So Elfland: Beyond the Fields We Know is good and done; printed and shipped. All the backers have it and other folks will soon be able to get the PoD on DriveThruRPG and Lulu, the PDF on itch, and copies of the print run through Goodman Games, Exalted Funeral, and Monkey’s Paw Games. Some goodies like the Elfland t-shirts and patches will soon be available on my Etsy store. For those of you who backed the Kickstarter, I would hugely appreciate a rating or review on DriveThruRPG or itch. It really helps other folks discover my work on those sites. If you do a review on another platform then let me know! I’d love to give you a shout out on Twitter and will include links in my next newsletter update.

A Retrospective

The campaign ran from Jan 17th -> Feb 7th and raised about 14.3k. After KS took their cut, I got just over 13k. It took about 2.1k to print the books, plus about 2k for producing various goodies (stickers, patches, posters, the pamphlet adventure, shirts, the music by Loot the Body). So we’re down to 9k. About 1k for art. I was able to make smart use of stock art and editing public domain pieces on this while also having great original pieces. 1k is honestly super duper low. My next project will have a much higher art budget, partially due to it being an MCC project so there’s less available stock/public domain art that fits the vibe. Then we’re gonna round shipping costs (so postage and also the cost of the packaging, all done by me) to around 2.5k. Down to 5.5k profit. Then my state will take somewhere between 800-1000 in sales tax on that original 13k I got from Kickstarter. So about 4.5k in profits. I’m also left with about 200 copies of Elfland: Beyond the Fields We Know, Christopher Robin’s Nightmare & The Blood Rose Curse, 250 patches, and a good bit of extra stickers and bookmarks. Then I sell some copies of to Goodman Games, Exalted Funeral, and Monkey’s Paw Games. After some shipping costs, more sales tax I’ll pay next quarter, and a few reshipments for lost/damaged packages. I get about 5-5.5k in profits. Not bad all things considered. But if I tracked how much time I spent on all this, I’m probably getting a low hourly wage. Just doing all the shipping this past week took somewhere between 12 and 15 hours. I did writing, material research, playtesting, art direction and editing, layout, social media marketing, promotional interviews on podcasts and streams, managed the crowdfunding campaign, shipping and handling, customer support, bookkeeping and probably a few more things that I can’t remember. A whole lot of time and energy went towards this project. Still, I’m happy. I like creating things.

As of this post, around 1k has already gone to art for the next project. I’ll set aside some more to fund additional art commissions and editing. And the rest is honestly helping with a house down payment. This is not my full-time job by any means, but is finally (after 2+ years of work) reaching a level where its making enough money that it isn’t all just going towards the next project. Moving homes in the near future means I’m gonna have a hard time running playtesting and finding writing time for a bit. That said, after things settle down, I’m gonna be able to much more easily convince my spouse that this a valuable use of my time since I’ll be able to do things like partially pay a for a bathroom renovation with my nerd money.

Next project I’ll be doing will involve all the same jobs as I laid out up above, plus trying to figure out backerkit. I have enough of a “back catalogue” of products that it seems to make sense at this point. It’s an additional cost and another learning curve, but I’m guessing that all those enormous kickstarters use backerkit for a good reason.

What I Learned This Time

First off, a Kickstarter usually gets the majority of its backers in the first 48 and the last 48 hours. If you look at the curves for funding on any of my prior Kickstarters, you’ll see that’s true on those. My initial 24 hours did much better than previous ones, which can wholly be attributed to have a “Day 1 deal”. Backers got an iron-on patch for free. Everyone who backed later could also get the patch, but it basically amounted to an extra $5.

I knew that I wanted to do a bonus for early backers, and initially planned to offer a small discount. After looking at other successful projects, it seemed like framing the Day 1 Deal as “you get something extra” instead of “you get a discount” is more common so that’s the direction I went in. It seemed to work well. If you have opinions on what kind of extra goodies you like as stretch goals then please let me know in a comment. For example, bookmarks are easy to do, but if no one really cares about bookmarks then I’d rather put effort into something better.

I also noticed that, starting on Feb 1, I had a higher number of backers pull out than I averaged on any previous weeks. Of course, that’s when ZineMonth started so there were suddenly a lot of shiny new projects competing for people’s attention. In the end, it wasn’t a huge effect and I didn’t have any days that ended with less funding/backers than it started, but it didn’t feel good at the time. Still, I wouldn’t change anything. January is a hard time to run a KS. People just spent a lot on Christmas presents and are trying to save a bit of money for ZineMonth. So it’s either keep going like I did, or push your project back by a couple months.

How To Deliver On Time

So I promised an ETA of April 2023 for a Kickstarter that ended on February 7th. Time to give the low-down on how I delivered so fast. Basically, I just got things done ahead of time. I had all the writing done, all the art done, and layout 90% done. About a week or so into the Kickstarter, all the editing was done so I was able to order a print proof from DriveThruRPG. I received those a couple of weeks after the KS ended and was immediately able to pick out typos and layout mistakes. Between what I found and what backers found in the PDFs, I was able to order the print run really quickly. I was ordering things like patches and posters before I got the funds from Kickstarter just so I could get them ASAP and would have extra time incase anything went wrong. So yeah, just get the actual work done before the KS. In my opinion, it’s better to wait until you at least have things written and at least have a really great cover art piece. People see that polish and it attracts more folks to your product.

Mothership and Pirate Borg

So I wrote an adventure for Mothership called Operation Fishblade and a d10 table pamphlet for Pirate Borg called What the Hell is a FishBlade?

Operation Fishblade - A Mothership 1e pamphlet adventure

The [REDACTED] Corporation commenced a dark project called OPERATION FISHBLADE. Troubleshooter Scarla Suozzi commands a team of drones, disguised as “alien fish with robotic bodies”, to accomplish [REDACTED]’s goals. The PCs board the her ship, the Galathea, with the intent to stop these "alien fish" but will discover much that the situation is much more complicated than it appears.

Physical copies have been shipped to Tuesday Knight Games and Exalted Funeral.

A Pirate Borg pamphlet with a d10 table of different fishblades. It can be fully seen in the preview images on DriveThruRPG.

Next Up: Marvels of the Multiverse and The Technomancer of Candy Mountain

So that’s a work-in-progress cover by Boson Au. This is the next issue in my “of the Multiverse” series of MCC zines. It’ll have a funnel called The Millennials Awaken, which involves cryo-frozen clones awakening as their spaceship crashes above Terra AD. Eons ago, they were test subjects in a long term space research project, finally returning to earth, they’ve mutated in much the same way as those on Terra AD have mutated. Curse those leaky reactor cores! The zine will also MCC-ify some things that are missing from this specific ruleset. You’ll get my simplified rules for Mutation Duels (even more simplified than the spell duel rules from Enter the Dagon), Benisons and Dooms for the wasteland, and a brand new class called the Jungle Juice Drinker. They essentially use a deed die to make potions and jury rig cyber mods from dead creatures and broken robots.

Edwin Bickford is working on the cover for The Technomancer of Candy Mountain. That’s a big adventure that is essentially “focused sandbox”. The PCs travel to a mountain vale where the fauna and flora have been candified by a regionally specific kind of mutation. It’s also given rise to a people called the Sweeties. These folks are another new character class of candy people, who can use mutations and have a Cuteness Die that works similar to how Thieves use their Luck in DCC. They have their own genotype table that has “mutational proclivities” associated with different sub-genotypes. The actual adventure features rumor tables, random encounters, a company run shanty town, and a functioning candy factory run by an enigmatic figure named Wuza Wylder. There’s lot of fun opportunities to take sides with either of the main factions, plus some minor factors that the PCs can have fun with too. Very goofy, but also lots of commentary about worker exploitation.

If so inclined to run a playtest of one of the above MCC adventures, feel free to reach out to DragonPeakPublishing@gmail.com. Please include “MCC Playtest Judge” in the subject line.

The Wrap Up

So that’s a lot. Hope it was worth the wait. It’ll probably be a month or two until the next update. Moving to a new home is gonna suck up a lot of time. But I hope to offering a new issue of The Skull Scryer. If you don’t know what that is, go look at my first post here or back at your “welcome to this newsletter” email. It should have a link to a lil zine that you can print out on your home print. There’s also copies at Goodman Games for just a couple bucks. Alrighty. Until next time folks! Keep on rollin’ dice and keep on being kind to one another.