Myriad Methods Distilled

Dave and I decided to fire up White Haired Man from its 5 year hiatus a little over a month ago. During this time we have carefully considered our past products, formats, and the methods we used to create them. This was an important process for us as one of the primary reasons we drifted off to sleep was producing our adventure into many formats. So, imagine writing 50 to 88 page adventures, chock full of art, and careful consideration of trade dress all produced together into a beautiful digital product in the format of a PDF. Now, the PDF requires extensive work to have it more useful via links.

 Then another format would be to take all the raw files and reproduce it into a format usable in Fantasy Grounds, an online multiplayer roleplaying platform. This platform also required tweaking with XML programming, similar to HTML, yet different. All the artwork would have to be properly sized for this new format, often edited heavily for use. The maps and floor plans in particular were a nightmare to convert. Fantasy Grounds also needed digital artwork tokens that would be used to represent our horrors, creatures, NPCs, etc. Whew, sounds exhausting.

But wait there's more! All of that work discussed above only covered the OGL version of rules. We thought at the time that having our work available for other rule systems would be ideal. Maybe it was for customers...but, for us it meant editing the original content to conform to a wholly new set of in game rules. We sought out a license to become a Savage Worlds third party publisher. After meeting in person at GenCon in 2008, White Haired Man was granted permission to publish for Savage Worlds.With this license in hand we reproduced our adventures into a format suitable for Savage Worlds rules. Then, all of the previously mentioned work needed to be performed again. Create and modify PDF. Create Fantasy Grounds format, then edit carefully in XML.

When we set out to create adventures we needed a place for them to call home. So we created a backwater swamp area known as Kith'takharos. Each adventure we produced in a series of five adventures added more background, npcs, lore, etc to the setting. Such in fact that after we had published all five adventures we were able to create a sixth product for just the setting itself. These adventures were written to be played either as a self contained adventure, or they could be hung together and run as a series of adventures with enough setting to be a full fledged campaign.

We considered all of this extra work to produce alternate formats and frankly, we almost threw in the towel. However, we have the experience of editing our adventures, why not simply edit the way we approach this area of our business. With that in mind we have decided to move forward and produce an adventure in a new setting with the working title "The Warten Confederacy." This time around we plan to build up the setting organically as we did before. So, the first adventure will reveal enough of "The Warten Confederacy," as needed to run the adventure. As before we are creating our setting in a way that it may simple be added into a GM's existing world, wherever a coastal city may be located. This should make it easy for a GM to 'shoe-horn' in our work, while preserving the overall touch and feel of their own self-created world.

Other GM's may use our adventure products to run our adventures in a series of loosely connected adventures, adopting our world as their own. Either method works, and we believe GM's will appreciate the choice.

Lastly, we do not plan to 'port' over our work into myriads of formats. We are planning to produce shorter, more concise 32 page (plus or minus) adventures exclusively for Savage Worlds in PDF format only. We will sell our products through DriveThruRPG.com. We have no plans to produce a website at this time, yet another time saver. If we decide to do anything web related it will be to point to DriveThruRPG and have our customers buy through them. I am thinking of creating and running digital marketing campaign's. This free's us of the obligation of maintaining a website with commerce abilities, along with being responsible for our customers identity and credit card data.

The only area we are not sure how best to address is marketing. How do you let others know that you have a product available? We don't know all the answers. What we do know is that this blog will hopefully attract others who may have an interest in RPG adventure products. If you are reading this, you are that person!

We are also discussing a proper Kickstarter campaign to launch our product. This will allow us to gauge interest in the form of a group of people willing to invest money into our product, and help us to execute the final push for hiring artists and polishing an already written and designed adventure.

What else can we do to increase our audience? What have you done to increase your audience, reach, sales, etc. How do you market for your small start up? Follow this blog by adding your email, you'll be notified as each article is published. Feel free to respond to any and all articles, or like a previous response, present me with what you would like to know more about. I will do what I can to respond in kind.

Soon I will be back at making the City of Warten into a map usable for an upcoming adventure we are writing/designing. But not before continuing on with a personal miniature painting project for Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu.