The digital files for Ganymede Outriders have been fulfilled!
If you backed Ganymede Outriders, you should have received emails from Itch and DriveThru will access to your copy of Ganymede Outriders, and the linked files!
If you have the opportunity, please consider leaving a rating on Itch and DriveThruRPG – every rating helps increase visibility, and means more people are likely to find and play Ganymede Outriders.
I am thrilled to be able to release this game, and it’s down to the support of our backers. Thank you! I hope you get even a fraction of the enjoyment from reading and playing Ganymede Outriders as I have in creating it.
If you didn’t back Ganymede Outriders, and are keen to see what it’s all about, you can find it on Itch here, and on DriveThruRPG here.
What have backers got so far?
Ganymede Outriders
The core rules are a 40 page A6 sized book, including background on Ganymede, and all the rules required to play.
A Call for Help
A 24 page A6 sized PDF adventure, with interior art and map by yours truly, and additional rules on racing.
Let the Cards Fall
A whopping 40 page A6 sized PDF, with additional information on the setting of Ganymede Outriders, and 14 adventure outlines inspired by the weird and wonderful imaginations of our Commander level Backers.
Example of Play
Is… well it’s exactly what it says in the title!
The Drift System
A PDF document perfect to send to players, or to use a reference when creating your own spin off material/games. It includes all the rules for the Drift System used in Ganymede Outriders, as well as some additional commentary on why the rules exist, or how they might be modified.
Sheets
The two page character sheet and single page vehicle sheet for Ganymede Outriders.
So what’s next for Ganymede Outriders?
Once the print copies have been delivered here at Caradoc Games, I’ll begin fulfillment to all Outrider and Commander level backers. For anyone who missed out, and wants a physical copy, they’ll be available from the Caradoc Games website, and from Indie Press Revolution and Exalted Funeral after I have finished fulfillment to backers.
With the ‘Drift System’ file in the downloads, and with Ganymede Outriders available for use under the Caradoc Games License, I hope that anyone who is keen takes the opportunity to create their own content for Ganymede Outriders, or utilising the Drift system. If you do – make sure to let me know so I can celebrate and share!
I plan on kicking off a ‘Drift Jam’ on Itch.io later this month, and would invite everyone to consider creating something for the jam – whether it’s a business card with a table of crazy Ganymede Events, an adventure, or a spin-off hack of the game system or setting – I’d love to see it!
What’s next for Caradoc Games?
Aside from the above? Well…
Behind the scenes I’ve been working on our next game: ‘With Every Fibre‘. This is a fantasy game set in the city of Fasthold – a once floating city that has crashed to earth in an unknown landscape. Adventures can take place in the fortress of Fasthold itself, in the dangerous mines and tunnels beneath Fasthold, or in the unknown wilds beyond the shadow of the city…
This is another A6 game, with a full unique system and setting in one book. I’ve been playtesting this one for a while now, and am really excited to share more in upcoming months. It’s also the first game I’ve released where I have drawn all the art!
Ganymede Outriders is ready for ZineQuest/ZiMo! As always I ordered some test prints of the game to see how everything came together. You can see a flip through of Ganymede Outriders and a short run through of the rules and setting in the video below!
If the last post was looking back at the worn path of 2023, this one is about looking forward into 2024. What has Caradoc Games got planned for this year, and what are some things I’d like to work on outside of that?
Ganymede Outriders is a big game in a little package. The game uses a custom designed system built for thematic and quick play; putting the emphasis on fun and high action. Ganymede Outriders includes a full RPG system, and is ideal for both one-shots and campaign play. It is designed to be played with 2 to 5 players and a GM.
Ganymede Outriders will be published as a 40 page A6 zine – another pocket sized book because I like the format, and it keeps the shipping cheap for overseas buyers.
I’ve been working on a bunch of support material for this one, including an SRD, an example of play, and an adventure. It will be available for people to hack, remake, or create for under the Caradoc Games license. Which means you can make stuff using the system, or for the game setting, for free or for sale, without Caradoc Games expecting a tithe.
Everything for Ganymede Outriders is done and ready to roll, and I am super excited for this to launch. I think the setting is fun, and the rules lean into it – something I love doing with all my games!
Ganymede Outriders will be the first game I launch in 2024, but it won’t be the last.
With Every Fibre
Coming in second is With Every Fibre, which will probably be launched somewhere on crowdfunding a month or so after Ganymede Outriders, or the middle of the year at the latest.
With Every Fibre is a fantasy dungeon crawl. The system is designed to OSR-like, but uses D10s for skill tests, and a range of other polyhedrals for weapon damage, spells, and the like. Here’s the pitch:
With Every Fibre is a rules-light fantasy adventure game. Between the covers you’ll find the rules of play, spells to cast, weapon traits you can unlock for special powers, adversaries to face down, tables to roll on and more.
With Every Fibre includes a full RPG system, and is ideal for both one-shots and campaign play. It is designed to be played with 2 to 5 players and a GM.
With Every Fibre will be published as a 48 page A6 zine. I’m really proud of this one. First of all I think the game system is fun, and contains some interesting ideas. Mostly though because all the art and maps for With Every Fibre and the adventure were done by own hand!
Like Ganymede Outriders, everything for With Every Fibre is already done – the rules are written, the art is complete, the layout is finished… So basically, it’s ready for launch!
Heralds… Maybe…
The third release for 2024 is likely to be a game I have been working on for a while called Heralds… A game where setting building and map creation are a strong part of the game – but I haven’t decided whether this will be a setting book, or whether it will come with a game system as well. Knowing me, I’ll probably end up designing a game system for it, but who knows!
This one is planned to come out late in 2024, I don’t know the page count, and while it’s partly written, I need to go back and rework stuff I put down to paper from a couple of years ago… it’s very much fluid at the moment.
Of course, if Ganymede Outriders or With Every Fibre do particularly well, this third release for the year might be something expanding those systems, and Heralds might be bumped back to 2025. Speaking of which, at some point, probably in 2025, I want to revisit Corsairs and Rascals.
A Podcast?
One of the things I have been considering is starting a short review series – one where each episode is less than twenty minutes, and focuses on a single table top role playing game. One of the reasons I thought about doing this is because there are so many indie games that struggle for reviews, I thought it would be nice to do something to fill that gap. Yeah – it would probably keep a fairly positive focus, but that’s mainly because I’m motivated to talk about the things I like. I’ve done podcasting before, and I’m not sure I have the energy to make this a multi-person affair, so it would probably just be me talking into a microphone. Sure it could be TikTok or YouTube or whatever, but I’m not really interested in creating video content, and I almost never watch these forms of game media myself, stick to what you know right?
Other Stuff…
Three games and support material is a pretty reasonable release schedule for 2024, but there are other things I am working on, including a novel manuscript, creating more art for my projects, and other things both personal and professional. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ve been working on Ganymede Outriders for a while. The rules have been through many iterations, but none so dramatic and ironically circular as the changes implemented due to playtesting.
Playtesting is a vital component of game design. Of course it’s handy to see how the math behind the mechanical design holds up, and how all the cogs you carefully fit together actually turn when people are trying to do things with your system – these things are important. Perhaps more importantly it helps give you, the designer, a gauge on the feel of the game. It’s one thing to design a system that works, it’s another to see whether the experience of the players sits close to what you intended.
Ganymede Outriders was designed to be a high action game, a game where players feel like their characters are capable of success, and capable of beating the odds. It was designed as a game where the resolution of a test was quick, and the players had systems to mitigate bad luck, and take agency in the telling of the story. Playtests revealed that it did all of that, but not brilliantly. One of the players was beset by bad luck, and I mean a run of really bad luck over multiple sessions. The systems I had created to help lift a character out of that situation just weren’t pulling their weight, and the systems I had created to add complications and consequences were compounding it.
Now, sometimes bad luck is just that. A system shouldn’t be designed around outliers necessarily, and any game system that uses randomisers can feel like it’s blocking you if you happen to be consistently unlucky. But what the playtests showed, and what was half hidden behind the averages, was that there were a number of cogs that just weren’t fitting well together. The system designed to lift a character out of a bad fix wasn’t effective enough, whereas the system designed to implement consequences on the characters was quite effective.
These outcomes were the result of system creep – the addition and slight modification of the game rules over time, to add in this, insert that cool concept, and adjust the other thing. The math stacked up – on average – but if you happened to get behind it could become a vicious cycle.
Ironically the changes required to fix these issues pushed the game closer to the original rules, and as is so often the case, good changes came from pulling things out rather than adding things in.
In Ganymede Outriders players can spend their character’s Stress (a resource) to roll extra dice – why did I think that stipulating that this choice had to be made before the dice were rolled was a good idea? Well, I thought it added a fun push your luck element. The real result was that a player might try and push their luck, and just roll badly, lose Stress, which can lead to negative consequences, and things would only get worse from there. Not a fun element after all – and one that forced players to make a choice based on limited information. Removing that stipulation – that you have to decide before you roll the dice – was a small and simple change, but one that fed the push your luck feel rather than limited it. A player can roll, get close to a success, and decide to push their luck based on known information, rather than just gamble that they’ll need the extra dice. A small change, but one that had a profound effect on the feel of the game. Players were much more willing to spend their Stress to gain those extra dice because they could see that they were only a small step away from the outcome they wanted. The cogs I had hoped would work well but felt like they were grinding were suddenly spinning together smoothly.
It’s just one small example picked from many possible examples, one example of a rule that might have been easy to overlook, but which was having a negative impact on the very system it was designed to compliment. The adjustment – a simple enough change – is easy to write off as inconsequential on paper, but in fact has a significant impact on how the system feels in play.
Playtesting is important.
Ganymede Outriders is, I think, a pretty fun game system, and a pretty fun setting. When it releases it will be a small pocket-sized book jam-packed with game. When it’s released it will come with digital files that include a rules overview of the system, and a playthrough example. The rules themselves – the Drift System – and the setting of course – will all be available under the Caradoc Games Third Party License – so if you’re a creative and want to create adventures, new settings, or whole new games using the Drift System – you absolutely can, and you don’t have to pay a tithe to do so.
2022 was an interesting year, for myself personally it has meant some significant change, for Caradoc Games it’s been a year of overcoming complications and trying out some new things.
Looking back over 2022 from a ‘games and writing perspective’, I have achieved a number of things this year. I finalised, printed, and fulfilled Foundlings. I ran a Kickstarter for Owlbear Omelette. I designed and wrote Prisoners of the Elf King. And I have almost fully developed the next game, slated for the second quarter of 2023: Ganymede Outriders.
It sounds like a lot, and I suppose it is, but I also felt like I did a lot more than I actually did. On reflection, the key reason I didn’t get as much ‘game related’ stuff done as I had planned or thought I might was because of how busy my own life was outside of Caradoc Games. In 2022 I worked full time as a teacher, I also worked some 20 hours a week coaching gymnastics, and then worked on Caradoc Games related stuff outside of that. I have three very active kids, and family life is important. If I got less done on games than I had intended I think I can give myself a break – this year was busy!
One other significant change that happened this year was that I stepped away from the classroom after nearly 20 years as a teacher, and took over the management of a gymnastics center. All of this happened at the same time the little country town I call home flooded. The gym was forced to move locations and the weeks from the floods to the recovery were massive. While this chaotic start to a new career was interesting, to say the least, I really am hoping for a more stable year to come. I loved coaching throughout 2022, and am looking forward to what the new year brings.
So back to game related stuff. The year started with Foundlings, and it was a rocky start. Originally I had intended to fulfill Foundlings through my own webstore, but an error I couldn’t work out in the coupon system was taking time to resolve. In the end I opted to run a pledge manager through Gamefound, which was… interesting. While it took more time than I had planned for, I am thrilled to say that Foundlings was successfully fulfilled, if a little late. This game seems to have done well post-kickstarter, and I ended up having to order a second printing not long after the first. I hope it continues to do well, I really like this little game, and I think it uses some really fun rules. If you’re after a post-apocalyptic fantasy game, with strong environmental themes and a focus on the slow degradation any post-apocalypse brings – this game might just be for you!
The second quarter was spent getting my game Freedom or Toaster finished and laid out for the Tiny Tome – a Kickstarter run by Long Tail Games. I really like this little micro-rpg of mine, and was thrilled it got a chance to be a part of such an awesome anthology of games. As a one-shot I think Freedom or Toaster works great – it has simple resolution mechanics, a fun and funny theme (human-like robots trying to escape a busy mall to live their best lives, while human robot police hunt them down). It also has one of the best rules I have added to a game (imo): every time a robot speaks they have a noise they have to include in their speech – maybe it’s ‘beep’, maybe it’s ‘woo!’ – every time I have played Freedom or Toaster this element has been a lot of fun.
Around the same time I started work on Ganymede Outriders, a game I originally hoped I would release as a perfect bound book of something like 100 A5 pages. But…
When fulfilling Foundlings I had a number of messages from backers complaining about the high cost of shipping. Believe me, I get it. As an Aussie, shipping is a nightmare. Having the cost of shipping be about the same as the game itself – for a game which is a staple bound booklet no-less… yeah. For Foundlings I actually charged less than what it cost me to put those games in the post, and at $14 for shipping per copy – no, it was not cheap. I looking at working with a shipping partner, I looked at localised printing, and while these offered some solutions, the cost in currency conversion between AUD and USD meant that any savings I could pass on were negligible or non-existent.
My plans to make bigger books with Ganymede Outriders and Heralds was only going to mean bigger shipping costs, but what if I went smaller instead? What if I could send something in a DL envelope? That would cost about $4 AUD for international shipping.
The plan for Owlbear Omelette was hatched.
Owlbear Omelette was a game I had originally released in 2019. I chose to revamp the game for this little experiment, and converted it into a 36 page staple bound A6 booklet. I reworked the rules, added some fun new options, redesigned and added a bunch of random tables for generating a dungeon or palace, and let it loose on Kickstarter. It didn’t explode, in fact, it barely scrapped over the line, but it funded. It funded and it let me trial how much cheaper and easier it could be to send stuff via DL. Owlbear Omelette wasn’t even on my radar for a re-release at the start of the year, but here we are: a successful Kickstarter fulfilled, and copies already available in retail at places like Indie Press Revolution, and soon to be at Exalted Funeral.
The experiment was a success, and this led me to work on my next game. It wasn’t that I abandoned Ganymede Outriders – that one was still percolating in the background, but I wanted to make something that was spiritually like Owlbear Omelette, something that was hopefully amusing to read and play, and that poked a bit of fun at itself and it’s genre. Prisoners of the Elf King was born.
In Prisoners of the Elf King you play as Dwarves, captured by the eponymous Elf King, and released from your cells by your burglar. Rather than climbing into barrels and getting dashed to pieces in a river, you have collectively decided to find your own way out.
Like Owlbear Omelette, this game is both the adventure and the rules system, with the rules specifically designed to engage with the themes. In Prisoners of the Elf King Dwarves can ‘Dig Deep’ to score extra successes, but if they do it to much they can release their bane. The characters all have passions – which play off the characteristics of the Dwarves in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, and if they are fulfilled the player can advance their characters. The party also has a sheet with three tracks – Fly You Fools measures how close the Dwarves are to escape. Diplomatic Incident is rolled after the game, and can mean the antics of the Dwarves lead to a massive war (Battle of the Five Armies style), and Drums in the Deep is the track that gets filled up if the Dwarves dig too deep too often.
I think the system is fun, and I got a lot of pleasure out of designing a set of rules that play with the material that inspired it. Like Owlbear Omelette this is a strongly focused game – it sets out to tell a story, and has all the rules you need to play that story. I’m thinking of calling this little line of games ‘Episodes’ – because that’s very much what it feels like. They are a different design experience to something like Corsairs, Rascals, Foundlings, or Ganymede Outriders – all of which are game systems and settings.
Prisoners of the Elf King will be hitting Kickstarter in February this year, as a part of the ZineQuest and ZiMo promotions.
Of course, with the rules for Prisoners of the Elf King done and dusted, I turned back to Ganymede Outriders. This is a game and setting, includes vehicle rules, and a travel system. I am going to try and squeeze all of that into an A6 book. Will it work? We shall see…
Toward the end of last year Thunderworks Games ran a Kickstarter for their Roll Player Adventures game. This was hugely exciting for me, as a part of this Kickstarter included the Tales of Ulos graphic novel. I wrote one of the comics in this novel: Blackjacked Buccaneers, and it was one of the most enjoyable pieces of freelance writing I have ever undertaken. You can read some thoughts about it all here. I was very pleased to see Roll Player Adventures do so well, not least for the selfish reason that I get to see a comic book I wrote go to print. And who knows, maybe we’ll see more of Kaemon and Pitlin in the future…
Well, that about wraps up the year that was. 2022 was a busy year, but I am pleased with everything I got done. It wasn’t the biggest year for Caradoc Games in terms of money made, and one of the reasons for this is because I had made the decision to move away from freelance work to focus on my own games (Blackjacked Buccaneers was the exception – I mean who could say no to writing a comic!).
The Owlbear Omelette Kickstarter raised about $1600 AUD, of that about $100 was profit, but I also sold copies into distribution, and that, for me at least, has been where my games have made the most. Online sales through my website were almost non-existent, sales on itch.io came to about $40, and DriveThruRPG sales totaled about $140 (after DTRPG took their 30% cut). Royalties from Long Tail, and sales through distribution (both Indie Press Revolution and Exalted Funeral) came to a bit over $3000. None of this includes royalties for the comic book – I expect those will start next year some time. Not a huge amount to show for the work it has taken, but all building. I now have four games in print, the experiment with cheaper shipping options was a success and has created the model for Caradoc Games moving forward, and I have two games ready for 2023. With a back catalog starting to make some money, and at least two games lined up for release next year, I hope the building I have put into this year will start to grow in 2023.
I have rambled long enough, I’ll write about my plans for 2023 in another post.
So, you’ve managed to escape the dungeons of the Elf King… But what next? While your burglar helped you slip your cages, the next steps they proposed could be generously described as ‘sketchy’, at best. So, while the burglar heads off to prepare, you and your fellow dwarves are going to find your own way out!
Yes! You’ll all be damned if you let some button-less burglar drown you in barrels, there has to be a fitter way out of this foresty fastness!
Prisoners of the Elf King is a madcap escape from the palace of the Elf King… can you and your fellow dwarves get away?
Temporary cover (art is currently being completed by Juan Ochoa)
Rules for Digging Deep, for when a dwarf needs to push for extra successes (but be wary of digging too deep)!
Rules for Fortune and Misfortune, Hurts, and Helping.
Rules for Dwarf Creation
A table of secret Dwarvish Passions
Party rules, including three tracks that can affect all the characters: Fly You Fools, Diplomatic Incident, and Drums in the Deep.
Fly You Fools measures how close the Dwarves are to escape.
Diplomatic Incident: Do your antics lead to a massive war some months after your escape, and do you survive it?
Drums in the Deep: Did the Dwarves Dig too Deeply and release their bane?
A table of magic items.
A table of Elvish curses.
A selection of NPCs to face down.
8 tables for randomly generating an Elf King’s Palace, and the sorts of encounters a Dwarf might stumble across while escaping.
The party sheet and character sheet…
Prisoners of the Elf King is the next game coming from Caradoc Games. Like Owlbear Omelette, Prisoners of the Elf King is an adventure and a unique game system all wrapped up in one A6 zine. Designed for 1 Dwarf Master (DM), and between 1 and 4 other Dwarves, Prisoners of the Elf King is ideal for a one-shot, a mini-campaign of 2-4 sessions, or for convention play.
Prisoners of the Elf King will be going live on Kickstarter in February, just in time for ZineQuest and ZiMo! And if you’re curious about what either of these things are, or are keen to create your own game, then check out my Zine Resources page here.
Hitting Kickstarter soon is Owlbear Omelette, the souffle sized edition of an older game, now updated and with all new art from the always spectacular Juan Ochoa.
Owlbear Omelette is a game designed specifically for one-shots, or mini-campaigns. It is a palace crawl (or dungeon crawl, depending on you tastes), in which a team of erstwhile goblins seeks to find some Owlbear eggs for omelette making purposes. Why? Maybe this video can help explain it…
Inside this A6 sized zine you’ll find all the rules you need to play, from deed doing, to goblin creation. There are also a bunch of tables – from the Oh No! table – to find out what happens if you do something silly while carrying an Owlbear egg. To a magic item complication chart.
The rear of the book is dominated by random encounter charts, which can be used to generate corridors, palace and dungeon rooms, encounters, what those encounters are up to, names and more.
To give an idea of how this system works, let’s run through a sample room and encounter, using the Dungeon charts… every number in brackets represents a D6 die roll.
Our goblins make their way down a (5) large corridor. Through the door at the end they find themselves moving into a (4) barracks. Yikes! That’s an extra encounter. Inside the barracks there is (1) a challenge to be faced, and (3) some heroes…
The challenge is (6) that ‘there is something difficult to cross’. Let’s say this difficult to cross thing is a good old chasm, replete with rickety and narrow bridge. On the far side is our extra encounter: heroes, they are (2) rogues and paladins.
A paladin…
A rogue…
What are the heroes up to you ask? (6) Double yikes! They are looking for an easy source of XP to grind! Would that be our erstwhile goblins? But what is the vibe of the room? According to the Vibe table (2), things are about to get wild!
So, after a few dice rolls we have an encounter laid out: Our erstwhile goblins left a large corridor and entered a barracks. Separating our goblins from the rest of the room is a chasm, stretching across which is a rickety narrow bridge. On the far side are some rogues and paladins looking for XP to grind. As the eyes of one (called (5) ‘Zalabar’) notes the entrance of our goblins, their face lights up. Things are about to get wild!
What will our goblins do in the face of this new encounter?
Owlbear Omelette is designed to a be a quick paced and enjoyable game, perfect for those nights when you are looking for something light and fun to play, a palate cleanser, a convention game, can’t decide what to play, or can’t get the usual group all together.
The new edition updates the rules and adds in a bunch of new elements, including the random encounter charts we used to create the sample encounter above. All the art, from cover to cover, is brand new and the product of the magic hands of esteemed RPG artist Juan Ochoa, who has done a stunning job (as always).
A few weeks ago I completed fulfillment of my latest game: Foundlings. This is the third game I have published physical copies of. All three of the games I have published (Corsairs, Rascals, and Foundlings) are A5 saddle-stitched zines of varying lengths.
Foundlings is the largest, clocking in at 48 internal pages, and cover (4 more pages). It has the highest GSM cover stock, making it the heaviest game I have produced. Why is this relevant? Well, this post is broadly about shipping costs.
If you backed Foundlings on Kickstarter, $15 AUD would net you one physical copy of the game (as well as PDFs, etc). The cost of shipping (which I collected through GameFound) was $14 AUD.
Yes.
Shipping cost nearly the same as the game itself.
Anyone from Aus will probably not be overly surprised, but for anyone else: this wasn’t me price gouging, inflating the cost of shipping to make more out of suckered in backers who just wanted their physical copies, this is actually less than what shipping those games cost me.
A backer jumps onto GameFound, uses their credits to get their copy of Foundlings, and pays the $14 for shipping.
Stripe and Gamefound take their %, and I get about $13.30 deposited into my account. Shipping an envelope large enough to hold an A5 zine internationally (let’s say somewhere in Europe), costs me $13.50 at the post office. This does not include the costs of the envelopes, labels, time, or anything else.
Shipping is wildly expensive for a small time publisher.
With Foundlings I tried something I hadn’t done before, I used shipping partners in the UK and the US to help reduce the costs of shipping. So how did that go?
It did not really reduce the costs of shipping.
The cost to send a box of games to the US (or UK) is expensive, the processing costs charged by my shipping partners (which were very reasonable I need to add), were in USD and GBP – both of which are worth considerably more than the humble AUD – so whatever the cost, you can times it by a minimum of 1.5 for USD, and about 2 for GBP.
All of it meant that the actual savings passed on to the customer were small – indeed, the shipping costs for Backers in the UK and the US were both only a couple of dollars cheaper than had I not used shipping partners.
It might have been more cost effective if I was shipping larger quantities than I did, but not significantly.
Now, I’m not complaining – it costs what it costs. It’s important to note that I absolutely understand why backers might be upset with the costs – hell, I certainly am! It is also absolutely reasonable for shipping partners to charge – of course – and both partners I used were extremely reasonable and extremely helpful, and I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with them – they were and are wonderful.
But… Shipping is expensive. It is, by a long way, the most expensive part of creating and getting a game like Foundlings (or Corsairs, or Rascals) into the hands of gamers around the world.
In fact, it’s so expensive, that I’m not sure I want to try publishing a game of the same size (or larger) here in Australia, and sending it out internationally. I think for any future game of this size (or larger) I will need to look at working with a publishing partner, probably in the US. Anyway – food for later thought…
So why is this post called Downsizing? Well, if you made it this far, this is the experiment I plan to undertake…
The next game I am releasing is called Owlbear Omelette – a reworked and rewritten version of a little game I published back in 2019. This game is designed to be a fun and silly dungeon crawl style game, in which the players (Goblins) are ransacking the Goblin King’s palace for an Owlbear Egg for the express purpose of omelette making.
Owlbear Omelette will be published as an A6 saddle-stitched game. At 34 internal pages, it will be about the same thickness as Corsairs, with the added bonus of being literally half the size.
Why?
Shipping.
Besides the fact the A6 is a fun little size, and I quite like mini-games, shipping an A6 booklet of that size will allow me to use tough card DL envelopes, keeping the cost of international shipping to about $4.00-5.00 AUD. That reduces the cost of shipping by two thirds, and with currency conversion should come out at a pretty minimal addition for most international backers.
Will it be successful? Who knows! I will be Kickstarting Owlbear Omelette during the ZineQuest promotion Kickstarter is running in August, and will let you all know how successful (or not) it was after that…
If it is successful, then maybe I need to take a long and careful look at a few of my planned and upcoming games, and ask myself how they would look wearing an A6 sized overcoat.
Rascals is in the post and winging it’s way around the world!
After a mildly stressful beginning, the Rascals Kickstarter has been fulfilled. So what was the stressful part? Well, full of excitement, I marched into the post office with the intention of sending off Rascals. The postal worker informed me, that due to Covid, Rascals would be treated as ‘parcels’ instead of ‘letters’. A difference that would mean the cost for shipping each copy of Rascals would more than double, and that the money gathered for shipping was no where near enough to cover what I was told it was now going to cost. After recovering from the mild fit my heart decided to undertake at this news, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and legged it.
I was fairly confident I had done my due diligence, and had researched the shipping costs properly, but by the same token, Covid has had a way of changing things rapidly. Add to this that fact that being told a thing by a person who should know has a way of getting one to question one’s own reality, and I was ‘somewhat’ concerned.
After undertaking some more research, and finding that I had been correct after all, I decided the best course of action was to try my chances at a different post office. Thankfully the people there were wonderful, took everything in hand, and to cut a long story short: Rascals is in the post.
On the project page I preview some of the wonderful art created by Juan Ochoa, and you can also see my first foray into creating a project video…
I’m really thrilled with how this project has come together, the black and white interior, supported by the sublime artwork of Juan Ochoa, looks really nice (in my very biased opinion). I can’t wait to see how the project goes!
