The Adventure Gaming Periodical - Issue #15 - Two Years of RV Games

Appreciating the Journey

Jul 25, 2024

This July newsletter celebrates two years of RV Games! It’s been quite a ride, four successful Kickstarters and a successful BackerKit Crowdfunding game and distribution for more. We’ve had three successful Crowd Sales on The Game Crafter for our Microgames, which is a line we will continue to focus on later in the year and next. However, this online magazine has proven to be a glimmer of positivity even when we have a slow month for sales, it’s where I’ve been able to publish very personal essays where I can be as Queer as I want to be.

Nuts and Bolts, Practical Learning

At this point, RV Games now has a roster of four different writers who we are guiding along the writing development process from pamphlets or rules supplements to Zines to hardcover campaign sized books. I love writing my own work, but I’ve realized that I love publishing and supporting people in this better even better. For me, writing entails a necessary level of pain and introspection, that isn’t necessarily a joyful creative process for me, so supporting others through this is something that fills my bucket.

We’ll have a bunch of exciting projects to announce throughout the rest of this year and 2025. It’s taken two years, but we now have the infrastructure and pipeline to be a true multi-project company. We tend to follow the Roger Corman model: releasing many smaller budget projects instead of focusing on singular blockbuster products. The lower your budget, the fewer copies that you need to be profitable, and it spreads the risk out better than sinking everything into a single large project. However, it also means that you need to be constantly publishing and crowdfunding and selling your back catalog as add-ons during the next campaign. You also need to have a deep enough pipeline that you can deprecate older modules for newer ones and hopefully develop some evergreen products that get multiple print runs.

Just like I’ve learned to always have multiple suppliers, fulfillment partners, and distributors and back-up artists, writers, and editors for projects, I’ve also learned from my own misfires (Mitosis was not as highly received as we had hoped), working with other folks, and observing the industry that you don’t want to have a single point-of-failure in the form of one large project on which your entire company depends. This is why even though we’re moving much more firmly into the realm of hardcover and boxed modules and games through 2025, we still keep ourselves firmly planted in the ecosystem of zines and pamphlets.

Zines and pamphlets are a great way to develop new writers since the budgets are lower and the timelines shorter, and new writers need practice to develop their craft before they can put together a book-length commercial level manuscript. We will continue to leave a spot open in February for a new writer who we will support through ZineQuest and beyond. We’ll publish anyone with good ideas and writing skills and who takes well to editorial feedback, but we also strongly lean towards bringing forward voices of folks traditionally marginalized in the ttrpg community with an especially strong focus on Queer designers and writers.

Loving Kindness

I practice mindfulness and meditation regularly, and the type of meditation that has the most impact on me is “Loving Kindness” meditation where you grant yourself permission to give yourself love and kindness and then you put these wishes out into the world for others. This meditation always leaves me as a sobbing mess, being so full of love.

There’s two different events that have happened in 2024 that made me evaluate how I incorporate love and care into my business. Working with doctoral students is my day job, and I lead with love and care and humanity when working with my students. However, my work with RV Games was still rather transactional even when working with folks who are my friends.

Return to Perinthos

In January, the legendary game designer Jennell Jaquays passed away. As part of processing this as a community, we helped to spearhead a game jam and book, Return to Perinthos, benefiting her family. We were able to immediately give her family $4,300, which covered their ambulance bills, and we will have more money for her family once everything is complete and fulfilled.

What was most evident to me when I watched Jennell’s funeral was that Jennell was such a kind influence and mentor for so many people. I realized that I want nothing more than to be remembered as positively as her. It’s great to make influential games, but building love and care and community is what’s most important.

The Hecate Cassette Archive Curse

The need to focus on building community over building games came into full view as we have worked on Hecate Cassette Archive. The team working on this module has encountered the following things:

Multiple cross country moves
Major breakups/divorces
Ill parents
Family hospitalizations
Death of a family dog upon returning home from hospitalizations
Housing issues

With all of this life stacked on top of each other, we decided that the module had been cursed!

People started disappearing from contact, and I could see resentment start to build as folks went MIA. At this point, it’s when I started sharing vulnerable things about myself with the rest of the team. My relationship with Joshua Justice became especially close as we have worked through this. I started holding more whole team meetings and explicitly checking in with people to see how they are doing. We now start our meetings seeing how everyone is doing, and we know about what’s going on in each other’s lives.

At this point, this same team could make absolutely anything together. We’ve managed to support each other through this curse and have turned into a small community that is full of love. Queer joy is real!

Writer’s Group

As I saw the team cohere around the HCA curse, I realized that I was also missing out on opportunities to bring together the writers who work with RV Games. I created a writer’s group for five of us (myself, Joshua Justice, Chris Airiau, DiscoDan, and Shea Perry), and it has turned into a community space full of connection and collaboration. The next year of RV Games is going to a big one with all of us putting out medium to large scale projects, and they’re all going to be stronger through this community space.

Memory

Not everyone is lucky enough to make it through crowdfunding and the business aspects of the indie ttrpg world unscathed. In a recent post, Crab Dominion, dissected the failure of their own Mothership Kickstarter, Memory. RV Games is the publisher mentioned in the post who reached out to try and fulfill the back catalog for Crab Dominion while taking on Memory as a long-term project to get it completed to the extent promised during the Kickstarter. Even though this publishing deal was unable to come through, we’ve still been working with D.N. Wilkie to put together a print & play/digital version of Memory based on the CC-licensed manuscript shared by Crab Dominion at the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign and by recovering art from Zach Hazard Vaupen. This module is being released for free in this newsletter, on Itch, and on DTRPG. This is not my module, so it will always be free, releasing it is a gift for the backers of Memory and for the Mothership community. It falls short of the 32-pages promised by the Kickstarter, but this module is really great work, and it would be a shame if it’s not shared with world in some form.