Road to Kicking the Starter
This article contains affiliate links, meaning that if you decide to purchase a product through my link, I get a Commission at no additional cost to youI’ve been e-mailing other TTRPG creators to get an idea of what should the steps be for Kickstarter.
I initially had the idea of Kicking a dungeon that I now feel like it is too large in scope after reading Kevin Crawford’s advice on Kickstarter. He’s the author of Worlds Without Number, Stars Without Number, Cities Without Number and I’m sure others, perhaps also without number.
Them Hex Features
His suggestion is to have a tight idea with no scope creep allowed. That’s good for me because all I want to do is make Hex Features for players to stumble into. I got my list of potential Hex Features off of The Alexandrian, I think. One of the weird options is Unusual Resources and I got Music which made me have to think of what could give you Music as a resource.
I made a NPC who qualifies for what I think is a decent Hex Feature. A Fey that teaches Music to anyone and anything with quite devout students.
The first thing I would need to do is write out the Adventure Site. When I covered my Page-to-Prep, I would get those twenty or thirty page dungeons down to three pages. Since my notes of the created Fey is one page, I guess ten pages on the outside is what I’m looking for. That sounds perfect for a Zine-length product, which I think is perfect to write down notes if it were a physical product.
Beholders sure are expensive
Commissioned Art for Paused Project by CollegeArtist
The most expensive aspect would be the art and it is important. I learned my lesson with my The Mad House; you really need art. While I am economically minded, that is not who I should be selling to. The more cost conscious a person is, the more critical they are of their purchase. If two people pay $5 for a product, but one earns $50 a week versus $500, the $50 person will want to ensure they get their money’s worth. If the $500 finds the product to be great, that’s awesome, but if it isn’t, 1% of their budget probaby isn’t going to be something they sweat over.
DnD Shorts said it best that the greatest part about spending money on artists is seeing your imagination come to life. I would want to comission four pieces of art; the cover, the Fey, a two-page spread of those under the Fey’s command and a map of their lair. That’s easily $500, if not more. I do have a bunch of art already comissioned for my initial planned adventures but I’ve had to put that on hold due to my opposition research plus a realistic look at my own capabilities.
The advice for manufacturing is that it usually costs triple you think think; between costs, taxes and surprises to throw money at problems until they stop twitching. The question then becomes is $1,500 enough? Looking at other Kickstarters, I see wildly different amounts but $1,500 seems very do-able. The problem is a lot of Kickstarters know this but they understand the psychology of ‘appearing successful’, so they put rock bottom target funding to be able to say “Funded in X microseconds” on the Kickstarter splash page.
Pros and Cons of Production
I would like for it to be cheaper than when it is available for regular purchase, both as an incentive to back and a ‘Thank you’ to those who are willing to give me their money for a dream. $3 is probably the price point I was thining of, meaning I would need 500 backers. Doing a bit of opposition research, I see that small publications get around 400 backers. I fall short of my goal but I already have a plan on getting it over the finish line: offering pledges that would allow backers to add their likeness to the art. One of the board games I’ve backed has my likeness and it is pretty fun to see people squint but never ask, chalking it up to a coincidence. One of my favourite board games of all time, Web of Spies, has 35 pieces of art dedicated to people who backed the game for a bit more.
The big money does seem to be in physical rewards. I have trepidation for a variety of reasons. I don’t like the idea that the only viable way of printing is to do so in China. I do not want to be responsibe for terrible conditions of their production plants. It also seems so daunting when it comes to managing a worldwide distribution plan; this might cause me to go with Order on Demand on Drive Thru RPG. Crawford recommends this because of how inexpensive this option is.
Seems like I kind of have a plan. The big thing would be to write this beast and then figure out how to use Scribus, the free version of InDesign, to make essentially a readymade product that just needs funding for art. That or be OK with using Homebrewery for the mini-module.
As I’ve been told by far more successful people than I, always be hawking. Let me know if this sort of disjointed rambling into the world of Kickstarter would be of an interest to you. If you have spare change, give me just the tip in my ko-fi jar; it helps me purchase writing fuel in the form of caffined beverages. The other option is signing up for my Patreon which for $5 USD gets you access to my notes from my games plus undetermined perks you could help determine. Does that fill you with determination?
