Observations of the Fox

I've managed to get the back end of DriveThruRPG working again, so I've just put up the first 4 books for Sceletus, both individually and as the  Sceletus Starter Bundle . This has included generating up a banner to get some more traction and a bit more attention for the product.   Let's see how things go. The last time I thought I had a game this good, it was Shattered Heroes (and I'm still not sure if we're legally allowed to talk about that).  

Sceletus was initially meant to be released with 4 books. The first was the core rules for the players, the second was the supplemental rules for someone who was running a game. Two extra booklets were intended to be released with those first two. Now Erin and I have finally completed them to a point where we are happy with the results, and they've finally been completed and are available for sale over on Itch. Orders of the Bones The Grey and the Green The "Orders of the Bones" booklet provides details on some factions that might provide help or hindrance to the players as their tell the stories of their animated dead characters. The booklet entitled "The Grey and the Green" is all about a mysterious fungal hive-mind entity that threatens to wipe out everything the characters know.     These additional booklets haven't seen any sales yet. I thought about putting them up for sale on the Vulpinoid Studios shopfront at DrivethruRPG in addition to Erin's It...

Sceletus has had its soft release. There's still things that need to be changed about it. Included in that are needing to add in a few more images and finish off the book about the political groups that exist in the setting and how they can be used to manipulate stories in the game. Here's the page for the Game Jam that it's been submitted to. and Here's the page for the game itself. I'll probably put it up on DrivethruRPG soon as a paid version, so get the free edition while you can.  

Halloween is almost here. The game about skeletons that I've been working with Erin on is almost done. I'm going to have the make sure enough of it is finished for a soft release.             There's another book in the starting sequence, but that's not going to be ready by Friday. Hopefully the next post will tell you that the game is now available. 

 We're running a little sale over on the online store...  DrivethruRPG Vulpinoid Studios  

 We're reaching the home stretch for 2024, and it's actually been a decent run for the blog, after a few years of letting things slide.  Earlier this year, the blog had it's best month ever. There have been a couple of decent sequences of posts, including writing an RPG, some analysis of RPGs, and a serialized set of posts about how to run a game.  I've been able to share links from the blog on assorted social media. Especially when people have "come up with a new idea", and I've been able to point to a post from 10-15 years ago and say "hey, I was saying that same thing way back then...and people didn't listen to me then either." I'm getting a bit of a Cassandra-complex... but anyway... One of the things I've noticed (and one of the things pointed out by a new generation of readers), is that many of the old posts aren't archived well. So I might spent a bit of time sorting them and adding them to the "other tutorials" t...

  If you've been a reader of this blog in the past, you'll be aware that I've regularly got a few backburner projects. Over the years, these projects have included cartography, mutiple games, illustration series, physically creative endeavours.  In the time since I started this blog, I've moved house several times... Riverwood (Start of blog ➡ October 2010) Buxton  (October 2010 ➡ January 2019) Barham  (January 2019 ➡ April 2019) Barham  (April 2019 ➡ January 2019) Coleambally  (January 2020 ➡ December 2020) Oxley Vale  (December 2020 ➡ May 2021) West Tamworth  (May 2021 ➡ July 2022) East Tamworth  (July 2022 ➡ August 2023) South Tamworth  (August 2023 ➡ Current) The last move should the be last one for a while, if not the last one altogether, since my wife and I have bought the house we've moved into. During this time I've worked a number of jobs and studied at various levels... Padstow TAFE College [Certificate 4 in Web Design]  (...

I was amused to see this when I checked the sales of "Beneath the Glass and Steel". I'm amused to see stuff like this from people who once worked closely with the people they are now publicly distancing themselves from. I was just going to leave it as simple amusement until someone referred me to this insightful blog entry . Reading through it raised this scenario to a new level. I won't write more, the linked blog entry says more than enough. In case you're interested, the 'zine has now sold 10 copies.

Beneath the Glass and Steel - Issue #01  has just gone live on DrivethruRPG, I'm not sure how well it will start selling, but I've generated up an advertising banner for the site, have established a small community of folks who've said they'd be interested in writing articles for future issues, have sent copies out to the regular reviewers on OBS (even though that hasn't particularly generated any positive outcomes in the past) and have generally done what I can to get the word out across my various social media presences. I'm hoping that the current groundswell of supprt for Cyberpunk 2077 will translate into a few sales, which in turn will cascade across my other products... but now it's just the waiting game.

This morning I uploaded parts 2 and 3 for the Modular Dungeons project. And I've just added a bundle that allows people to purchase the first three parts at a reduced cost. That bundle can be found here. A few people have already started purchasing the products in this new range, so that's always good. I need to scan in a few more elements that I've drawn, and then I'll be able to start creating a few more of these. I'll be happy when there's 10 of these packs.

I've been trying a few different techniques over on OneBookShelf/DrivethruRPG/RPGNow to see which ones are more effective at generating sales for me. I've had quite a few of my games and gaming products for sale as Pay-What-You-Want, and these remain consistent sellers, but most people choose to pay nothing for them. This means exposure is building, but income isn't. Adding The Law into a charity product bundle similarly didn't generate any more money for me, but it wasn't really about getting money, it was about contributing to a good cause, and getting a bit of exposure for a game that I'm pretty passionate about. almost 500 copies of the game went out in that lot. Using the sales of The Law, I now had a list of emails in the OBS system. I used this as a promotional tool when releasing The Dispatch Guide, and within the first week sold half a dozen copies, which was a little faster than I normally would reach that point, but as a second book in a series ...

OneBookShelf has a function where a product can be sent to a group of reviewers. The idea is that this will get at least one of them to read through the product and provide a bit of feedback, because good reviews are one of the strongest promotional tools available to a new product. When I released the Dispatch Guide for The Law a fortnight ago, I sent comp copies to their reviewer's circle, and figured I'd send a copy of the core rules for The Law along with it... after all, a GMs handbook makes more sense when the rules it refers to are also present. I indicated at the time that I'd provide feedback on this feature... I can't remember if I made that indication here on the blog, or in one of the game design Facebook groups I'm a part of. Either way, a fortnight has passed, I've sold half a dozen copies of the Dispatch Guide , and a few more copies of The Law . I haven't had a single review from the reviewer's circle.

It's been a bad run over the last couple of weeks. I finished my university studies over a month ago. I've been trying to get accredited as a teacher since the beginning of the year, and by this stage the process should have been completed. I know there are jobs in the fields where I'm qualified to teach, but I can't get through the bureaucracy to get to those jobs. Chasing this down has drained my bank accounts dry, with costs for car registration, power bills and phone bills coming in on top of that.  I tried to do a bit more study while waiting for accreditation from the relevant government departments, but I can't even do that, because the up front fee for study at the local college (while cut back due to being a registered carer) was still too much... ...so I've fallen back on doing what I love to do, what I find to be a fun diversion when the real world just starts getting me down, and what tends to make me a bit of extra money on the side. I...

This coming weekend, I've put a couple of discounts on some Vulpinoid Studios products over on RPGNow/DrivethruRPG. It's a part of the "Irregular Birthday Sale", where some years I remember to discount stuff, and some years I'm too busy and forget about it. It's also partly a response to Free RPG Day being held on the weekend of my birthday. The first product being discounted this year is The Law, which will have it's PDF reduced to a dollar.  Here's the link.  (It will only be active on the weekend of June 16th-17th, 2018) The second product to be reduced will be the Ghost City Raiders Starter Bundle. This pack of PDFs contains the core rules, ten character types and ten scenarios, with a total individual sale value of $22, it normally sells for $10, but for the weekend will also be marked down to a single dollar. Here's the Ghost City Raiders link. (It will also only be active over this coming weekend) In previous years when I've p...

I've been so busy focusing on why people haven't been noticing or buying my games, that I hadn't noticed one of my little games actually reaching a sales threshold. Tooth and Claw has gained "Copper" best seller status on DrivethruRPG. I hadn't noticed this because I usually look at my products through the RPGNow shopfront rather than the DrivethruRPG shopfront. It takes 50 paid sales on a single shopfront to gain one of these little badges, and I've got a few other products slowly crawling their way towards a similar status... quite a few of my games have sold 60 or more copies, but those sales are scattered between the various shopfronts of the OneBookShelf network, so no others have the mark yet... despite their regular turnover trickle of sales. Then there are the free-release and pay-what-you-want products, which have hundreds if not thousands of downloads, but only a tiny percentage of paid sales. Still, it's nice to see a slow but stea...

Go there... get it now. Here's the link.

Why write my own, when this post by Dan Maruschak already says almost everything I would want to say on the topic? Why get frustrated that my work generally doesn't get out there, when a number of people have commented that their own work wouldn't have gotten out there if it weren't for face-to-face networking at conventions in North America or the UK? Or just lucky breaks? For the last 10 years, I've been involved in several initiatives to get Australian game designers recognised. In most cases, one or two designers have been raised above the rabble, while everyone else either continues to struggle along in obscurity, or has their profile marginally lifted. In the past six years, I've been studying and my game design has been a backburner project. I'm not actively getting my stuff out there, instead I'm just refining what I do, and getting the rest of my life on track. Most of my stuff can be found on RPGNow/DrivethruRPG , print stuff on Lulu , ...

For those who are interested in the progress of the next book to be released for The Law, here's a sneak preview of the current status. Here's the first few pages... It probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense without a copy of The Law, so here's a link to that.

Between assignments and other work, I've been putting together the complete card set for NOIR. Hopefully in the next 24 hours. the game will be available as a pay-what-you-want product on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow, and I'll also have a minimal overhead version available on those sites as a print-on-demand set of cards. Time for the next project.

Last night, I managed to upload " The Law " to my DrivethruRPG/RPGNow shopfront. I was thankfully alerted to the fact that there were a whole heap of spelling errors on the page, due to the "p" key on my rapidly aging keyboard not working half of the time...but that's all fixed now. I'll probably update the shopfront page with a few more images and a couple of more interesting elements of text, but for the moment it's done it's job. While I was sleeping, a copy of the game sold, and now I can purchase the "Dr Who Humble Bundle" that I referred to in yesterday's RPGADay question. Stupidly, in my enthusiasm last night, I started working on the Dispatch Guide for the game (which, for those who haven't been following, is basically the GMs guide). The first ten pages of that basically came from the fact that I wanted to keep the whole game tightly focused as a highly illustrated 32 page "game comic"...which meant there ...