Creating a new TTRPG Player's Manual

[Daraco]

Hey guys, I'm new here, looking for advice and help.
So I created a D10 TTRPG a few years ago, and even started building a Master's Manual for the game, After having played the game with friends for a that past few years and worked out the kinks in the system i feel that i'm a point to wanting to officially launch and publish the game. HOWEVER. the main manual is still just a skeleton book so to speak. I've started to contact graphic artists on fiverr to get some original artwork, and i'm still looking for a good editing team to correct and make the manual more appealing. not to mention trying to find a good printing/ publishing company. But i have no idea where to start. I want to set up a kickstarter to help build up the hype and some funds to properly bring the game to life. but again i need to know a ball-park budget to get started.

 

[cavetroll]

I mean you can do it super cheap with public domain art, or you can spend $10-20k on art depending on how many pages and the quality of the art. Editor on the cheap maybe $1500 on a fiverr. Likely impossible to find an available ttrpg editor.

The point of the kickstarter is to raise the capital for these things. You probably need some lucky posts on reddit to go viral to advertise it though.

As I understand it if you use a printing company its cheaper (PrintNinja — Quality, Affordable Offset Printing). Though for myself one-stop-shopping at lulu is more appealing, but the price per book is considerably higher.

Thats all I know, which is not much.

 

[Blue]

Morris has posted several articles about TTRPG publishing. I'd look to them. For example here's one on kickstarting.

Kickstarter musings

I've backed 49 Kickstarters. I'm no Superbacker, but I've backed my share. I've also created 26 Kickstarters. With that in mind, here are some of my personal observations. Your mileage may - and almost certainly will - vary, and you're more than welcome to offer your own perspectives. The below...

www.enworld.org

 

[Daraco]

Morris has posted several articles about TTRPG publishing. I'd look to them. For example here's one on kickstarting.

Kickstarter musings

I've backed 49 Kickstarters. I'm no Superbacker, but I've backed my share. I've also created 26 Kickstarters. With that in mind, here are some of my personal observations. Your mileage may - and almost certainly will - vary, and you're more than welcome to offer your own perspectives. The below...

www.enworld.org

thanks for the thread link, it helps me decide what type of pledges to offer for the project.

 

[Daraco]

I mean you can do it super cheap with public domain art, or you can spend $10-20k on art depending on how many pages and the quality of the art. Editor on the cheap maybe $1500 on a fiverr. Likely impossible to find an available ttrpg editor.

The point of the kickstarter is to raise the capital for these things. You probably need some lucky posts on reddit to go viral to advertise it though.

As I understand it if you use a printing company its cheaper (PrintNinja — Quality, Affordable Offset Printing). Though for myself one-stop-shopping at lulu is more appealing, but the price per book is considerably higher.

Thats all I know, which is not much.

thanks for the advice. I may have found a good graphic artist who understands the implications of the project, now I just need to find an editor and someone to work the proper page layout of the rough draft.

 

[cavetroll]

thanks for the advice. I may have found a good graphic artist who understands the implications of the project, now I just need to find an editor and someone to work the proper page layout of the rough draft.

one artist? wow, I have 10 working right now, to make sure I can finish this year (I'm doing a monster manual too). Took me quite a bit of time to find the artists who are the best bang for your buck since they are massively different prices there. Of course the perfect ones quickly get overloaded with work as people realize how good they are.

Originally I thought I could just buy some existing art, but its just not the same.

I thought about working in ms word and giving it over to a 3rd party to do the layout but its not that complex so I bought affinity publisher and laying it out myself. I'm glad for that since I can also decide exactly which pieces of art are needed to complete a particular page.
I mean this is half the fun right

 

[Daraco]

one artist? wow, I have 10 working right now, to make sure I can finish this year (I'm doing a monster manual too). Took me quite a bit of time to find the artists who are the best bang for your buck since they are massively different prices there. Of course the perfect ones quickly get overloaded with work as people realize how good they are.

Originally I thought I could just buy some existing art, but its just not the same.

I thought about working in ms word and giving it over to a 3rd party to do the layout but its not that complex so I bought affinity publisher and laying it out myself. I'm glad for that since I can also decide exactly which pieces of art are needed to complete a particular page.
I mean this is half the fun right

I had thought of multiple artist, but i wanted to art to be the same thruout the manual. But the artist Is confident he can do it.. I'm not rushing to get the manual out as i've been working on it for the past 10 years, so taking time for each aspect is ok.
Right now it's exactly what i'm doing, the manual is in ms, I have some clipart where I want the original artwork to be.
I still need to finis up the little details such as Basic NPC and backstories, More defined explanations of the world itself and the creating a monster list... For now when we've been proof playing the game mechanics, I've been using D&D monsters and converting the stats to fit my game mechanic, but I want to try and make more original each monster ( which is hard considering that D&D have basically made every possible monster out there) so trying to be original is hard. I'm also looking for partners is that domain to help complete it.

 

[Piratecat]

thanks for the thread link, it helps me decide what type of pledges to offer for the project.

The best advice I can offer is that when crowdfunding, it is up to you to bring the crowd. By that, I mean that a successful project already has a bunch of people knowledgeable about the game, and wanting to back it on day 1.

I encourage you to publish a low cost "ashcan" version - rules only, no art. Use it to get people interested, to playtest more, and to figure out what works and what doesn't. Once you have that, you'll hopefully have built a community around your game -- and once that's the case, a kickstarter is a lot less risky.

 

[cavetroll]

I encourage you to publish a low cost "ashcan" version - rules only, no art. Use it to get people interested, to playtest more, and to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I thought about this, but I just can't do it because the PDF because unreadable (at least in my mind) without the art breaking up the monotony of text and tables.

 

[Piratecat]

Fair enough. My main point is that it's possibly folly to try and crowdfund until folks know and care about your work; and that may require getting people to play it ahead of time and then to evangelize for you. Publicly playtesting, or running it for people, really helps a lot in my experience.