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?
There’s an ending in Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, which sees V get her own back on a singular character following a life of being betrayed and left behind. It’s a nasty, justifiable, selfish move to hand Songbird over. When she does, the US Government offers to remove Johnny Silverhand from V’s head, saving her life.
What followed had me in tears: the bittersweet goodbye exchange with Johnny, flying over a Night City sunrise, and waking up 2 years later realising that all of V’s friendships and relationships had moved on. V returns to Night City, her only remaining friend (if he ever was a friend and not an enabler) having sold out. She’s without her cybernetics and fades away into the crowd to start a new life I never got to see.
How do I get my game made?
I’ve been doing the self-publishing thing for a while and have worked in TTRPG publishing long enough to occasionally get approached by someone with a developed idea/prototype of their game and asked “How do I get my game made?”.
This is my living answer to that - some of it might change over time, some of it you might disagree with, and it’ll likely grow over time. This started off (24th June 2024) as a response to an email I received from a friend-of-a-friend that I thought might be useful to keep public.
Admittedly, I don’t really deal in board games so I might not be the best person to ask here! I’ve got thoughts on the boring logistics side because that’s more my speciality. This is general “running a good games business” advice, which if this is a hobby project, might mean that you can flex these and not worry about them so much.
To begin: as a general rule you want to at least 5x your production costs in retail price.
- 1x covers the cost of printing
- 2x covers the printing of the next copy
- 3x covers the cost of folks you work with
- 4x gives you the ability to run discounts
- 5x leaves you with profit!
The thing is, selling games direct to consumer is difficult when you’re just starting out. For that reason, you’d usually want to actually 10x your production costs. Any shop you sell to will usually take stock at about 50% of your retail price (because they have to make money too!), so you need to be able to cover the 5x I listed above, but also make some money yourself when selling the game at half of its retail price.
Some other points:
1. Cards are expensive to print. I’m not aware of a print shop in the UK that’ll do card printing at a cost that is in any way feasible to productise. For that, you’d usually have to go to China to dedicated board game manufacturers. They’ll print your games for peanuts with the disclaimer that they only do so at volume (ie. at least 500-1,000 copies). That’s a big ask when you’re just starting out and something you probably shouldn’t do without a strong retail strategy in place (unless you fancy storing 1,000 copies of a game you can’t sell in your house, which I have absolutely done and many folks I know have done haha)
Just for reference, I just used a quote estimator on Panda Manufacturing’s website and they gave me an estimate of $1.17 per copy for a standard card deck of 54 cards (I know that’s one more than you have in your game but it might be worth slimming it down so you’re not moving up a size bracket), a tuckbox, and an instruction booklet. At 2,000 copies. This means you’d easily be able to sell these at £10/copy and be comfortable. I’ve attached the screenshot.
Screenshot 2024-06-24 at 12.04.40.png
2. Become part of game maker communities. There’s a bunch of folks in the UK and internationally doing this and sharing information. Not sure if you’re a Discord guy but it’s a really good idea to become one and become part of these communities. For information-sharing, camaraderie, support, and marketing. Obvs people don’t like it when you enter a community to self-advertise so this is a slow process. Some great Discords I’m in:
- Atopia: mostly board game focused but plenty of TTRPG folks in there. Very nice place with folks sharing lots of thorough WIP work. https://discord.gg/SaKCtgeB
- UK Tabletop Industry Network: these folks hold monthly meetups all over the UK, they hold shared stalls at big conventions (great way to get an in into the convention circuit which can be inaccessible and expensive when starting out!) https://discord.gg/GpsDNfsV
- The Lost Bay: started off as a discord for a single TTRPG designer to talk about his work but is just quite a pleasant community. The scene is very big on information sharing, so everyone’s very open about their work!
It’s important to get talking about your game as soon as possible to get people interested. Unfortunately that means having to get over any personal inhibitions about talking about your own work and talking about it on socials constantly.
3. Consider giving shit away for free. Nothing gets you into people’s good books more than free stuff. If you head to the tabletop section of itch.io there’s so many free games and games that are WIPs being given away for free. A big concept in the TTRPG scene is the “ashcan” - a rough, ugly, unedited, WIP version of your game that you give away to solicit feedback. For your card game, a print-and-play version might be a good idea to start off with?
Creative Producer
I don’t really believe in careers, so when I came across this tweet from Michael Oswell I had to do some thinking:
To borrow from Andrea Long Chu, I want to have absolute commitment to the bit. My working life isn't a planned career. It's not a coherent practice, nor can it be. The least I can do is to try and make visible the rather bizarre set of social relations we find ourselves in.
— Sim Gishel 2000 (@_MichaelOswell_) July 30, 2020
When people ask me what I do, I hesitate a little; I’m working two part time jobs and I was a freelance graphic designer but now I’m also a game designer, I guess? When you’re freelancing, I think personal branding is a Very Important Necessary Evil. I’m not a brand! But I do need a way of quickly communicating what it is I do and, unfortunately, there’s not really a quick way of saying graphic-designer-operations-manager-union-organiser. I also often think that if you’re trying to score creative work, you have to show yourself to be creative. There’s nothing more offputting (to me, snobbishly, personally) than a creative with a boring, characterless website/portfolio/business card. After some thought I landed on a term I have a love-hate relationship with:
✨ Creative Producer ✨
I think “storying” is part of a greater Oral Tradition which shapes how people perceive you, both professionally and socially. It’s fun to arrange the disparate parts of my life into a connected whole. “Creative Producer”, then, makes for a good story: a tongue-in-cheek contraction of an odd anti-career. If we’re talking books, I’ve handled writing, editing, art direction, graphic design, pre-press, and accessibility remediation. I’ve also handled the logistics of getting pallets of books across borders, of EU tax rates, and mixed VAT-rated fulfilment. Holistically, I have both created and produced. If we know each other through the TTRPG scene, you’ve most likely done the same.
I hate the label because it’s vague and betrays an inadequacy I don’t see as a problem (considering I mostly work freelance): being a jack of all trades but master of none.
This is the result of the first chat I had with Josh Cable about Milk Bar’s flagship adventure. I wanted to use Mausritter’s Honey in the Rafters as an example structure for a location rife for exploration.