Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

Yeah, but they do not seem to sell well.
Maybe an adventure that had new monsters, a divine power-up as a reward, etc. would be attractive. Give those who make thier own adventures something to want in the same product.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

While there were other circumstances involved, the Nordlond Sagas project that produced Forest's End and Dragons of Rosgarth lost me something like $10,000 in the end. I wasn't yet depending on GB as my livelihood then, as I am now, but that would have been rough.

Adventures are also hard to do well from a mass market perspective. For every person that says "Hall of Judgment is too specific, I can't use this Viking crap in my own campaign," there's another who says "Hall of Judgment should have specified every little thing, from the price of grain to the content of every building. Not specific enough."

"Too wordy. You only need like five words per room."

"Not enough lore. How can I even run this without doing all the work I paid you to do?"

Yeah. Oh, also:

"I'm tired of all this fantasy stuff. Do something else."

So...yes, adventures are hard to sell.

Edit: I mean, I love doing them. I would love to have a steady stream of them coming in, and thus going out. I'd like each one to do well enough just by putting it on websites that I don't have to bother with Kickstarter.

But many of the blind submissions I have received are not well suitable. They're "this is an adventure from my campaign" with little to no context shifting to make it more, dare we use the world, generic. It has to have enough hooks to make it go, but not so many it could have only worked in the campaign from which it sprung. A bunch of other constraints too.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

It would be interesting to see some market research on this topic.

What impact do ready made campaigns have on the revenue of the big RPG brands?

If an RPG wants to attract new players, how much do ready made campaigns help?

Are the players and GMs who spend the most money on the game paying for campaigns and adventures, or other stuff?

If the campaigns and adventures didn't exist, would they spend money on other stuff? Or are campaigns and adventures a prerequisite/boost for selling other stuff?

Anecdotally, as our gaming group is now mostly middle aged, all the games played at the moment are ready made campaigns. The GMs don't have the time to create everything from scratch.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

Seeing research would be interesting, yes. In the absence of research, looking at what WotC does could tell you something about what THEIR research is telling them. Judging from their output, campaigns and adventures must be quite profitable because the bulk of their output consists of them, with character-facing splatbooks and monster books only a large minority. (Although they do tend to mix some monsters and magic items into each adventure or campaign setting book, too.)

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

But that doesn't really apply well to GURPS. D&D GMs and Players are a rather different breed, and SJG has come out and said "adventures don't sell well at all".

Now, among GURPS Fantasy fans? They probably sell better than the other GURPS genre fans... which is why I 'd ask Douglas Cole whether his adventures had more backers than his Bestiarys (my guess is yes, despite being a loss, I'd bet the adventures had way more backers).

So Doug, out of your KSes, which GURPS Nordlond ones have been backed the most, the adventures, the Bestiarys, Nordlondr Folk, or Delvers to Grow? (or even Shield's Up, but I think that was an add-on to the Bestiary Expansions?)

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

Maybe it's worth examining why SJG has hitherto been less successful at selling adventures than WotC has, especially to fans of D&D-style fantasy. It's a large potential market.

I was reading the GURPS classic adventure Orcslayer today thanks to a YouTube video review of it, and it strikes me that it would be a very good first adventure for either a GM or a player new to DFRPG and/or GURPS. It has a good but concise setting that takes only a page or so of space (easy to digest), it has enough simple procedures to be interesting but not overly complex (travel 50 miles a day, reduced by encumbrance; here's how to handle food and water and hunting; a couple of others); it's straightforwardly linear but doesn't assume that the PCs must win every battle, not even the big ones; player characters are constrained to be fairly simple so you're encouraged to jump right into play (e.g. if you play a certain warrior maiden, you can choose between her ten-year-old, twenty-six-year-old, or sixty-year-old versions, all with different point values, but you don't need to decide whether she can cast spells or whether to wield a morningstar vs. lance).

I am not a fan of GURPS Fantasy but I'm a fan of DFRPG because of the things it removes from GURPS. I'm a fan of dungeons, dragons, and fantasy adventuring. In discussions about D&D I often meet people who are looking for things DFRPG has. I think selling people on GURPS and then selling them on GURPS Fantasy and then selling them GURPS Fantasy adventures is likely to be harder than just selling a good DFRPG adventure and/or setting and the tools to run it well (DFRPG boxed set + pedagogical support from the adventure itself).

The other thing you'd want to learn from WotC's example is that it helps to include both GM-facing and player-facing material in each book. Adventures should have a couple interesting and novel magic items, monsters, or new ways to spend character points in an appendix at the back. GURPS excels at this kind of thing and DFRPG adventure or setting book writers can take advantage of that. "Those who reach the rank of Eel Brother in the Snake Blossom Cult may spend up to 5 points to buy [combo constructed using GURPS Martial Arts], described in Appendix B." Boom, done! WotC only wishes they had such elegant crunch.

That's the lesson I take from the indirect WotC market research. Execution matters, and GURPS has strengths that WotC doesn't have at these kinds of products. You can beat them at their own game! Go after that market!

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

Judge for yourself!

The first Bestiary was my most-backed DFRPG project, and yet it probably came up shorty by a few hundred backers of what it would have taken to make me really happy with it. Especially given the protestations about GURPS not having a consolidated fantasy bestiary!

Citadel at Nordvorn was next, and I was very happy with it. It also picked up 100 of folks who skipped the original HoJ release.

Hall of Judgment was the first 3pp release for the DFRPG, and pulled in roughly 1/3 of everyone who bought the boxed set (1,587 in the first KS).

Nordlond Sagas was poorly backed and lost over $10,000 net. So not only was it low backer count, the costs ran away as well (the pledge prices were established before the manuscripts came in, and they were targeted originally at 48 and 64 pages, but grew to 112 and 96 in order to properly cover the material...that was an "early learning" mistake in several ways).

Then we have Nightmare Fuel, which went from "folks really like monsters!" to "...um, or not." Artifacts is a gear catalog. They're famously popular...except when they aren't.

If it were possible to predict what stuff of mine folks were going to like, assuredly I would make more of it. But for each example of "folks liked this" we find one or two "...but not twice."

The answer to the above is "that's only half the question." Each thing I repeated, and each thing has done well AND poorly.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

It's interesting that my first reaction to seeing "Old-School Solo Adventures Conversions of TFT solos to OSE" in that list was, "I want that!" followed shortly by "Oh, too bad, it's not DFRPG." Something about that pitch is definitely exciting, maybe the promise of hack-and-slash.

It doesn't surprise me that that one topped the list.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

Followers topped 1440 at one point; of those following, only 275 converted to backers, leaving (by various measures) over 1,000 folks "on the table" who expressed enough interest to follow but not to back. That would have represented - at my best conversion rate - nearly $19,000 in additional revenue.

Solo adventures for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG would likely at least be welcome, if not outright popular. Converting David's efforts to the DFRPG would be interesting, but would require a stretch goal for "Black and White to Color Art," which isn't a bad thing, but it is a hurdle.

We shall see. I've got some plans for other products in other markets, but right now, signs are pointing to "get a day job back in technical industry, and do RPGs as a hobby again." That might wind up being better for everyone, as it means that I can go head down and do the things I want to do, however long they take.

Re: Artifacts of Legend: Coming to Kickstarter May 25
 

What's the connection here between system conversions and new art? When I think "old school" I think black and white, simple art. I just picked up GURPS: Orcslayer today and I'm loving all the sidebars and sketches and maps, all in black and white.