Ballistic’s Report: Week Ending Jan 22

The end of 2020 brought some lingering projects into 2021, but hopefully I shall get this year off to a more buttoned-down start. Each week I shall do a quick newsburp on what Gaming Ballistic has been up to this week. Inspired a bit by Kromm’s Another Week in the Life of GURPS thread, it’ll cover on the high level project movement for announced things, and wave hands vaguely at things best left unmentioned.

This first update will have all the future potential sections, for structure purposes, but some may be empty.

Gaming Ballistic Patreon

Quick update on Patreon status.

• Patreon Launched! I promised myself I’d get this started in January, and I did. Getting the ball rolling here is a victory.
• Membership status: 20 patrons and $144 per month.
• Tiers and rewards: The initial setup was probably too expensive: $5 and $25 content tiers, plus the writing coach tier. That high level tier is fine; I don’t expect many takers, but it’s out there for those who want help. The $25 tier was too much for casual uptake, and this early in the Patreon’s voyage, there’s no “oh, wow, this is worth the subscription” history there yet. So I dropped the tier from $25 to $10 to allow those who wish to help GB make progress to contribute more than the baseline tier.
• The funds for this are 100% going to be reinvested in the business for advance work. Pre-visualization and early-stage art for projects prior to launch is going to be the most likely sink for the funds. Some of these can turn directly into products; others have a longer lead time.

New Releases

New projects available for retail sale.

• Gaming Ballistic Website: none this week.
• Gaming Ballistic on Warehouse 23: none this week.
• DriveThruRPG: none this week.

Product Announcements

• No new title announcements

Currently Fulfilling/Shipping

Project where hardcopies and PDFs are going out, or scheduled to do so.

• There will be an update to six files – the five More Perilous Journeys books, plus Character Collection 1: Experienced Adventurers – as soon as the final MPJ book goes to press. I’ll do a mass update and distribution of the via Backerkit as soon as The Sunken Library is finished.
• Pledges and pre-orders for More Perilous Journeys are currently closed.

At the Printer

The last stage of production. Following PDF finalization print orders get placed, then take anywhere from 10 days to several months to print and arrive at the shipping center, which is basically my house.

• Four of the five volumes of the More Perilous Journeys Kickstarter campaign’s USA-bound physical copies went to the printer last Friday…and I have already received shipping notices on all four that they’re in the shipping queue. The last time I got news like that, the books were here in two days.
• Rest-of-World production of these five books is going to wait until I can place the order for all five books at once, probably Monday. There are only 55 packages going out, and the few people who are getting all 10 of my TFT books will be pleased to know that their copies from “Five Perilous Journeys” are already at the fulfillment center

In Production

These books are past the “writing and editing” stage, and are in layout and art finalization

• The Sunken Library, the fifth of the books being produced for the MPJ project, is nearly complete. I am waiting only for two sets of counters (1″ square bits of art, each individually crafted to relate to a character or NPC in the adventure). There are 72 such counters in the book, a new record. I expect to receive one of the sets today, any time now. The other I have to ping the artist; life is complex still in 2021 so the art may or may not be available. As soon as it is, though, this one goes to the printer as well.

Crowdfunding

Announced or active campaigns.

GURPS Pyramid Scheme

• Launched: Jan 17; Ends 5pm Central on Tuesday, Jan 26
• Funding Status: Funded; Passed 7 stretch goals; Next and final goal at $32,500. Requires 275 more pledges at average per-pledge spend of $22.50 to achieve the goal.
• Not a GB project, but an important project for the line. The short-article (4 pages, about 3,000 words) format makes it a good place for new authors to cut their teeth if/when future submissions are solicited. Bear in mind: writing concisely is hard, (“I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”) but if you can do it, it’s a phenomenal feather in the “I’d like to write for you” cap.

No announced or active campaigns for Gaming Ballistic. Two potential projects are being eyeballed for the first quarter of 2021. They’re about neck-and-neck for which is likely to be ready for launch first. One of them is designed to go from launch to “books mailed out” in about a month. The other will be a longer campaign, but I’m really looking forward to it.

In Development

Writing and content creation for announced projects. Some of this may be cryptic.

• I’m currently working on more volumes for the Character Collections series. These are ‘up-gunned,’ meaning longer (12-20 pages instead of eight), and more tightly themed. They’ll also include counter art for each character. I can easily see lots and lots of these: I have five additional volumes in planning and development right now.
• I have done a tiny bit of work on the Nordlond Ovinabokin: the Nordlond Bestiary and Enemies book
• Various other Nordlond projects got some level of discussion with authors, and Kromm and I had several really interesting discussions on potential future projects. We’re friends, but only talk business every few weeks. This was one of those weeks, with at least three or four projects being bandied about.
• Mission X: there’s been some background work on this at the high level; more mission statements and strategies.

Friction

Bits of news and items that put a monkey in the wrench.

• This doesn’t impact Gaming Ballistic directly, but DriveThruRPG‘s partner LightningSource has ceased providing saddle-stitched printing (short books with staples). The new requirement is for perfect binding, with a relatively substantial minimum number of pages. This impacts ZineQuest, and had GB used DriveThru for POD for my TFT products (I don’t), they’d be impacted as well. I’ve seen folks on Facebook and Tenkar’s Tavern talking about product lists on the order of dozens of books that would need to be laid out again on the new format. Shorter books simply won’t fly that way, and the alternate formats suggested by DriveThru don’t all qualify for media mail rates in the USA. This is a rough blow to a lot of small-time folks.
• I am still looking for sources for card and counter printing that are EU friendly. I had a fantastic conversation with Chris over at Nord Games, and he gave me a line on one in Poland…but while Nord started at the same time as GB, they got big, fast, and the Minimum Order Quantity for the new vendor is still too much for Gaming Ballistic without significant growth.
• Several of the large projects currently under way are looking at requiring a lot of backers to make them sing. I mean, more is always better, but there’s a sweet spot at 1,000 to 2,000 folks where you can do almost anything. I’ve got an eye on my mailing list and project backer counts for this year with that in mind.

Fair Winds

Information about things that move GB forward

• A positive outcome on the Nord front was a conversation with another UK fulfillment partner who has some really good capabilities to pull from some of my more difficult sources. They also have some US partners where they can move large quantities of stuff from the manufacturer directly to Florida, and then ship from there. The prices are still subject to Covid surcharges…but once those go away this might be really attractive. Another possibility is actually reversing this: moving some product made in the USA in semi-bulk through that distribution center, acting effectively as freight forwarding or consolidation. Shipping – specifically international shipping but the USA internal stuff has not been stellar either – is the bane of my (and likely the industry as a whole) existence these days. Anything that balances ease for the company with not-insane pricing is welcome.
• I’ve done some background work to help smooth getting from rough draft to layout on certain projects. “Automation” features that will be incredibly useful (and have already proven so) for “many of the same type of thing” projects like the Nordlond Bestiary and Character Collections
• I had a very productive discussion with four or five experts who happen to be my friends about the best way to proceed on a particular effort. A lot of things crystallized for me after the conversation, not the least of which because these four or five folks had five or seven different perspectives, which gave me a great view of the terrain.
• I’ve gotten a lot of good writing done this week, thanks to the workload on The Sunken Library finally easing up and coming to an end. I’ve made the decision to focus on making Gaming Ballistic my only job this year, with my wife’s blessing, and being able to look forward to new projects (and let’s be frank…new revenue) and make progress definitely puts a spring in the step.
• On the TFT front, SJ and I had some great discussions about future work, some of which is pretty exciting…and substantial. Vague? Yeah. I learned my lesson(s) in 2019-2020 about too-soon chatter. I continue to be ridiculously happy with my relationship with SJGames.
• They’ll be listed in the credits, but I really need to give a shout-out to some of the folks who have invested a ton of their personal time proofing and reporting errata on the More Perilous Journeys books. That kind of fan support is just breathtaking, to quote Keanu.