In The Works

The last few months have been difficult. A couple of busy periods with the day job, plus family medical drama put RPG and zine stuff on the back burner. Even writing this post was delayed. I sat down to do this last night, and then my daughter, who had been a little out of sorts all day threw up. I spent most of last night asleep on her bedroom floor, and most of today wandering around in a semi-zombie state.

Difficult is relative, in reality, I'm a very fortunate guy. Among many things I've been using to buoy myself up recently has been Neil Gaiman's instruction to "make good art" - come what may, just get on with it. Listening to a couple of guests on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast has helped too, particularly Seth Godin and Kevin Kelly. Onwards and upwards, and all that.

In the next few months then, here's what you can expect from me (with some indication as to where they are in terms of completion):

• A Random Encounter Issue 3 - Vandel J. Arden
• Main interview done, transcribed and first editing pass done. Follow-up questions thought through and sent out. Cover commissioned. Print bonus in the works. Interior art in the works. ETA: end-July/start-of-August.
• A Random Encounter Issue 4 - Patrick Stuart
• Main interview done, will start transcription this week. A couple of follow-up questions identified. Cover commissioned, along with interior art. Print bonus is a mystery at the moment but a couple of ideas are tickling my brain. ETA: end-August/start-of-September.
• Fort [working title]
• It's coming up on the one year anniversary of Oddpool, and I had a couple of pages of follow-up ideas for the areas around that haunted and cursed place. Fort will be a Pocketmod-sized supplement about the area to the west of the river, a hold-out of civilisation and a strange place. People who think they're normal, living between a dead city and miles of marshland, but who are a bit... odd. (may or may not be inspired by the geography and locales of my hometown and surroundings) ETA: September/October.

My home office is starting to look like a small self-publishing outfit - which, I guess is kind of what it's becoming. As well as two issues of A Random Encounter, a re-print of Oddpool and two more issues of the zine on the way soon, I have the print runs of two other things that I've done in the last few months. These are for my dayjob, but couldn't have happened without my experiences of self-publishing RPG things.

As Issue 3 moves closer to completion I'll be announcing subscriptions - which will work out at the same cost as individual issues, but I'll throw in pdf copies as well for instant gratification - I have candidates for Issues 5 and 6 who have been tapped and given positive responses. So subscriptions to begin with will be for up to the end of this year/Issue 6. I have a big list of names for 2017, but if people are happy to support subscriptions I want to make sure I can deliver the goods.

I'll be posting RPG ideas more in the coming days as my brain needs space to vent while I get on with transcribing audio, editing three podcasts for my day job and working on admin and emails. I need to find creative outlets! I think I'll be offering a game or two for AntiGenCon this year, so just working through some ideas for that too... Currently a game of Maze Rats is winning out, but I might also run Escape The Undermaze too.

Want to know more about anything here? Comment below or email me! Thanks for reading, N.

Oddpool OOP

Following a flurry of activity around Christmas-time it was only a matter of when, not if, I would sell the last copy of Oddpool from my tiny print run. One of the pre-order people for A Random Encounter picked it up the other day and so now all of the Oddpools that I made are gone!

Come to think of it, I don't even have a copy...

As I've said a few times before, Oddpool started as a little gag gift to give to some friends at a games night (Patrick, David and Chris, who were all by that point successfully published in the indie RPG-o-sphere). After their encouragement, it didn't take long for me to see that this was my way to start taking RPG projects forward. And once you start making things, and you realise that you can make them, you realise that the only thing stopping you from making more things is yourself.

(this even extends to blogposts; until recently I would have told you, "Oh, I don't have as much time, oh this is happening, that is happening," but really I'm the only thing in the way)

Anyway, Oddpool is out-of-print, for now at least. I have a couple of ideas for a few other small micro-zines, so I might see how they pan out over the next few months and maybe do a couple of print runs, then offer them all up as a kind of micro-zine pick and mix? That's my current plan anyway.

For now, there are still the Payhip and DriveThruRPG options for getting pdfs, both of which include pdfs for printing Pocketmods and a mobile phone screen friendly version.

Oddpool - go on, you know you want to...

A Tiny Experiment

In the first issue of my forthcoming interview zine, A Random Encounter, I asked my interviewee if they had been given any particular advice about publishing or making games from others. They mentioned a couple of things, but one thing in particular jumped out to me:

It was James Raggi that told me not to just use Payhip but to make sure I used OneBookShelf because you get so many sales that way from people who are looking for something to buy and they just stumble across your product.

This was particularly interesting to me; I knew that my interviewee had released something on Payhip initially for pdf (and Lulu for print-on-demand), but it being on OneBookShelf had passed me by. They went on to say that they now got virtually no pdf sales via Payhip, it was all on OneBookShelf.

Oddpool has been on Payhip since September - and the last print copy is in the drawer just next to me if anyone has a few quid lying in their Paypal back pocket! - and Oddpool is small and niche. I didn't think it was necessarily worth me putting it on OneBookShelf, or if it was even possible for me to do it. But my interviewee's words kept coming back to me, and after I decided that I was going to make sure A Random Encounter was on OneBookShelf it dawned on me that it might be good to put Oddpool up there first, make sure I'd had a test run of checking all of the settings etc.

It was put up on OneBookShelf and approved just over nine days ago. I linked to it once or twice on G+, set it as pay-what-you-want with a suggested minimum of £1 and left it at that. I've mentioned Payhip quite a bit over the last five months, regularly - and hopefully non-annoyingly - reminding people that Oddpool is there. I checked in just now to see what the sales have been like on OneBookShelf up to last night.

Short version: OK, so I'm not a millionaire from a Pocketmod! But here's the comparison:

Payhip - available for five months - 43 PWYW sales, 7 paid, total revenue after fees = approx £5.
OneBookShelf - available for nine days - 89 PWYW sales, 7 paid, total revenue after OBS royalties = $7.05 = approx £4.87.

Small sums of money relatively speaking, and as a guy with a maths background I'm not going to jump up and make wild claims or extrapolate ("Oh my gosh, if I'd just used OBS for the last five months then I'd have earned so many $s!") - but clearly being on OneBookShelf makes a difference, I'm guessing most of all in terms of visibility. People are already there looking for pdfs to put in their basket and can see your title. I'll be interested to see how A Random Encounter fares, and am tempted to run another experiment, advertising the link on G+ for the print direct from me and for the pdf via Payhip, but putting it on OneBookShelf with little fanfare for the first month to see what happens. Worth doing?

Has anyone reading this done any experiments in terms of how they sell or make their work available?

PS - find out what other questions I ask my interviewee in the first issue of A Random Encounter, coming soon!
PPS - find out the identity of my interviewee next week!

Notes on micro-publishing, part 4

I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

In the last three posts I've talked about how I went about making Oddpool and sharing it, what it cost to do things and how I set them up, and then I shared details of what has happened in terms of sales - and did a breakdown of where £1.99 for a print edition goes.

In total I've generated £15.41 towards future artwork (and with thinning out my RPG collection this number has been added to), so I've done something towards my third goal. What about the other two? Did I have fun? And what did I learn from doing this?

Rough, unused/non-final art of some "Spidercrew" cultists - may appear in a future Oddpool campaign...

Notes on micro-publishing, part 3

This is my third post reflecting back a bit on making Oddpool and the experience of selling a little RPG product. On Thursday I shared a post about the practical side - how I made the pdf files and got things printed and assembled - and yesterday I looked at how I have been sharing and selling it. Today I want to look at the numbers a little bit, and then tomorrow I'll reflect on what I've learned from this small project, some questions or thoughts that I've had, and what this means for the future.

Unused piece of Oddpool artwork. Maybe next time...

Notes on micro-publishing, part 2

Oddpool has been out for a month - there are only a few print copies left - and because I want to make self-publishing RPG things a part of what I do, for fun and for profit, it seemed like a good time to look at the numbers and process involved thus far.

This not a "how-to": I'm just going to say what I did, what I think went well and what I think I could do differently, and some little things I've learned along the way. Like I said yesterday, I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

Yesterday, I shared some of the practical details of how I made Oddpool. Today, I'll look at what I did to set up a payment process, and how I went about sharing Oddpool. Tomorrow I'll look at the numbers of all this, and what I learned by doing this small project.

Notes on micro-publishing, part 1

As Oddpool has been out for just over a month now - and there are still a few print copies left for around the price of a Starbucks coffee! - and because I want to make self-publishing RPG things a part of what I do, for fun and for profit, it seemed like a good time to look at the numbers and process involved thus far.

This is by no means a "how-to": I'm just going to say what I did, what I think went well and what I think I could do differently, and some little things I've learned along the way. I had three goals with making Oddpool:

1. To have fun making something and sharing it.
2. To learn a little about the behind the scenes logistics of this kind of enterprise.
3. To raise some money towards artwork for future releases.

In this post, I want to share some of the practicals on how I made Oddpool, both my process for creating the files involved and what I did to make the printed editions. In a second post I'll look at what I did to set up a payment process, and how I went about sharing Oddpool. Depending on how long I waffle in that post, it might be a third post before I get on to reflecting on what I've personally learned, and the numbers side of things, but I will get to them.

Not appearing in Oddpool

Honestly, this is the last post about it for a while, I swear...

In making a Pocketmod-sized supplement you have to make really hard choices. What stays, what goes; how much detail can you afford; what sized font can someone read or not - I was tweaking and tweaking for a while. A very hard choice I had to make was whether or not to include the Superlambanana in the booklet. In the end, I decided not to include it, more because an idea like it would need artwork and I wasn't quite sure about what I could or couldn't do with a work of art, and I was struggling to come up with a name that was as expressive as Superlambanana.

So in the end, it was cut out, but it left a nice giant-sized hole for the Pool-Auks, which are actually much more symbolic of the city. The Superlambanana would have been nice though...

Superlambanana
Twenty-feet high, apex wandering creature
STR15, DEX15, WIL20, 25HP
Driven to protect babylambananas. d8 stomp, Armour 2. Can always hear any distressed offspring and will come to their aide. Spawns a new child every four days, extruding from the back surface over a period of an hour. Often accompanied by 2-8 babylambananas.

Babylambanana
Horse-sized smooth sheep/fruit hybrids
STR10, DEX10, WIL7, 2HP
Driven by curiosity. No attack, Armour 1. Harmless, mouthless, bleats. Will approach strangers and shiny things. Will have a nest of shiny objects, which may contain treasure.

(Oddpool - now down to the last six of the signed and numbered print copies!)

Thanks! and Small Projects

It's not about Oddpool at all.

Oh wait, it is a little bit...

At the time of writing, there are only ten print copies of Oddpool left. Given that it went on sale on Friday, is a teeny-tiny tome, and is a home-made DIY thingy, I'm quite pleased!

I was really inspired by a post I read some time ago on small projects. The TL;DR version: "doing lots of small things could help to develop ideas and to share them - and maybe feel more personally satisfied." Still, it took me a long time from reading that article, and re-reading it, to make the connection with even more tangible things like Oddpool - a small project if ever there was.

A year or so ago, in my day job, I ran a workshop where I was the subject of a business case study exercise: I ran some numbers by them about running my own micro-business of RPG things. A dozen very well-educated people told me: "The numbers say no. Good sense says no. Invest your time, skills and effort elsewhere and you'll do better." Which didn't sit right. Because I wanted - and want! - to do something in RPGs but I didn't know what or how.

I have a piece of paper with projects on it stuck to the wall next to my desk, looming over me, all daring me to do something. But until I got some feedback from friends - "this is fun" - I had stopped thinking that I could do anything. Small projects are the way forward for me, I think, with writing and doing things for RPGs.

Selling fifteen print copies of a Pocketmod is a beginning. Like Patreon campaigns, this is not a get rich scheme: it's a "help me" proposal. Picking up a Pocketmod or making a donation via pay-what-you-want for Oddpool means that my options open up. I can think seriously about other projects because:

• some people bought this first thing, maybe they'll buy something else.
• I have this money from the first thing as seed funding for the next thing.
• I have a little bit more confidence that I can work towards the next thing.

In many respects that last one is the most important.

I have plans, and Oddpool is helping make that happen - if you've picked it up, thank you!

Unused Oddpool artwork, maybe for another time...

Oddpool is out!

Want a peek at a weird ruined city for explorers to look around when playing Into The Odd or other role-playing games? Want to get your creative brains thinking about what people might find at places like the Dead Fields, the Copper Tombs or the Red Keep? Want inspiration for thousands of strange gangs that survive there? Want half a dozen creatures that have been sighted in the ruins?
And do you want it all to fit in your pocket?

You want Oddpool.

Inspired by the city of Liverpool, Oddpool is an eight-page Pocketmod mini-booklet which answers yes to all of the questions above. You can find it on Payhip where it's a pay-what-you-want pdf download, or if you want to be part of an exclusive club, you can buy a print edition from me! Details are on the Oddpool page: to start things off I've got a limited run of 25 numbered and signed copies, printed on good 120gsm paper, cut and folded by me: £1.99 if you're in the UK, £2.75 if you're somewhere else in the world.

But wait, there's more! I wanted to compare paper qualities, so got an equal number of 90gsm copies too, before settling on the 120gsm paper stock. I'll be putting a 90gsm paper copy in every order of a print edition from me, so you can pass it on to someone else. Details for ordering are on the Oddpool page.

Oddpool is the first thing I've made and shared like this, so I hope you like it. If you do, let me know - and maybe let other people know too, that's fine by me!

Big thanks to Chris McDowall, creator of Into The Odd for being so supportive of me making this! And thanks to you for reading this page, whoever you are, I hope you enjoy Oddpool as much as I enjoyed making it.

People in Oddpool

When I ran a game set in Oddpool, I was of course influenced by the people of the city. At the same time, the game city is supposed to be a ruin, filled with weird creatures, strange architecture and general bizarreness. The people who live in Oddpool do so in small groups/gangs, with their own customs, their own wants and needs, and their own ways of interacting with others. When I ran my game, I just slapped Redmen and Bluemen in, as substitutes for football supporters, but for the Pocketmod I wanted something better.

I've been heavily inspired by David McGrogan's inspiration tables over the years (I've shared a few of my own on this blog before), so it seemed like the most natural fit for the Pocketmod would be to provide a little inspiration tool for generating groups and gangs of Skalls: rolling gives a couple of details to then inspire the GM to create the rest of the group. I've used the table to generate the following, Skalls you may find on the streets of Oddpool.

The Why of Oddpool

At the start of 2015 I was really interested in playing Into The Odd, and while the print edition hadn't gone to press yet I had the pdf and two interested players in the form of Patrick Stuart and David McGrogan. The system looked so simple to run, I thought that I would take a stab at quickly putting some notes together for a sort of city crawl. Liverpool is just on my doorstep, and it's where all three of us grew up around or lived for a while, so it seemed like it would be fun.

As it happenened, on the day, we were playing in the cafe of the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton, which looks out over the River Mersey and at an old sea defence, Fort Perch Rock. It made sense to me then to start the adventure there, a weird some-when counter-Earth that is fundamentally Odd. Captain Jean wants Henry Winkler (Patrick) and Karl Kennedy (Dave) to go into the ruined city of Oddpool to scout it out, see what they can find and report back.

They cross the river on a converted ferry boat, and then creep around the streets, tangling with strange gangs, mechsuit-corpses, zombies and a bizarre sheep-banana-hybrid giant. They made deals with a gang, ran from danger and survived despite their retainers taking a couple of hits. It was a lot of fun to run, and then after writing a quick AP on G+, the ideas went back on to the back burner as with so many other projects.

Flash forward to the summer, and I'm meeting Patrick and Dave again, along with Into The Odd's Chris McDowall, in order to playtest Dave's new project. I bring along my copies of their books for them to sign, and made a little Pocketmod from some of my Oddpool notes so that I didn't feel left out. I shared the pdf on G+, zero artwork, really rough around the edges, and a fair few people seemed to like it, and so the wheels started turning again...

For the longest time I've wanted to publish something for role-playing games. Why not have the first step be a little Pocketmod? I have lots of pictures of Liverpool, I live nearby and can take more, I have the tools to typeset something simple... Why not do it?

So I am, simple as that. I've been working on this in my spare time (and sometimes not in my spare time!) for the best part of a month, off of notes and ideas that have been percolating for about eight months. It's a little 8-page booklet that gets folded from a single sheet of A4. Directly compatible with Into The Odd, easily hacked ideas for other systems. If I make any profits from making this available I'm going to be reinvesting them into artwork for other projects (and I might go for tea and toast with my wife and daughter).

More soon: tomorrow, three groups that operate within the ruins of Oddpool...

Eventually

In April I was working on a hack of Into The Odd - and I still am, it's just taking me longer than I thought it would. I had a busy time of things with work for a few months, and then my priorities shifted. Into The Oort is still coming along, but I have a couple of smaller projects that I want to do before then.

The first thing to do is to release Oddpool, an eight-page pocketmod that casts Liverpool as a ruined city for exploring.

Fingers crossed, last details to check and so on and so forth, I'll be releasing this on Friday! Which is very exciting. I'll be releasing it as a pay-what-you-want pdf download, and also looking at getting a small print run printed on 120gsm paper, home-made/-assembled and numbered or something - something a little fun. Over the next few days I'll say more about it - and maybe hint at another project I'm eager to start soon.

But the battery on my laptop is dying so I must sign off for now. More tomorrow.