AI chatbots are immensely popular tools, and many have speculated about how to use them to improve D&D and other TTRPG games. Here’s a list of prompts that you can use to improve your game.
Add Variety to Your Game
Give me some recommendations for great D&D 5e books and resources from third party publishers
If you ask a chatbot for these resources directly, it can create suggested resources from adventures to stat blocks, but because AI uses an average of everything, you’ll only get average results. It can be helpful to get you past Blank Page Syndrome (AKA Writers Block), but everything gets repetitive quickly, and don’t expect any ideas that will blow away your players.
But by suggesting products made by actual design professionals, it might show you some of the more popular books by creative designers who know and love the game and have invested themselves in making your game better. Or you can check out the most popular titles at the DMs Guild.
It will hallucinate though, suggesting books that don’t exist, so you’re probably better off asking people about their favorite resources or going to the suggested companies’ websites.
Give me a list of D&D 5e blogs that give Dungeon Masters great advice, and give me directions how to subscribe to them
Because you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s hard to get general advice from a chatbot that’s helpful beyond the most generic suggestions. But thankfully, the hobby boasts many amazing blogs full of great tips that will answer questions you didn’t know you had and give you tips you’d never think to ask for. Or you can follow the RPG Blogroll to get a steady feed of insights and suggestions from people who know the game and write from extensive experience.
Get Feedback to Improve Your Ideas
Give me a list of online communities where Dungeon Masters give each other advice
While you could feed your latest adventure idea into a chatbot and ask for feedback, even minimal experience playing the game as a human will give you more insight than a chatbot. The problem is that chatbots don’t have insights. A black pudding has more insight than a chatbot.
Instead, find online places with other players and GMs. All of the major social media platforms have them. Personally, to avoid chasing algorithms, I prefer oldschool forums like EN World.
Give me a few questions I can ask my players to make sure they’re all enjoying the D&D 5e game that I’m running as Dungeon Master
You can’t ask a chatbot what your players value most in a game. It has no values. You have to ask the players. But a few pointed questions can be helpful.
Impress your players with amazing art for your encounters
Give me a list of sources to find low cost or public domain non-AI fantasy artwork that would work for my D&D game
Instead of exploiting talented artists by using their work without their permission, find some interesting art & use that for inspiration. It’s the reverse of how most DMs design their encounters, but perusing the Smithsonian collection, Wikimedia Commons, or other sources can give you many adventure, monster, or treasure ideas. Sadly, most public stock art sites have become nearly useless as they’ve been flooded with AI images. If you’re looking for something specific, DriveThruRPG is the only fantasy art site I know of that forbids AI images to be added as stock art (although they still allow it to be used in other products with a content flag and haven’t removed the hundreds of AI-generated images currently in their library), support actual artists so they can keep creating original pieces by purchasing stock art from DriveThruRPG.
Notice the Pattern?
OK, this article is a but tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you recognize the point. What makes tabletop roleplaying games great is the people. For all the amazement over AI tools, human creativity can ponder an idea, consider it, and imagine it. AI takes a Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder of words and mindlessly puts them into a mold, the opposite of what makes analog games so great.
Talk to people — local and online communities. Support creators, both the homebrew community and professional designers and artists. Get advice from people who care about their players and want everyone at your table to have a great time.
How the Wyrm Worked: 2023 Retrospective
April 21, 2024
At Wyrmworks Publishing, our mission is to help you make lives better through tabletop roleplaying games. That mission inherently depends on you — we can’t do this ourselves. We — our team, our patrons, and our subscribers — the Dragon’s Hoard — worked together as a party of thousands of heroes to make lives better last year.
Here’s what we did together in a year (in roughly chronological order):
We released Limitless Heroics – Including Characters with Disabilities, Mental Illness, and Neurodivergence in Fifth Edition, the most comprehensive disability compendium ever created for a tabletop roleplaying game. Thousands of gaming groups, including both home groups and professionals like therapists, schools, specialized education programs, support groups, and a children’s theater have added this and other Wyrmworks Publishing resources to their game spaces to make them more inclusive.
Multiple libraries and game cafes have made Limitless Heroics available thanks to purchasing it themselves or through your donations. I get frequent notes from those who have added it to their game space. We love hearing about the impact it’s having!
Changing the TTRPG Industry
We were the only public voicespeaking to the effect of the OGL debacle on accessibility (that I could find, and I looked). In the short time Hasbro posted its final OGL survey, that page got 27,000 visitors. I hope that some of the readers who subsequently filled out the survey form, including the hundreds who clicked through to the survey from that page, included those accessibility insights in their responses. And I hope that it in some small way added to the influence of so many others who fought for our community. More than that, I hope that it raised representation and accessibility awareness at Hasbro for future designs across their product lines. We’ll never know whether they heard us, but we’ll keep talking about it regardless.
Disability in the Afterlife In 1 Corinthians 15:42-49, Paul briefly ponders what bodies will look like when we awaken in the spiritual realm, saying “there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another.” Basically, no one knows what our bodies will look like in the world to come, but it is reasonable to assume they will be an “idealized version of ourselves,” whatever that means to the individual. For many people, this likely means an end to their physical and mental disabilities. However, our minds and bodies have a way of shaping our identity – our sense of who we are. For example, one person may feel that their reliance on a prosthetic is a hindrance, another person may feel that their prosthetic is an extension of their own body, and an integral part of their physical identity. As a result, the diversity of human bodies in the afterlife is likely to be diverse as it is in the Physical Realm, with some people choosing to be freed from aspects of their physical form that they did not like, and others choosing to embrace their disability as an eternal part of who they are. This is why some people (like Rodney or Rodriguez) may appear in this adventure with a disability, even though they have already entered the afterlife.
– Heroes of the Heavenly Host, p. 41
We crowdfunded Inclusive Artwork: Fantasy Stock Art with Disability Representation for TTRPGs, the first and largest collection of fantasy stock art ever produced. When TTRPG publishers want to include disability representation in their products, the lack of available stock art to accompany it makes that cost-prohibitive, since commissioning quality art is expensive if you’re going to pay the artists fairly.
We wanted to remove that obstacle while supporting disabled, neurodivergent, and mentally ill artists.
Limitless Champions: Making Disabled Fantasy Heroes a Physical Reality
We crowdfunded Limitless Champions. We created the largest, most diverse collection of disabled fantasy minis ever made. Like stock art, very few miniatures include disability representation, and those available are mostly limited to representation through wheelchairs and canes. We expanded that range significantly, including miniatures and printable STL files, cards, accessible condition markers, and more. If you missed the campaign, you can find the collection in our shop.
We also licensed Limitless Champions characters to Fiona Shade Stories’ Adventure College Student Handbook to help make zir products more inclusive. One of those characters was featured in a recent Actual Play. If you’re interested in using our characters or other content, check out our HAG License or contact us.
In 2024, we will crowdfund Limitless Champions Adventures, a collection of adventures featuring these NPCs. To supplement those adventures, we created Limitless Champions Adventures Bonus Encounters with STLs and animated maps. They were each available free for a week or more, and they’re currently available through our Patreon.
Interviews
I love meeting the amazing people using TTRPGs to make lives better on our Gaining Advantage show. (We posted 11 episodes last year.) I also had the honor of being interviewed last year (including here a few from late 2022):
We want to make our resources available to everyone, but poverty prevents a lot of people from accessing many TTRPG resources. So to allow us to both pay our team and make our content as available as possible, we include full previews of our content on the product pages in our store. But that preview isn’t accessible or convenient for many people, so we also partner with you to make Community Copies of some of our products available. Thanks to individual Community Copy purchases, crowdfunding add-ons, and Patreon rewards, you helped us make the following free copies available:
We launched the Dragon’s Lair, a modular database of all of our publications, maps, and lots of exclusive content. It is the most affordable, accessible way to use our content. As of this writing, it has 1,704 entries.
We also launched the Wyrm’s Workshop, an opportunity for you to get your ideas published in our books! This also gave us the opportunity to hire more disabled, neurodivergent, and mentally ill freelancers. And because it costs money to pay those freelancers fairly, we developed a credits system via our Patreon to enable those without the financial means to contribute their ideas to the Wyrm’s Workshop.
And we emailed 49 notes of encouragement to the Dragon’s Hoard. (A big thanks to those of you who expressed your appreciation for the encouragement. That becomes ammunition to fight my inner critic.)
I’ve also had conversations with other publishers and content creators almost every day about accessibility and representation in their products.
What’s coming in 2024?
Here’s a sampling of what we’re already working on
We have at least two, hopefully three Kickstarters coming in 2024. The first two are currently in the playtesting and editing stages:
Leave a comment below or on any of our products or posts.
Send us a note to share how our work has made a difference to you or people you care about.
Finally, a heartfelt thank-you. When we started this, we wondered whether anyone would agree with our intentions and resonate with our work. We wondered whether this ridiculous idea of changing the world by rolling dice and pretending together could change lives and make the world better. Hundreds of people told me it wouldn’t work, and that I should quit before I started.
And the truth is, it couldn’t. Not without you. But here you are. And here’s how far we’ve come. And we’re just getting started. And we’re not going to stop.
DriveThruRPG CCP Partners Prohibit TTRPG Ableism
April 21, 2024
Here at Wyrmworks Publishing, we don’t want the corner on inclusion and accessibility. We want these concepts to become so ubiquitous in the TTRPG industry that our work becomes redundant, at which point, we’ll turn our focus to one of the other countless struggles in our society that keep people from knowing how loved and valued they are.
We have a long way to go, but we’re making steps in the right direction.
In May 2023, I emailed DriveThruRPG to add “ableism” to the nondiscrimination template for their Content Guidelines for Community Content Programs.
What are Community Content Programs?
A Community Content Program (CCP) allows third-party creators (like us) to create supplemental content for existing TTRPGs, like adventures, character expansions, and more, making more resources available for that game without breaking copyright and trademark laws. They often include artwork, style guides, and other resources to help creators make their publications capture the feel of the core game. DMs Guild, which allows the use of Dungeons & Dragons IP, is the most popular, but DriveThruRPG partners with about three dozen other companies to offer similar programs for other games.
So what’s up with the Content Guidelines?
When a publisher sets up a CCP with DriveThruRPG, they include Content Guidelines that tell creators what they can and can’t do with the game content. DriveThruRPG provides new CCP partners with a sample Content Guidelines template, which the partner can use as much or little as they want. Those guidelines usually include a nondiscrimination clause, and many use DriveThruRPG’s template for this as well:
Neither your products nor any promotional material, including blog/social media posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material. We reserve the right to remove any materials that we determine do not conform to our guidelines for this program.
Nobody wants their game to be used to promote nazis. (OK, nobody that DriveThruRPG would be willing to partner with.)
In May 2023, I looked through the guidelines for all of the CCPs, and I noticed that only one company, Onyx Path Publishing, included a reference to specific ableism in their guidelines.
I contacted DriveThruRPG:
Given that the template words it, “racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views,” after checking every agreement, I found that only Onyx Path’s specifically mentions “ableist.” I note it especially since ableism is so widely accepted in our culture, unlike most other forms of discrimination, and while it’s certainly covered under, “discriminatory” and “repugnant” in my view, not everyone would agree, especially in the TTRPG space, but I’d like to suggest that you consider clarifying and adding “ableist” to that clause in the template for future CCPs and possibly suggest it for current ones.
A mere ninety minutes later, they replied to let me know that they were changing the template and contacting all CCP partners with the suggestion and would update any change requests immediately. (Again, each CCP decides on their own guidelines wording, so this change is 100% optional.) Considering that this is a change to legal documentation, these are weighty decisions, so I was astonished at the speed of the response!
So like Teos Abadía’s recent article about changes in D&D Beyond’s content, this is old news that you didn’t know about. I waited to write this to allow time for companies to make changes so we could celebrate as many as possible.
What changed?
As of this writing six months later, the following CCPs now specifically forbid ableist content (Remember that Onyx Path Publishing included it already):
I have every expectation that the rest consider their existing “other repugnant views” umbrella clause sufficient. If someone reported CCP content to them that discriminated against people based on ability, they would respond accordingly. Some CCP partners not listed here have personally assured me of this.
If you are a CCP owner and change your agreement, let me know, and I’ll be thrilled to add you to the list!
Why is this important?
While our culture has taken great strides to reduce discrimination against marginalized demographics over the past several decades, it’s a slow process. In every case, we still have a long way to go. However, ableism remains the most widely accepted form of discrimination.
To use a mainstream example, we recently watched the Peacock TV show, Baking It, and in the Season 1 Finale, the hosts, Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph, did a bit called, “Nut Roast,” a parody of celebrity roasts. Here’s an excerpt:
Hey, look who it is, it’s walnut. Hey, walnut, you lumpy son of a nut, you’re the Elephant Man of the nuts. “I am not a good snack!”…
Uh-oh, it’s peanut…Look at him, he’s just sitting there. Somebody get him an epi-pen, I think he’s in shock!
In December 2021, they mocked people with facial differences and with life-threatening allergies in rapid succession. My family cringed, and I searched online for an apology by NBC or anyone from the cast or crew. Nothing. I searched for blog posts or news articles about the obvious ableist jokes. Nothing. Not even a Reddit post or tweet. In two years, nobody on earth with Internet access even noticed and cared enough to mention it until this post. And this is just one example.
We have a long way to go. We’re counting on the gaming community to roll initiative with us. And we deeply appreciate DriveThruRPG and the eight TTRPG producers who quietly but publicly entered this particular fray. They deserve recognition for leading the industry along with many others who have helped raise awareness through other efforts.
Has this changed the TTRPG industry?
Has this changed the content made available via these CCPs? I hope not. I hope that all of those who create CCP content already consciously avoided ableist content. I have friends who create CCP content, and I know that they don’t need a clause in a legal agreement to make sure their products are welcoming and inclusive to all people. I expect that those who changed their agreements did so because they already found ableism repugnant and would not want their brand associated with it.
But I also hope that the inclusion of one extra word causes everyone who sees it to experience a subtle influence. Maybe they subconsciously tweak the language in their projects to avoid microaggressions. Maybe they consider adding a disabled character and discussing it with someone whose lived experience is represented by that character. I regularly encounter compassionate people who don’t realize ableism exists. Sometimes simply learning the word makes them more sensitive to it when they encounter it.
Finally, thank you to our Patrons and everyone who supports our work and raises a sword with us or other TTRPG parties to welcome everyone to the table. Rule systems don’t make this hobby great — you do.
Unlock New Opportunities for Inclusive TTRPG
April 21, 2024
Ever wished you could bring your character to life in exciting new ways? Wyrmworks Publishing is unlocking new possibilities to make your tabletop RPG experience more immersive and inclusive than ever before.
Community Copies Donated: Limitless Heroics Players
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Wyrm's Workshop Sidequest Credits
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Community Copies Donated: Limitless Heroics Full
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Community Copies Donated: Limitless Champions Adventures
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PBP Game
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I DM a game for you
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With your support, we can keep making the hobby more welcoming and help you play the character you imagine.
Welcome to inclusion.
Meet Us at Gamehole Con!
April 21, 2024
I’m excited to announce that Teresa and I will be attending Gamehole Con in Madison, WI on Friday, October 20th! It’s been quite a while since my last con experience, back in the 80s at Gen Con in Milwaukee when I was in high school. We’re looking forward to checking it out.
We’re thrilled at the prospect of meeting lots of fellow gamers, creators, and fans. Gamehole Con is known for its welcoming community, and we can’t wait to be a part of it.
Our plan for the day is to wander around the convention, exploring the various vendors, and, most importantly, connecting with fellow attendees. From mid-morning until around 5 p.m., we’ll be soaking in the atmosphere, checking out all the fantastic offerings, hopefully catching a seminar, and getting to know some of the incredible people who make the TTRPG world so awesome.
If you’re at Gamehole Con too, please do come and say hello. We’d love to get to know you!
Reddit IPO: Reddit banishes the disabled community
April 21, 2024
reddit is killing 3rd-party Apps and API Access infographic (Click the image for full-size)
Reddit is preparing to go public, which means they need to demonstrate profit to potential stockholders. But profit and control comes at a cost, as we in the TTRPG community know all too well. Their recent API pricing changes have ignited a battle for equal access. It’s time to roll initiative once again.
Impact on the TTRPG Community
The TTRPG community thrives on collaboration, creativity, and diverse perspectives. Reddit has been a vital platform for building real-world adventuring parties of every kind. With the API pricing changes, the TTRPG community faces significant challenges:
Limited Customization: Third-party apps, like Apollo and Dystopia, have allowed TTRPG fans to personalize their Reddit experience like a homebrew fantasy world. These tools have facilitated streamlined access to TTRPG-specific subreddits, making it easier to find relevant discussions, game advice, and homebrew content.
Community Engagement: Third-party apps offer advanced features for interacting with Reddit, including real-time notifications, improved search functions, and intuitive interfaces. This gives TTRPG fans Advantage to engage in discussions, seek advice, and collaborate on projects.
Accessibility Barriers: Many TTRPG players with disabilities rely on third-party apps to overcome the accessibility Wall of Force in the official Reddit apps and interfaces. The loss of these apps will limit their ability to participate fully in TTRPG communities and access valuable resources.
Broader Impact on Disabled Individuals
While the TTRPG community is directly affected, it is essential to recognize that the API changes have an even greater impact on various disabled individuals:
Visually Impaired Community: Blind and visually impaired individuals heavily rely on third-party apps to access Reddit content through assistive technologies. These apps provide the necessary features for screen readers, alternative text, and other accessibility enhancements that enable equal participation.
Transcribers and Describers: Reddit is home to numerous volunteer groups dedicated to transcribing and describing images for alt text, making visual content accessible to individuals with visual impairments. The loss of third-party apps may hinder the crucial work of these groups, resulting in a significant loss of accessibility for the broader Reddit community.
Other Disability Communities: The API changes resonate beyond the visually impaired community. Individuals with motor disabilities, cognitive impairments, or other disabilities may also rely on third-party apps (or hope for new ones that give them better access) to navigate Reddit more efficiently and effectively. The loss of these apps would create additional barriers to access and participation for these individuals.
Unifying for Accessibility and Inclusion
To ensure that the TTRPG community and disabled individuals continue to thrive on Reddit, collective action is vital. By joining forces and advocating for accessibility, we can make a difference:
Amplify Voices: Share the stories and experiences of TTRPG players and disabled individuals affected by these API changes. Spread the word through your social circles like chain lightning.
Message Your Mods: Encourage the mods of your favorite subreddits to join the Blackout.
Seek Media Attention: This change comes on the heels of Reddit’s IPO announcement like a sycophantic imp chasing an arch-devil. Will potential stockholders want to support a company that has received media attention for knowingly making recent discriminatory choices?
It’s time to stand together to ensure that Reddit remains an inclusive platform for all, fostering creativity, collaboration, and accessibility within the TTRPG community and beyond.
Social Spell Schools: Welcome the Isolated to your Dungeons & Dragons Game
April 21, 2024
Disabilities and chronic conditions are isolating. For us, any kind of social life is a unicorn. As Briana describes at The Daily Disability,
The more my health problems grew, the harder it was to find a community that I felt like I fit in to. I joined group after group in hopes of finding a few that would help how I was feeling. I ended up not even being able to join discussions in one of the groups, because I didn’t have close relationships with anyone in the group. It was very disheartening.
Even when we have a free block of time that could be spent with friends,
My ADHD and hearing loss make parties, conventions, crowded restaurants, and anywhere else with a lot of noise nearly impossible to navigate, as I can’t filter one voice from another.
Other neurodivergent traits and mental illness in my family lead to disdainful looks and disparaging comments from the public.
Potential friends ghost us when they get a taste of the chaos that is our life, unable to handle the stress.
Neighbors avoid us.
You might be experiencing stress just reading this list.
But aside from our church, the one environment I’ve found welcoming is the tabletop roleplaying game community, at least the ones I’ve facilitated. Here’s how that magic works:
Enchanting Communities
Support Limitless Champions to create more inclusive game worlds! On Kickstarter now!
While the enchantment school of magic tends to focus more on manipulating people, there’s power in making a roleplaying game community charming. An accessible environment communicates a welcoming atmosphere. Proactively designing an environment considers a wide range of access needs.
Consider diverse mobility needs. Do people have space to move?
How does your environment affect those with sensory needs, such as sensitivity to noise?
Do you allow electronic character sheets and other assistive technology?
Do you meet in a place that’s financially prohibitive to people on limited budgets, like a restaurant or a FLGS with a cover charge?
Do you exclude people like us from your game world? (Check out Limitless Champions as a way to add that representation.)
Evoking Trust
You can say you’re welcoming, but we’ve been targets of Vicious Mockery before, so you’ll need more than one successful Charisma check to gain our trust. So be patient with us if we seem reserved or aloof. It’s not arrogance. It’s caution. If you want people to feel like they can relax and truly have fun at your table, allow time for that to happen.
We may ask for less than we need, worried about how willing you are to coexist with us and being used to settling for less.
We want to be treated like any other member of the party, but don’t ignore our traits and degrees of ability, either. That is, we want to be accepted as we are, neither expecting us to be someone else nor treating us as inspirations.
When things get inconvenient for you, but you roll with it like you would any other friend’s needs, then we start to trust, but we all move at a different rate on that scale.
Conjuring Community
So you have a welcoming and inclusive environment, but we’re still sitting at home, reluctant to put ourselves out there. We may never know about you, and we’re probably not looking, because you’re a unicorn.
Join local online communities, and mention inclusion and representation. Demonstrate that you’re an ally.
If you play at an FLGS, put a copy of Limitless Heroics on the corner of the table.
Post flyers on LFG boards at your FLGS. Include a note that you’re accessible.
Friendship Necromancy
We may believe that the idea of social connections or even friendships is dead, that it would truly take some magic to change that. But by creating inclusive and welcoming spaces, we can create environments that truly communicate that D&D is for everyone.
How to Succeed in Tabletop Roleplaying Game Publishing
April 21, 2024
In September 2020, I left my 22-year career with no prospects. I picked up a temporary day job to pay the bills and provide health insurance, but in July 2021, I left that job to focus on roleplaying game development full-time. I didn’t have much to lose, since my day job wasn’t paying enough to sustain my family, but it was still a risk — something is better than nothing. I stepped into uncharted territory with a plan to launch a Kickstarter to get the business off the ground, but as an Enneagram Type 3 personality, I’m terrified of failure, so I was plagued by the question, “Will I succeed?” And not only do I consider myself already successful, but I believe I’ve learned how to do that, and in an industry where every challenge seems to be mythic, where the monster, once slain, rises again stronger than ever, it might be helpful to share my insights, as my road has been unlike most in this field.
Note: I’m presenting these observations and tips as a publisher, not a freelancer. It’s important that you decide which you want to be as you start out. If you start as a freelancer and don’t start building an audience right away, you’ll have some makeup work to do if you decide you want more control over your work. But publishing requires a lot of work that’s not just creating.
Choose Your Class
The three pillars of any RPGs are exploration, social, and combat. In TTRPG publishing, the tiers follow a similar pattern.
Exploration. Search yourself. What are your passions? What is your niche? What do you love creating? What mark do you want to leave on the hobby? What niche would you love to spend the next few years learning about, exploring, and working on?
Social. Find your audience. What niche is underserved? What are people requesting that isn’t available? It could be a topic, a unique combination of topics, or a new product. Maybe people want jellyfish-themed subclasses or feather dusters that look like phoenixes or cockatrices.
Combat. Where’s your proficiency? When you get to work, what are you good at? What do you have a knack for? Are you a wordsmith, an artist, a crafter, a speaker…what rolls do you have bonuses on?
Now find where all three of those overlap. You need the skill to make something valuable, or you won’t get compensated for your work. You need an audience that wants what you’re creating, even if they don’t know it yet, but it’s definitely easier if they know and are looking for it already. And you need passion, or it’ll get boring fast, and you don’t want to turn your hobby into a business only to get bored.
Thanks to recent events, my belief about this industry has been solidly confirmed that, just as TTRPGs are cooperative games, not competitive, the same is true of the TTRPG publishing industry. “A rising tide raises all ships.” Consequently, the most effective form of marketing in the TTRPG industry is cross-promotion.
So make friends. Find people who share your passions and your niche. But don’t stop there. Gamers often have eclectic tastes, so don’t limit your social circles. At the same time, by making friends whose lives and interests are different, you’ll expand your awareness, empathy, and creativity.
As you expand your social circle, start talking to your friends about cross-promotion. Or just promote their stuff without expectation of reciprocation. Just be a good friend. Over time, each of you will help each other, you’ll expose your audience to new products, and your audience will grow at the same time.
When I started, I thought I needed Twitter to build my audience. I met some cool people there before I moved to Mastodon, but the return on the time investment would have been better spent elsewhere. Here’s how to get started without Twitter:
Learn the Craft. Publishing a supplement is more detailed than creating an adventure or homebrew for your home game. Each game system requires certain standard syntax. Learn those phrases. Get involved in an online community like /r/UnearthedArcana/. Take the Write Your First Encounter course from the Storytelling Collective — it’s worth the cost.
Put some small free creations on DriveThruRPG. This is the easiest way to build an audience. If you start with free, people will try your work, and you’ll be able to email about half of them with future announcements. If writing is your specialty, not layout, find a template for Word or use GM Binder or Homebrewery for design, and use public domain art.
Create some slightly larger projects, and charge for them. (Don’t make them Pay What You Want. There’s no benefit to that.)
Meanwhile, start thinking about a Kickstarter, a project big enough to make it worth the platform, but it doesn’t need to be huge. A 30-page adventure, collection, or other supplement using stock art will get you started, and a low price tier for the digital format will encourage people to try your work with minimal risk. The goal of this project is less about income and more about number of backers. Use DriveThruRPG to fulfill at least the digital product, and they will allow you two emails to your customer list. And then when your backers get their finished product, they’ll be added to your email list there. Meanwhile, when you send out surveys at the end of your project, offer the opportunity to join an external email list, like Mailchimp’s free email tier. (Note: Mailchimp recently drastically reduced their free tier subscriber limit. You can start there, but you’ll need to move to something else quickly, so shop around.)
By the time you finish your first Kickstarter, you’ll have three ways to contact your audience: DriveThruRPG, Kickstarter backer updates, and your email list. Each has a different focus, so be careful how you use each one, and respect each group.
Repeat the process, adding collaborators to build larger products (or keep doing small ones if you want!), and you’re well on your way.
Keep Leveling Up
Part of the benefit of collaborating means learning. Use editors and sensitivity readers. They will help you learn how to make a better product. Hire extra writers, and learn from their styles. Get on Discords with other creators to improve your craft. Ask your peers to look at your works in progress, and invite feedback.
Merging hobby with career is wonderful, but you still have to account for exhaustion. Running a business doesn’t typically have “office hours,” since the to-do list grows faster than you can check items off, and I typically find myself working 50+ hours/week, and my mind is often on work when it should be on family.
Find another hobby. I set goals to read a certain number of comic books via my Marvel Unlimited subscription each week. It allows me to relax and feed my creativity with a different medium and genre than high fantasy TTRPG.
Invest in your values. Think about what’s most important to you. For me, it’s my Christian faith and my family. If I want both of those to grow stronger, I need to invest time in them. For me, that means blocking out time on my calendar for those priorities and sticking with them. Thankfully, my wife loves me dearly and won’t let me neglect those values. If your time use doesn’t reflect your values, consider asking someone to hold you accountable to your own goals. I use RescueTime to set productivity goals, but it also helps me limit my work.
It’s a Game. If it’s not fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Tying back to the first point, TTRPGs are amazing, but publishing has major challenges. It won’t always be fun, but check with yourself — when it’s time to start your work, are you excited or dreading it? That can change depending on the day’s plans, but how do you feel about it overall? If you start to dread it, you may want to consider a different field or at least a different approach. Maybe you need to hire people to take some of the drudgery from you. As I often tell my children, “Make choices that give you what you want.”
What I wish I knew before I started
Finally, here’s a few tips I learned along the way that might be helpful to someone:
VAT: If you use DriveThruRPG for fulfillment, they handle VAT and other international details. If you don’t live in the EU, it’s almost impossible to ship physical products there due to VAT unless you work through a distributor. Especially when you’re just starting out, using their Print on Demand service is invaluable.
Proofread your updates: You can edit updates for up to 30 minutes after you post them, but most backers read it in their email, so they won’t see the typos you fixed. I sent out 2 updates with subject lines that said our pre-order store was open when it wasn’t yet, because I thought it would be when I started the message, but then plans changed, and I forgot to edit the subject.
Figure out how you’re going to handle pledge management in advance. Contact the company you’re planning to use. Get it set up and ready to launch as soon as possible, preferably shortly after you launch your campaign. Know how to import your backers into it. I tried importing my backers into Gamefound, and while adding people was easy, I gave up trying to import their pledges in a form that worked with our campaign.
Marketing isn’t evil. It’s just letting people know about the cool stuff you’re making so they don’t miss it. Even though Limitless Heroics had 2300 backers, more people keep finding it. Our website continues to get significant traffic from Kickstarter, even though the campaign ended a year ago. The more we get the word out, the more people who want this will know it exists. Just be honest.
Twitter is lousy for marketing. I can count on one hand the number of people in this industry who have built a publishing business using Twitter as their primary marketing platform, and they all spent thousands of hours there interacting, and even then, the number of paying customers to followers is minuscule. Twitter is useful for freelancers, because it’s about building relationships, not topics, and the algorithm demotes offsite links. But no matter what social media platforms you use, email is still king and the most effective way to connect with those interested in your work..
DriveThruRPG’s 2 PoD options have significant pros and cons. When I launched the Limitless Heroics Kickstarter, I had no idea how it would be received, whether anyone would want it, so I chose their voucher system that didn’t include the print cost in the backer tier. It was the lowest risk, but it led to a lot of confusion. I still get frustrated backer comments and messages about it. If you’re not sure about your project’s popularity or plan to allow for a lot of backer-submitted content or stretch goals that could increase the page count, this insures that print costs don’t outweigh backer tier amounts, but be prepared to answer a lot of questions after the campaign when it’s time for fulfillment, and be very clear about how this works in advance, repeating it frequently. Also, the boilerplate messaging that OneBookShelf offers for this process is confusing. Here’s my suggestion to reword it, but IANAL.
This campaign offers a digital copy as the main reward. However, backers can also pay extra after the campaign to get a discounted physical printed version of the book or cards through OneBookShelf’s Print-On-Demand (POD) service. The POD version will become available to order after the digital version has been completed. Backers will receive a link to purchase the discounted POD version from OneBookShelf.
So, what’s your TTRPG publishing journey like? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
What the New Barbie With Down Syndrome Can Teach Us About Inclusivity in TTRPGs
As we see this gradual shift in representation in toys, we normalize disabilities in the lives of children. That way, we transform a “plastic” toy into a subtle tool to normalize people with disabilities in their lives, preventing othering and expanding their awareness and acceptance.
This new doll allows children with Down syndrome to play with toys that look like them and represent their experience, just as toys have added more racial and cultural representation in recent decades.
But this toy is for other kids, too, so the fantasy worlds they create in their pretend play includes disabled people as much as any others. And the more we get accurate and respectful portrayals in multiple forms of media, the more understanding, empathy, and acceptance will be mirrored in children’s play and their subsequent real-world interactions and relationships.
I’ve seen this impact in my own children. Because my work and passion lead to many conversations at home about disabilities and inclusion, and they love the service animals in Limitless Heroics, when we met a student at their school with a service dog, they reacted as they would to someone’s cool new backpack—they thought it was cool but not strange. When they encounter people in their lives with disabilities, they notice the differences and are sensitive to them, but they don’t think of them as “those people.” They are “my friends.”
What can we learn from Barbie about inclusivity in TTRPGs?
Ollie, the halfling/dragonborn bard with Down syndrome from Limitless Champions
The new Barbie doll with Down syndrome has something to teach us about the importance of representation in TTRPGs. By demonstrating the importance of accuracy and inclusion of disabilities and other characteristics in our characters, Barbie provides an opportunity to continue a much-needed conversation about inclusivity within the realm of gaming.
How can featuring characters with disabilities, such as Down syndrome, in a respectful and dignified manner enhance inclusivity in TTRPGs?
What steps can game developers take to accurately reflect people with disabilities in stories and characters in TTRPGs?
How can TTRPG players create diverse and inclusive gaming environments that accommodate everyone, including those with disabilities?
How can we better listen to and consider feedback from players with disabilities in order to ensure inclusivity in all aspects of the game?
By learning from Barbie and paying attention to the importance of including diverse and accurate representations of disabilities, we can help create and foster more inclusive and respectful TTRPG communities.
3. StepsRamps to Improvements in Representation in TTRPGs
Although Barbie has taught us about the importance of representation in TTRPGs, there is still much work to be done when it comes to improving the game’s representation of those with disabilities. Here are some helpful movements to consider when trying to ensure that people with disabilities are properly represented in TTRPGs:
Creating characters with disabilities that are complex and multi-dimensional.
Making sure characters’ disabilities do not define them and limit them in any negative way.
Ongoing conversations with willing players who have disabilities to help shape that representation in game rules and worldbuilding.
Consider what accessibility looks like in your game world.
Making sure players with disabilities have the resources and support they need, both physical and social.
Considering how any special features, skills, equipment, or backstory related to a character’s disability impacts both the game and the players.
“You’re playing D&D? Who’s winning?” Has anyone ever asked you that? TTRPGs are uniquely cooperative. Properly played, everyone wins, because the success is more than loot or levels—it’s a welcoming environment and enjoyment for everyone. So imagine this box text describing the real world:
As you enter the room, you see a diverse group of adventurers gathered around a table, each with their own unique character sheets. One player, with a character that has a physical disability, shares their backstory with the group. The other players listen attentively and ask questions to better understand the character’s experience.
As they start to create their characters, the players encourage each other to consider incorporating diverse backgrounds and experiences. They work together to ensure that each character is balanced and equal in strength and credibility, regardless of any disabilities they may have.
As the quest unfolds, the players encounter a wide variety of NPCs, and some have disabilities as part of their larger descriptions and interactions.
Throughout their game, the players celebrate each other’s successes and work together to create solutions that benefit everyone. They make sure that all players, including those with disabilities, feel included and supported both in and out of the game.
As you watch, you realize that this group of adventurers has truly embraced the importance of inclusivity and diversity in TTRPGs. They have created a safe and welcoming environment where everyone can enjoy their adventures together.
The Cost of a D&D Wheelchair
April 21, 2024
By its use as a universal symbol of disability in the real world and its use throughout literature as the definitive representation of disability, it’s no wonder that, when people think of disability representation in TTRPG, wheelchairs roll into our minds immediately, so today (March 1) being International Wheelchair Day, let’s examine the role of wheelchairs in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons.
But what does a wheelchair cost in-game, both in gold and other expenses?
What is its purpose?
Some wish to include wheelchairs to make their game worlds more interesting or to give a real world minority representation in the game world. Following the lead of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which added prosthetic limbs as a magic item that perfectly replicates a missing limb without requiring attunement, a wheelchair, magic or not, may be gifted to players with only narrative mechanics. Pathfinder 2e likewise offers a basic wheelchair free as part of a character’s backstory or 5 sp or 5 gp, depending on the model, plus upgrades.
The Combat Wheelchair offers its most basic model for 20 gp with multiple upgrade options and associated costs and no mechanical penalties associated with the corresponding disabilities.
The cost, both in gold and other associated effects such as attunement or mechanics may be higher in your game. While understandable to want to give easy access to players, some groups may want to reflect the real world challenge of acquiring proper mobility aids, both in equipment and maintenance costs. You may want to reflect the difficulty of acquiring an expensive specialized device in a world with little or no medical insurance (which is the real world for many). The standard wheelchair in Limitless Heroics is 50 gp.
Do you require attunement slots for magic wheelchairs? How well can they navigate difficult terrain? Do they have limited levitation to more easily navigate obstacles like stairs? Do they follow the cost guidelines in chapter two of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, or do assistive items get a discount?
Ultimately, these decisions depend on the nature of your game, but even more, the desires of your group. While many dismiss any kind of disability or assistive representation in the name of verisimilitude (even though wheelchairs predate rapiers in the real world), it’s just as easy to explain why the wheelchair is there as why not.
But remember: you don’t owe the game anything. TTRPGs are all about the players. If including wheelchairs in your game, either PC’s, NPC’s, or other creatures (like the Goblin Wheelchair Cavalry!) communicates a more welcoming, “We’re open to all,” environment to your players, include them. If your players struggle to get the assistive care they need and want to forget about red tape for a few hours, let the local temple or artificer give them out for free. Maybe some gnomes like making them with minor added features that aren’t always reliable. Or maybe you want to represent the challenges of acquiring accessibility in the real world and explore ways in the game world that will spark ideas for the real world.
Magic Mobility
In your game world, the type of wheelchairs, especially magic wheelchairs, can vary according to the level of magic and technology.
In a magical steampunk world like Eberron, it may be powered by a bound elemental or clockwork. A dark fantasy world may have chairs made from arcane metals and spikes; in other worlds, a fiendish chair resembling a torture rack or a fey chair of braided crystal or wrapped in vines. And again, the costs would be dictated first by their role among your players and second by your world’s economy.
Ultimately, the cost of wheelchairs comes not in their expense, but in their value, partly to in-game characters, but mostly to your players.
However you incorporate them, you communicate the value of disabled people. It communicates acceptance instead of begrudging toleration. It makes your game accessible. It invites more people into the hobby.
