Housekeeping to begin the new year
First news, then the Matter of Arthur
I know that I promised that I would launch right into talking about King Arthur Pendragon RPG and sharing notes for a campaign that I drew up for it. But I wanted to get some Ramen Sandwich business out of the way before we proceed into what promises to be a month of Arthuriana.
First, I am pleased and above all, relieved, that our second Kickstarter for The Hobgoblin’s Fortress hit its funding target. I appreciate everyone who pitched in and contributed to its success, but it’s not quite over yet. This time, I’m experimenting with Kickstarter’s new late pledge feature, which allows us to accept pledges even though the campaign is, strictly speaking, over. So we’re going to keep accepting pledges until we have to go to press — probably in late January. The catch (for you backers-come-lately, that is) is that the price of each pledge level goes up a bit. But better late than never, eh?
In spite of this, however, I remain concerned about our ability to succeed on Kickstarter going forward. Even though we hit our funding target, by all other metrics the campaign did not perform well and the fact that we funded conceals a lot of underlying weakness. We had fewer backers than the last campaign for The Hobgoblin’s Fortress, the one that failed. The campaign drew little to no traffic after the first two days. It’s not that a lot of people took a look at the campaign and decided to pass on it. Very few people saw it at all. This is not an anomaly, either; our last three campaigns have followed a similar pattern, going back to Severed Heads and Broken Blades last year.
Based on our recent experience, it seems like Kickstarter is just not drawing the same level of backer enthusiasm as it did, say, five years ago. The energy just isn’t there anymore, and it seems like the numbers aren’t there either. High-profile and splashy campaigns that have laid the groundwork with a lot of pre-campaign publicity still thrive, of course. But I feel like there is no longer a critical mass of backers who are willing to discover those of us creators who are the next tier or two down from them.
As to why this might be so, I have my hypotheses. The one to which I am most heavily inclined right now is that the crowdfunding scene for tabletop games has been split by the emergence of Gamefound and, more recently, Backerkit making a power move to establish itself as a place for hosting campaigns, not just augmenting them. Even if there are plenty of people who spend time on more than one of those platforms, those are still people who in the past would have focused entirely on Kickstarter because competitors just did not exist. Now their attention is divided.
As to what Ramen Sandwich Press ought to do about this, I draw upon my old gambler’s instincts. Clearly, we’re having a bad run and it feels like the sensible thing is to step away from the table, shake off the head fog that losing streaks tend to generate, and then put our chips down at another table. Or try a different game. I’ll have more to say later about just what that means, but it’s clear to me that we can’t keep doing things the same old way and expect that, magically, our fortunes will somehow reverse. We have to try something different.
I can say, however, that I have decided that our next project will be another location module, this one called Lair of the Storm Giant. This will be our first module set on (and somewhat under) a mountain peak, so we’re returning to our goal of having the series cover a comprehensive variety of terrain types. Your party visits the mountaintop residence of a reclusive storm giant who spends her days in study and contemplation. As a proper hermit-philosopher, she is self-absorbed and a bit dotty, but well-meaning. She promises the heroes access to the wisdom of the ages if they can prove themselves worthy through a series of challenges, undertaken in the caverns beneath her domicile that turn out to be, in essence, handyman work and pest control. But her pests and odd jobs turn out to be anything but mundane. Storm giants live larger than everyone else, after all. Literally. Once I finish Path to the Hobgoblin’s Fortress I’ll get started on it.
After that, I want to write another splat book, this one the book about integrating war into fantasy RPG campaigns that I discussed in this post. Working Title: In a Time of War: A GM’s Guide to Armed Conflict. I’m seeing it as a book that need not be system-specific and I don’t think it will be hard to stat it out for both D&D and Pathfinder. There will be plenty of sample encounters exemplifying the sorts of things that can happen in and near a war zone. There will probably be a bunch of new NPC builds as well.
There are probably a couple of other things I could do to truly straighten out Ramen Sandwich Tees’ online points of presence, but after a couple of weeks of work during the Holidays, I think it’s finally in good order. Our Etsy storefront is open and functional again. For the moment, we’re only offering short-sleeve t-shirts and the Gamer Philosophy tote bags there. I’ll add more listings if we make some sales, but Etsy charges us a listing fee — it’s so small as to be almost nominal, but even so I’d like to see evidence that our Etsy sales have come back to life before making a deeper re-commitment. The short-sleeve tees are always the best sellers, so they’re the right vehicles for testing the waters.
Finally, this: I have decided that my big project for this blog in the coming year is to add audio and maybe even video content. Rereading Tennyson’s “The Passing of Arthur” (as I obviously did in the course of preparing the previous post), I remembered that I participated in a couple of poetry reading contests in graduate school, and not only did I have great fun, but I also did fairly well at it (I think I was runner-up both times). I always enjoyed reading aloud in school, both as a student and as a teacher. Substack gives us the ability to post audio and video content. So I’ve thought about recording myself reading some of my posts and posting them as mini-podcasts for paid subscribers (screw text-to-speech, I can do it myself and do it much better than any software tool).
But then I thought, why stop there? Why not read some poetry aloud, with commentary about the poem thrown in?
And why even stop there? I could read aloud a couple of my old conference papers, maybe content from my Ph.D. thesis (I wrote about Tom Wolfe and The New Journalism, which threw the English Department of the University of Chicago into a bit of confusion). Maybe record some podcast-lectures, like my own mini-great books lecture series. Why not? That’s the part of being an English professor that I really enjoyed; maybe this is an opportunity to separate what I loved from all the crap that ultimately soured me on academia.
Well see. I have to look into recording equipment and find a reliably quiet place to record first.