Products that I Wrote in 2024
If you've missed the past few weeks, for the month of December, I'm reflecting on my first year in the TTRPG industry. Today's focus is on products I wrote, and how I feel that I grew over the course of the year; next week, I'll focus on articles that I wrote.
The Beginning
At the start of the year, I was still running my Wild West-themed D&D 5e campaign, which inspired my first ever three products. I published The Tusall Gang, a collection of NPCs that I had directly used in that campaign. Basically, I stripped out the my-world-specific parts of the characters so that they could be more broadly used in a setting-neutral way, and then released them.
The second thing that I published was Quill Quest: the Outlaw's Tale, which was basically a choose your own adventure story using the solo-RPG Quill ruleset (which I reviewed on the blog).
A few weeks later, I released a pack of new spider stat blocks for D&D, which I had also used in my Wild West campaign--and in the campaign before that. On the blog, I worked through in detail how I balanced and built one of the new spiders.
All of these were in keeping with what I had originally set out to do with the blog: have a space to publish the homebrew stuff I was making for my home games, in the hopes that other people would see it. Quill Quest was a little beyond that scope, but I had enjoyed Quill and gotten inspired to write my own, and I was steeped in Wild West media for the campaign. Creating it was pretty easy, and let me use some of the content that I had researched that was not directly applicable to the campaign itself.
But a bunch of the homebrew stuff I was working on for the home campaign was not quite fit for publication. I have a homebrew species/lineage system that I kept iterating on, but which had ballooned into being a little unwieldy by the time of this campaign. I wanted another campaign of revision before I dared publish it. A lot of my homebrew subclasses could probably have been published, but some of them were tweaks on stuff other people had written and I didn't want to step on anyone's toes. With the 2024 rules coming out, also, I was hesitant to release anything major, because I wanted to see the changes to see about making things compatible with the new rules.
Besides, if I was just releasing the homebrew that I was using in my home games, it would be a lot of small monster packs--often without that coherent a theme--which I wasn't all that interested in trying to sell. Plus, I wanted to connect the blog to the products that I was selling, and I couldn't really think of good articles to write about a lot of the homebrew I actually was using.
Inspired by the Blog
This gave way to "phase 2" of the products that I was actually producing. These next three products were all basically geared towards an idea I had for the blog, that I then wanted to turn into a product.
I wrote a faction (technically system-neutral, but geared for use with D&D 5e in a lot of ways) built around the Luddites. I wrote this because I was inspired by the Luddite movement for a blog post. I was browsing for blog topics by looking at the "today in history" page of Encyclopedia Brittanica, saw that March 11th was the start of the Luddite revolts in England, and knew that I wanted to write in defense of the Luddites– I'd taught a lot about the Luddite movement at my previous job, and so I had a lot of knowledge about them to share. The blog post, in turn, inspired the product, completely disconnected from anything that I was actually running.
The same basic process happened for my next pair of products, which I released for April Fool's Day. April 1st happened to line up with when I was releasing a post, and so I wanted to talk about jesters to be topical. As I wrote about them, I had the idea for another collection of NPCs--like I did with the Tusall Gang. The result was my Fools of April collection, with fantastic art by Carissa Knickerbocker (one of my players, who does a bunch of art for my home games, who I tapped to draw stuff for the products I make). Fools of April did not really fit into being a D&D supplement--the jesters would not really be combat-focused, and so the result was a system-neutral thing that really made me start thinking more about writing stuff for other systems.
But I did also release a D&D product for April Fools Day: a jester background, which I then updated for the 2024 rules.
All three of these products were pretty much built as a way to extend the blog articles, since I wanted to be writing products, and not just the blog--in part, I'll admit, just to pay for the website's hosting fees, since the blog is meant to be free. But the issue there is timing! Writing a 1000-2000 word article every week takes a decent amount of time, especially if I'm doing history research for the post, and writing a whole second thing (a product) usually takes even longer than just an article. As a result, I only felt like I could do a product when I was ahead of the game on writing the articles, which meant that I was writing way fewer products than I wanted to... leading to stage 3.
Months of No New Products
Phase 3 of the year was the stretch between April Fools and October, when I released nothing for sale. As a teacher, the end of the year is always busier than normal (as I'm preparing students for their state tests). Then, I was traveling for a big chunk of the summer. In the aftermath, I was really just trying to stay on top of the blog--devoted readers will remember a few weeks where I didn't really publish anything on the blog, even, because I was behind after my vacation.
Plus, I wanted to write something bigger. A lot of the things I'd written were small, pay-what-you-want little collections. A background, a set of monsters. The NPC collections were worth charging for because of all the fantastic original art, but everything else was so small and short that making it anything other than Pay-What-You-Want would have felt counterproductive.
So, I set myself up to write a whole big collection of new goblins. I wrote the blog posts to research it, which was extremely fun to do. But I made a tremendous mistake--I wrote the blogs before sitting down to actually write the product. I needed to do research for the different goblins, and so I wrote about my research and my thought process as I went. I didn't have time for both the articles and writing the product (for the reasons I described in phase 2), but that meant that I sat down at the start of summer to turn the posts into a product and... completely lost motivation. I'd done all the fun parts, and now there was just this hugely daunting project. The product itself languished over the summer, until by the early fall, it was so long removed from when I'd been trying to hype it up with the blog posts that a lot of the fun was removed from it.
Will I come back to the project? Maybe. Hopefully. But I'm certainly not committing to any time frame on having something publishable.
That also meant that any time I sat down to write something smaller, I felt guilty that I wasn't working on the big thing. So, instead, nothing got produced. The blog continued (mostly), but nothing was ever "published, for sale." I learned my lesson though; I'm not going to write about the research or writing that I'm doing for a bigger-scale project until I have a draft of the project, so that I don't lose steam by putting everything into the blog.
October
Phase 4 was in October, when I released two new things. One was a vampire player option for D&D, and the other was a Vampire creature for Vaesen. Both of these were small, meant to get back into the swing of writing finished products after the whole Guide to Goblins momentum-killer. Both were things for existing systems.
I had known that I wanted to do a vampire-themed October since I started the blog--a little more on this next week. My initial plans for the month included more D&D content, but as I have gone out and tried new systems and grown increasingly disenchanted with D&D as a system, publishing a whole bunch of D&D vampire things felt like it no longer aligned with the blog/the website/my interests. So, one D&D thing and one thing for Vaesen.
And it did help at restarting the momentum! I'm working on some projects to publish in 2025--though again, I'm not going to write about them until I have them at least drafted. I'm working on some bigger things that won't just be little drips of small-form content--maybe a whole adventure, maybe some bigger creature collections. I'm hoping to write more Vaesen stuff because I really enjoyed building the vampire.
Key Reflections
Reflecting on the year, a few lessons stand out to me:
1) I can't share all my research and work-in-progress ideas, or I'll lose the momentum to actually write the thing. They can either go hand-in-hand, like with a short product (ex: the April Fools things), or I can do the product first and then go back to talk about it (ex: the process behind the D&D vampire, or some of the phase 1 homebrew shares).
2) I want to write something bigger, but I've mostly written small things this year, and I want that to change. It is hard to maintain momentum on a single product/project, but if I want to release something more complex, I need to prioritize that. I also can't expect to whip up something more complex in a short period of time; I actually am going to need to sit with something for a while, if I want a bigger product. I'm never going to be hugely prolific.
Next week, I'll continue my reflections, turning to the articles and posts that I've written this year. Be sure to subscribe to make sure you don't miss it--there are both weekly and monthly versions, depending on how much of me you want in your inbox.
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