a whole woooorld" and then basically just assigning all of it as homework for the GM. BARG was an attempt to fix that by adding district-generation procedures and adding some structure, primarily by using Tim Denee's really excellent Doskvol Street Maps. At some point it also turned into a rewrite of Blades (lmao).

Session played: 15-20, ish? A lot.

What went wrong: It had a really rocky start—we found that trying to take over an entire neighborhood when you're a bunch of nobodies is really fucking hard. (Let's just say both me and my players really earned a lot of respect for the Sopranos and the Peaky Blinders.) After some soul-searching and a big ol' timeskip, I just gave my players an entire neighborhood to start with. From then, it was actually pretty smooth sailing.

What's worth salvaging: Honestly, this project was mostly a success, it just needs an absolute fuckload more legwork and prep and work on my end before it can really be called finished. Here's the draft, though (and some very incomplete tables). Maybe keep an eye out for this one sometime next year or two, if you're interested. 

#10: LANCER Hexcrawl

The pitch: Make a big ol' hexcrawl for LANCER. Four or five regions, a half-dozen dungeon-type locations, three-ish factions, a handful of quest lists/lines, maybe 100 keyed hexes total. A fat zine's worth of concise content. 

Sessions played: 0.

What went wrong: Turns out I really can't stand LANCER. It's far and away the game that I want to like the most, but the rules writing is just abysmal and the game offers absolutely zero guidance on how to actually balance it. While I really like weird mythic sci-fi mech about playing giant robots that fight each other, sitting through minimum one (more likely two-three) hours of really dense crunchy combat is my breaking point. It bores me as a player and taxes the hell out of me as a GM.

What's worth salvaging: The... pitch? What LANCER is really in dire need of is good old-fashioned content. (Or, at least, content that you can actually play, as opposed to whatever the hell Wallflower is doing.)

#11: Locks & Keys

The pitch: One of the cool things about Lady Blackbird is that characters all have these things called "Keys," like "Key of Secrecy: Hit your Key when you go undercover or lie to hide your identity." Hitting your key gets you XP and other stuff. Narrative triggers, basically. I made a bunch of these once for a classless-type OSR game: the keys are Keys, the associated perks you get are, hilariously, called Locks.

Sessions played: 3, I think (as part of another campaign).

What went wrong: On paper, nothing. These work as intended. In practice, though, it just feels pretty against the whole ethos to be incentivizing players like this. (We are against incentive here, after all.) 

What's worth salvaging: If you really love this idea, take it and go. This one basically works mechanically, I'm more just opposed to it on a, like, ideological level. 

#12: Forged in the Dark Scooby-Doo

The pitch: you play the Scooby Gang, pillars of the American mythos that they are. You go into a collection of places around town (the Abandoned Factory, the Seaside Cove, the Old High School) to solve mysteries. Here's the twist: when you go looking for clues (or otherwise touch the dice, really), there are two sets of clues per location-mystery to find:

1. If you fail the roll (pretty common), your clumsy incompetence leads you to actually find evidence that it's Old Man Withers! Bank statements, machinery, human footprints, lost wills, etc. etc.
2. If you succeed the roll (pretty rare), you find evidence that holy shit, Bigfoot is real. Once in a blue moon on a mystery, you actually see aliens, you actually talk to ghosts, etc. etc.

After finding all the clues from one set (regardless of how far you got on the other), you conclude the mystery.

Sessions played: 0.

What went wrong: Mysteries are hard, man. While Scooby-Doo offers the amazing affordance of not actually being about mysteries, really, it's still tricky. Is it too contrived? Is there any tension? Is it too weird to have the results of the mystery be based on fucking dice rolls? Isn't this whole twin-solution thing like way too meta anyways? All questions that vex me. 

There's also the issue of people trying to play as like, weird Scooby-Doo OC, which I am absolutely not here for—if we're playing the Scooby-Doo game, we're playing as Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby, goddamn it. (There's also the question of, you know, copyright? Unclear.)

What's worth salvaging: Thing is, I really, really love this one. Scooby-Doo is near and dear to my heart, and getting to kick off sessions by having the Fred-player say "Let's split up and look for clues, gang!" fills me with joy. God, maybe I need to make this game.

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Okay. I think that's it. If you ever wonder why it's taking me so goddamn long to release Seas of Sand and Time After Time, it's because I keep getting distracted every five seconds with all of these (not to mention my projects that actually have released since starting, like Lowlife and The Big Wet). Ugh. A blessing and a curse, roleplaying games.

RPG Editors: A Love Letter

I love RPG editors and I think you should, too.

Seas of Sand, my perenially-almost-done setting guide, is now finally more or less done, at least in terms of the actual writing and editing process (art's a different beast, as is printing). And let me tell you, my editor (the esteemed Matthew K.) has been 100% absolutely essential throughout the entire thing. Likewise, when I was working on Lowlife and the Big Wet and one or two future projects, having a good editor is amazing. It's fantastic. It makes everything about working on RPG better. 

(What does an editor do, you ask? See Jared's guide.)

Here's why editors are great.

Reason #1: you don't need to worry if it's good.

You know how in writing class they always tell you that when you're writing a first draft, the goal is to just put something to paper, and then fix it later? You know how that advice always kind of felt like bullshit, because if it goes to paper bad it's almost worse than having written nothing? Well, with an editor, that's actually not a problem. 

The editor's job is, in large part, to make your shit better. You can hand them garbage, and they'll very patiently explain to you why and how it's bad, and the precise changes you need to make to fix it (which very often just means hitting "accept suggestion" in docs).

You can just write. If it's workable, it'll get fixed up; if it's terrible, it'll get cut; if it's great, it'll get polished. But you, the writer, don't have to think about any of that shit while you're writing. You get to just go off. 

Reason #2: problem-solvers.

When I hit a wall, like "how do I explain this weird rules concept" or "I'm losing my mind making sure these price tables all match up" or "what the fuck do I put in the next 96 entries on this d100 table?" you can go ask your editor and they will help you. They can do research, or sit with you and drum up ideas, or sift through your manuscript and hunt for issues. 

If you're very, very lucky, it's possible your editor will even sometimes just sneakily do a little bit of writing themselves. Fill in a table entry or two, rejig a spell to be way cooler, offer a basically-almost-done monster idea. That's only if you're quite lucky, though—if you expect them to do actual writing, you gotta pay them to do actual writing.

Either way, though, when all hope seems lost and the writer's block comes crashing down, your editor is there to help you solve your problems.

Reason #3: sanity check / hype beast.

If you're like me, you'll sometimes get very deep into a project, or some aspect of a project, and completely lose all sight of home. You bury yourself in the mechanics and ramifications and vast new possibility spaces emerging, and very quickly unmoor yourself, sometimes from the rest of the project entirely. It's difficult to get a sense of whether what you're working on is actually good, since you've just spent 72 hours straight staring straight into it.

At this point, it's your editor's job to come and tell you, frankly, "this is absurd and will never work." They might help you salvage or rework it, but sometimes it turns out what you made is far beyond mortal ken, and thus needs to be cut.

But! Occasionally, you'll spend three days working on something bizarre, and then your editor will come in and tell you that actually, this thing you made is really fucking cool. Then, they push you onwards and help you make it even better.

Your editor is usually both your harshest critic and also your most dedicated cheerleader.

Reason #4: quality control.

Your editor is there to fix all of your dumb mistakes. When I write, my stuff's often filled with stupid little errors. I miss words, I forget punctuation, I garble meanings, I get lost in the weeds. I vary my sentence structure wildly in tables and lists. I'll use a term, thinking I've already defined it, and then never actually leave the definition anywhere. My laid-out drafts have an occasional tendency to repeat paragraphs and titles. Orphans abound.

An editor fixes all that. All of the random tiny issues, they hunt down and solve. It's great.

Reason #5: connections.

Assuming you hire a (semi-)professional RPG editor, one who works in RPGs full time, there's a very good chance they'll know lots of cool people in the space. If you, say, are looking for a layout designer, your editor probably knows somebody; if you need an artist, they probably can help you find one; if you need a distributor, they might have the connect. 

(Obviously, this one's a little less true if your editor is totally new to the space—but still.)

While there are lots and lots of RPGs being published all the time, a relatively slim number of those have editors. (A small diatribe: lots of RPGs that list an editor really, in my opinion, have been proofread but not actually edited. Finding typos and errors and fixing unclear bits is valuable, undoubtedly, but fully editing—dev, line, and copy—is a very different beast. One that, I suspect, very few RPG manuscripts properly go through. Once you've gone through a relatively-rigorous editing process, there are lots of little tells to spot on a project that hasn't seen that kind of rigor.)

Anyway, all this to say the number of full-time or close-to-full-time RPG editors is relatively few, and thus most of them know each other. Once you make friends with one editor (probably because you hired them) you'll make friends with more, and thus make friends with lots of people—writers and artists and layout'ers and editors and designers and distributors, the kinds of people who you'll want to work with. The editors I've hired and made friends with have opened many, many doors for me.

Reason #6: good to great.

So here's the thing, right: a lot of what people talk about in regards to editing is in terms of taking something bad and making it good. Or, at least, finding the bad parts and fixing them. That is true, obviously; lots of what editors do is fix mistakes. 

Thing is, though, if your manuscript is already good, or if you just do lots of rounds of editing, your editor is there to make your manuscript even better. They take your good ideas, all the stuff that's been percolating in your brain for months, and they juice them up. They play up the good angles, create more game, push the exciting and engaging and interesting. 

Writers are often blind about their own work; they've been staring at the pages for too long, they lose the forest for the trees. Editors have their eyes open: they can read through a manuscript and immediately say "ah, these are the parts that work and should be amplified, these parts should be cut." It's those kinds of collaborative, deliberative decisions that can really transform a project from something kind of cool and innovative into something genuinely fantastic. 

RPG editors are amazing. Go hire one for your next project.

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For what it's worth, I also do RPG editing. (I'm not nearly as talented as many of the ones on your favorite RPGs, but I'm also cheaper and my schedule is probably more open. I also do layout! Double whammy!)

1d50 Things I Learned in 2021

An end-of-year retrospective, in no particular order.

1. Trying to match colors across Photoshop and InDesign after the fact is a nightmare. Write your color codes down early, in CMYK, then stick to them across both.
2. Mixam's page cuts are not that equal, even from page to page: what you put in the bleed genuinely does matter, even if it seems like it doesn't.
3. Picking two or three colors (one of which can/should be black or white) as your page background, main body text color, and spot color is a very cheap and easy way to make your basic PDF stand out.
4. In New York, unless you 100% absolutely for-sure positively know it'll be amazing and worth it, never pay more than $1 per slice of pizza.
5. Good game text is what keeps people playing your game, but good presentation and artwork is what gets them to start at all.
6. Almost every RPG written by beginners (mine included) is over-written. Most paragraphs can be sentences. Many sentences can be cut. Never explain anything just to explain it.
7. Relatedly, almost all indie RPG designers (like other indie game designers, to some extent) are writing for a niche crowd that has already played RPGs. Yes, your game might be played by your mom who's a total newbie, but the person running/facilitating that random tiny indie game has read and played fifty other RPGs. Stop explaining what an RPG is.
8. A monster that normally talks but suddenly can't is spooky. A monster that normally can't say a word but suddenly starts talking is terrifying. (Did you know ghouls can talk in most systems?)
9. As a broad rule of thumb: wizards that travel = good; wizards that stay in one place = evil. 
10. Unless you have the same person doing writing and layout, make sure your writing is entirely done before you go to layout.
11. International shipping is crazy expensive. Budget at least 1.5 times what you think you should for it.
12. Inform 7, the interactive fiction tool, is a rough ride. Parser games in general are rough.
13. Maps are always useful. I've never looked at a map that came with my RPG and said "nah, this is useless." High-quality maps are among my most-used and most-prized RPG tools. (Top of the list currently are kahva's topographical maps and Tim Denee's Doskvol street maps.)
14. Languages in RPGs are deeply under-explored, and people are eager and excited to use them more. Not in the sense that we need more fantasy languages, but we need new and interesting ways to use language, on a mechanical and roleplaying level.
15. I hate reading paragraphs in RPGs. Maybe I'm just spoiled with Mosh and Mork Borg and slim little hacks, but I'm just so tired of opening up an adventure or system and just seeing paragraphs and paragraphs of text.
16. Putting player characters in positions of power—lords, elders, commanders, cult leaders, presidents—is a good way to give them agency. Even in a system where, on paper, all power lies with the GM, giving the player characters lots of in-fiction power is a good way to get them impacting the game in big ways. 
17. Lots and lots of "generators" in RPGs are less-than-helpful. I want a step-by-step instruction list or a mad libs fill-in-the-blank or a worksheet. Give me something I can like, fill out for my game. Stop making me do all the legwork. 
18. Use your good ideas first; don't save your good ideas for later down the line. You'll always have more good ideas, so don't hold out on the good shit early.
19. Editors are fucking amazing. I've only hired a couple, but every time I've gotten an outside editor to look at my work, it's improved many times over.
20. Bigger is always cooler. A dire bear that's 22 feet tall? Cool. A dire bear that's 75 feet tall? Rad. A dire bear that's 450 feet tall? Fucking awesome.
21. College and university campuses are a very useful scale for thinking about medieval / fantasy cities. Walkable, and small enough you can walk from one end to the other in half an hour or less—but you also will never see inside every building, nor will you ever meet every person. 
22. There's no substitute for legwork. Legwork on the part of the designer—making maps, stocking dungeons, writing out descriptions for things, actually doing the work—is what makes RPG projects actually good. Stop giving me seeds of adventures and actually spell out the adventure for me.
23. Unless your game is actually going to be in brick-and-mortar stores, back-of-the-book text is useless. Put another table or a quick reference or something on there instead. 
24. I sort of knew this already, but I still feel like I'm processing it: in terms of dice, multiplication is slower than subtraction which is slower than addition which is slower than comparison. It's faster to pick the highest of 2d6 than it is to add 2d6 together.
25. I listen to more Spotify than anyone else I know.
26. If you can't pick a font, start with one of Vignelli's six and figure it out later.
27. Trying to make tables in multiple layers, with the lines on one layer and the text on another, is a giant pain in the ass but also lets you do some very cool things with weathering and distressing and stuff.
28. In both RPGs and video games, it's easier to mimic physical action than anything else. Give your players tools to jump, swim, fly, leap, swing, zoom, merge, and so on. 
29. When you make a Kickstarter thumbnail, keep it simple: big text, big image, bold colors. Too many look cluttered, and that's bad.
30. There's something a little ineffable that emerges with longer campaigns. A campaign that lasts one session feels different than three sessions, which feels different than 12, which feels different than 50, which feels different than 200. I find myself wanting to run longer ones more often.
31. Reading before bed is absolutely cracked. Just overpowered as fuck. Reading for 30 minutes and sleeping for 7.5 hours makes me feel better than sleeping for 8. Just busted as hell.
32. Sean McCoy's paragraph < list < table < diagram < illustration hierarchy is really, really good. 
33. Turns out the key to making good french toast is to add a little vanilla extract and cinnamon to your egg + milk, then let the bread sit in there for longer than it feels like you should. You want the bread almost fragmenting; instead of fishing it out of the bowl with a fork, use your spatula and tilt the bowl so you can lift the whole thing out. The more milk + egg your bread soaks up, the juicier and fluffier the toast will be, and the better it will taste. And really, it's almost impossible to overdo the vanilla and cinnamon.
34. Watercolor brushes in Photoshop are a really good way to add just a smidgen of texture to a page background, or to any illustration. Slightly offset the color (usually a touch darker) and just paint over your main body color.
35. The RPG space is a bizarre cottage industry. Relative to other creative fields, there's no distribution, no publishers, no networks, no pipelines. Just like ten thousand enthusiasts trying to do everything themselves. I have no idea how to fix this, but it's an issue.
36. Everything they talk about on Trying To Be Kind. Killer podcast.
37. Undead are way scarier when they're something you saw when it was alive. A corpse in a dungeon that sits up is a little spooky; a goblin that you definitely kill and then sits up anyways is way more alarming.
38. I'm tired of "TV Show X, but as a game!" Both in the official licensed sense and in the "strongly inspired by" sense. 
39. The existence of Morton's List, the game written by an on-again-off-again ICP member that was banned from GenCon and is essentially Crime: The Game. Truly a wild time.
40. Many dungeons don't need to be on grids. Flowcharts work fine. (Unless your players will be doing a lot of digging / warping through walls.)
41. Subsection headers can be written as [Page #].[Subsection #]: so subsection 4 on page 16 would be 16.4. Mosh does this, it's not hard, it's easy to reference, it looks very cool.
42. GM screens are a nightmare to make. Do not try to make them unless you somehow have a printing industry connection the rest of us don't.
43. K6BD rocks. Turns out everyone saying it rocks for years was right.
44. Secrets are a good way to make macguffins interesting. A magic rock is boring. A magic rock that has to be kept secret because otherwise the Inquisition will be after you is suddenly very fun. Players having to decide who they can trust is always good.
45. A 100-foot cliff is a challenge for low-level players. A 1,000-foot cliff is a challenge for mid-level players. A 10,000-foot cliff is a challenge for high-level players. A 100,000-foot cliff is a challenge for anyone. (For 5e players, consider adding an additional 0 to each.)
46. Tinfoil hat on: system design is prevalent because systems are a means for the designer to directly influence the game; content is meant to be changed and thus does not allow the same level of authorial control. System design is, on some level, an authorial power trip (also supported by all of WOTC and their marketing team).
47. Brutalism is rad. I'm a fan.
48. Random encounters in dungeons and wilderness zones are time pressure: more time in the dungeon means more chances of encounters means more chances of death. Move fast and you're less likely to die. Time pressure's often lacking in RPGs, and is usually good.
49. One of the best ways to learn layout is by trying to mimic existing RPG material. I learned a ton from trying to make my own Blades, 5e, and Mosh character sheets.
50. There's a difference in "system" between mechanical game-system and diegetic world-system. If I say "food is currency," that is a mechanical game-system, since you like pay for goods and stuff with food and thus there are some complicated currency-per-day systems, but! it's mostly a diegetic world-system. The people in this world use food as currency: the emergent behaviors from that rule make the game rich and interesting, because it's rooted in the world itself.

There were, obviously, more things I learned this year. But this is good enough for now. 

How To Do ZineQuest: A Step-by-Step Guide

ZineQuest 4 is just around the corner: this is a guide about how to launch a project for it and then see it through to the end. (What is ZineQuest?)

As a quick note—this is going to be fairly US-centric, as that's where my experience lies. I expect printing and production costs will hold similar-ish, but shipping will vary a whole lot. Apologies to the international readers; I hope you can find some value in this regardless.

This is a pretty mammoth post. There's an executive summary at the end. Strap in.

WHY ZQ?

Why make a project for ZineQuest? The short answer is because:

• It can make you a (small) profit
• Having published projects people can hold in their hands is good for clout
• It's a lower-stakes way to learn the ropes of RPG production
• It's (sometimes) fun!

Obviously, neither RPG publishing nor Kickstarter are for everyone. There are lots of good reasons to do neither. But I assume, if you're reading this, that you're interested in Kickstarter and publishing RPGs, so we're going to proceed as if you've already made up your mind.

STEP 1: THE ZINE ITSELF

Traditionally, the requirements for ZQ projects were as follows:

• It must be 5.5" x 8.5"
• It must be saddle-stitched (stapled) or unbound
• It must be 48 pages or less
• It must be in 2 colors (typically one paper, one ink)

Following the rules means that your project gets by Kickstarter staff as "ZineQuest," and so when people come to the site and click the big scrolling ZINE QUEST ZINE QUEST ZINE QUEST banner, they'll see your project. 

In practice, however, these rules are not really enforced; if your project hits 2/4ish of those, you should be fine. Really, the main requirement is that you say "ZineQuest" somewhere on your project page. I also recommend emailing games [at] kickstarter.com to tell them you have a ZQ project, to make sure it gets tagged properly.

That said, your zine should probably strive to be close-ish to those requirements, mainly because they're actually pretty good constraints for a first-time project. 

Here's what that means, in practice:

• Zines are short. You don't have that many pages, and your pages aren't that big. Think small.
• Your colors are limited (perhaps not solely two, but <5 for sure), so your art has to be closer to black-and-white.
• At 8–10pt font, most zines hit a maximum of around 400–500 words per page, meaning you should  keep your project under 20,000 words. (Obviously you can go higher than this, some ZQ projects came out to north of 100 pages, but <20k is a good upper bound.)
• Because it's stapled pages, production quality can't ever really be all that high. Zines are definitionally cheap.

Critically, there are no limits on content beyond being somehow related to RPGs. Here's a non-complete list of things that have been successfully launched as part of ZQ:

• Entire new systems
• Hacks of existing systems
• Adventures and modules
• Settings, both more and less agnostic
• Story- and lyric games
• Journaling, epistolary, and solo games
• Worldbuilding-y games
• LARPs
• Maps
• Essays
• Memoirs and autobiographical stuff
• Arts-and-crafts-y things

Essentially all ZQ projects (>95%) successfully fund. If you have an idea for a project and you want to get it out in the world, ZQ is a good time to do it.

STEP 2: THE KICKSTARTER PAGE

I have a longer post about this, but you'll need a page for your Kickstarter. Here's the fast rundown about what you need on your page:

1. A description of what your game actually is. Assume I know what RPGs are; don't assume I know the intricacies of FKR vs. NSR circles, or the difference between journaling and epistolary games. Give me tangible, descriptive details of the game.
2. What makes it cool, interesting, and unique. Most RPGs are a hack or derivation or modification of something else—tell me what makes your specific game cool and unique. If you have previews of content, use those. 
3. What the rewards are. Presumably a PDF and a zine, but detail those a little: is your zine an unusual size or shape? Do you have any fun add-ons? (postcards? patches? jars of bones?) If you can put together a mock-up of your zine, do it.
4. Who you are. Tell me your name, where I can find you online (twitter/blog/etc.), and one line of who you are. Show me any relevant projects or experience you have; published stuff is ideal, obviously, but blogposts and short little hacks are always better than nothing. 
5. Stretch goals. See Step 0K. They can be very useful but also very dangerous. 

For ZineQuest, I don't think you need a video. Yes, the biggest projects always have videos, but you aren't making a huge project, you're making a zine. Having a video won't hurt you, but if you're not experienced with video production already, I wouldn't recommend learning it just for ZQ.

2A: MARKETING & THE CAMPAIGN

So, this is not my area of expertise, but the short version is that ZineQuest itself is marketing. Yes, you should blast on Twitter, post on whatever discord servers you're on, tell all your friends, try to get on podcasts, post on the subreddits, and generally be loud about it, but—unless you have lots and lots of followers already, ZineQuest is most of your marketing.

Which is... fine, I think. Like I said, 95% or more of ZQ projects get funded. Having more reach never hurts, but lots and lots of projects get funded with nothing more than retweets.

You'll get spam emails and KS messages from shady marketeers; don't answer them.

STEP 3: PRODUCTION

AKA "turning your google doc into a zine."

Okay, you've got a cool draft for an RPG and just ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, hooray!

On paper, for a Proper Legit RPG, there are about 4 components to take a basic idea and turn it into a PDF that you might actually want to read:

• Writing. The actual, literal words on the page. In traditional thinking, this is the "game design."
• Editing. Taking the things the writer writes and making them actually good. This has the sub-types of dev, line, and copy editing plus proofing, but just assume it's all editing.
• Art. Pictures, graphics, illustrations, maps, and so on.
• Layout. Arranging the page elements together so they actually fit nicely.

A big-budget trad RPG will have multiple people doing all of these things, probably sub-divided into more specific roles throughout. 

In practice, as you know, the only one of these that you "need" is writing (and even that's questionable). But! the more of them you have, the better your zine will be. 

Here's a basic rundown on each:

3A: WRITING

You know how this works, probably: you write the words in the book, and (theoretically) those words tell people how to play their game. 

This is your game, so you're likely doing the writing. 

3B: EDITING

There are four kinds of editing, really, each of which matters for different reasons:

• Developmental editing (dev). This is where your editor reads your draft and gives you feedback on a broad level: mechanics, organization, style guides, the broad strokes. 
• Line editing (line). Jarrett Crader, RPG editor extraordinaire, describes this as "unfucking sentences." Fixing grammar, word choice, flow, and generally making everything as good as it can be.
• Copy editing (copy). This is where your editor goes through your manuscript and makes sure that all of the style choices are consistent. Things like "HD2" vs "2HD" vs "2 HD" vs "HD 2" and so on. 
• Proofreading (proof). You go through and make sure there aren't any literal typos or errors. Dev, line, and copy edits are about improving things, proofreading is literally about catching things that are objectively incorrect.

In general, you'll want an editor that is not you. If you have generous friends and family, a lot of this can be done at home. Your RPG friends and players can provide suggestions (dev edits); you might have a best friend or partner willing to typo-hunt for you (proofing). 

In some communities, you might be able to find another designer who'd be willing to trade editing with you—you edit their zine, they edit yours. Extra work, but it's free!

Hiring an editor will more or less always be better (like me! I do editing! Hit me up!), but that will obviously dig into your budget.

3C: ART

This is a huge field, obviously, and other people have written about it in more detail than me. 

My main advice you should think about the difference between cover art, full- and half-page art, and spot art (the small pieces that often "fill in" otherwise-empty space). You'll want your cover art done before your campaign launches, ideally, so you can use it on your campaign page.

If you're good (or even like, passable) at art, you can obviously make your own artwork. If not, there are many, many artists out there, many of them good and cheap. Either way, I would recommend that across your KS campaign and zine, you pick one artist and stick to them—a cohesive style is always an asset. (If you're looking for artists, check out #PortfolioDay on Twitter and r/HungryArtists on reddit. Always be polite to strangers, especially ones you want to hire.)

Another option is to use stock art, free art, and public domain art. Stock art from Adobe Stock or Shutterfly can easily come out to <$10 apiece; free and public domain art is, of course, free. There are better collections of resources elsewhere, but check out Pexels, Unsplash, and Wikimedia Commons to start.

3D: LAYOUT

This can vary a lot, but the basic things involved in layout are:

• Literal page formatting. One column or two? How big are the breaks between lines, columns, headings? Where do you stick page numbers, section markers, and so on?
• Font and typography. Which font(s) are you using? How big are they? Are you doing anything fancy with kerning, tracking, leading?
• Information design. What's the order and flow of things? Where do art and diagrams go? What about labels, keys, legends, and so on?
• Aesthetics. Does it look nice? Can it look nicer? 

These are all fairly blurry categories, and there's more beyond them. The key takeaway is that good layout (even more so than art or editing, imo) elevates a blogpost or google doc draft into an actual book, something you'd want sitting on your table. As with art, there are many, many books and blogs out there about layout and graphic design (if you don't know where to start, I'd look through OSE, Mothership, and Mork Borg, then read Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type).

Like editing and art, you can hire a layout designer to do layout for you (I do layout work! Hit me up!), but you also can do your own layout. This can be scary, but it's doable (I taught myself 80% of what I know about layout, fwiw). You'll need some software (probably InDesign or Affinity Publisher) and it'll involve watching YouTube tutorials and a lot of screwing around, but it is doable. 

--

For a lot of newbies to RPG production, this is the hardest and most complicated part. Taking your document and turning it into an actual book is difficult, time-consuming, and (potentially) costly. That said, it is fundamentally doable. I did it with relatively little help or good examples, and while my first few zines were pretty shoddy, they did get made. I have faith in you.

STEP 4: PRINTING

Okay! You've got a fancy PDF, with good writing and editing and art and layout. How do you print it?

There are three common ways to print your zines: DriveThruRPG, Mixam, and your own local printers. Here's the rundown:

4A: DRIVETHRURPG

DriveThru is the major RPG marketplace. More or less every trad publisher releases their stuff through it, and many many indie types do as well.

There are two major advantages to DriveThru: first, it's popular, and thus will get you some eyeballs—I've made significant cash on DriveThru just by having my stuff there, even with minimal marketing. 

Second, and more importantly, DriveThru will handle on-demand printing for customers: anybody who wants a copy of an RPG can order one off of DriveThru and they'll print it immediately. No print runs, no storage, no shipping. 

It's basically impossible to over-emphasize how useful this is for super-fresh indies. You don't have to deal with storing copies in your garage, you don't waste any cash on excess copies, you don't have to mail anything to anybody: you set up the page, and then it's there. In terms of raw convenience, it's unbeatable.

There are, however, three major disadvantages to DriveThru:

• No zines. Since earlier this year, DriveThru's printer, LightningPress, no longer prints saddle-stitched books. You can still print slim perfect-bound volumes, which aren't so far off from zines, but if form-factor is a major sticking point for you, DriveThru can't deliver.
• Low quality and customization. You just... don't get that many options on DriveThru. Your inside covers will always be white, the paper quality's not that good, construction's often kinda flimsy. Big RPG nerds like me can spot DTRPG production values from a distance, and that's not really positive (not really negative, either, but you know).
• Cost. DriveThru eats a big chunk of your profits: they cut their production cost off of your basic book price, then take 35% of those profits. For example, you have a zine that retails for $10; it costs DriveThru $5 to print. Of the remaining $5, they take 35%: for each $10 zine you sell, you see $3.25. 

In general, I think DriveThru is still a good option for first-timers. It's extremely low-risk compared to other options, it takes far less work on your end, and gets you a decent book. If you're feeling intimidated by other options, DriveThru is never a terrible idea.

4B: MIXAM

Mixam is an online printing service. This means that you can, at basically any time, go on Mixam, plug in your PDF, and order a bunch of zines to be sent to your house. 

You now have a bunch of zines sitting in a box at your house. There's no marketplace, no on-demand printing for customers, and no shipping or handling. You order some number of books, they print them and send them to you.

That said, there are two big advantages to Mixam:

• High degree of quality and customization. You can customize your inside covers, you can detail all the colors, you can pay a bit extra for nicer paper weights and things, the whole nine yards. If it's something you've seen on a zine before, it's highly likely Mixam can do it for you. (Tuesday Knight Games and Mousehole Press, who make Mothership and Artefact & Orbital, respectively, both print with Mixam.) They just make good zines.
• Cost. At low volumes it's basically the same, but DriveThru doesn't actually get cheaper with more copies—Mixam does. The flipside is, of course, that you have to do sipping and handling yourself.

If having a high-quality product is very important to you, Mixam is the way to go, I think. It's a lot more work on your end and a bigger risk if you want to sell copies later (see Step 6A), but if you're for-sure committed to it, it's a good choice.

4C: LOCAL PRINTERS

There are, somewhere in your local area, printers and print shops that could print zines for you. (Unless you live in the woods or something.)

These printers have the potential to be cheaper and easier and more wholesome than DTRPG or Mixam, but also the potential to be slow and shitty and unreliable. 

It's worth poking around a bit with your local shops. I myself haven't ever printed locally (mostly because I'm a student and thus move around a fair bit, and also because I hate talking to strangers on the phone), but I have friends and colleagues who have. If you find the right shop, because they're humans you can speak with, you can locally get an even-more-customized product than you could through Mixam. They might also be shitty, though, no telling.

If you're in contact with your local RPG circles via FLGS / Facebook group / whatever, it might also be worth asking around to see if anyone knows any printers. 

Worth investigating, but I can't guarantee any outcomes. 

STEP 5: SHIPPING

This part is quite a bit different depending on whether you went with DriveThru or Mixam / local printers. That said, they start the same way:

First things first, you need to collect shipping data from your backers. This has two steps:

1. Send out backer surveys. As a creator, you can send out a survey to all your backers, where they can answer your questions. You (obviously) need to collect shipping addresses and stuff here, but you might also ask other questions—backer names, specific tier rewards, etc.
   After you've sent out the surveys, I'd allow at minimum two weeks before shipping. That'll get you most people, but the longer you give it, the more responses you'll get. You'll never get everybody, but if you can get >95% of backers to reply, that's good enough for now (probably).
2. Collect backer data. Once the surveys are responded to, Kickstarter lets you export all that data as a .csv or other spreadsheet—extremely helpful. You can always export another copy when you need to.

This is where the shipping paths diverge. 

5A: IF YOU PRINTED ON DRIVETHRU

Go to the "Publish" tab, scroll down until you see the menu on the right that says "Promotion" and hunt for "Send complimentary copies." Click it.

Add your title, go forward, and then click the option that says "Add, Edit, or Upload Groups." This lets you add that entire spreadsheet of backers you just exported from KS, with all their shipping data. DriveThru'll compile it into addresses, you keep hitting forward, and then you pay several hundred/thousand dollars to send out the copies to all of your backers.

That's it. They handle everything afterwards. You're done. Kickstarter delivered. 

(This feature is the real appeal of DriveThru—the marketplace is nice, but being able to simply say "go" and have them handle all the shipping and printing for you? Unbeatable.)

5B: IF YOU PRINTED WITH MIXAM OR LOCALS

Strap in, this is where it gets a little rough.

Currently, you should have a box full of zines sitting in your closet, and a big spreadsheet of backer data. 

Right now, you need two physical things: mailers and labels. Mailers are cardboard envelopes, basically, which are ideal for shipping zines; labels are the literal pieces of paper you stick to the outside of those mailers. 

For mailers, get the smallest ones you can that'll still fit your zine (usually 9" x 6" or so). For labels, I would buy labels that can be printed on by ordinary printers: you swap out your regular printer paper for label-paper and print away. Both of these can be found at an office supply store (or via Jeff Bezos).

Now you have zines, blank labels, mailers, and a spreadsheet. You still need the actual shipping labels themselves. 

There are lots of places that will sell you labels, but my preferred site is pirateship.com, as they're cheaper than basically anywhere else. Make an account, and then create a new shipment: put in the weight and dimensions of your package (I'd add an extra 10-20% to the weight, just in case), then upload the spreadsheet from Kickstarter. Pirateship will create a whole bunch of shipping labels based on that spreadsheet, which you then pay for and download as a PDF.

Now, take that PDF from Pirateship and print it out on your label paper, one shipping label per half of label-paper (this makes more sense when you see it in-person). Take those now-printed labels and slap 'em onto your mailers, then stuff a zine into each mailer. 

A VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: when you get your labels from Pirateship, make sure to get a SCAN form with them. This is a big receipt that says "here's all the labels this shipment contains." Print the SCAN form with your labels. It's free, there's a button for it, you just have to get it.

Once all your zines are labeled and stuffed into mailers, call your local USPS office: tell them you're planning a large dropoff of [X] zines and that you have a SCAN form. They'll tell you to come around the back or side of the post office, somebody will come meet you, you'll drop off your dozens/hundreds of zines, they'll check the SCAN form once, and you'll be done. 

If you don't do this, dropping off your zines will take literal hours, you'll annoy everyone else, and the USPS staff will hate you. Get a SCAN form. Save the sanity of both yourself and our boys in blue.

But—once you drop off all of your (labeled, mailer'd) zines with a SCAN form, you're done! Congrats! 

STEP 0: BUDGETING

This is where it gets hard. The perennial question is, of course, "What should your KS goal be?" and the eternally-unhelpful answer is "It depends."

My basic piece of advice for budgeting is this: work backwards. Start with the costs that don't move, and build towards the ones that can. 

Here's a step-by-step example.

0A: PRINTING

Printing is, actually, probably the easiest to calculate. DriveThru has a pretty reliable print cost schedule, and Mixam lets you see prices on the fly. 

As a baseline, assume you're going to print 100 copies. The smallest projects won't quite get there, but it's a good threshold to work from. 

As a baseline, we're going to be making a 36-page black-and-white zine. A Kriegsmesser, say, or a Lay on Hands. On DriveThru, this runs about $1.85/copy, for a total of $185; on Mixam, a 100-copy run goes for about $130.

For reference, a 36-page color (saddle-stitched) zine on DriveThru is about $2.50/copy, for a total of $250; 100 36-page color zines on Mixam is about $250.

0B: SHIPPING

If you're printing with Mixam or locally: Pirateship will let you put in a sample package and then give you rates on the fly, which makes this process a lot more straightforward.

If you're printing with DriveThru: check out the estimated scheduling cost here. Historically it's been pretty accurate for me.

In general, domestic shipping inside the US for a zine will cost between $4 and $5. We're going to round that up to an even $5 for convenience and wiggle room. (It might end up being less, if you get lucky.)

International shipping is way dicier, especially in these global plague-times. This past year, in 2021, international shipping for a zine cost me about $15 per zine, on average. That varied a lot—western Europe is cheaper than most of the world which is cheaper than Australia which is (somehow) cheaper than Canada. It's hard to predict, but $15 is a solid baseline.

If you're not printing with DriveThru, you also have to buy mailers and labels. A 100-pack of mailers is about $30; 200 labels is about $15. We're going to round that up and say that, for mailers and labels, it's about $0.50 a copy—in higher numbers, that cost will drop.

Historically, as a dude writing in English from the States, about 30% of my backers have been international. That varies a bit, obviously, but I suspect that's a pretty reasonable baseline.

If we're printing with Mixam, 70 of our copies will cost about $5.50 each to ship, and 30 of our copies will cost about $15.50 each to ship—a total of (probably) about $850. You also have to pay them to ship the zines to your house (probably around $15), for a total of about $865.

If we're printing with DriveThru, 70 of our copies will cost about $5 each to ship, and 30 of our copies will cost about $15 to ship—a total of (probably) about $800. 

0C: PRODUCTION

Here's some fast math:

• Layout designers charge around $10/page. That's what I charge, that's what most indie/small-scale designers I know charge. If you're new or it's a really simple project or you have a good friend, it might be lower, but $10/page—which again, gets you very nice layout—is a baseline.
• Editors charge around $0.06/word for line, copy, and proof edits together, plus ~$25/hour for dev edits. Dev edits happen hourly because they involve, like, reading and suggestions and discussion. All the others happen per-word, based on your manuscript. (In general, for a ZQ project, I would tentatively say that dev edits are less necessary from a hired editor—talk to your friends and colleagues, then pay the editor for line/copy/proof.)
• Artists vary a lot, but you can generally probably expect to pay around:
• >$300 for full-page art (that is, 5.5" x 8.5"). The bigger and more complicated, the more expensive.
• $100–$300 for half-page art (half that)
• <$100 for spot art
• If your art's in full color, roughly double all of those
• These are, obviously, estimates. Really successful professional artists will charge more, but I've hired artists for multiple projects now, and they've generally held around these numbers.
• Be nice to your artists. Pay them what they're owed. Don't shortchange them.  

The "traditional method" for paying you—the writer—for ZQ is that you get paid whatever the leftover profits are. Typically, this is not a lot. The traditional method is traditional because it's very cheap. 

We're going to assume our 36-page manuscript is around 10,000 words; we could fit more, but let's say we have breathable margins and some nice diagrams and things.

A layout designer will cost us about $360 for layout. Simple.

If we're paying an editor for 8 hours of dev (quite a bit for a project this size) and the full run of edits, that'll come out to around $800. Cutting the dev reduces that to $600. 

For simplicity, let's say we're going to get one piece of cover art ($300), a half-page piece of art ($200), and two pieces of spot art ($100 apiece): call it roughly $700 total. 

For the full monte here, layout and editing and art, production comes out to $1860, round it up to $1900.

Of course, we don't need any of this. We could spend $50 on Affinity to do layout at home, skip dev edits, and spend another $150 on a very simple half-page piece of cover art for a total of $800.

You can go even further—download a bootleg copy of Powerpoint for layout, trade edits with a friend, and use exclusively free and public domain art, for a grand total of $0. Your zine will look, feel, and be cheaper, but hey, zero dollars is zero dollars.

Production is extremely variable.

 

One fast note—its customary that, once the project is done, every contributor to the project gets a copy of the game for free, from you. This is small in the grand scheme of things, but it's worth remembering.

0D: KICKSTARTER'S CUT

On paper, Kickstarter takes 5%. In practice, Kickstarter takes 10%. Assume 10% of your cash is going to Kickstarter.

0E: THE SLUSH FUND

You should set aside another 10% for "oh shit!" moments. They happen. That said, after the campaign ends, you can dip into this when you're coming up short elsewhere. Eat your slush fund before you starting eating your own pockets.

0F: PDFs

This is where the math gets weird: PDFs you sell on Kickstarter are, basically, free money. You still have to pay for production for the PDF, but you don't have to pay for printing and shipping after that. 

How many PDF-only backers will you get? In my experience, about 25% of the total. If you have 150 backers, around 36 of them will be PDF-only. 

But, PDF-only pledge tiers are usually cheaper than print tiers, sometimes significantly so. While in my experience they've made up around 25% of backers, they usually only account for 10-15% of your total funding. It's tricky.

We've arbitrarily decided we're planning to have 100 print backers, so we can equally-arbitrarily decide that we'll have about 32 PDF-only backers on top of them.

0G: SETTING THE TIERS

Tiers, or pledge tiers, or just pledges, are the various levels that backers can give you money in exchange for rewards. Usually, there is a cheap tier for just the PDF and a "standard" tier for PDFs + physical zines. 

(Sometimes, there's an even bigger, more expensive tier that includes fun knick-knacks, like patches or stickers or postcards or jars of bones. I would avoid these for now unless you're very sure about them—they are almost always lots of extra work, headache, and sometimes cost.)

Generally, you need your physical zine tiers to do three things:

1. Make enough to pay for itself.
2. Make enough to pay for fixed costs (production)
3. Not be significantly outside the expected realm of costs for these kinds of things.

Generally, speaking, most physical zine tiers for ZQ cost between $10-15. Any higher than that and you'll need to prove that you've got something real fancy to show off (like absurd production quality or a huge team or something).

Does this $10-15 track hit all three? Sort-of yes. It definitely hits #3 and #1. #2 is variable based on your production costs.

PDFs are usually about half of whatever the physical tier was; $5–$7 PDFs are standard. You could probably nudge it higher to try to raise more (but you might lose backers) or lower to try to get backers (but you might make less overall). As I said, PDFs are basically free money from your side, so the stakes are low—half the cost of the physical is a good baseline.

0H: PLEDGE TIERS' SHIPPING

On Kickstarter, you can attach shipping costs to a tier. Not only that, you can attach shipping costs to a tier based on the individual countries / parts of the world you're shipping to (so the US could be $5, $12 to the UK, and so on.) This is very handy, since it lets you modulate the amount people have to pledge for shipping.

Critically, these shipping costs are added onto the pledge, and thus to the total funds raised of the Kickstarter itself. If you have a $12 basic tier with another $5 added on for shipping, $17 gets added to the total funds raised on Kickstarter. If you have razor margins on your total Kickstarter amount, this matters a lot.

Let's do some math.

We're going to charge $12/copy for our (36 pg, B&W) zines, plus $5 for US backers and $15 for international backers (you might ratchet shipping costs up by a dollar or two, just in case).

Assuming all of our shipping funding gets eaten (it will), we're paying about $2 per copy, leaving us with a net $10 per physical tier. If we're sticking with our 100 print backers, that's an even grand; add on 32-odd $6 PDF-only tiers, and we have about $1200 to work with. 

Some of that $1200 is earmarked: 10% of the total goes to Kickstarter ($1050), another 10% goes to the slush fund ($900).

This remaining $900 is for two things:

1. Paying your artists, editors, and layout designers
2. Paying yourself

Both of these matter.

0I: GAMBLING AND/OR INVESTING

Making a Kickstarter page is free; launching a campaign is free. 

That said, I would broadly recommend that you front some of your own cash ahead of time to buy art. Every time that I've commissioned art for a KS project ahead of time, it has paid off many times over. In general, I would recommend that this is your cover art: make it the cover of your zine and the thumbnail on your KS page, to link the two together. Good art catches eyeballs and opens wallets.

This means, essentially, that you're gambling with several hundred dollars of your own money that your Kickstarter will succeed. If you have a full-time job, a $300 bet is not out of the question; if you're a mostly-broke grad student (like me), a $300 bet is serious.

Like I said, though, every time I've invested in for a Kickstarter campaign's page, it's paid off. My lowest-funded and least-successful Kickstarter projects were the ones with little art or crummy art. 

0J: SO HOW MUCH SHOULD YOUR CAMPAIGN GOAL BE?

The short answer is: enough to pay off any investments you've already made. 

Because of the way shipping and PDF tiers work on Kickstarter, there's no way to guarantee this number, unfortunately. But, using data, you can make some reasonable assumptions.

Let's say you've sunk $300 into art for the campaign page, so you need, at bare minimum, $300 in profits from the campaign. This assumes you're spending $0 on layout, editing, and your own time & effort.

Time for some weird projection math based on averages:

Each $12 pledge:

• Adds about $9 in funding you can use to your pockets
• +$12 pledge
• +$2, for 33% of a $6 PDF pledge 
• -$2, for printing
• -$1.50, for Kickstarter
• -$1.50, for the slush fund
• Adds an average of about $22.5 to your campaign total
• +$12 pledge
• +$8.5 shipping (average of $5 US + 30% of $10 for international)
• + $2, for 33% of a $6 PDF pledge

This means that if you need $300 for art-debt, you need a pledge goal of roughly $750 ([300 / 8.75] * 22) in order to not go under. The rough hypothetical breakdown here would be:

• 25 physical zines, US (each kicking in $17)
• 10 physical zines, international (each kicking in an average of $27, varying by country)
• 10 PDF backers (each kicking in $6)

As a worst/best case scenario, imagine you get 125 PDF backers and nobody else: you make $300 in profit (post slush-fund and KS's take) and have to produce zero zines. Alternatively, imagine you get 28 international backers and no one else: you make $235 in cash, leaving you technically "funded" but actually still $65 in the hole. Neither of these will happen, but this kind of hypothetical math is worth thinking about.

If we hit the long-assumed 100 physical backers and all these math averages hold steady, you'll have about $900 for paying off art-debt, production, and your own wallet; your campaign will have raised $2200—a very respectable amount for a first time Kickstarter project. 

(I think this math all checks out. Please let me know if it doesn't.)

You can see how, if you're paying for plenty of art and layout and editing ahead of time, Kickstarter goals skyrocket hugely despite the projects themselves not actually having all that much actual cash to work with (see NERVES and A Catalogue Chimerical as two examples of these kinds of high-upfront-goal projects). That's a risky play—projects with relatively high goals compared to others are much less likely to get funded.

Of course, if you do everything yourself and spend $0 before the campaign, you can make your goal whatever you want—think about how much money you want to take home at the end of this. If you don't care about the money (but you should), set your goal somewhere between $500 and $1000. 

So what if you do want fancy art and editing and layout and everything? If you have such variable margins on everything, how can you ever be sure?

0K: STRETCH GOALS

There are, in my mind, three basic kinds of stretch goals:

1. Creative stretch goals that are more work for you but have relatively low costs otherwise: extra pages, more content, more stuff in the book. These are... fine. They're fine. Do them if you want, but I'd advise keeping a very tight leash on new content, and write as much of it as you can ahead of time.
2. Creative stretch goals that are more work for you and also have high costs otherwise: pamphlets, inserts, pocketmods, more zines, stickers, postcards, dice, the dreaded shirts. Avoid these. They're bad. They eat all your time and money.
3. Non-creative stretch goals that cost money but relatively little time: higher production values, essentially: more art, more editing, more layout, snazzier zines, and so on. These ones are good: they make your book better and you can tightly control for them ahead of time.

My broad-spectrum advice for ZQ is that, if you really want snazzy editing and layout and art, make them stretch goals. Calculate how much the new stuff will cost you (you can do it on paper ahead of time, but also just talk to the people you want to hire), then make it a stretch goal. If you hit those goals, perfect; if you don't, well, at least you're not in the hole.

Calculate your stretch goal costs carefully. Add lots and lots of padding. Remember, every time you pay an artist/editor/designer/whoever for new stretch goal stuff, you're taking away the money that could instead be going into your own pockets. 

I would strongly advise against stretch goals like #2. I've added pamphlets and inserts and shit into my ZQ projects, and they eat up tons of time and money. Avoid them. 

--

Okay. That's budgeting. If you're still here, good job.

STEP 6: AFTER KICKSTARTER

You made your budget, you ran the campaign, you made the zine, you printed them out, you shipped them out to all your backers. Now what?

First, put the PDFs of your zine up for sale on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. These are the two major PDF marketplaces for RPGs, you want people buying them there. Post about them when they go live.

If you printed with DriveThruRPG, you should make your zine available for sale to the public through print-on-demand. Then, you're done. People will buy your RPG, and you'll make money in your sleep.

If you printed locally or via Mixam, you have a choice. You can:

1. Print enough copies to send them out to your backers, friends, and family. 
2. Print some extra copies to sell to online retailers.

Option #1 is pretty straightforward: you make money off the KS, and anybody in the future who wants your game has to settle for a PDF.

6A: SELLING COPIES TO RETAILERS

Option #2 is a little trickier. This is another gamble: you're printing off extra copies, once that haven't already been paid for, in the hope that you can sell them later to make more money. 

Here's how this works:

1. You've sent out all your Kickstarter copies, and now have a box or three of zines left over, sitting in your closet.
2. You contact online retailers (see the list below) and tell them you have a zine you'd like to sell, and why it's cool.
3. They purchase some amount of copies (probably 5–15 or so) from you at wholesale prices.
4. You box up those copies, walk them down to the post office, and mail them to the retailer. (Retailers pay for shipping.)
5. The retailer sells them on their store.
6. Go back to #2, rinse and repeat.

Wholesale price, usually, is 50% of normal price. If your zine is $12, wholesale would be $6. If a retailer buys 10 copies at wholesale, you make $60 profit.

The advantage to this is that you get to keep making money after your Kickstarter ends—if your zine is really popular, you might actually make hundreds or thousands of dollars. 

The disadvantage is that, every once in a while, you have to message people asking if they want your game, box up a bunch of zines, and walk them down to the post office. Not an insurmountable challenge by any means, but it does mean you can't ever 100% stop thinking about the game. 

How many extra copies should you order? There's no one single right answer, but my broad advice is about half(ish) as many as you had physical backers for during the campaign, with a floor of about 100. If you had 100 backers during the campaign, I'd order another 100. If you had 300 backers during the campaign, I'd order another 150-ish copies to sell to retail. 

If it turns out your zine is wildly popular after the campaign and you run out of all your extra copies, congrats! You get to do a second print run—a rare achievement in RPG circles.

6B: SOME ONLINE RETAILERS 

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are some online retailers who may or may not be interested in stocking copies of your game:

• Exalted Funeral
• Spear Witch
• LF OSR
• Ratti Incantati
• Monkey's Paw
• SoulMuppet
• Rook's Press
• Four Rogues
• Floating Chair

No guarantees these folks will for certain want your stuff, but they're worth reaching out to. They all have contact emails, lots of them you can find on Discord or Twitter, too.

THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Here's how to do ZineQuest:

1. You need an RPG. It can be almost anything in terms of content, but must be generally zine-sized.
2. You need a Kickstarter page. Tell us: 
1. What your game is. 
2. Why it's cool. 
3. What they get. 
4. Who you are. 
5. If there are any stretch goals.
6. I recommend paying a bit of money for nicer art ahead of time; it usually pays off.
3. You need to produce the zine. There are four parts to this:
1. Writing. This is probably what you do.
2. Editing. This makes the writing better, and costs $0.06/word, usually.
3. Art. This is pretty; big art costs >$300, medium art costs $100–$300, small art costs <$100.
4. Layout. This makes the book pretty, and costs $10/page, usually.
4. You need to print the zine.
1. If you print on DriveThru, it's way easier but they give you shittier books. 
2. If you print on Mixam, you have to ship it yourself, but they give you nicer books.
3. These generally cost about the same; Mixam gets cheaper with more copies.
5. You need to ship the zine.
1. If you print on DriveThru, you pay them $5 domestic and ~$15 international and they handle it.
2. If you print on Mixam, you need to pay $5 domestic and ~$15 international, plus $0.50 for labels and mailers. 
3. Pay for your labels on Pirateship, then print them and stick them on your mailers. Make sure you get a SCAN form before you drop everything off at the post office.
6. You need to pay for everything.
1. Most zines are $10–15 on KS. Most PDFs are half that.
2. Remember shipping gets added to your totals.
3. Set your goal so that you can break even on any money you spent ahead of time.
4. Use tactically-calculated stretch goals to pay for more art, editing, and layout.
7. After the Kickstarter ends, you can still make money.
1. If you printed on DriveThru, enable your zine for sale and you're done.
2. If you printed on Mixam, you can sell your zines to online retailers.
3. They buy a handful of copies at a time at wholesale price (50%) directly from you, then sell them on their stores.

--

Okay. I think that's everything. 

I hope this has been helpful, thank you for sitting through such a beast of a post.

Feel free to share this wherever you want; if you have your own suggestions or ideas, please leave them in the comments.

If you have questions, you can always find me on Twitter at @HeadOfTheGoat, or on Discord at SquigBoss#1353. If you need an editor or layout designer, I'm available for work.

I look forward to seeing your zines!

Not Horrifically Failing at Kickstarter: a Guide

Adapted from a guide I wrote several years ago that you probably didn't see.

Hello! I'm writing this guide to cover the basics of making a Kickstarter page and campaign that probably won't horrifically fail.

A couple of conditions and caveats to that:

1. At time of writing, I've done four Kickstarter campaigns (soon to be five, since ZineQuest 3 is around the corner). All four succeeded, but only one of them was a major success in anything approaching a strong, influential way; the other three did fine, but they weren't anything to write home about.
2. All of my Kickstarters were for tabletop RPGs. That's what most of this blog is about, but if you wandered here for some other purpose, bear in mind that TTRPGs will be the focus. I would tentatively guess that what I advise could be extrapolated; something similar (a board or card game) would be pretty similar, but something more different (a video game) would take significant tweaking.

Regardless, caveat emptor.

This guide is divided into several sections. My advice is loosely ordered according to priority; that is, the first things are more important than the last things—but everything I'm telling you is worth at least something. 

With all that said and done, the guide itself:

1. ACTUALLY MAKE SOMETHING GOOD

This is the simplest part of Kickstarter, but is also probably the most difficult. If you don't make something good, it's much, much harder to get funded. It's worse than that, really: even if your bad thing does get funded (which happens all the time), once it comes out people will realize it's bad, and then you're screwed.

On some level, this feels obvious: "No duh, Sam, of course my game actually has to be good." Sure, sure. Everyone knows you should always do your best.

It's a bit different here, though. While backers don't get to see the final product of what you're making until it's done, they can sniff out a lot about you. Don't cut corners. Keep your standards high the whole way. Show some effort in your product and your page. If you do these, it will show: backers will realize that even if you're not the most ingenious designer or have the snazziest budget, you've poured some heart and soul into the making of it, which counts for a lot.

Dedication is important: part of the allure of Kickstarter is the fabled pipe-dream—the plucky underdog creator that couldn't find a home for their work in the mainstream, and so turned to the crowd.I f you can sell this image, this story, this allure, your project is far more likely to succeed.

The best and simplest way for that dream to feel true is for it to actually be true: if you can show, quickly and easily, that you are turning to Kickstarter as your last best hope, people will latch onto that. 

Likewise, the pages that succeed are the ones that don't feel like sales pitches. Everyone knows a sales pitch and can spot it from a mile off; if you frame your page not as "buy this thing" but as "here is this cool thing I made," you will see more success. 

That's why dedication matters: you have to really and truly love whatever it is you're putting up. People can see that, they can feel it, and they'll back your project because of it.

2. ART MATTERS

There's a notion in some circles—particularly very-online DIY-ish blog-centric game circles—that art basically doesn't matter. That gameplay (and thus, in RPGs, rules text) is king, and art is for the sidelines: window-dressing on the main event.

This is wrong. 

Art is critically important in pitching your game: art is what people first see, what immediately draws their attention, and what sticks in their head after they've gone. A mediocre project with amazing art can and will succeed more than a good project with mediocre art.

The most important art piece in the whole of your game is the pitch thumbnail: it's this art that people see when they're scrolling by your project on Kickstarter, it's this art that will get publicized elsewhere online, and it's this art that will be the icon of your game.

For the page itself, the more art you have, the better. You need text (don't do that weird thing where the entire page is one giant image), but the more you convey about your game through images and artwork and expression, the better. Use art for titling your sections, for breaking up text, for showing off stretch goals, for diagrams, for gameplay, whatever you can. More art is good.

Bad art is death. You could have the best, most creative, most brilliant project in the world, and if you have crummy art, your game will die. The flipside, as mentioned, is that you can have an utterly garbage game, but if it has amazing art, it will sell like hotcakes.

Ideally, you have the liquid cash on-hand ahead of time to fund commissioned pieces for the Kickstarter. You can work with one artist to have a more detailed vision and a clearer idea of what you want—once you've funded and made your money back, you can hire them again for the final book.

If you have zero art and have zero budget, trawl around online for royalty-free images and use those (check pexels, unsplash, wikimedia commons, etc.), or fork over a pittance of cash (<$50 is enough usually) and grab some stock images that fit your game. For any royalty-free images, don't be afraid of recoloring, tweaking, and adjusting them using Photoshop (or gimp, or paint.net, or whatever you have). Having at least a visuals is critical, so get whatever you can, but make it look good.

3. PROVE THAT YOU'RE LEGIT

Straight-up scammers on Kickstarter are relatively rare these days, but everyone's heard horror stories of campaigns that promise the world, hit their funding goal in spades, and then vanish with the cash. Or maybe the creators don't disappear, but they over-promise and then produce mostly garbage once the game's actually released.

There are two key parts to proving you're legit:

First, show you're not a scam. There's no direct etiquette to this, but you should explain who you are, what you need the money for, where the money's going, and what your general estimates are. Be transparent, be honest, and be yourself. If your backers smell something fishy going on, they'll be quick to withdraw and leave you in the lurch. 

Don't promise too much. One of the most common reasons that Kickstarter projects fail after being funded is that they smash through their goal, wildly promise extra content, and only then realize they've massively overscoped and can't pull through. If your stretch goals smack of being too ambitious—let alone the base goals of your campaign—backers will be wary of a scam.

Second, you have to prove that you can actually pull off making the game itself. There are a thousand wannabe game devs that jump on Kickstarter with what they think is a million-dollar idea—and may well be, honestly—but they have zero skills to back up their lofty ambitions. You need to prove that you're a talented designer, one that can actually deliver on what you're promising.

There are several ways to do this: showing off past projects is very helpful. If you've made a 200-page RPG, making a 300-page RPG isn't that much of a stretch for you. It's rare that people will actually click through your portfolio and actually look at what you've made, but just having a volume of work on-hand for reference is extremely useful in proving your credibility.

The best way, really, is to just have a lot of the work done already. Show demos, examples, instances, scenarios, whatever you can to show that you know what you're doing. Getting started is usually the hardest part of these sorts of things; showing you have the core of your game done is a good way to prove that you can get the rest of the way. 

This ties into Point #4:

4. SHOW SOMETHING OFF

Your game is made of stuff. Show that stuff off.

What this stuff is varies a lot based on your game, but a good possible includes:

• Page/spread samples
• Rules text
• Example play procedures
• Actual play of your game
• In-game art
• Character sheets
• Content (items, monsters, classes/playbooks, events, tables, etc.) that will be in the game

Show off as much of this as you can. Don't just tell your backers why your game is cool, show them. Let them see for themselves what they can get if they back your project. Tantalize them. Show off one really dope feature or level or example and they'll want more.

For some games, you might actually give away some for free ahead of time. Lots of RPGs put out their basic hacks or the basic rules early, for free, before the Kickstarter page even launches. This is a good marketing tactic, since it A) gets eyeballs on the project, and B) it means that people know what they're getting their hands on before they dump a bunch of cash. It's also just a good way to build goodwill: people love free stuff, and are a lot more willing to contribute to a paid thing if they already like the free thing.

Ideally, you've actually been doing this for a while before your campaign launches: putting out blog posts, releasing snippets of content, maybe running some playtests for strangers.

This ties into Advice #5:

5. HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE OUT RIGHT NOW

People love shinies. If you can hang something on a string right in front of them, they’ll take it.

This means that you should have a tier reward, ideally for every tier, that gives something out right then and there. This is probably some kind of playtest kit or early backers kit, something that lets them start playing right away, but it could be something else, like a set of player’s options or an intro module or something.

However you figure it, you want something that you can give away, right now. It's a really good incentive to get people to pledge sooner, rather than later, to hook them in on the impulse buy. Lots of would-be backers think about backing a project and then forget about it, or wait to see if it’s doing well first, or otherwise hang around a lot, and putting something right in front of them is a good way to sell that.

This ties in to #4, too: if you’ve put something out earlier, for free, that can do basically the same thing. A souped-up or revised version of what’s already free is a great incentive: people know what they’re getting and it’s nothing too crazy, but it’s still shiny. Likewise, if backers know they already like something (your free thing), they’ll jump to get more of it (your shiny). It’s a vicious cycle, sorta, but one that profits you immensely.

6. KNOW YOUR MATH

There's a lot of tricky math on Kickstarter, and there are lots of other posts and articles that cover it in more detail than me. I'll hit the best-of list here:

1. On paper, Kickstarter eats 5%, but they will usually end up charging closer to 10% in processing fees. If your budget is super-tight, this might sink you.
2. You'll want separate shipping fees depending where in the world you're sending your physical products; these shipping fees get added onto your total funding amount. If you have a $20 tier and $5 shipping, the total contribution added to your campaign is $25. 
3. You can change tiers after launch, but only if nobody has pledged to them. Go through your tiers and make sure they're all perfect before launching.
   
4. You can always add more tiers; if you have some special reward or early bird tier that sell outs ultra-fast, do another round. Make some more cash.
5. Budget in a little buffer cash. Things always end up a little more expensive than you think, so make sure your "oh shit" fund is intact, in the event that things really go south.

Review all of Kickstarter's funding math. It's very important.

7. ALWAYS BE AROUND

Hit up every single social media outlet you can find: be on Kickstarter constantly, but also be on Twitter, reddit, the Gauntlet, rpg.net, enworld, the RPG blogosphere, the podcast beat, the RPG Discord servers, wherever you can. Be there. As often as you can, as fast as you can. 

Hawk your game. Tell everyone who will listen about it. Always be around to answer questions. There are a number of YouTube channels and blogs and podcasts that will just talk about the newest Kickstarter releases—if any of them turn hits on your game, be there to answer questions (google your project incognito to find them). People will leave comments on your posts, always be ready to answer them. If anyone DMs you, answer them, too. Word of mouth is a powerful force in the RPG sphere, so don’t be afraid to use it.

Likewise, there’s a chance that someone will message you to be on their podcast or come on their show or do something on their chatroom. Take it. There’s a chance they’ll be weird and scummy to you, but more often than not they’re just trying to hawk their own brand, same as you. Those opportunities are beneficial, even if it's just for the eyeballs. 

While your project is live and afterwards, update frequently. I've never heard of anybody complaining about too many updates, and while I could theoretically imagine it, it's better to update more often than necessary than not often enough. Your backers are the most important people to you, so keep them in the loop.

8. DON'T CAP YOUR WHALES

This ties into #6. Whales are the big spenders on projects, the people who will dump proportionately huge amounts of cash into your game. Lots of people will take the low tiers, some people will take the middle tiers, and a few people will grab the high tiers—those are the whales.

Don’t be afraid to have some high tiers. People will take them. Probably not all of them and probably not very fast, but there are definitely backers out there that have deep wallets and are willing to spend on the projects they care about.

Because of this, don’t cap your whales. Always let people spend more money in exchange for stuff. Do combo deals, add on fun knick-knacks, offer to run games, let them name the example NPCs, do whatever you can to charge more. Your whales will eat it up, and you’ll be all the closer to funded for it.

That said—don’t really lose your mind. If your basic low tier is in the $5-$10 range, don’t go putting up tiers for $1000. You can get away with those huge tiers on projects where the baseline is $50, maybe, but don’t do it for small projects. It’s not often that a whale bites by any means, but it definitely does happen. 

Don’t cap your whales. Let people spend their money.

9. USE EVENTS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Every once in a while, Kickstarter will run events. For an event, Kickstarter will do some advertising ahead of time to let creators know, and then they’ll have special conditions to join the event. My first game was a part of ZineQuest, where you made a very short RPG (a zine) with some specific formatting conditions. If you fulfilled the requirements and tagged your project correctly, you’d show up on Kickstarter’s ZineQuest page.

There are several other events like this, where doing certain projects can earn you visibility. If you can fit your project into one of these, you’ll be rewarded with lots of free clicks, and possibly the illustrious “Project We Love” tag, which is very hard to get otherwise. Boosting visibility is extremely helpful, and will increase your chances of getting funded.

If you can’t fit your project into the current event, you should be wary. Other projects that are in the event will be getting boosted on Kickstarter, and yours will not. You won’t necessarily get buried, per se, but you’ll be fighting against the current. Trying to launch a non-event project in the middle of an existing event is a dangerous business, one that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. Be careful, and do your research ahead of time.

IN CONCLUSION

Kickstarter is hard. It’s scary. It’s a lot of work. But! You can use it to fulfill dreams you otherwise could not, to push projects that otherwise would not exist, and to earn the cash needed to keep working the entire time. 

Follow these rules, and you might not horrifically fail. You still might, though. Uncertain. Anyway, good luck.