NOW LIVE! -- Presents for Goblins: Festive Resources for 5E on Kickstarter! A festive softcover of holiday-themed D&D 5E resources, including the short adventure 'Presents for Goblins'.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ParanoydStyle" data-source="post: 7864236" data-attributes="member: 6984451"><s>Two 3 important questions</s> ok fine 2 reasonably important questions and 1 very important point of advice:a) are you looking for freelancers to write for this (supplements, adventures, in-universe fiction, whatever)?b) do you have money dollars to pay freelancers to write for this?c) ADVICE: for PDFs use itch.io not DriveThruRPG: DriveThru takes a 30% cut (maybe even 33% or 34%, don't recall) for simply hosting a file which is preposterously extortionate. itch's default cut is 10% but you can give it as much or as little profit share as you want. You could even give them 0% and keep 100% of the MSRP if you wanted to (personally, the fact that they are asking for less money makes me want to give them more money, or at least some). Also, you can do any sale of any kind that you want at any time for any length of time, you don't get automatically opted in to site-wide sales. For dead tree, though, you're stuck with DriveThru, but trust me, go itch for the PDFs. I got a strong feeling I'd be a much happier, less emotionally damaged human being right now if someone had told me that back in 2015 when itch was brand new. The only argument against it is that itch is primarily known for videogames, not tabletop games, and OneBookShelf (parent company of drivethru) has cornered the market on roleplaying games the way that Amazon has cornered the market on...ok basically everything. But every single time a pen and paper game goes up for sale on itch, that argument gets weaker and weaker-- and they go up every day.Being 1980s pulp horror it is rather extremely <a href="https://endtransmission.itch.io/phantasm">RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS.</a> And to be clear by that I mean <a href="https://endtransmission.itch.io/phantasm">I  designed and wrote an entire full-size full-length 211 page Best Free RPG ENnie-award-nominated game in essentially that genre</a>.PM me if you want you don't have to respond here.Spoilered for unsolicited and cynical advice.[spoiler]I saw this after I made my original post and I had to respond:Oh, you poor, poor clueless kids, how I pity you. Because I done BEEN you. I spent over half a decade trying to do what you're trying to do otherwise I'd never speak this bluntly to anyone and I never feel comfortable speaking with authority on any topic but...this is something I spent a significant chunk of my adult life trying to do and not just failing but really fucking my life up in the process. So whenever I see a bright eyed young man about to venture down that road, it feels wrong to say nothing.The first thing you must understand is that matter how much the hobby grows, at least 70% of that growth is going to go into the big leagues, i.e. D&D and Pathfinder (maybe a 50/20 split dunno). Then the true medium-sized companies: Catalyst Game Labs (Shadowrun), PEG (Savage Worlds), Modiphius (a whole lot of licensed stuff, including Fallout), Cubicle 7 (Dr. Who), Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu), Evil Hat (FATE), Arc Dream (Delta Green) et al. are fighting over the next 25%, leaving that last 5% of the market share of a niche industry for LITERALLY EVERY OTHER RPG PUBLISHER TO FIGHT OVER. So the industry growing isn't going to help you: the SIZE of the industry will change, the SHAPE will not.Depending on what your goals are and how you define success (my own definition was actually to make enough to at least contribute as my ex did to the family I planned on us eventually having, which was setting the bar way too high and also super stupid in a half-dozen other ways I'm not gonna get into) you might do very well. I have a couple ENnie nominations and some Silver best-sellers on DriveThru: not a bad takeaway, but nowhere near worth the physical and emotional scars that I also walked away from the industry with. I'm not saying your game is bad. I'm not saying no one will buy it.I'm not even saying it's technically impossible for you to make real money off of it: not impossible, but statistically, it's about as plausible for any true independent in this business (opposed to say, a company attaching itself to a preexisting fad) as it is that you'd win the lottery and be struck by lightning on the same day: with the distinction that you need to prove you're incredibly creative, talented, skilled, dedicated, and perserverant before the guy at the convenience store will even sell you the lotto ticket or you're you're even able to go outside when it's raining.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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