A hidden path, taken to the end
about 2 years ago
– Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 02:25:18 AM
I feel like a blackjack dealer at the end of his shift, like I should clap my hands together, show my open palms to the overhead security cameras and wish everyone good luck as I leave. Dealers do this, of course, as a matter of internal security, to show that they're clean, that they aren't palming anything from the table. But as a player, it has always struck me as a grand gesture of farewell: that's it, you all can keep playing but I'm out of here.
The last of the print copies of Book of Hidden Paths went into the mail on Friday, and those of you who are due digital rewards should have received download instructions a week ago. If anyone is having problems getting their rewards, please contact me so we can straighten things out But, barring that, this Kickstarter campaign has drawn to a close. Thank you for your support, but now I'm putting your tips in my pocket and going on my contractually-mandated break.
As for what happens after I've gone out for a smoke or taken a catnap in the shabby, musty break room, the plan is that I will go back to creating location modules, at least for a bit, before writing about random encounters in settled areas. Our next Kickstarter campaign will feature two modules that can be run separately, or in conjunction with each other. One will describe a village of artisans and laborers whose sole job is to prepare royal tombs, with the catch being that one family has been sneaking into those tombs and looting them. The other will be something of a dungeon crawl, and it assumes that your party has decided to help the tomb raiders' family when they don't return as expected. We have also decided that the next campaign will be formatted differently than has been our practice in the past, with the primary goal of broadening our audience by reducing the cost of buying in. More on that when the details firm up.
As to whether or we will continue with Found by the Way so that there will be Pathfinder-compatible versions... well, we're still turning that question over in our minds. I have made no secret that this campaign didn't draw as much support as I had hoped, and that it met with much less than enthusiasm than the 5E crowd showed for Book of Chance Meetings. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised at the post-campaign pre-orders that trickled in, so that Backerkit-generated sales, expressed as a ratio to Kickstarter-generated sales, compared quite favorably to how things went with Book of Chance Meetings. What does this mean? I honestly have no idea what it means, but I tend to think that it means something.
If you will permit me to spout off a bit longer, I can think of two data points that illustrate our dilemma in whether or not we should continue to invest time and effort in the Pathfinder market: At Dice Tower West earlier this month, I estimate the ratio of Pathfinder peeps to D&D peeps among the people I talked to at our booth to be no worse than 1:2, probably more like 4:6. And yet, we sold no copies of Found by the Way or Book of Hidden Paths — except to one buyer who said that he was converting everything to OSR anyway, so it didn't matter whether he bought the Pathfinder- or D&D-compatible version.
[BTW, our official position on Dice Tower West is that it's convention with a lot of promise and potential; we just wish we had gotten to meet more of the 2k+ folks who attended.]
The second data point is the comment posted to Book of Hidden Paths' DTRPG page just after we made the PDF public there. It probably comes off as snootier and more entitled than the poster intended, so I'm not going to get worked up over it. But it does illustrate one dilemma that we face. As some of you may remember, we launched our first Kickstarter campaign for Found by the Way literally two weeks before Paizo announced Pathfinder 2E. So from the very start, we have been caught in the transition from 1E to 2E. Knowing that some people will never switch to 2E and that others will do so only after much resistance, do we write those people off entirely, or do we try to keep them happy by working out ways to run material that is 2E native with 1E? IMO, working back from 2E to 1E is not hard, but it does take time that's wasted if the work doesn't increase sales or brand goodwill. Should we actually focus on 1E as a separate system rather than a something related to 2E? Is this person a crank outlier or a representative of something much larger? We missed out on selling to him, are we missing out on more by not publishing stuff that is exclusively 1E-native? I have no idea about the size of the "Never Pathfinder 2E" crowd, and I have no idea how large it will be in the future.
This is something we'll have to work out going forward. In the meantime, thank you again for your support, and I'd like to leave you with a couple of announcements in the hope that you can help us spread the word: First, Ramen Sandwich Press kicked in Tome of the Utility Drawer (PDF only) to DriveThru RPG's charity drive supporting Doctors Without Borders' relief efforts in Ukraine. Also, we're using eBay for Charity to contribute to both Doctors Without Borders and the American Red Cross. I call it our eBay proxy, but Stuff and Nonsense is the eBay store that I've been using to build cycle through and pare down my various collections for about 15 years, and now I'm listing Ramen Sandwich Tees apparel and print copies of Ramen Sandwich Press stuff there. Through March 31, 10% from all apparel sales through eBay will go to Doctors Without Borders. That may not seem like much, but print on demand has its costs, so it represents almost all of our profit on these items. Also, 20% from the sale of print copies of Book of Chance Meetings and Book of Hidden Paths will go to the American Red Cross.
