Legends of Avantris Announces Neon Odyssey, a 5E Space Opera Project

Avantris Entertainment, the publishing arm of Legends of Avantris and the makers of The Crooked Moon, has announced a new space opera-themed D&D project that will launch on Kickstarter later this year. Neon Odyssey is described as a "a neon-soaked science fantasy space opera trilogy for D&D 5E," drawing inspiration from sources like Star Wars and Cowboy Bebop. The Neon Odyssey project includes three books, an Outrunner's Handbook containing player rules and character-building guides, a Cosmic Codex detailing the Stardust Rhapsody campaign setting, and the Overdrive Expansion that contains optional rules for professions, racing and more. All the "classic" D&D character classes are reimagined in the books under new names and containing mechanical upgrades, with 40 subclasses, 30 species, and 300+ alien monsters and enemy vehicles to battle against.

The Kickstarter for Neon Odyssey will launch in May, with Avantris running weekly Neon Odyssey-focused content on their channels from March to June. Avantris's last Kickstarter to fund the Crooked Moon, raised over $4M in 2023.

 

[...m...]

...it's a good snapshot of the actual costs for producing books + accessories; sands of doom included a soundtrack, giant dry-erase maps, cards, and GM screen plus multiple hardcover + softcover books...

 

[Morrus]

...it's a good snapshot of the actual costs for producing books + accessories; sands of doom included a soundtrack, giant dry-erase maps, cards, and GM screen plus multiple hardcover + softcover books...

I already know well how much it costs to make books and stuff. Which is why I expressed curiosity on the profit margins of the other stuff. The plushies and miniatures and dice and stuff.

 

[humble minion]

I already know well how much it costs to make books and stuff. Which is why I expressed curiosity on the profit margins of the other stuff. The plushies and miniatures and dice and stuff.

I've always wondered how much of an overhead charge there is with that stuff before you get to a per-item cost. I'm not in the business, but I believe that manufacturing runs of this sort of thing get cheaper the more you make, which makes small numbers less profitable. If you're offering them in your campaign, you need to be moving a lot of them.

But they only tend to be included in the high tiers, so only a relatively small fraction of backers get them. Using the plushies for an example, even for a mega-successful campaign like Neon Odyssey, so far only 3000ish backers have backed a tier which includes a plushie, which is about 1/8 of the total backers (of course some more plushies are probably being bought as add-ons which are outside of my visibility). 3000 is not a big manufacturing run for something like this, and for a campaign less abnormally popular than NO, you could be talking only five percent of this number or less. And plushies do take up space to store and aren't hugely value-dense by weight or volume so I don't think anyone would be keen to overorder and be stuck with a warehouse full of them.

 

[Morrus]

I've always wondered how much of an overhead charge there is with that stuff before you get to a per-item cost.

For minis, as an example, there’s a high upfront to initially cast the mini but the individual units after that are much cheaper. We’ve looked into it a couple of times but at our scale it made no sense for us to do. At larger scales, it makes much more sense.

 

[humble minion]

At larger scales, it makes much more sense.

Yeah, and that makes foreknowledge of what level of backing your campaign is going attract much more important, I suppose. I guess that's why so many big campaigns are stressing the pre-launch sign ups and giving rewards for signing on early etc, so they can get a bit more data on how much traction a given campaign it likely to have and they can better guess which of these tchotchkes are financially viable to offer.

Legends of Avantris obviously knew that Neon Odyssey was going to be massive before it launched, because they had sufficient confidence to put a $500k price tag on their first stretch goal.