Planning for 2024…

So, to restate the obvious-but-important: It’s January. Time to really dig in and figure out what’s coming. To do that, though, I need to briefly cover where I’ve been.

2016: Dungeon Grappling. My first project. Broke even but I did it on time, on budget.

2017: Lost Hall of Tyr. Meh.

2018: Dragon Heresy, Hall of Judgment, LHoT 2nd Edition. Lost a lot of money deliberately on Dragon Heresy, but this started my GURPS 3PP journey.

2019: Citadel at Nordvorn (good), Four Perilous Journeys (good), Nordlond Sagas (not good). Expanding into TFT. Nordlond Sagas cost me most if not all of the profits on Nordvorn and 4PJ. Fulfillment took a long time.

2020: More Perilous Journeys. Very late. Very much the only project done in 2020. Got laid off that year too. COVID lockdowns. Excruciating. Lowest point. But decided to make a go of being a full-time publisher.

2021: Rebound. Character Collections for TFT. Delvers to Grow. Tower of the Moon for TFT, Backerkit-only before Backerkit Crowdfunding was even a thing. Bestiary for DFRPG. Record revenue, not record profit … but produced a lot of great TFT/GURPSy stuff.

2022: Till Death Do Us Part (TFT) was good. Over 500 backers. Tested and failed Brazilian Market with Combate Epico em Masmorras with only 129 backers. Old-School Solos did 803 backers and kept me afloat through most of 2023. I also ended with Nightmare Fuel for the DFRPG, trying to build off of the Bestiary. That didn’t work. The books were great, but Backerkit Crowdfunding as a first attempt didn’t go well, and the full-color books were expensive. Probably broke even on that one.

So things were starting to get rocky already, but I had One Big Thing in 2022. I also changed up how I pay myself, stringing out profits into a “salary” that allows a good project to keep me going for a long time. That’s more or less what happened in 2022 with BSA, and it kept me going through the first six months of 2023…

What happened in 2023

So the long and the short of it was I had very big, very unrealized plans in 2023. They did not come to pass.

First task of 2023: Fulfill Nightmare Fuel. Cards, VTT, and three books. That took a while. Best Supporting Actors had mostly in-hand art and was a conversion of the Character Collections to OSE. That did fewer than 400 backers, but had a very nice profit margin. Sedra ran very, very late – over a quarter. I had to pull in Artifacts, which only did 425 backers … not really enough for a full-color book to do well. Follow with Sedra for TFT, and another sub-500 project.  Needed to finish with something so I elected to do an OSE version of Sedra, which got 220 backers.

Overall, I did not feel like a game publisher with 50 books to my credit. Because of how expenses and revenue fall, Tax Year 2023 will show a break-even or small loss; success from 2022 and BSA (not a great result, but higher margin because it already existed) kept me fed in 2023, but that’s all.

So that brings us to 2024

I have already made the decision to go big or go home this year. The Big News is that I am nearly done with a playable rules book for the Mission X RPG, which shall finally put some Ballistics in Gaming Ballistic. The characters book shall be next, and that’s going to be a bit of a slog but I know what I have to do.

But … that’s not something I can launch tomorrow, though I will need to get my preview out for a long time to start with a bang.

Some thoughts, then:

Nordlond Ports

I have a lot of Nordlond for Dungeon Fantasy RPG. I think it would do very well moved over to TFT, OSE, maybe Shadowdark, and re-starting support for Dragon Heresy, perhaps.

The Infinite Archipelago concept still appeals to me, and I’d like to place Nordlond into it. Porting over to TFT, OSE, Shadowdark … easy enough. Redraw the map lines as islands a bit, take the cultures that haven’t yet been explored and break them into their own areas for folks to write about.

But what I really want to do is break up the existing giant “oh, there’s more adventure off the map” land mass for DFRPG Nordlond and Dragon Heresy Torengar into that same concept. I think that opens up a lot of fun for having more Viking and inter-human conflict in the setting, with no King and happy little Viking country, but rather allied-or-not high lords. The existing setting material would not change much, surprisingly. All of my efforts were basically focused on a single river (the Jotunnain) plus everything north of the Wodenain (the river that goes from Isfjall, from Hall of Judgment, to the Sea at Raven’s Bay and the town of Leira).

So making that the southern border of a Nordlond Island, keeping a bunch of the Dragongrounds as-is, and poof, Island. Some other areas mentioned in lore and alluded to like the Broken Coast can be island of themselves. The Veiddarlond? Can stay. Of course it can stay.

But that would allow co-development of smaller adventuring areas, and folks can use the Infinite Archipelago concept.

These ports would be time consuming but probably pretty good for me, as it would serve as an outstanding expansion in my potential market reach. I need to look more at Shadowdark, but that system and TFT seem alike in kind: fairly gritty, fairly flat progression systems where the kind of resource bloat you have to see in OSE/5E based games, with XP for gold and/or geometric experience requirements.

More Infinite Archipelago

I’ve already got one manuscript in hand for a GM’d adventure from David Pulver called Sea Hag’s Wrath, which I will probably work into various systems right away as soon as I put OSE Sedra to bed.

We have plans to work through the year – but at a relatively slow pace – on another solo adventure and the Elazar companion island to Sedra. Releasing these sequentially or even PDF-only and then Kickstart a print run for them late in the year might work out.

I had a few meanderings with folks on a totally-not-China and totally-not-Japan new setting, but one fell through and the other is maybe “hmmm” more than a plan.

So there will be at least three new TFT books in 2024. Those will migrate to OSE/Shadowdark almost certainly.

What about TFT to DFRPG?

Sedra and Elazar contain (now) five solo adventures and several GM’d scenarios. They are a rich land with their own culture and ideas. There’s no reason I cannot port these from TFT to the DFRPG … but all the artwork for the TFT stuff is in Black and White/Greyscale. I’d need to see very successful projects in order to colorize them.

Do folks feel color is mandatory for the DFRPG line? I have been adamant about it in the affirmative … but allowing projects to start B/W and grow into full color via a stretch goal process would not be too bad, were the goals set right.

Delvers to Grow Companion

I have a bunch of ideas here. Bringing some new templates into currency. Lots and lots more packages, many of them more tailored to NPCs than PCs. Epic Upgrades that lean hard on the powers infrastructure used for Holy Abilities to allow a lot more character growth past 250-400 points, where “I’ve taken all the packages in the core book” starts to happen. Lenses/multi-templates.

But let’s face it: Delvers to Grow has proved it meets its mission of fast character generation and a fantastic on-ramp for newcomers. But it didn’t break 500 folks when it launched, and sequels tend not to overperform the original. I may wind up releasing this bit by bit on paid-Patreon, and see what happens.

Ready-Made NPCs for DFRPG?

Character Collections was a pretty good product for TFT; less so by far for OSE. Would people be interested in more characters and NPCs ready-made for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG?

Branch out to innkeepers, pirates, townsfolk, and the like?

A giant batch of pre-gens to get folks going quickly? Varying in points from 50 (or fewer) to 500?

These would likely start black and white, but could grow to color and would certainly be drag-and-drop into Foundry, because that sort of time-saver appeals to me.

Systemless

I’ve got some systemless flavor stuff: Let us Rejoice (festivals in RPGs), something in process on in a similar vein for actual churches, and some ready-to-use inns and taverns. A micro-setting with no system called Two Warring Houses that sets up a fun complicated factional thing on opposite sides of a fertile river junction.

Encounters and Micro-Settings

Finally, short, portable encounters or situations you can drop in to most games, in the 8-12 page range (probably either 8, 12, or 16 – the 4-page thing is important for print). This might be one big encounter and a bunch of little ones (a la the seeds in Hall of Judgment, with random tables).

You Tell Me?

I have two years or more of work I could do. I think some of it would be really fun. I’m committed to Mission X this year, but I need to “feed” Gaming Ballistic in the meantime.

So tell me: what of the above excites you? What do you want to see more of? What do you want me to NOT do that I’ve mentioned above?

In any case: I wanted to ask, because I need to have a bit more basis to keep me going in 2024, and I want to kick the year off right.