Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/7/2021
- Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Core Rules
- Battletech: ilClan
- BLASTER: Volume 3
- M20: Technocracy Reloaded
- Trails of Ash and Bone
Top News Stories
DM’s Guild Releases Print-On-Demand Guidelines: Announced in the DriveThruRPG Discord on Wednesday, the DM’s Guild has established guidelines for community content getting to Print-On-Demand. First, it has to be said that this does make PoD on the Guild more accessible than it was – we checked with DM’s Guild staff, and prior to this the only way to have a printed product on the Guild was on a very limited case-by-case basis – Exploring Eberron is the only one to have crossed our desk. That doesn’t mean it’s now actually easy.
In addition to all of the usual guidelines familiar to DTRPG’s PoD market, all print files need to be completed by a Guild-approved layout designer, of which there are currently only four. Only products that are already Platinum Best Sellers or higher, or new products from a creator who has another product that is Platinum or higher, can be submitted. In terms of actual numbers that means more than a thousand copies sold – only 889 products (3.47% of everything on the guild) meet that specification as of this writing, and it’s likely that that does not translate to 889 individual creators. Finally, a product has to have 100 or more pages, meaning even many of those Platinum or higher products still don’t qualify – a quick count seems to show that only 20 of the 72 Adamantine products, the bestsellers, would make the cut.
Some of these restrictions make internal sense, particularly the layout requirement – you’re playing in the Guild’s sandbox, it tracks that you’d be held to a certain standard of quality. Still, while undeniably more attainable than it was, actually calling the Guild’s Print-on-Demand program ‘accessible’ doesn’t quite fit either. It’s early days yet, though; hopefully this is the first step towards a greater number of creators getting to see their work on the printed page.
Discussion of the Week
The Avatar Kickstarter and TTRPG Cross-Pollination: The Kickstarter for Avatar Legends from Magpie Games has shattered records for TTRPG projects by raising $2,502,090 as this is written, a number that will be hilariously outdated by the time we add a period to the end of this sentence. It has also, predictably, kicked off discussions ranging from the right of licensed games to use kickstarter at all to how much, if at all, Magpie’s success will either help or harm everything from other individual projects to the entire TTRPG industry/crowdfunding mechanism. In all the fervor, though, we’ve found one thread by @JazzElves to be particularly worth a look, talking about entry points for the hobby and the best ways, Avatar or otherwise, to actually get people playing new games.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
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