2024 Recap
2024 has been ludicrously busy for me! I started a new job, I ran two Kickstarters, shut down and then resurrected Peregrine Coast Press, and ran two TTRPG industry networking events. I’ve done some design work, weathered the biggest wave of games industry layoffs ever, moved PCP into a studio, hired an employee, done 4 conventions, visited a friend’s wedding, and holy shit I got so depressed while doing all of it. In the last year I’ve done more trips across the UK than I can count, talking to game developers in studios of all sizes, supporting them in organising their workplaces and building their unions. I’m seeing the year off while being in 4 semi-regular RPG groups.
January
- Started a job at the IWGB Game Workers union as a Branch Organiser. Getting paid to be a professional communist is pretty dreamy. I spent two weeks in London training for the job.
February
- What followed was one of the worst waves of games industry layoffs we’ve ever seen, making my first two months on the job a total blur and trial by fire.
- I ran the Kickstarter for Milk Bar, which raised £16,000 and is still kinda ruining my life. Writing is hard!
- Spent a long weekend in the Scottish highlands with friends, playing TTRPGs and drinking a lot.
- I made the decision to scale back Peregrine Coast Press. In agreement with Syd and Harry, I took on the last admin bits and fulfilment work that was outstanding and sent a big ol’ email celebrating what we’d achieved.
March
- I got to see Hadestown, finally, after like 6 years of devotedly listening to every recording made available.
- Severely annoyed SoulMuppet’s warehouse/fulfilment providers by shipping them 19 pallets of books without warning. Can you even imagine how many books 19 pallets is??
- Scaled back Peregrine Coast Press and took all of our stock into my bedroom, finishing up a few fulfilment projects that were on the cards out of my house.
May
- I took up cycling. After spending a couple of months falling in love with cycling while using the Leeds city bike scheme, I splurged on an e-bike and committed to a car-free lifestyle.
- The London MCM in May was supposed to feature a TTRPG industry networking event hosted by Dicebreaker. Sadly, private equity kept hacking the industry to bits and gutted Dicebreaker, meaning the event was cancelled on short notice. Over at SoulMuppet, in collaboration with the UK Tabletop Industry Network, we jumped into action to host a replacement event. We booked a room in a pub, got a couple folks to give short presentations, and put on a really fun afternoon.
- We also exhibited at UKGE, the UK’s biggest tabletop game convention - it’s a gruelling three-day affair but the chance to see friends from the industry in one place is always a treat.
July
- High on the endorphins of cycling everywhere, I bought a trailer for my bike so that I could deliver the last few fulfilment projects to the post office. But wait… I realised then that this is…. quite a good time? Handling fulfilment personally and having my finger on the pulse of indie RPG publishing was actually really fulfilling??
- And then… deep in the throes of a bout of depression, I realised I had quite a bit of money left over from the Milk Bar Kickstarter. What if I didn’t have to hold all these boxes of stock in my bedroom? What if what if what if.
- Not long after, I had rented a studio and made the decision to revive PCP. Working from home is tough and lonely so why not spend some of that Kickstarter money to give myself a space to be creative and to keep running a shop?
- Anica Cihla reached out to me with a neat little project called Sin Eater. I genuinely think this is gonna be some of my best/favourite design work so far. What’s one more project for the plate?
August
- By the back end of August, Peregrine Coast Press was back in full swing. Full apologies to all the folks I palmed off in February only to revive PCP a few months later but look, I was going through some shit.
September
- The shop was doing like so much better than I had planned and wrapping parcels during my lunch breaks from my two day jobs just wasn’t feasible anymore so I asked a good friend and ex-neighbour, Jamila, to come help out for a few hours a week. Offloading some of the to-do list to another person meant that we can keep growing without my time being as big a blocker anymore.
October
- At SoulMuppet, we did MCM London again. It was hateful. I do not recommend.
November
- The call went out for Mothership Month: a month-long group crowdfunding project to show case the Mothership team’s next book. As ever, what’s one more project for the slate? I corralled friends Sam, Josh, and Kyle (the whitest dude names I could find) into putting together a pitch.
- Dragonmeet rolled around and one of our internal goals at SoulMuppet was to participate in more ladder-building in the industry. To that end, in collaboration with Dragonmeet, we hosted the regrettably named Muppetmeet. A whole day of panels and speakers from folks on all spectrums of their publishing journey, covering topics all the way from retailing RPGs, to building diverse teams, to queer analyses of games, to the actual nitty gritty of turning a hobby into a sustainable business. I think it was pretty great and the feedback has been really heartening.
December
- Mothership Month goes live! We raise £20,000, the biggest crowdfunding project Peregrine Coast Press has ever been involved in. The whole process is a huge success. This, in combination with the success of the shop, deeply alters my 2025 planning for PCP.
- When I restarted PCP, I accounted for a solid 6 months of the business burning money: hiring a studio and paying a member of staff are expensive, getting the word out about PCP being back in business would take time, and word of mouth takes time to spread (I should put some money into advertising but tbh so far I’ve not needed to and the whole thing gives me a headache). That all paid off in December: 4 fulfilment projects that I had been chatting to folk about all finally came to fruition this month and Jamila and I have spent several days cooped up in the studio packing hundreds of parcels. On top of the crowdfunding project, December has pushed all my financial projections out of the window and given me solid proof that PCP’s financial model works, with the obvious proviso that there’s recurring work coming in.
- This is also really affirming of the decision I made to put the legwork into making PCP complaint with all the EU bureaucracy and tax bullshit. All of these projects had EU backers and I’ve been able to offer a solution which works! It’s not the cheapest (fuck you and your 25% tax on books, Denmark!) but it’s a unique offering tailored to small creators who can’t/don’t want to do this stuff personally for the sake of fulfilling one or two projects a year. I strongly believe that PCP has a strong future ahead as a creative studio, as a fulfilment provider, as a shop, and as a distributor of indie RPGs into the UK physical retail space. UKIPR soon?
- Being cooped up in the studio also makes another thing clear: we’re really short on space. On a whim, I visited a nearby business park and found a unit we could hire that’s about 60% of the price and just a smidge over double the square footage. Needless to say, there might be a move coming up in PCP’s near future. The added benefit here is that the business park also has flexible storage space billed monthly. If I have a bunch of books coming in, I can easily (and pretty cheaply) rent out a storage unit on the short term. This kind of flexibility is going to be amazing - being able to scale up and down during high intensity periods, having a clear idea of pricing for storage, and so on will help with bookkeeping.
And this is just the stuff I can talk about! So much of my union work has to be in stealth mode because, it turns out, employers don’t really like it when you try to shake up the power they have in the workplace. Hopefully some of this work will be made public soon.
I think the main thing I’ve been deeply unhappy with this year and would like to fix going into next year is work-life balance (who’s surprised, really, lmao). Getting Jamila into the studio helps with some of that. Working as a union organiser means that, by the nature of the job, I have to quite often be available when folks aren’t working. Late evenings and weekend trips aren’t uncommon, and then when you combine the design work and fucking Discord, where literally all of my job comms happen, it’s quite hard to switch off. I’m still in “startup mode”, so I don’t mind putting in long days because I think each year the viability of PCP increases, but my limits have been thoroughly tested this year. It gets real murky considering that RPGs are obviously my main hobby too and I’ve felt the desire to branch out more and more this year. I want to make music, I want to travel again, I want to write, I want to read, I want to watch films. I want to lead a life enriched. But do I want that so that I can make my own work more enriched? Am I turning art into a means? How do I switch off when I’ve turned the art and its very production into my job?
Could a depressed person do this?