As many of you already suspect, I’m further along on this project than just concepts. I’ve fleshed out the first 3-5 supplements that could be brought to market as a cohesive RMU 4th Era launch. Arguably having several books ready to go creates more momentum and incentives player buy-in of the setting. Of course, any new users for SW would likely want the older material from Terry as well giving the entire product line a great boost.
I’m not getting into too much detail, but here is my working list.
SW: 4th Era Addendum. I’m not sure it should be called a Master Atlas since it doesn’t need to rise to that level of detail and/or it would include some redundancy. Nonetheless, this is the essential primer for the new setting that would include a “history” (I’m starting this on year 20 after TBotNE) that establishes the current state of affairs, politics and power and high level topics. 150 pages. Plus Map Gazatteer.
A Grand Adventure: “Rise of the Loremasters”. I’m envisioning this as a fusion of the Druid narrative from Sword of Shanara, and Star Wars sequels. The Loremasters, decimated by the final battles, are absent from the affairs of Shadow World. Worse still, Karilon has been quarantined by powerful magic and inaccessible. Starting with the “Search for Randae Terisonen” this multi-part campaign has the group seeking out surviving Loremasters and eventually helping restore the order. 60 pages.
A Dungeon Crawl. RM and SW has never had a tradition of dungeon adventures, but several expansive facilities were abandoned at the end of the 3rd Era. Are they still occupied? What evil resides in these remote places. The players are tasked with gathering intel, recovering or destroying a powerful talisman or artifact. 50 pages.
A Wilderness Adventure. Without the aid of Navigators, the group must traverse a land ravaged by a last battle. Now overrun by XXX, the players are tasked with connecting to a remote enclave in a traditional hex or wilderness crawl. 35 pages.
A City Supplement. With Eidolon destroyed and Norek drowned in a cataclysmic tidal wave, a new city has arisen as the center of commerce in Emer. 120 pages.
I see most of the focus still on Emer and Jaiman but with clear development guidelines, third party authors could start utilizing and/or developing other parts of the hemisphere.
As I’ve been getting further along with my work on the 4th Era of Shadow World, I thought it worthwhile to step back for a moment and examine the merits of this work. Certainly as I spend more time and energy on this, I’m more convinced that this is a executable path for I.C.E. that addresses many issues raised by the community and the needs of the company moving forward.
Some issues or challenges:
ICE and RMU has no realistic strategy to create a new setting for the RMU rule set. World building takes work, creative input and resources. I don’t see any realistic model for the company to create a brand new world or game setting.
ICE principals and users are not young. How many more years does the current experienced user base and thought contributors have left? I’m sure the IP will eventually fall to a new generation, but what will that look like?
User demand and product expectations are even higher now. The market demands quality products with appealing layout and artwork and consistent new product output. The handwritten published products of the late 70’s and early 80’s are gone.
The great news is that building a 4th Era for Shadow World accelerates a publishing effort because it is a work of extrapolation. Unlike a new setting, we already have a large collection of canonical work product from Terry including a deep history, geography, maps, groups of politics and power and a thematic style that can be built upon. It’s a fresh start with a deeply established foundation. Terry’s work becomes a starting point and a reference source. This reminds me of the RPG Twilight 2000. While the idea is fun on it’s own, it’s notable that using a near future in our world avoids a tremendous amount of setting work. A simple world Atlas can be a DM’s best asset in that game!
Equally important, by having a significant event horizon between the 3rd & 4th Era we can tweak the setting a bit to move it more towards the RMU ruleset. Thus SW: 4th Era setting mirrors the same mission as RMU: a new product built on the collective past. I’ve written often about the rule gap between RM and SW. The reality is that Terry didn’t let RAW get in the way of his world building or story telling. We were left fiddling with rules to bridge the differences. I realize that the seemingly easier path is just to create conversion guides or convert existing products for RMU. That strategy still leaves us without new Shadow World products or stories.
As I’ve argued before, a 4th Era allows the Shadow World story to continue, preserves and respects Terrys work but creates a framework for new content, new writers and new adventures. Clear editorial and content guidelines can be created. Product editors can maintain setting continuity, help place adventure concepts and supply direction. But the setting is now opened up and not constrained by the active timeline found in the Master Atlas’s and SW books.
I’ve got a pretty hefty list of product ideas already in the queue, but you know what? Many of them won’t take as much work since I’m using established material and SW DNA. Much of the heavy listing is done. Of course the first book needs to be a new “Master Atlas”: Adventuring in the 4th Era plus a map gazetteer. This would tie up the loose ends of the 3rd Era and anchor the new age for other writers. Similar to the original publishing of Shadow World in 1988, a half a dozen products could be published in short order to officially launch the “new/old” setting for RMU.
I’m already falling off on my blog schedule, but time of year, work, RL and Shadow World projects take priority! I have a number of pending blog topics, but I use these Random Musings as a way to organize my thoughts through writing. Hopefully they add value for reader(s), but it also creates a record of my creative development. I was reading back through my posts from 10 years ago, and I was surprised by how my perspectives have changed or my approaches to the game have progressed.
Rolemasterblog.com. Clearly the RMBlog activity has really whimpered out over the last few years. Peter isn’t actively playing, we’ve covered A LOT of topics over the last 10 years and you sort of run out of things to discuss. Additional, sites like discord have become the primary place for roleplaying discussions. We are pondering the future of this blog and hopefully we can come up with a long term solution to keep things going. Other ideas are porting over to substack; this seems to be the new alternative to long form discussions.
AI. I heard there was some discussions on Discord regarding AI. I’m dealing with significant industry disruptions from AI in my own professional practice, and it’s no surprise that roleplaying, and publishing, are also coming to grips with new technologies. As a hobbyist, AI can be a great aid for organizing sessions, generating quick content during gameplay (battlemaps, NPC’s etc). As a content creator, I certainly feel defensive about AI generated material. I just don’t see how it goes away and we aren’t far from AI run games…exciting or scary?
RMU. Based on a relatively small data set, RMU continues to be a crowd pleaser! I think that’s fantastic. I will reiterate that there will always be a base of gamers that are seeking out “crunchy” systems. That was true in the 80’s and still true now.
Shadow World. Not sure what to say about Shadow World. I’m going to keep pushing out material.
Verisimilitude vs Simulation. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot. I would argue that Rolemaster provides verisimilitude: the appearance of realism and complexity. Despite it’s reputation, RM mechanics are a simple probability system. Culturally, we are programmed for probability and deterministic outcomes, so the d100 system is appropriate for modelling virtually any action. I also have a background in early wargames (Squad Leader) and RPG’s were birthed from wargaming. These games arose out of battle field analysis and tactics. Rules were specific, inflexible and were designed to simulate reality: line of site, facing, weather effects, morale, RoF, etc. To finish this thought off, I feel like there is a streak of simulation design driving RMU right now. Endless debates on rule wording, the appropriate penalty, conflicting effects. For me the goal is the appearance of complexity with tactical options without the need for over engineering.
Trends. LitRPG/Progression Fantasy/Challenge Zones/Level Matching. I’m probably late to the topic, but fantasy literature is being parsed into all sorts of sub genres. Two that keep cropping up is LITRPG and Progression fantasy. Both are fiction that emulate a game system mechanics and seem quite popular. Adjacent to these fantasy genres is the concept of level matching. Whether it’s difficulty zones in Everquest, or a progression of challenges starting in the village, moving into the wilderness capped with increasing difficulty as one goes deeper into a dungeon. This is the norm in many RPG’s and now in fantasy fiction as well but I’m not a fan. The reason I like Shadow World as a setting and Malazan as a book series is it’s lack of progression. Shadow World has a deserved reputation for being dangerous and perhaps high level. As a mixed genre setting, dangers can be mundane, magical or even technological. Power is not distributed evenly or uniformly and the Rolemaster system can be the “great leveler” with it’s open ended rolls and critical charts.
I’m not sure I fully thought through any of these! But I wanted to get it down in words and reflect upon it further.
There is an intersection between two topics I’ve discussed here on the blog: “originalism” and “retconning HERE and HERE” of Terry’s Shadow World material. Over the 30 years of Shadow World publications, the setting material has evolved, expanded and perhaps even matured. It’s easy to just adopt any and all material by Terry as canon, but some of his work was contradictory or vague. Other material was a moment in time, but when viewed through the entirety of his work product just didn’t fit well. Other material was seemingly forgotten or de-emphasized.
Perhaps no better examples are found in the Master Atlas 1st Ed., material that then originally defined the Shadow World tone and feel. It was the next step of the Loremaster series and “set the table” for all future Shadow World products. I recall when those first few books for Shadow World came out in the late 80s. We were already 7 years into playing Rolemaster (mostly repurposed MERP, Court of Ardor) but by then had graduated high school and our core group had gone off to college. Time was more critical so I embraced the Rolemaster specific setting as a valuable GM aid to save time.
Reading through the Master Atlas I saw the many similarities to the Tolkien world: an expansive timeline that spanned thousands of years, Elves, an epic high level feel etc. Looking back, that first Atlas seems almost quaint compared to the depth of books we have now, but these elements seemed important to the story of Kulthea:
The Ilarsiri. The Access Stones seemed ripped right out of the LOTR but nonetheless seemed a key bit of lore for Shadow World. Where were they located? Who had them? Were they the pinnacle of artifacts in this setting and drive a major narrative? The third party book “Norek” incorporated one of the Master Stones into the material and the Nameless One is rumored to have one. In those early days of Shadow World, the Ilarsiri seemed to be building a foundation for SW power and lore. But they sort of fell off the map. The Emer supplement took things in a new direction: the Ark of World, Shadowstone, Soulsword, etc. Perhaps this ended up being too derivative? The Master Atlas 4th Ed. only has 3 or 4 mentions of the Ilarsiri, so it certainly was minimized. To me, this is a good example of Terry discarding material in favor of his new ideas and writing.
Heralds of Night, While the Unlife was an omni present enemy going back to the Loremaster books, the Heralds of Night became the new baddie with the Master Atlas. There is some confusing and contradictory information about the Heralds. Are they a product of the Unlife, a remnant of the 1st Era, something else? I always felt these were the SW version of the Black Reaper. Subsequent books have introuced high level antagonists, evil cults and dark demi-gods that serve the same purpose. The Heralds, while still a entry in later editions of the MA feel minimized.
Implementors. Many fantasy settings had famous weapons, and Shadow World had the Implementors. First found in the Clourdlords of Tanara (the tomb of Ezra?), the Implementors were expanded in the Emer supplement book with both regular Implementors and Lord Implementors (wielded by Lorgalis). I think they are great, and I’m a fan of having a small number of major artifacts to drive story lines. The artifact of the week seems banal and perhaps reduces any awe/fear/wonder that such items should invoke. Nonetheless the Implementors haven’t been prominent since the early years of Shadow World.
Looking back, the Seeing Stones, Heralds and Implementors seemed like a test run, an early framework of artifacts and opponents that were mostly set aside. Rather than being bad ideas for the setting, I think Terry’s vision of Shadow World matured, or changed, as he wrote new material and these elements felt too generic?
I’d be curious how many people have used these elements in their shadow world campaign?
I recently posted up an updated version of my “Channelers Guide” over at the RM Forums and thoughts I’d make a few comments.
Book title. I’m still not sure what to call this! I use “Guide”, “Handbook”, “Religions” interchangeably at different points. Is this work about Channeling, religions, Priests?
Analog approach. Despite efforts to improve my work efficiency, I’m still using an old school approach to updates. I’ll jot down an idea, write a quick note or send myself an email and then put those scraps in a folder. Then when it accumulates I’ll add it to the master doc, add copy and then edit/page setup.
Now that I have a group again the new material is piling up! I have 2 channelers in the group and I wanted to flesh out a few more religion details as part of their character backgrounds. I’m already thinking about v3.0 but want to finish up the Book of Essaence first.
As Micael pointed out on the RM Forums, I left out 6 spell lists for some of the Gods of Charon. Most of those had some treatment already in Powers so I didn’t focus on either adding too, or creating a new religious organization. For now. I’ll be adding those in the next version.
Other adds for v3.0. Summary of any significant religions in the various books. Artifacts, maybe some common temple floorplans or designs. With the spell lists and new material it’s going to push to 100-120 page count.
Editing. I have no skills as an editor or in page layout. I wish I could put out a more professional product, but the last 10% just takes too much time.
Here are the links to the spell lists not included in the guide.
Book of Essaence (BoE). This project has been a lingering goal of mine for quite some time. In fact I should have written this first, before BASiL, to help guide the design of spell lists. There are pieces of the BoE throughout this blog: powers and spells of the Earthwardens, Dragonlords, Xiosians, Essaence flows, magical languages. BoE is tying all of these pieces together into a cohesive whole, with a history starting in the 1st Era and following the origins of spells through to “present day”. The outline is currently at a dozen or so pages, but spell lists will inflate that for the final product. With the baseline finished I’ve come to the conclusion that early magic had to have 2 stages: Proto-Magic and then Arcane magic. That solved a lot of issues I kept encountering.
So why do the BoE? Much of it is academic and would have little if any impact on gameplay. Perhaps it’s my nature, but Terry left many gaps in the Shadow World setting, particularly in the underpinnings of the magic system. We have the “results” (Spell Law) but we never had a clear idea how it got there. Kulthea is not in a fantasy universe of magic; it’s in our “real” universe with a special circumstance that allows for magic. For me, this needed better road rules!
Anyway, I’m moving along quite nicely with my writing goals for 2026. Will I hit all of my benchmarks? Probably not, especially as my RL gets hectic again in a few months. Either way, I’m no longer waiting for any real opportunity from ICE to expand the Shadow World product line. If I have ideas in my head that need writing down I’ll keep on going.
This is the first in a series closely modeled after Peter R’s read-throughs of such games as Zweihander (sorry for the missing umlaut, all) and HARP. I’ve recently adopted the playtest of Against the Darkmaster (abbreviated as VsD) for my tabletop home game, and I’m also running VsD via play-by-post for a few folks on the official VsD Discord server. I have a number of thoughts about the system—at least the system as it is portrayed in the QuickStart—and I’ve been sharing these with the designers and now you, the readers of this blog, if you care to receive them.
I feel that it’s appropriate to establish my relationship with VsD. My first rpg was Middle-Earth Role Playing. I believe I was twelve years old at the time, so the game must have been just published. Later, I discovered other games, notably Champions and West End Games’s Star Wars, but I never got into D&D until years later when 3e was released and a local group needed someone to DM for them. Last year, nostalgic, I began a MERP campaign. I quickly “evolved” it to RM2, then, dissatisfied with some of RM’s mechanics, I “devolved” it to Original D&D. Naturally, I was interested in what the designers of VsD had done with the game for which they likewise had fond feelings.
When I talk about games, I prefer to differentiate “emulationist” from “simulationist.” In my definitions, an emulationist game seeks to imitate a very specific intellectual property or (sub)genre. A simulationist game seeks to be “realistic.” Now, I understand that games that I consider simulationist—and this includes Rolemaster—often contain magic and the supernatural, but I argue that, even while exhibiting those unreal elements, such rules seek to mechanize the content according to the “laws” of actual physics as best as we can understand them. This is not to argue that these systems can’t (in my definition) be used to emulate specific genres and properties, but this is not the purpose for which they have been created, and, in such situations, for a certain play experience the GM must be relied on entirely. With emulationist designs, in contrast, the intended experience is built into the rules (though a GM always could mess this up).
I don’t believe VsD seeks to “compete” with any other d100 system. Instead, I think VsD hopes to rewrite MERP to emulate a very specific experience, and the milieu for this interaction is epic, “heartbreaker” high fantasy. In the introduction to the QuickStart, the designers cite novels, movies and music as their inspirations.
I am most familiar with the novels, though I have puzzled over a hierarchy that the designers seem to be suggesting: VsD “draws its main inspiration from the classic works of the masters of the genre, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Ursula K. Le Guin, passing through the two Terrys (Brooks and Goodkind) and their followers, Weis & Hickman, Jordan, and Williams.” This appears to rank Tolkien and Le Guin (though both are fantasists, to me they are qualitatively very different writers from each other) as the “masters.” The two “Terrys” appear to be grouped simply because of their names. Though I am told Brooks’s later books get better, his 1977 novel The Sword of Shannara is a very bad, almost note-for-note imitation of The Lord of the Rings. In contrast, Goodkind (I’m only familiar with Legend of the Seeker, a two-season television series based upon his work) crafts a truly unique secondary world. If Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Robert Jordan and Tad Williams are supposed to be followers of the Terrys (and not all of them together of Tolkien and Le Guin), then it’s puzzling that the Weis and Hickman and Williams publications predate Goodkind.
My confusion here almost certainly results from a simple error in phrasing. It’s no big deal (right now), and the point is understood. Possibly with the exception of Le Guin’s, all these works feature Iron Age Western and Northern lands of myth and magic in which a diverse group of usually-reluctant heroes band together on a long overland quest to defeat an Evil Dark Lord usually through the use of some legendary item. I don’t think it’s too much to say that there’s usually an even more specific element in these works: major characters around which an adventuring party soon forms begin their journey innocent and naive in a secluded pastoral community, usually in the West of the land. Into this intrudes an Evil Force that is seeking these very characters. During the course of the heroes’ quest, armies will be mobilized against the forces of the Evil One, and the principal characters either will be involved in the military campaign or in the final mission to find/destroy/use the relic of power that actually can defeat the Dark Lord.
That’s it. That should be the VsD experience, not just because the GM sets such a course but because the rules impel it. I will say right now that I’m not entirely convinced that VsD, at this point in the playtest, achieves specifically the form that I have described. In some aspects it greatly delivers. To preview some later articles for this series, it provides Encounter recommendations for overland travel that are highly evocative of this genre. It has rules for PCs to find Safe Havens (not in the QuickStart but detailed in the blog) that are likewise emulationist. It’s certain that the degree of correspondence should not be judged by the QuickStart alone: the texts and tables provide many evidences that the QuickStart is a living document and a fractal portion of all that the designers have written. But the developers have told me that (right now) mass combat is outside their designs. I understand. The final product is expected to be over 300 pages already, and, really, it won’t hurt to reserve some aspects for “support” purposes. But my point remains: in these sources there always is some space for a great big war.
I have had my say and completed my introduction, but still there are two more inspirations forming VsD. And, looking at them now, I’m realizing I might have had the wrong idea about VsD’s object of emulation. VsD is inspired by the “great fantasy movies” of the 70s, 80s and 90s. I’m not sure there were any “great” ones. They were all we had, so we made the most of them. If we still like them (and I do), it’s because they are a part of us now. The writers term some of these films “sword and sorcery”, and if this subgenre also is an inspiration, then some of the design choices seem at odds. Most likely the authors aren’t using these terms with the same specificity with which I understand them, so I’ll depart from this observation for now.
I’ll have to do the same for the final inspiration: metal music. Specifically, VsD combat is inspired by metal. I didn’t have any older siblings to introduce me to roleplaying or music. Roleplaying I managed to find all alone, but music didn’t mean anything to me until 1991 when the American Top 40 began playing tracks from U2’s Achtung Baby, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and R.E.M.’s Out of Time. I’m afraid I won’t be able to comment on how bands like Malmsteen, Dio and Black Sabbath inform VsD combat.
Well, that was more than anyone wanted! Next we’ll get into the rules themselves, and I’ll be keeping my mind on how well they emulate the fictions. First up, Character Creation, and I’ll probably have to tackle it in a few parts.
I admit I’m not that clued up on all the details but I have been reading what others have posted who seem to have rather more of an understanding on what is happening.
One of the changes would appear to be a lack of backwards compatibility between the second edition of Pathfinder and the original rules, which could prove to be a mistake. After all, lack of backwards compatibility between D&D 4 and 3.5 was probably one of the factors that led to Pathfinder’s success in the first place. Paizo got a lot of players from D&D 3.x who didn’t want to move to the 4th Edition.
In the decade since then, some of Paizo’s customers will have purchased perhaps thousands of dollars of official material from Paizo (given the various subscriptions) that may not be compatible with the second edition, never mind third party content. I certainly wouldn’t be willing to have that all written off. So this could cause the Pathfinder market to fragment.
However, that is not really why I am writing this post. One thing I have taken note of is that, according to more than a few comments, Pathfinder Second Edition seems to have quite a bit in common with D&D 5E, in terms of reduced complexity. So, perhaps the system is being simplified to regain market share. 5E may have taken some players from Pathfinder.
Now, after I admit I have no idea how many official rulebooks, the Pathfinder system was getting a bit bloated, and perhaps impossible to keep on top of. I have stated more than once that Pathfinder is at least as complex as Rolemaster. So, if Paizo is shifting towards a less complex format with the second edition, such as seen in 5E, that does not exactly bode well for complex systems such as RMU.
Is there a general trend towards the less complex in game systems and, if so, what does this hold for Rolemaster? Will it remain an extremely niche game system even after the release of RMU?
This is Part 3 of an article series on self-publishing in the RPG industry. Also see Part 1 and Part 2.
Do Reviews Help or Hinder?
Freeimages.com
The effects of reviews on sales can be hard to quantify, especially when there isn’t a lot of consistency in sales in the first place. When sales are all over the place, it’s effectively impossible to determine whether a review has benefited or harmed them.
I recently had a couple of supplements given two star ratings – no reviews, just ratings. Personally, as both a publisher and customer, I find just a rating like that useless. As a publisher, I don’t know what the purchaser found wrong with the supplements, so can’t improve it. Similarly, as a customer, it really doesn’t help me decide whether or not to buy it. Maybe the rating had nothing to do with the product in question – I have actually seen that happen in reviews, so it could easily happen with ratings too. Maybe the purchaser simply didn’t like the colour! I have also had a two star written review, but that lacked enough detail to be really helpful to anyone as well.
Good reviews – Endzeitgeist.com writes incredibly detailed ones – help both as a publisher and a purchaser, as they go deeply into what’s good and bad about a supplement. I think a review, good or bad, from a known and trusted reviewer has the biggest chance of helping or harming sales. For other reviews, in my opinion I don’t think one good or bad review will make a huge difference, but half a dozen reviews would provide enough information that it could affect people’s decisions (those 2/5 ratings and reviews I mentioned haven’t stopped people buying the supplements in question). My current opinion would be that individual reviews don’t sway most people either way, unless it’s from a well-respected reviewer or an extremely detailed review highlighting any good or bad points. However, bad reviews could make a difference if there isn’t much preview of a product available (on the OneBookShelf sites you can give potential purchasers a full-size preview of part, or all, of what they would be getting – I consider this useful). Having a decent amount of content in a full size preview allows potential customers to see for themselves what the content is like.
The best-selling medals on the OBS sites also help as a customer, as they show that many others wanted to buy a supplement, whatever its rating might be. The medals start at Copper and go through Silver, Electrum, Gold and Platinum. The better the medal, the more copies have been sold of that supplement. Supplements do have to sell for money – even 1 cent – for a sale to qualify, and each site calculates them individually, so, for example, having enough combined sales on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow to reach a sales medal level will not grant one – the sales all need to be on one site. DriveThruRPG generally sells more copies than RPGNow.
I currently have, at the time of writing, 4 Silver and 15 Copper best-sellers on DriveThruRPG and two of the Silvers are also Copper on RPGNow. There are also quite a few supplements within 1-5 sales of Copper and a couple of Coppers that are getting similarly close to Silver. Electrum is probably still quite a few months off for the closest of the Silvers.
What Return to Expect?
Don’t expect a brilliant return from your work, although it is possible to build up a company that works and pays a decent return (Mongoose Publishing managed it for example). RPGs are still a very niche market, and this is reflected in the money paid out. For example, the standard rate of pay for freelancers in the RPG industry is one cent per word, although some do pay higher. Paizo, probably the second largest publisher after Wizards of the Coast, pays a lot more and the independent Raging Swan Press, thanks to their Patreon campaign, also pays much higher – currently a substantial 11 cents per word for the latter, which appears to be the highest in the industry by far.
Having dealt with writing freelancers in other niches and specialities, 1 cent is really very poor for writing that often requires specialist technical knowledge, but the truth is, the market often cannot support anything more. Rates such as Raging Swan and Paizo are more of the exception than the rule, and most pay much less, because it simply isn’t possible for publishers to make a decent return on their money for higher amounts – and that can be stretching the definition of decent. There also isn’t that much work available at those rates, and they tend to be for tried and tested freelancers, not newbies.
So, if you are writing for your own publications, the lesson to take from this is to expect that it could take a couple of years – or more – before you see a decent return on the time you invested. Your initial return per hour spent will most likely be less than you’d make at McDonalds. The advantage is with this sort of work is that it keep earning once published. Sometimes you may never see a decent return, directly at least, from a publication. Indirectly, it might bring in customers who later buy other products or who might buy a fair few at the same time (I have had a few 50+ sales).
Morguefile
Currently, I’m netting around $2,500 a year from the OneBookShelf sites; I don’t yet have anything published anywhere else but that’s in the works. For me, if I was to take that out, that’s easily a month’s fixed living expenses (my living expenses are a lot lower than those of many others). Which isn’t bad for a fun hobby (I do spend more time on this than I should, from a financial point of view anyway, because I enjoy it). Although supplements can take a while before they earn anything remotely close to a decent wage, the benefit is that, once written, they can keep earning money without further work. My income did decline a bit recently, having pretty steadily gone up, but that would appear to be due to the ranking algorithm change mentioned earlier in Sales & Marketing in Part 2 so I didn’t make as much money in the Cthulhu Mythos and Halloween sales this year as I did last. I do expect it to start going up again, as the average quality and price of each supplement published increases and as I get more supplements out there.
Due to the difficulty in making enough money to pay others in the RPG market, and the ease of entry, most small publishers (me included frankly, although I am working on it) don’t have a huge degree of professionalism, for areas outside the actual development and publishing of material – basically, areas outside those related to actually creating the text, or perhaps images. Better research and tracking, writing better copy on sites and improved marketing could all help boost sales. Should you lack skills in any area, consider teaming up with someone who has them, if they are interested. There are also some publishers – Fat Goblin Games is one example, with their ‘Imprints’ – who publish the work of other publishers through their own company, with the smaller publisher benefiting from the larger one’s customer base and expertise. What is expected from such a relationship by each party is no doubt variable.
This is Part 2 of an article series on self publishing in the RPG industry. Also see Part 1 and Part 3.
Setting the Price
Morguefile
Price is a tricky one. There is a temptation – which I fell into – of undercutting the competition, but in the long run, this really doesn’t help anyone. OneBookShelf (OBS) tend to say don’t sell for under $1 (although $0.99 can help sales and makes little realistic difference). If the supplement includes artwork, especially artwork which you are unlikely to be able to reuse but costs money to buy, this can mean that a higher selling price is necessary.
OneBookShelf also allows for Pay What You Want supplements, where the purchaser chooses what price they think the supplement is worth. I prefer doing this to out and out free. Naturally, the price most choose is nothing, but some may come back and then pay more than you would have priced the supplement for. Plus, these customers may also be added to your mailing list, a potential future source of income.
Some publishers offer most, or all, of their material for free. Often, this is because they have a Patreon campaign that generates the money in another way.
Where to Actually Sell
The OneBookShelf network is by far the biggest player in the niche. There is also the Paizo store, the Open Gaming Store and Warehouse 23 from Steve Jackson Games.Amazon, through Kindle and CreateSpace, is another. There are also other more specialised sites such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, which sell material for tabletop software systems, which tend to require knowledge of how to create or adapt material to these. Such content can also be sold through OBS as well. OBS do offer a 5% exclusivity bonus, if you only sell on their sites, but many of the bigger players cover multiple markets, so it’s likely that there’s a definite advantage to doing so, if you can. There are other print on demand publishers, such as Lulu too.
A final option is a store on your own site. Although this will likely give the highest percentage – after all, you won’t need to pay a percentage to another store’s owner – it can also be the trickiest to do.
Sales & Marketing
SXC.HU
OBS has tracking codes, which they call source codes. These can be used to track where a sale came from (if the person creating a link used them; the codes you see in a marketing source report are not solely the ones you create yourself, but all relevant ones), although these do get overwritten when another is clicked.
My highest sales numbers come from the various OBS internal codes combined, especially from the front page and also purchased (these, being listed as FrontPage and also_purchased, are very easy to spot); however, over the past year OBS changed the ranking algorithm so that it ranks by money made from a supplement, not number of supplements sold. This generally benefits the bigger publishers – who tend to create more expensive products; smaller publishers who make the occasional pricey supplement also benefit – and OBS, who make more money from larger sales, but it’s not so good for the smaller publisher who has lots of pocket-money priced items. This was notable in the past couple of OBS sales, when products were selling in numbers of about a tenth of what they did in similar sales last year, because they were no longer at the top of the sales listings.
My next major source of sales is through emails to my mailing list through the OBS email system. I send out emails when new products are released, and I give discounts on some new releases, to keep people interested in subscribing to the list, and link to other products and sales as well if they are appropriate. I used to always send an email out at the start of a sale as well, but just prior to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale OBS essentially asked publishers not to do this, as they had already notified customers (although this was stated before the customers were actually notified). Not that surprising, because it wasn’t unknown to get a lot of emails from many different publishers, but telling my customers and potential customers about site sales always generated product sales, and a generic one by OBS does not have the same effect.
The footers on the OBS sites can be used to promote similar items, and this is probably the next largest source of combined sales. Not every product has a footer, as yet, but I add footers with other relevant products when I see some that are related.
I also sell a few through my own site, although this doesn’t sell that many as yet; it probably pays for the domain name at best (the hosting is basically paid for elsewhere). The site needs more useful content in order to attract people who then might click through and purchase products.
The sales generated by social media are harder to quantify. I only know of one sale that came through social media, Facebook in its case, but that customer purchased about 50 products! Update: I have just started getting results from Pinterest after quite a few years of posting on the site. My pins have just started being reposted a lot (both my own supplements and reviews of other peoples) and this has resulted in an uptick in views and a number of definite sales.
Another area I have got a few sales from is ads in products themselves. I’ve added links to related products in the back of a few recent supplements, which can also fill up empty space! This has generated a few sales, but nothing significant as yet.
Probably the most important lesson to take from the source codes is to actually use them, every time you create a link.
