A Year in the TTRPG Industry
It is December, and it feels like time has completely flown by. Most of you probably know that my day job is being a teacher, and something that has always been stressed in my teaching career is the importance of reflection. Take a moment – what went well? Where is there room to improve? What are you proud of? Reflection is important in growing.
So, for the month of December – yes, this whole month – I'm going to be doing reflection. Consider this a series. I promise this length of reflection won't be an annual thing (unless y'all are super into it and want it to be), but at the end of the first year of Veritas Tabletop, I think taking a reflective lens to this past year will be valuable.
A sneak preview for the series: this week I'm going to talk about a bunch of general stuff, including some key lessons about the TTRPG industry that I've learned; later (the order is still being worked out), I'm going to write about products (games I've played, things I've written for sale, etc); I'll also write about my favorite articles I've written on the website this year, and I'll share some article stubs that never made it to full-length things; and on the 30th I'll share some goals for Year 2. Hopefully, that sounds interesting to everyone! If not... well... I'll see you in January with a return to my more typical content.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Indie Games
My biggest takeaway since starting Veritas Tabletop is a huge growth in my appreciation for indie games. I will confess that for years, I was in the "D&D leaves a ton of room for homebrewing it into different genres, so why bother learning a whole new system?" camp. I'd dabbled when friends wanted to run things other than D&D, including a Vampire: the Masquerade one-shot and a short Blades in the Dark campaign that launched and fell apart during 2020. I'd played one-shots of systems like 10 Candles for specific events with friends in college. I'd co-DMed a Star Wars campaign with an entirely homebrew system built by me and a friend, and it was, frankly, bad– poorly designed, and co-DMing fundamentally did not work for us, leading to the campaign ending with a whimper.
But I'd never even really considered running a campaign in a system other than D&D (except for the failed Star Wars adventure). Certainly, I never dared venture into that massive swath of games on DriveThruRPG.
Oh how wrong I was! I'll share some of the particular games that I've enjoyed in a later post, but I'll just say that my horizons have been broadened massively. There's so much out there that does genre fiction better than D&D, baked into its core. I will never be able to run horror in D&D as well as I can in Dread or in Vaesen.
While I cannot attribute this wholly to starting to write my own products / entering the TTRPG industry, working on writing supplements for games and my own products (and writing about TTRPGs on the blog) has introduced me to a larger breadth of games than I would have otherwise been exposed to. After all, I pretty much only knew D&D, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, and the Powered by the Apocalypse + Forged in the Dark ecosystem before this year.
A quote from my recent interview with Eren Ahn really helped me encapsulate this mentality shift:
There's a much bigger crowd of people who write more indie stuff [beyond Wizards of the Coast and Paizo]. Sometimes, those are not even really meant to be played; they're almost poetry, they're doing interesting things with tone and game vibe. – Eren Ahn, in an interview with me
Games are a particular form of art. I'd always seen this as "playing an RPG" and the act of communal storytelling. But the design of the games is also a form of art. Ignoring that whole artistic space of game design in the interest of "well, I can hack D&D to do X" really had me missing an entire artistic field that I was not seeing until I started making art in that space.
Classic Rant: Playing TTRPGs is like cooking in ceramic cookware, and making TTRPGs is like pottery. It's folk art inside folk art. And yes, there are equivalents to celebrity chefs and cookware brands who are mass-marketing the stuff on their side. (1/?)
— Levi Kornelsen (@levikornelsen.bsky.social) 2024-10-18T18:35:42.867Z
Post by Levi Kornelsen on Bluesky
So, just in that, this year has marked a tremendous mental shift for myself and the way that I think about TTRPGs.
Creators
The other thing I learned by "being a part of the TTRPG industry"--even though I have a heavy dose of imposter syndrome about that label, since I've pretty much just written supplements to other systems and not my own thing from scratch--is that the RPG space is an incredibly welcoming world.
I absolutely hate marketing and most forms of social media (in my personal life, I had an old Facebook page I never use, a TikTok I only watch stuff on, and a Reddit that I'd use mostly to read stuff on r/DnDBehindtheScreen... and that was it), but I forced myself to get a Twitter and to start posting on Reddit. Twitter was long past its prime, and so I also got a Mastodon because it seemed better. I figured out how to use the Discord that I had made in college and forgotten the log-in for, because everyone said that was a crucial space for RPG discussions. And in late September, I got a Bluesky because a bunch of people on Mastodon were saying that Bluesky seemed to be the place most people on Twitter were migrating to.
With the exception of Twitter and (occasionally) Reddit, those spaces have been universally welcoming. I got to participate in VaesenCon as a panelist, despite not knowing anyone involved in the planning. I had one of my childhood RPG heroes (the guy whose advice blog I was reading when I was first learning to GM) favorite my introduction post on Mastodon.
But I wanted to shout out a few of the people who have been exceptionally welcoming or interesting follows, who I have particularly enjoyed interacting with and--if not always getting to know them in conversation--at least getting to know their thoughts by what they share. Consider this my "joining RPG Bluesky" starter pack.
John Hedge, who I first met through a VaesenCon panel. He has wonderful thoughts about horror, RPGs, Vaesen specifically, and about moving beyond the standard D&D fare of heroic fantasy.
Levi Kornelsen is someone I found entirely through Mastodon and followed on Bluesky as soon as I got an account. His discussion of genre, his work on fantasy cultures, and his musings on RPG theory are some of the most interesting content I've seen. He's a must-follow.
Alex posts a (mostly) daily TTRPG question, which has helped me break through writer's block multiple times by giving me something simple and creative to write about. And it fosters such a fun community space for discussion and seeing what other people are doing.
Keith Ammann is another RPG hero of mine, the author of The Monsters Know: one of the most focused blogs I've read. I've used Keith's website as a resource for years, and so when he replied to one of my posts on Bluesky, I was beyond honored. Anyways, follow him for good political content and also a really great analysis of D&D.
There are plenty of others doing amazing work, but I wanted to highlight these four who have really helped elevate my experience as a person new to the whole social scene of TTRPGs.
Conclusion
This has been a wonderful project for me to embark on, and I've really enjoyed my first year making Veritas Tabletop. I've been welcomed into a wonderful community, and my own horizons have been broadened immensely. I've played new games and had a lot of fun doing them! I've had great social media interactions and wonderful conversations out loud with other creators through VaesenCon and from my interview with Eren Ahn. I have become a better GM and a more thoughtful RPG player as a result, and I'm so excited for Year 2.
Next week, I'll highlight some of those products – things I've played, things I've written, things I've bought purely for their artistic merit that I doubt I'll ever actually play.
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