Almost sounds like I'm designing a new feat of special ability, but yeah... I seemed to be much further ahead years ago.  Regardless of politics and culture war stuff (Pundit seems to still be doing very well), I assumed that my Kickstarters, DriveThru sales, YouTube views, hardcover books sold, convention recognition, and just everything would continue to tick up, slowly but surely.  Even 3 steps forward, 2 steps back would be better where I am now. 

I'm extremely proud of what I've created (and helped create what with commissioning artwork, getting gaming friends involved with manifesting their own Vengerized gaming material, such as Cha'alt), over these last few years especially. My designs and discoveries in the hobby over the last 5 years have really soared, and some of it (like Crimson Escalation) I give away for free!  I'm excited about the friends I've made, the convention games I've GMed, and the Cha'alt campaigns I've run.  And I'm even making my own hand-drawn maps that are just as good if not better than what I was paying an award-winning layout guy to create for me years ago.

But in terms of attention, impact, money, and influence, it does seem like I'm going in the opposite direction.  No idea if this is some natural occurrence, the Empire Strikes Back of an epic comeback, or the universe leveling things out. 

Regardless, I just had my first ever failed Kickstarter last month, and started a new one that I hoped would be better received than a digital comic based on my home campaign setting of Cha'alt.  Here's my guide to gonzo that includes a Cha'alt adventure (based on an X poll, those 2 got the most votes), and if we're lucky, a truncated Lavender Moons comic, after all. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vengersatanis/primordial-chaos-gonzo-like-a-fucking-boss/

However, this post is really about the entirety of my RPG "career" in the industry.  Yes, my stuff is more niche than someone like Pundit doing authentic medieval fare, but still... if you look at the online marketplace, a lot of niche stuff seems to be making bank, bro.

Ok, 3 parts interesting topic, 1 part venting, 2 parts rant, and 1 part shameless self-promotion complete.  How many parts is that?  I don't know.  I'm a sorcerer, not a mathematician.  Thanks for reading, hoss!

VS

At least economically, things are pretty crappy right now. I don't what your sales are like overseas but here in the US the cost of living has soared to great levels of suck thanks to Bidenomics. My personal gaming budget has slowed to a tiny trickle. The other not economic factor that could be in play is Kickstarter fatigue. I got to the point before the economy turned to crap, that I already have more gaming material that will probably be able to enjoy playing before I die.

Hey Venger! This is DMNick, formally of the Roll For Initiative podcast. Just want to let you know that I've purchased all of the Cha'alt material and I'm going to incorporate it into my Land of a Thousand Towers campaign. It's a mix of...

-Anomalous Subsurface Environment
-Operation Unfathomable
-a few other crazy stuff
- and now Cha'alt!

Think of it like Thundar the Barbarian cassarole, with a  Heavy Metal mag and the classic movie filling, a sprinkle of the animated series Primal, and topped off with a layer of Korgoth of Barbaria.

You might even say it's GONZO!

BTW, I'd love to get the Cha'alt material in print. Any way of that happening? I'm willing to give my second born.

Venger, I have several of your books and I like them but I have a few criticisms I think bear on the topic at hand.  I like your stuff and would like to see you succeed

Your content, Cha'alt et al, has a lot of cool ideas and I love to borrow from your stuff for my own games but it doesn't feel like a full setting.  Instead it feels like a grab bag of pieces that don't quite fit and don't quite make a complete picture.  I do recommend your books when someone wants to flesh out stuff like Ultraviolet Grasslands, Barbarians of Ruined Earth, or Yoon-Suin.   

I've mentioned to you in the past but I run a tight game at the table.  I do my level best to account for as many possible player choices as I can before running a session and I get to know my setting, my NPCs, and the rules so I can adjust to things my players do I didn't anticipate.  When I use your products, it's clear that the GM is expected to improv and stitch it back in.  For me, that just means I have to do a lot more work in prep to run a good session.  I'm not good at improv so I minimize it and focus on my strengths as a GM.  This means I'm less likely to use your books, less likely to buy more books because I don't use them as much, and I'm less likely to have them out to share and recommend them.  (BTW, I have .pdfs and print out pages I'm using for a lot of "books" I use.  Just my style of GM organizing.)

The other thing I see is that you seem to be trying to do everything.  You're a game designer, a publisher, a comic artist, and so on.  Good on you, if it's all working but if it's not I hope you can focus on your successes and focus on what matters.

Whether or not any of this is useful to you,  I hope things get better for you.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on August 15, 2024, 02:55:58 PMAt least economically, things are pretty crappy right now. I don't what your sales are like overseas but here in the US the cost of living has soared to great levels of suck thanks to Bidenomics. My personal gaming budget has slowed to a tiny trickle. The other not economic factor that could be in play is Kickstarter fatigue. I got to the point before the economy turned to crap, that I already have more gaming material that will probably be able to enjoy playing before I die.

Yes, I'm in the USA.  It's true, the economy seems like we're in a recession right now.  And if it wasn't for billion dollar crowdfunding campaigns for "exotic" sets of dice and mid-OSR products like ShadowDark, I'd say fair enough.  But some people are making bank hand over fist in certain segments of the hobby.

Thanks for the comment!

Quote from: blackstone on August 15, 2024, 03:24:36 PMHey Venger! This is DMNick, formally of the Roll For Initiative podcast. Just want to let you know that I've purchased all of the Cha'alt material and I'm going to incorporate it into my Land of a Thousand Towers campaign. It's a mix of...

-Anomalous Subsurface Environment
-Operation Unfathomable
-a few other crazy stuff
- and now Cha'alt!

Think of it like Thundar the Barbarian cassarole, with a  Heavy Metal mag and the classic movie filling, a sprinkle of the animated series Primal, and topped off with a layer of Korgoth of Barbaria.

You might even say it's GONZO!

BTW, I'd love to get the Cha'alt material in print. Any way of that happening? I'm willing to give my second born.

That's awesome!  I hope to read of your gonzo adventures, and if you have a question or simply want to tell me about your campaign (normally, that's where gamers die a little inside standing around listening to someone go on and on about a campaign you're not at all apart of), I would sincerely love to hear about it.

If you mean the 3 Cha'alt hardcover books, that's the top-tier backer reward on the new PRIMORDIAL CHAOS Kickstarter.  If you're talking about compiling all the PDFs into a hardcover, I'd like to offer that down the road, but just can't do it while I'm in a sales slump.

Quote from: BadApple on August 15, 2024, 07:55:19 PMVenger, I have several of your books and I like them but I have a few criticisms I think bear on the topic at hand.  I like your stuff and would like to see you succeed

Your content, Cha'alt et al, has a lot of cool ideas and I love to borrow from your stuff for my own games but it doesn't feel like a full setting.  Instead it feels like a grab bag of pieces that don't quite fit and don't quite make a complete picture.  I do recommend your books when someone wants to flesh out stuff like Ultraviolet Grasslands, Barbarians of Ruined Earth, or Yoon-Suin.   

I've mentioned to you in the past but I run a tight game at the table.  I do my level best to account for as many possible player choices as I can before running a session and I get to know my setting, my NPCs, and the rules so I can adjust to things my players do I didn't anticipate.  When I use your products, it's clear that the GM is expected to improv and stitch it back in.  For me, that just means I have to do a lot more work in prep to run a good session.  I'm not good at improv so I minimize it and focus on my strengths as a GM.  This means I'm less likely to use your books, less likely to buy more books because I don't use them as much, and I'm less likely to have them out to share and recommend them.  (BTW, I have .pdfs and print out pages I'm using for a lot of "books" I use.  Just my style of GM organizing.)

The other thing I see is that you seem to be trying to do everything.  You're a game designer, a publisher, a comic artist, and so on.  Good on you, if it's all working but if it's not I hope you can focus on your successes and focus on what matters.

Whether or not any of this is useful to you,  I hope things get better for you.

Yeah, I think the "loose" nature of my stuff (campaign setting, but probably also adventures) is a valid criticism.  If I could alter my brain somehow to write in a "tighter" way, I don't know that I'd want to, but I totally get it.  Regardless, I'm sure there's still some tightening-up I could do in the writing as a compromise... without losing that "anything can happen" vibe, which I feel is instrumental to my own gaming style.

The digital-comic thing may be a bridge too far, as in stretching myself too thin, as you mentioned.  I don't do any of the artwork, just the writing, but it is a different medium of conveying campaign setting material, and that's fine if it's just not going to enthuse an audience enough to happen.  The self-publishing thing is just a way for me to put out my own stuff, so I don't have to rely on someone else.  Though, it would be great to simply hand over my stuff to a guy who does all the packaging and selling for me. 

Whatever happens, I will focus on my successes and what's most important.  Make the main thing the main thing.  My own personal gaming has never been better.  I try to keep that awesomeness in perspective.  Thanks for the patronage, feedback, and reply, hoss!


 

Its reasonable that social and technological circumstances (material conditions ;-) exert pressures on the hobby.

Online streaming made the hobby more popular, but drifted expectations and playstyles and expanded the influence of non-participants (just people who watch)

VTTs certainly could reduce homebrewing - it's much harder to figure out how to code things on a VTT then in your pen and paper notebook. They definitely discourage elegance in game design - elegant design is hard to do, but now if you have enough $ you can paper over your-non elegant game by saying "just run it in a VTT". They also certainly would encourage running pre-published materials instead of your own.

Not sure what to tell you, but I can say that while I've been pretty successful in all of my products, my "authentic medieval" stuff (and Star Adventurer, which is straight sci-fi) have done better than my Gonzo products (or my Occult-Modern Invisible College). Some genres are more popular than others.

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 18, 2024, 09:55:31 PMSome genres are more popular than others.

While this is absolutely true, you have to decide where the balance will fall on writing what you love and writing what will bring in the money. If you can do both, then you're in the golden zone, but often you have to "sell out" to some degree and then you risk being taken as a poseur in the more popular genre and combined with the increased volume of competition in those popular generes...

So, are these gaming products your primary source of income (your "day job") or is it a hobby that brings in supplemental income (you "side gig")? If it's the latter, then I'd suggest sticking to writing what you enjoy. If it's the former, then you have some tough decisions to make, and I don't envy you on that.

I myself only make a few hundred dollars every month or two from my gaming industry side gig (I do proofreading) That, along with complimentary products, is still just a drop in my money bucket. Because of this, I only work on products that I want to work on, and that makes it feel much less like work than it otherwise might.

If you take that route, make sure the primary source of income is something that will sustain you and yours without crushing your spirit. Then, dabble away at writing in your own niche.

Well, in my case, it is my primary source of income, and I do quite well. Well enough that I can make products that interest me even if I know that due to genre they won't make quite as much as some of my other products. Though fortunately, the genre I like to write best (and am best at because of my educational background) are the genre that also sells best.

Mind you, I've never tried doing something that was the more standard fantasy.

I'm not an industry guy so all I can provide is my one data point and that is what I do and don't buy. I'm not into heavy gonzo. I don't buy comic books. The only product of yours I've actually purchased is Revelry in Torth. More please. That product captures everything I want in Sword & Sorcery, and the art is perfect. You "get" that particular genre better than most who write for it. If you wrote short, tightly-focused OSR adventures that could be dropped into other Sword & Sorcery settings, I'd buy them all.

I really liked one of the older versions of Crimson Dragon Slayer.  I believe it was labeled as D20 Revised.  It was a very nice rules-light game, and as I'm getting older I'm tending to prefer lighter games.  It was fairly generic in its rules (which is good!), but had a dash of gonzo to set it apart a bit from the crowd.  And I thought that was fine.

But later versions of Crimson Dragon Slayer turned me off.  When a Sleaze Factor rule was introduced, I became less interested in the game. I play with a group of old fat guys, so I don't want sex rules as part of my game. And I've been on the lookout for a nice, simple, light game to teach to people who have never played tabletop RPGs before, and CDS comes close to what I'm looking for, but the sex stuff disqualifies it.  I was rather surprised when you introduced the Crimson Dragon Slayer Micro version of the game, which shrunk the game even further in page count, yet you still found room in the very limited page space to fit in sex rules. 

I'm definitely not telling you how to write your games.  If you think sleaze rules should be in a game with an already limited page count, you do you. I'm just saying why I, as a consumer, would not spend money on it.  And while Crimson Dragon Slayer is free, this carries over to your other products as well.  I came very close to purchasing your Cha'alt books several times, when you had really good sales on them, but the ick factor for me (and for the fat guys at my gaming table, and for the newbies I might introduce to RPGS) prevented me from pulling the trigger on your products.  I know the sleaze is part of your brand   but I'm sure you know it also limits your brand.

Quote from: HappyDaze on August 20, 2024, 12:25:59 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 18, 2024, 09:55:31 PMSome genres are more popular than others.

While this is absolutely true, you have to decide where the balance will fall on writing what you love and writing what will bring in the money. If you can do both, then you're in the golden zone, but often you have to "sell out" to some degree and then you risk being taken as a poseur in the more popular genre and combined with the increased volume of competition in those popular generes...

So, are these gaming products your primary source of income (your "day job") or is it a hobby that brings in supplemental income (you "side gig")? If it's the latter, then I'd suggest sticking to writing what you enjoy. If it's the former, then you have some tough decisions to make, and I don't envy you on that.

I myself only make a few hundred dollars every month or two from my gaming industry side gig (I do proofreading) That, along with complimentary products, is still just a drop in my money bucket. Because of this, I only work on products that I want to work on, and that makes it feel much less like work than it otherwise might.

If you take that route, make sure the primary source of income is something that will sustain you and yours without crushing your spirit. Then, dabble away at writing in your own niche.

The RPG stuff has always been a side gig, which allowed me to write what I wanted.  However, it's taken so much time and effort that the RPG hustle is preventing me from going after more lucrative side gigs.

Quote from: Vidgrip on August 20, 2024, 07:35:56 PMI'm not an industry guy so all I can provide is my one data point and that is what I do and don't buy. I'm not into heavy gonzo. I don't buy comic books. The only product of yours I've actually purchased is Revelry in Torth. More please. That product captures everything I want in Sword & Sorcery, and the art is perfect. You "get" that particular genre better than most who write for it. If you wrote short, tightly-focused OSR adventures that could be dropped into other Sword & Sorcery settings, I'd buy them all.

I'm sure you're not alone.  While I do like that niche, it's not where my heart is... and I would think that particular sub-genre is oversaturated by this point.  Although, I could be wrong.  What's even popular right now?  Grimdark, epic fantasy, serial numbers filed-off Hogwarts, gay barista tea and crumpets? 

BTW, Liberation of the Demon Slayer is much like Revelry in Torth.  The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence is a kind of hybrid of those earlier works and the super-gonzo Cha'alt stuff. And there were some later efforts that you might like, though not as awesome as the earlier and later stuff, in my opinion.  Such as Stairway of V'dreen.