RM Update #10: Like Mad Men, but With Much Cheaper Drinks

A couple of weeks ago, that was me back there,
sending up a flare for proofreaders

Ad copy...

So. Much. Ad copy...

If you aren't aware, ad copy is all the writing for the game that has no demonstrable benefit the quality of the game. In order to sell the product, you have to describe the product. And in order to do that, you have to both include enough information that the customer actually knows what they're getting, while simultaneously condensing ideas down into the shortest of possible statements to compensate for the human attention span.

This means you end up writing the same damned thing, over-and-over, bouncing back and forth across a spectrum of drafts that can range from Russian-novel long to something that is no more than screaming the name of the game (RED MARKETS!...so how many can I put you down for?). And you never know where it needs to be cut or where it needs to be expanded...ugh.

Anyway, that's how I'd describe the last few weeks of writing: ugh. I'm very glad I don't have to do advertising every day for a living. It's awful. Combine the impossible task with my tragically Midwestern allergy to self-promotion and makes for a rough month.

But it's over!

The ad copy is done, or as done as it is going to get. I'd rather give Medusa an eye exam than look at those paragraphs again. The trailer has been scripted and recorded. I've got all the art over to Ross, who is kind enough to be making the trailer. As of now, I'm just waiting on the video and some art assets for the text (stretch goal banners, fancier heading, etc). The press list is assembled, and the whole campaign is built. If I didn't mind going up without some fancy visuals, I could launch the campaign today.

Not that I'm eager to get started or anything...

I'm so far along on my end that, aside from building a Facebook page for the game, all that's really left to do is to wait for the calendar to hit May 23rd. So this week I finally got around doing my complete rewrite of the Negotiation rules. What started out being my most dreaded revision from the beta playtest has quickly turned into welcome relief. I forgot how much more enjoyable it was to make a thing instead of describing how you plan to make that thing.

I'm not fooling myself here. I know keeping the word circulating about the Kickstarter will be no easy task, and I know I'll be trading financial anxiety for fulfillment hell if we're lucky enough to fund. But even acknowledging how long the road ahead is going to be, it's a relief to think about a time in the near future when there is nothing to focus on save getting the book done. No more constantly promoting it. No more waiting long, quiet months for more feedback to roll in. No more seeing how much money I can skim off my paycheck next month to pay for art. I might soon have a bank account dedicated to Red Markets, with the funds ready to hire out whatever work I need. All my time not spent on staying alive or on the day job can be solely dedicated to getting the game done.

God, that sounds nice.

So, to sum up, the last few weeks have been all about promotion, but I've finally hacked away enough at it that I can get back to the real task at hand. The pre-KS hasn't been all bad though. I've done a lot really fun podcast interviews lately: Misdirected Mark, Insert Quest Here, and Legends of Tabletop, to name a few. I look forward to the many more I have scheduled.

But talking on a microphone isn't words on the page, and that's the only metric that ultimately matters. I better get back to it then.

Thanks for following along with the updates. I hope to see you on Kickstarter May 23rd!

RM Update #9: The Return of RPPR, So Many Spreadsheets, and a Kickstarter Date

Not shown: The part where the marker runs past the whiteboard
and the figures slowly morph into the yellow sign.

"Are...are you hunting a serial killer?" asks the student.

"No." I reply, taking a swig from my third energy drink with the desperation of a man lost in the desert. "Mr. Stokes is just planning his Kickstarter. I'm fine." I crush the empty can in my fist. "Everything. Is. Fine."

"OOOooookay," she says. "Want me to get some red yarn from Home Ec. so you can string it across the room until the pattern appears?"

"...Yes. Yes I do."

We're all about the spreadsheets here at Hebanon Games of late. I got the last price quote I needed; now it's time to plan the campaign. You lay out all your quotes, scale them down to minimum viable product, scale them up "beyond your wildest dreams," fill in the gaps between, and then decide where the stretch goals go. At least that's what the first couple of hits on Google told me to do.

Don't look at me like that. I'm a professional.

So while the cogs of game writing have ground to a halt, I've pulled the starting cord on the business engine. It's mathematical smoke, black with overlapping figures and furious cyphering, chokes the atmosphere out of my every waking breath. I can no longer remember what the air tastes like without its stink; I fear I will be poisoned if I leave the cloud's inky embrace.

Caleb: "Sadly, I can't yet afford the rent on a crazy conspiracy bunker.
Assistant! Add it to the list of stretch goals!"
Assistant: ... (assistant still does not exist)
Caleb: "You dissapoint me."

The Kickstarter Cometh

With all this preparation being done, I'm ready to gamble on a Kickstarter announcement: the Red Markets Kickstarter will launch no later the Monday, May 23rd. I'll have been off school a week then, giving me time for last minute troubleshooting. It's theoretically possible we might launch sooner than that: the auspices of Kickstarter statistics suggest that the closer you can get to the beginning of May, the better your chance of success. If we do go a little earlier, it won't be more than a week, and I will be shouting it on every piece of social media I possess.

But going early presumes everyone finishes preparations early, and everything goes perfectly with the timing. This, I doubt.

Any later than the third week in May and we risk closing too soon to GenCon. It's possible to run a successful KS at GenCon, but the probabilities are not on the side of a new IP. So if we delay past that date, we'll have to push the campaign to next school year. But I don't think it will come to that. There's still plenty of wiggle room in the schedule, and I'm about as committed to the May 23rd date as one can be.

RPPR Re-animates

We'll be talking more about the KS planning on RPPR's Game Designer's Workshop. Our most recent episode, dealing with project management for publishers, just dropped yesterday.

If you've been following the site, you may know that RPPR has experienced technical difficulties in the extreme of late. You can listen to an update about the Sisyphean nightmare that is web-hosting here, but suffice it to say the snafu is finally figured out. Now that the site's back up, the RM Kickstarter has it's main promotional platform back and we can move forward. Plus, everyone that's yet to hear the good word can catch up on their APs of The Brutalists campaign.

And So It Begins...

That's where we are at. And now I've got to get back to work. There's no cutting corners or "letting the Market work it out" on this one. The next few weeks will determine whether the last four years of my life were tragedy or comedy, so I'm off to triple check the math and agonize over ad copy. Wish me luck, and thanks for your continued support of Red Markets. Here's hoping to see you on the 23rd!

RM Update #8

Truly, there can be no finer an image to encapsulate
 the concept of economic horror

So...this happened.

In addition to all the work I did last week preparing for playtests that didn't happen (both got cancelled and rescheduled, but time spent in preparation wasn't spent on content creation), this happened at the beginning of the week. Stopped at the light, then quickly found myself being thrown towards it.

I'm fine. It was about as amicable as fender-benders get. Still, it was not what I was looking for in my life right now.

I've spent the last 16 hours dealing with various garages, car rental services, and insurance companies just so I can get back to work and continue one of the busiest work weeks of my life. And my troubles are nothing compared to Ross and RPPR's. The hosting service decided to downgrade and throttle the bandwidth without warning, and now they're trying to hold the site hostage for a higher price. It's not something I have any capability to help with, but Ross is my friend...a friend who happens to run the primary promotional tool for the game I've invested four years of my life in. So...you know...it's stressful, and I feel like a jerk for being stressed about it at all because my anxiety has to be NOTHING compared to the pain this must be in Ross's ass.

(By the way, for the few people that criticize Red Markets for being unfair to big business and unrealistically assuming corporations would not have the best interests of people at heart during a zombie apocalypse...might I direct you to the company currently trying to bilk a one-man small business for more nonexistent money? I mean, I know Ross is quite the fat cat, what with all that RPG podcaster cheddar. Perhaps they couldn't resist their own rational self-interest in the zero-sum game of high-yield podcast brokerage.)

"First we take over RPG Actual Play podcasting, then the model
train miniature sign production industry, and then...THE WORLD"

This is a roundabout way of saying I've gotten nothing done this week. Nada. Fuck all. And it's extremely depressing.

If you freelance write for any amount of time, something happens to your brain. It doesn't happen when you're writing as a hobby or as a side business; I felt stressed when parts of No Security were late, but I still felt like a worthwhile human being. But, the second you start linking your creativity to your very survival, the change is something you can't shake. Even after heading back to the day job, a pillar of your identity remains chained to your productivity.

You measure your worth in words per day, in pages drafted or revisions made. Zero progress means zero worth. It's not rational, especially when so few have invested in the product, but that connection can be haunting. I can work a sixty-hour week, clean my entire house, take care of my family, and answer a library's worth of email...and I still end up feeling like some useless sloth that's been sitting in front of the TV for a month, naked and covered in Cheeto dust.

I hate wasted weeks like this one. They drive me nuts. It would be enough to make you quit, if another wasted week weren't going to drive you that much more crazy.

Anyway, that's the update...for whatever it's worth. They can't all be winners. Here's hoping next week goes better.

Thanks for reading.

RM #7

Hello!

I apologize for the longer than usual absence. If that looked like the inevitable death of the blog, I understand. I've certainly invited that conclusion in the past.

But I'm still here! Still working! I just had the flu!

But, you know, I REALLY had the flu. To say that production dipped as I fever-dreamed the RPPR group trying to break into my home and kill me would be an understatement. Couple that with the end of the quarter (grades are due) and the 2-3 chapter a week revision cycle seems doomed from the start, in retrospect.

But progress has been made. The only section from the beta release that still needs revision is Negotiation. After that, the entire player section will be ready for the Kickstarter.

I've also been doing some pricing. Between print costs, editing, layout, art, and the variables that effect all those numbers (softcover vs. hardcover, B&W vs. color vs. glossy), there are a ton of estimates to collect and collate. I've just about got all the information I'm going to be able to gather in one place, at which point I'll start planning out the campaign's reward tiers and stretch goals.

Then there's promotion, of course. Ross and I recorded another Game Designer's Workshop about art direction and project management. The APs for The Brutalists -- our flagship playtest campaign -- keep on getting a healthy response. I'll also be running two important playtests for other podcasts this week. As always, time spent running the game means time not writing the game, but I've got to make sure the jobs I put forth show off all the best parts of the game; for these potential new fans, I won't get another chance to pitch Red Markets.

With all these other responsibilities, I'm starting to realize I might not be able to get the game entirely revised before the KS launches. I'm confident I can finish up within the first week of the campaign and still get some setting writing done inbetween answering FAQ's, but I'm going to have to switch into sell mode soon. Writing ad copy takes infinitely longer than games rules despite being a fraction of the length, and that's to say nothing of the research that needs to be put into a promotional plan. It'll be a photo finish as is, and I can't imagine how hopeless the whole thing would seem if I hadn't long ago given up the idea of having the game completely sewn up before launch.

All you can do is keep chiseling away at it. Thanks for following along, dear reader. More updates soon!

RM Update #6

Hello all! It's time for my weekly accountability confession.

I finished revising Character Creation this weekend. I always knew it was going to be the chapter that required the most drastic revisions, but, boy howdy, was it a monster. It's easy to forget how central any character creation system is to the mechanics of the game, but revising, adding, deleting, and proofing 20K words of it was certainly a reminder.

It's understandable. Players need information to make the character they want to play, and that information includes everywhere the character sheet touches the mechanics (spoiler: every mechanic is touched upon...that's why it's the character sheet). You've got to provide a quick reference to all those different rules without burying the text that actually get the process done. Meanwhile, you've to to recognize that the majority of potential players go for the character generation chapter before any other part of the book, so you've got to refer to all these mechanics without sacrificing so much setting information that the rules lose context and make the game seem too crunchy to a random customer.

It's an impossible task, and I will most assuredly fail it in the eyes of many readers (it's almost as if RPG players are opinionated or something). But I've slaved over it for two weeks now, using the playtest feedbacks from hundreds of people. If it doesn't work for someone at this point, it's certainly not for a lack of trying.

The above picture is actually out of date. I burned through the revisions in the Upkeep chapter yesterday inbetween taking a picture of my whiteboard and writing this post. The short section on accounting options was always going to be easiest to revise, but I didn't anticipate it would go that smoothly.

I'm working Casualties and Vectors now. As it involves adding a whole bunch of rules (Abberants weren't ready for the beta playtest, but they need to be there for round 2) in addition to revising, this chapter will probably take about as long as Character Creation did to finish. What's after that? There's not much to change about Humanity, so that will go quickly. But then Negotiation is another monster rewrite.

Thus far, I'm happy I've been alternating super-difficult revision with easy tasks that amount to little more than copy editing. Doing the easy stuff first would make rewrites like the Character Creation seems impossible. Conversely, doing all the crappy work first begs for burnout. It's all a matter of tricking your brain into doing the actual work, and I'm very grateful I had a few book-length projects under my belt before starting this thing.

Ideally, I can get the revisions done before the end of Spring Break. If I can manage that, It'll give me two months to plan the Kickstarter and write the worst part of all: ad copy. That's going to be agony, but schedule and snow days willing, I'll be able to get it done early enough that I can cleanse my palette by writing setting material for a few weeks before my every waking second gets hijacked by begging for retweets and answering backer questions.

Okay! That's all the new fit for print. The first playtest campaign -- The Brutalists -- is still being posted up at RPPR. For more "thrilling," hit me up on Twitter @HebanonGCal.

RM #5

This week's lack of progress is brought to you by Death and Taxes: specifically, because I feel like the former (flu) and had to do the latter.

Taxes are a bit of a nightmare for me. I make wages that could best be described as "rock-bottom middle class." When my freelancing work provides extra income, it typically has to go out the door the instant arrives; as an example of what I'm talking about, go read the entire book I wrote to pay for a single trip to the ER. You can't really setup auto-deduct for 1099-MISC freelancing checks, so you end up having to pay dearly for all that RPG work at the end of the year. This makes taxes really expensive and annoying, as you're scrambling through boxes of receipts so you can deduct your home office and anything else you use to run your "business" of one employee.

Still, I got some writing, podcasting, and art direction done...just not to really warrant an announcement. In the meantime, you should go read Laura B's blog. Laura's the editor of Red Markets ("God knows he needs one" says everyone who read the beta). She's also working on really great projects of her own, novelizing some of RPPR's more popular games. She introduced herself at GenCon by handing me a beautiful self-published edition of Wages of Sin, and now she's into her third draft of a novel based on The Dangers of Fraternization. Go give the lady some traffic. Her work deserves it.

RM Update #4

Howdy y'all.

I've not accomplished much on the revision front this week. If I'm being honest, I never could have kept up my previous level of productivity. Twas always a dream.

Grading ate a bunch of my writing time...and then XCOM 2 came out: a combination which is equivalent to a figure skater taking a lead pipe to the knees of sweet lady productivity.

But it's not a complete loss. I've pledged not to waste anyone's time with the latest RPPR playtest (though we are having fun). I'm always going to come to the table with something fresh to test. This week, it's the playmats.

Playmats for Red Markets are the definition of emergent play. Providing a physical drop sheet for token tracking the character sheet never occurred to me, but then Jace uploaded his to the forums (see above). Within a week, I had three other playtest groups telling me they were using them. It was a demand the mechanics were making that I'd been deaf to, for some reason. The use of physical tokens such as coins or poker chips seems to really help a certain type of player have fun, and the thematic synergy of literally spending coins on your rolls is just too good to pass up. I made up my own prototypes this morning and we'll give them a shot tomorrow.

I've also made some revisions as well. I've got a hard copy of the Character Creation rules full of annotations, but I've only made it to about page five entering the revisions electronically. This chapter was always going to be a nightmare: multiple sections -- tough spots, derived stats, retirement -- have changed completely due to playtest feedback. It's just short of a front-to-back rewrite of biggest mechanics chapter in the book. The only revision task between here and the KS Beta version that's harder is taming the Negotiation chapter, but that's a subject for another time.

Anyway, back to work. Thanks for keeping updated.

RM Update #3

Hello all! Update time.

The Combat chapter is revised and sent off. I'm still working on the Materialism chapter, but the beta-text is revised to fit the newest iteration. I'm also fixing copy errors as I find them (thanks proofreaders!), but I'm probably creating as many new ones as I fix.

Deleting and changing stuff is easy; adding stuff slows the process down. New rules need testing, of course, but increasingly less so as the process goes on and you learn the quirks of your own system. The difficult part is working those new rules into the larger outline: do they fit best under another heading or require their own section. If it's the latter, where does that section fit in the order? How does it fit into the hierarchy of importance that a style guide locks you into?

A lot of my writing time went into rules for selling excess gear (a ubiquitous demand from playtesters) and completely rewriting the rules for Haul and Refresh. I also had to add a section on Weird Damage (suffocation, falling, etc) to Combat before I sent it off. That was strange to write; I'm not sure I've ever used such rules, as written, in any system I've ever run. The stakes are always so high when rules like that come into play, and they're such outliers that stuff like poison damage is always hard to find. I usually just make something up to keep the game moving. I certainly hope players of Red Markets do the same, but you can't put yourself in the book to run games for everyone that buys it. Some folks want a deeper investment in system mastery, I suppose, and the game is crunchy enough to justify it.

I've still got to add in vehicle rules, but that's taking longer than expected. The section needs to be short, but it also can't integrate entirely into the rest of the gear list like I'd initially hoped. That means writing a separate set of conditions for vehicles altogether, but one short enough to prevent a chapter that's already the largest in the book from becoming unwieldy. Couple these concerns with the fact that I've never read a set of vehicle rules I actually liked, and it makes for slow going.

If you're wondering what this struggle looks like, imagine me typing angrily while repeating "I will not remake Autoduel. I will not remake Autoduel. I will not remake Autoduel..."

Wha? NOOOOOOOO!

I'm also busy with the usual logistical stuff: art direction (though a minimum because my artists are on point), licensing, pricing, playtesting, promotion, etc. At the pace I'm going, we'll make the current schedule, but it's going to be a grind. It always is, I guess, but there comes a point where you realize exactly how much is left to do. You feel it in very human terms -- hours spent alone without friends or family, invitations turned down, bleary eyes burned by computer screens, the feeling of looking at your words and hating them -- and that's the point I imagine most people stop. It's a crushing realization, and I'm glad I had it before on other projects. It's easier to overcome once you know you can overcome it.

So that's where we're at. Once the current chapter is done, I'll move to the top of the book and start marching revisions down the page. Then I need to get a website cooking and ready to go once we get some graphic design elements to establish a look. I imagine backers are going to want a better track-out link on the Kickstarter updates besides this janky blog.

I'll keep you updated if you keep my accountable. Thanks for the continued time and attention!

RM Update #2

I've kept a blogging promise exactly one time! Yay!

It was a productive week on the Red Markets front. I wrote a contract for freelance work (not exactly poetry, but necessary), and I gave notes on another piece of incoming art. I finished the gear list that I was working on in time for the start of the new playtest campaign. We stated up a nifty little enclave on Thursday night and made characters. The concepts are all a little "fraggle-rock" right now, but that's how every campaign starts out with the RPPR crew.

I didn't get a chance to revise the entire Materialism chapter like I'd hoped, but other parts of the book got done. I added the rules for enclave creation into the core book by adapting and expanding on the previous "Campaign Playtest Addendum" writing. I also finished the MBA Rules.

MBA Rules will probably be stretch goals, as they are not essential to the core gameplay of Red Markets. Basically, it's the advanced, optional stuff for players that really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the economics rules. Thus far, the chapter contains rules for running a small business, investing (basically playing the stock market in the zombie apocalypse), working a double (two jobs at once), pro bono (doing jobs for free) and loans.  I had rules for everything drafted up except loans. It was bothering me that the section was incomplete, so I finished off MBA instead of diving into the Materialism revisions. That's the haphazard method by which drafts get finished. At least for me.

For this week, Materialism revisions will likely have to wait a little longer. I need to get a chapter laid out and a template established before I can price how much the book will cost per page. I feel silly paying someone to do that with Lorem Ipsum when I could get post-Beta revisions entered into a chapter and have the graphic designer use that instead. The gear chapter is a bad choice for the job (too many stat blocks to be a representative sample, for readers or for my accounting needs). That means I'll have to fast-track another chapter for revision so I have something to give the graphic designers.

Right now, I'm thinking Combat. After the chapter detailing the Profit System, it's the one that's changed the least as a result of playtest feedback. The Profit System explanation is probably too short to constitute the 20-page sample chapter I want done before the KS, so it looks like Combat it is.

We'll see if I can get it done with school starting back up after a week of snow days. It'll be tight. Wish me luck!

Red Markets Update

NOT the final product. Though already gorgeous, the cover is still a work in progress.

Though I probably don't need to tell you this by now, I am utter shit at blogging. I will not be improving any time soon. I have made peace with this.

I am terrible at blogging because, when blessed with the time and energy to write, I work on Red Markets. When I have the time but not the energy, I write perfunctory emails to an expanding pool of freelancers and collaborators...working on Red Markets. When I have neither time nor energy enough to write, I talk to Ross on our podcast...about Red Markets. This leaves little left for blogging.

The benefit of all this shameful non-promotion is that 60,000 words of Red Markets are DONE. The entire player chapter is completed, and while changes will still occur, every rule included has undergone five iterations of alpha playtesting. RPPR is currently in the midst of playtesting extended campaign play (listen to us talk about it here).  Furthermore, the freelance writing gigs stealing time away from Red Markets are now complete (listen to the struggle here; read the books that resulted: Firewall and No Soul Left Behind).

So, aside from the day job, things are all-Red Markets, all-the-time over here at Hebanon Games. I'm drafting the GM chapter as the long-form playtest continues. I'm using the additive format of most RPG books, where core rules reside entirely in the player section and the GM chapter sticks to tips, alternatives, and exclusively behind-the-screen functions. This means the GM section should be markedly shorter than the 60K of other rules language. Though we won't be having enough to sell an ashcan at Gencon, there should be enough to start a beta playtest around August for those willing to hack through a Word document.

Which isn't to say Red Markets is only text...

He's a chipper fellow that won't let being declared homo sacer keep him down.

Now that I have a day job again, I've been using the funds from No Security to fund the pre-Kickstarter art, editing, and layout. From experience, I know these upfront costs are essential to make campaigns for big new books a success. I know its a gamble to put too much money up front, but any level of success means that money will not be wasted. It just frontloads costs even more than crowd-sourcing already does.

You've probably already noticed the cover image up top. That's by the magnificently talented Kim Van Deun. She's very enthusiastic about the project, and I'm thrilled to be working with her. Similar praise is owed Patsy McDowell. I've been using his concept sketches in this post and as the face of numerous RPPR GDW episodes. The final piece that resulted is great, but I'm saving it for the KS. Similarly, I'm eager to get some illustration work from long-time collaborator Ean Moody, but he's already contributed by designing the most thematically consistent character sheet I could possible imagine.

THINGS TO COME

I'm going to keep writing, obviously. I'm also going to commission more pieces from the artists mentioned while trying to bring a few more talented people into the fold. Leaving aside numerous possible disasters, the timetable is looking something like...

• June-July: Finish GM section. Commission more promotional art.
• August-September: Closed-beta goes out to other groups.
• August-December: Caleb drafts as much setting material as possible.
• December-January: Playtest reports come in, revisions are made.
• February: Kickstarter planning begins in earnest. I need to build another website in something better than Blogger or Wordpress.
• March-ish: Kickstarter launch. Open-beta goes to all backers.
• Sometime before the heat-death of the universe: a book is born

A lot can go wrong with that timetable, but we are literally as close as we've ever been. I'm hopeful and motivated. I hope you guys are as excited as I am.

I'd promise to keep you informed on this blog, but that's probably a lie. The best chance of keeping update are to follow me at @HebanonGCal and keep listening to RPPR's Game Designer's Workshop.

P.S. As far as I can tell, "Ex Terrorem, Lucrabamur" translates to "out of terror, we profit."

Money Talk: A Look Inside a Completed Kickstarter

I've been putting this post off for too long, and considering the confusion I created with my little DTRPG mistake, I suppose I can do so no longer. Here's how the finances of the No Security Kickstarter played out, and how they're informing my decisions in pricing the upcoming print version.

Why Am I Letting People Look Into My Wallet?

Well, the intention of Hebanon Games is to make easily available, professional quality gaming products. Largely, I think we succeed on that front, but the fact of the matter is that with exception of Ross Payton and other friendly mentors like the members of IGDN, I'm working without a safety net here. Tabletop Gaming is such a cottage industry that it's never really evolved beyond the Do-It-Yourself education model. While that makes the industry appealingly "punk rock" and original in some ways, it also means that people make mistakes a lot more often, as evidenced by my previous post. There aren't any traditional classes specific to this medium available, and instructional methods I could adapt into publication know-how (classes in marketing, technical writing, business, etc) are no longer available to me due to finances and time.

I think the quality of No Security is stellar considering the sheer amount of things that can go wrong. But experience remains my primary teacher, and despite commonly held opinions, experience is a TERRIBLE teacher. I know I wouldn't send my kids to a school that hired teachers dedicated to giving the test first, punishing inevitable problems with pain, refusing to use assessment to alter the "lesson" in any way, then giving the same damned test again. That's the educational ethos of a SAW movie, and errors are bound to occur.

So since I can't be perfect yet, at least I can be well-intentioned. The whole point of the RPPR Game Designer's Workshop series is to take the sting off experience's lessons for other noob creators, and I can be doing work on this blog to the same effect. While it might lose me some customers to lay my financial decision-making bare, Hebanon Games is about transparency even when people might disagree.

And if it ends up tanking the line? Well, that's just another lesson learned for the next iteration, right?

"Would you like to learn something?"

The Kickstarter

I'm not going to break out line-by-line receipts here for the sake of brevity (plus, I don't have the gas to make it to my storage unit aka Mom's house). Suffice it say that the KS money is LONG gone. After the 9% cut given to Amazon and Kickstarter, No Security made roughly $6,100. The pool of money generated by our generous backers went to fund the following.

• Art and layout: $3,000 plus and worth every penny. This includes everything in the original PDFs from Ean, Steff, and Chris, in addition to the commissioned sketch rewards.
• Printing the miniatures: $300 or so
• Shipping miniature rewards: $400 plus...I  remember being shocked it was more than making the damned things. Keep in mind this was before the international rate hike of earlier this year. I shudder to think of the cost had we had to wait a little longer to ship.
• Designing and printing postcards: $300
• Moniker domain name: $30 or so for the past two years
• Webhosting: First year was free, second year was roughly $150, and it was a total waste of money. Sorry, but I couldn't predict the fact that Eastern European muslim terrorist groups would love hijacking my site so damn much. THANK GOD we never built an online store. Bullet dodged.
• Increased Bandwidth: $50 during the months we distributed the preview actual plays. The original contract was for the minimum package and it didn't cover the downloads we were getting on the reward audio.
• Skype headset: $25 or so. I had actually never Skyped before the first online game, believe it or not. 
• Taxes: $500 plus. Sadly, the money from the KS jumped me a tax bracket last year since I still had a job at the time. As the lady at H+R Block was older than dirt and thought a "Ransom Kickstarter" meant I was holding a motorcycle engine hostage, I'm still not entirely sure I didn't get screwed on this deal.

So let's call the total $4,755, leaving $1,345 or there about for ole' Caleb. I freely admit to spending that money on luxuries like food and shelter. To put the number in some context, freelancing rates in the RPG industry usually land somewhere between .03 to .06 cents per word. Including the reward scenario Lover in the Ice and the reward short stories "To Bright Boy" and "A Cult of Two," that equals roughly 97,000 words. If we assume the minimum of .03 cents per word, an industry rate for that much writing would run about $2,910. I cleared less than half that, which I don't think is too bad a deal for customers taking a chance on a new creator. Considering that I didn't ask for that money in the first place (it was generously donated above the $1,500 funding goal) and much of it went to funding stretch goals, I have a hard time feeling like a profiteer for using that money to stay alive. 

But if after reading all that you still equate me to some Gordon Gecko-esque shark akin to the creator of The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, allow me one last retort. To distribute $1,500 across the hours it actually takes to write, edit, playtest, and revise 97,000 words is to be paid a pennies per hour. 

In short, my goal of buying the S.S. Hebanon and retiring to the Bahamas is a LONG way off. I assure you we're playing for the love the game over here, and I'd urge anyone thinking about getting into RPG publishing to aspire to nothing greater.

Behold the decadence of a thousandaire

The Pay-What-You-Want Model

The plan was to get on DTRPG and sister sites far sooner than we actually did. A lost email meant that reformatting the logo to fit their requirements took Ean 5 months instead of 5 minutes, but we finally got the page live in July. The goal was to merely increase our exposure; at the time we were planning to get a Hebanon Games page on their network, OneBookShelf Inc. didn't even offer a PWYW model. The scenarios were all placed as free with the exception of Lover in the Ice. It costs $1.99 because A.) it helps maintain some of the exclusivity of the backer reward and B.) the adventure includes some mature content that, while I'm not ashamed of, feels more comfortable behind a paywall and after a disclaimer (there's something to be said about the can o' worms opened up whenever sexuality is brought up in the horror genre and gaming in general, but that learning experience is best left for another post).

A few weeks after the set-up though, DTRPG and its sister sites started testing a Pay What You Want option. Since we had a few more scenarios to release (Revelations and The Wives of March were still in development at the time) and I was already considering how to fund Hebanon Games' next project, I reformatted the $0.00 to PWYW. 

The response was very positive and generous. Things only got better when, the week of GenCon, those beautiful bastards at at DTRPG featured Revelations as their featured free product. Plugging Hebanon during the week everyone has gaming on the brain increased our exposure massively and resulted in a lot of donations. By the time Wives went live, sheer luck had secured us a fanbase much larger than our original 250 backers.

Roughly five months after signing up with DTRPG, the products of Hebanon Games have been downloaded a combined 4001 times. We've made more than $800 from donations. The distribution deal we have with DTRPG dictates that we get 65% of sales after printing costs. Factoring in other processing fees, that leaves us with a little over $500 in profit (note: I don't include an exact amount here because it could potentially be used in a hack of the payment services used to distribute royalties).

If I promise to put the image of a terrorist in every post,
will you please stop hacking my games website,
anonymous jihadists? Please?

The POD Version

As my last post suggests, making a POD version of No Security has not been without challenge. I approached the endeavor for a number of reasons.

1. I was always a little sad that we never hit the print stretch goal. It's a writer's dream to hold his own book in his hands. I want to experience that for purely selfish reasons.
2. I got numerous requests from people asking for a print version. The messages trickled in regularly over the course of the whole year the project was underway.
3. I want Hebanon Games to succeed in the long term, and that means building a stable of varied print publications.
4. The added funds from the PWYW model helped us reach the stretch goal after the fact, so why not?
5. If the book was successful, it could fund the upfront cost of the next Kickstarter, allowing me to pay artists for their skilled and important work rather than dropping some lame line about compensating them in "exposure."
6. I would never make enough money to pay someone to redo all the layout for a print version, but I needed to learn Adobe InDesign anyway and I thought adapting pre-existing PDF's for print would be a good tutorial (note: this was a FANTASTICALLY stupid idea).

So that profit from the PWYW releases? Yeah, that's all gone too. I spent $600 to pay for art from Chris and Ean's cover design; I'll let you ask the artists for their exact rates because it's not my place to quote prices for them. The money from the PWYW customers and some personal donations on my part (read: plasma donations) are making the print version possible.

Plasma donation: like crowdfunding for hemophiliacs

Pricing

Here's where things get risky: I'm telling you the profit margins I'm planning for a product that doesn't yet exist. The print PDFs have yet to be approved for print by their respective publication houses, and the book is not yet for sale. People that disagree with my margins could very well not buy the book as a result. While that disappoints me, it will be a business lesson hard learned from that cruel bastard of a sensai, Experience. At least I will have been honest with the people kind enough to take a passing interest in my work.

Honesty is edible, right?

The plan is to have TWO versions of the book. The DTRPG and sister sites version will be a standard color, softcover priced at $20.00. If it is successful, we'll consider doing a deluxe version that is hardcover with glossy color pages, but the price will likely jump into the $30 range for those interested in the fancy option. We'll cross that bridge when we cliche it.

I also hope to have a CreateSpace version. The CreateSpace version of the book will also be a softcover, but it will have a Black and White interior. This is because CreateSpace has A.) more expensive color printing rates for B.) inferior color fidelity, in my opinion. The B+W version will be priced at $15.99. I include the CreateSpace version for international backers because they've all reported to me that DTRPG products are very hard to get due to shipping costs. CreateSpace has a more international presence, so hopefully this will make the book more available to fans outside the United States.

With both titles, I've set my profit margin to a little under ten dollars per book after taxes, printing costs, and distributor cuts (again, I don't include the exact rates for the security purposes; security questions for e-commerce sites often ask for the exact amount of the last transaction). Copies purchased through Amazon will earn a little less than half that, but my hope is that the increased exposure will even things out.

I've actually given this thought. The margin is informed by the following concerns:

1. It's comparable. For example, The Final Revelation by Pelgrane Press (great book, btw) retails for $22.99. It has more art than my book and is printed on glossy paper, but it's 20 pages shorter and entirely sepia toned. In my estimation, this adds up to a wash in terms of production value and the books are similar in tone and subject matter.
2. The scenarios remain free online. I'm not taking down the PWYW scenarios, so I can't expect the kind of numbers I would get if the adventures were exclusively available in print.
3. At the current margin and using only POD distribution, the book can break even if it sells 70 copies. If it sells another 70 copies, it funds the estimated cost of preliminary art and previews for the next Hebanon Games project, Red Markets. I think 140 copies is a pretty rosy estimate for a book made up of content already available online, but it's not outside the realm of possibility
4. If by some fluke the book is popular enough to sell way more than 140 copies, the excess can be used to fund a traditional print run for "brick and mortar" distribution and purchasing ISBNs. I've had some generous offers already, but the $3000 or more it would take to make the initial run is beyond my means. I'd be lucky to make 1/4 of my profit margin using traditional distribution, but at the current rate it would remain worthwile to pursue if I could fund the initial cost of wholesaling copies to game shops without going into debt. Setting the profit margin lower would mean that brick and mortar copies would make me pennies per book and still require an enormous investment on the front end. The current margin is fair, in my estimation, and it doesn't exclude other options in the future.

Now I just need to figure out how to get the gutter margin
to f***ing 3.75 inches and we'll be good to go.
Just give me a few more months....

Conclusion

So that's the past, present, and future of Hebanon Games' finances. Hopefully, my disclosure hasn't sparked any outrage, and if it has, I apologize and look forward to the trolling in the comments (as if my permission were needed). More importantly, I'd love to hear from any aspiring new publishers that have questions based on this post. If I can't come up with an answer, I'll do my best to find someone that can.

I hope to feel your watchful eyes when the print versions are finally ready and I announce them here. As always, thanks for your interest in Hebanon Games.