2023 In Review
By Alex White
- 9 minutes read - 1793 words2023 was an exciting year in many ways - more opportunities to get out to conventions being high among them. I’ve continued to develop some new games, and I thought that people might find it interesting to see what things are like for a small one-person publisher.
Sales Figures
I’ve seen a number of other small publishers put their sales figures out for the year, and I’ve decided that I’d like to do the same. As you can see, it is quite difficult to bring in money as a small publisher!
DriveThruRpg £223
| Title | Free | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starguild | 22 | 7 | 29 | |
| Adventures in the Underbelly | 1 | 1 | ||
| Gateway to Adventure | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| A Cool and Lonely Courage | 4 | 2 | 6 | |
| Love & Barbed Wire | 1 | 4 | 2 | 7 |
| Inner Circle | 1 | 6 | 7 | |
| Expect Three Visitors | 71 | 57 | 128 |
Indie Press Republic £183
| Title | |
|---|---|
| A Cool and Lonely Courage | 23 |
| Love & Barbed Wire | 3 |
Itch £95
The ‘Bundle’ column is the number of copies of a bundle which were sold containing that product. I got a proportion of the sale price of the bundle. PDF sales are direct sales of a PDF to a customer.
| Title | Bundle | |
|---|---|---|
| A Cool and Lonely Courage | 155 | |
| Love & Barbed Wire | 1 | 64 |
| Inner Circle | ||
| Expect Three Visitors |
Total sales income all channels (outside of kickstarters): £501
New Games
Expect Three Visitors
My latest game was kickstarted in November, and delivered to customers by the first week in January. It is currently available as a PDF on itch and DriveThruRpg and now I know that print copies have reached kickstarter backers, I’ll put a print version up for sale too.
Expect Three Visitors is inspired by A Christmas Carol by Dickens, and in particular the character of Scrooge. After the suggestion from a friend a couple of years ago, I developed a game based on my Retrospective SRD, with playing cards used to help guide emotional content of scenes. Scrooge is a great example of someone whose greed affects him and numerous people around him. Greed is listed as one of the “seven deadly sins” so why not expand the game to allow investigation of any of the others too? Envy, Gluttony, Pride, Lust, Sloth and Wrath all seemed like fruitful avenues for exploration.
The game is for 3-5 players, and each person plays the spirit charged with attempting to redeem someone, and also they play the present day client to the player on their right. Each spirit will, in turn, set scenes in their clients past, present, and future, and the roles in those scenes are played out by the other players around the table - so everyone is engaged all the time.
I’m pleased that I was able to employ an editor who wants to break into editing as a career, and also a first-time artist for the internal artwork. Getting a foothold in any business is hard, and being able to help out others is important to me. She doesn't have an online portfolio at the moment, but if she does I'll include a link to it here.
You can read more about the game here https://planesailinggames.com/games/expect-three-visitors/
And there are several playtest write-ups here (which show what the game can look like in play) https://planesailinggames.com/tags/expect-three-visitors/
Conventions 😊
A Housecon
I was able to visit my favourite housecon in the US again. While playing other games I did a couple of playtests of The Long Road Home including the YA story of the Broken Angel which you can read here https://planesailinggames.com/post/long-road-home-playtest02/ and a playtest of the ongoing Born to the Purple design.
Metatopia 2023
It was fabulous to be able to attend the in-person Metatopia in New Jersey once more. A convention dedicated to playtesting, it is an opportunity to playtest other peoples new games and provide them helpful feedback, and to get really high quality feedback on your own games. I ran Expect Three Visitors and The Long Road Home and got very helpful feedback on both.
I also played in many other exciting games, and you can read a full write-up of my experiences here: https://planesailinggames.com/review/2023-11-13-metatopia-2023/
I purchased two games that I’ve been wanting to get hold of for a while and look forward to playing them - Signal to Noise by Lunar Shadow Games and Pasión de las Pasiones by Magpie Games.
Dragonmeet 2023
For the first time in years I was able to get to Dragonmeet again (no covid, train strikes or illnesses to hold me back on this occasion). I wanted to be more than just a participant this time, so I signed up to help with the ‘Indie Games on the Hour’ programme, where you can run 2-hour sessions of indie games of your choice. I brought along Love & Barbed Wire and the playtest version of The Long Road Home, and both times I was GMing the people interested chose The Long Road Home. One of the players said that it was the first time he had ever played a story game, but I wouldn’t have known - he was so good at moving the stories forward and bringing a richer narrative to the whole game!
It was great walking around the stands and looking at the products on display and talking to stall-holders. Everyone I spoke to said that Dragonmeet was their favourite time to have a stall because of the people who come along (UK Games Expo is much bigger, but the people interested in RPGs is correspondingly diluted). I’m particularly inspired by Craig of Lunar Shadow Designs who writes up detailed blogs about the cost incurred in running a stand: https://lunarshadow.net/2023/12/10/dragonmeet-2023-retrospective-1-sales-money/
It was delightful to meet Russ of ENWorld in person for the first time ever. I've known him online for over 20 years, but this is the first time that we've met in the real world. He was a delight to talk to, and very encouraging.
I added to my pile of RPGs that I've not yet read by picking up Alien by Free League Publishing. I've heard a lot about it, and decided that this was the right time to pick it up. Hopefully I'll get to play it in 2024!
I had hoped to stay later for more conversations, but a train strike planned for Sunday meant that my trains were stopping running that evening. Even though I planned to get a 6pm train home the delays and cancellations meant that a 1hr journey turned into a 3 hour journey to get home in freezing weather!
Interviews 😊
I thoroughly enjoyed being interviewed by Mike on his Games Played Badly youtube channel. It was in the middle of kickstarter campaign for Expect Three Visitors, and it was great to be able to discuss the game and it’s inspirations with him.
I’m also happy to say that I’m due to be returning to the NotDND podcast/twitch interview In March 2024, where I’ll be talking about The Long Road Home. The Long Road Home will be hitting Kickstarter about then, and I’m looking forward to chatting with Jess again. There is a playlist of all the NotDND interviews that is worth a peruse… lots of great talks are on there. I bought some games on the strength of these interviews!
Game Design Work
I’ve been working on a number of games this year which are in various stages of development. Here is a quick run-down of them.
The Long Road Home
My next Retrospective game is inspired by the hobbits on their journey back to the Shire after all the events of their great adventures. It will use the flashback mechanism to allow a party of adventurers to think about the highs and lows, the successes and failures of their adventures. To remember the friends which they made and lost along the way. And finally, to see what happens at their journey’s end. I’ve been through several playtests and revisions in the game. Each change has strengthened the core experience and made it easier for people to get into the game, and to ensure that we are painting a richer view of the world of our story.
The most recent changes have been to put a little more weight behind the choice of genre at the start of the game. This is done by providing suggested example genre tropes for each of the genres on offer, and to modify the results of the homecoming by genre too. The genres you can choose from are Children’s tales, Young Adult, Heroic, Grim, and Horror. Children’s tales tend to be happier, while as you move towards Grim and Horror stories the tropes and outcomes become darker and more tragic.
The Long Road Home will be coming to Kickstarter in March 2024, and I will have playtest ashcan versions available on itch shortly
Born to the Purple (working title)
Although it has taken a backseat this year to Expect Three Visitors and The Long Road Home, I’ve continued planning and designing something tightly focussed around space diplomats finding their way amidst changing agendas and policies. Making deals and compromises along the way while the galaxy might be collapsing around them (metaphorically).
The core of the game is a combination of simplified Forged in the Dark, with some Fate sensibilities. You can see some of my earlier design diaries on the site here, and I’ll be adding additional ones this year as I’m thinking about how to represent interstellar politics in the game in a fun way. https://planesailinggames.com/tags/born-to-the-purple/
White Rose Society/Edelweiss Pirates
This has been on the back-burner this year, so I’m still in the early research phase for a game about the White Rose Society, a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany who ran a leaflet and graffiti campaign calling for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Not sure on the name for this yet.
Deeds not words (working title)
Another game that is still in the research phase (and has been for some years) this will be about the Suffragette movement in the UK. I’m particularly interested in asking the question “How much would you be prepared to sacrifice in order to gain the vote?” I think it is an interesting question to ask in these days when fewer and fewer people seem to be interested in exercising the franchise. It would be great to get this game out before the major elections in the UK and US in 2024, but unless I get some sudden inspiration that seems unlikely. You never know though!
I hope that 2023 is a happy and healthy year for all my readers, and that you are all able to enjoy a raft of fun games, new and old!
Cover photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels