Josh D | Vaulted Pyramid

Ah yes! That's a good one to look at. I've got a copy sitting in a pile somewhere. Ideal it'd be neat to find a way to get a group in on the action instead of it being solo. Maybe just a duet would be more viable.

"Flip a card to unveil the ghost and roll a die to see how good of a picture you took" or some bullshit like that. But would that be "scary"? Probably not.

With Dread in mind, I do wonder if there's a way to get a physical action in there. Like may some kind of card pulling game with a wagering mechanic that still has some skill to it. Not that I particularly enjoy card RPGs either way.

Do you think there's a way to create a Fatal Frame TTRPG in a manner that's actually fun to play and isn't just "horror game that happens to have a camera that deals d6 damage to ghosts"? The whole game is based around the visual component, so can that experience be emulated in theater of the mind?

My money is on two playable protagonists like Alan Wake 2. They already updated Jesse’s model for the AW2 DLC after all. Whether or not she has the suit we’ll have to wait and see. (There’s also the theory that Jesse and Dylan were the same person, but were fractured at some point)

It was awesome talking to Chris about a favorite Mothership module of mine, Picket Line Tango on the Ansible Uplink!

The Goonies is an interesting one (I just rewatched it like 2 weeks ago) where the main characters are not engaging with it, but the story was inspired by Santo Cristo de Burgos, a 17th century Spanish ship built in the Philippines to facilitate trade between Asia and “New Spain” (Mexico).

2013’s Tomb Raider takes a novel approach with Lara being this naïve recent graduate who wants to make a mark but ends up getting stranded on the island, making it more of a “survival” narrative than one that focuses too heavily on the tomb raiding.

Uncharted does an interesting job with this by making it pretty explicit that Nate and Sully are thieves. They may be fighting worse thieves, but their actions are framed by the narrative as being morally gray.

National Treasure came pretty dang close by using America’s mythology. Though its sequel couldn’t resist the allure of the “hidden Native American city of gold”.

Do you think it’s possible to create an adventure movie with the charm of Indiana Jones or The Mummy without the imperialist fantasy?

UHF Contact: modern horror TTRPG adventure collection Struggle for survival in this analog horror zine!

Just launched UHF Contact, an adventure collection for Liminal Horror with art by David Szilagyi

www.kickstarter.com/projects/mal...

Whenever I need a pick me up, I remind myself that there are currently 61 published novels that began as Reylo fanfics. That list expands to over 200 if we’re talking just being inspired by the pairing. At least one of them has been turned into a movie that’s already wrapped filming.

I'm under the impression that this is basically "bare minimal mechanic conversion to start playtesting", with the vibes coming later. Having read a bunch of Chris's playtests in the past, they all go through pretty radical changes. So we shall see!

Public Access spawned one of my favorite RPG campaigns of all time. I’ve been champing at the bit for the physical version, so I’m happy it’s finally coming.

Since the digital baseline price is 50% of physical, for every PDF I sell I make about $17.50. To make the same amount of money, I would need to raise my digital price to be about 65% of the physical (~$32.50). Thats not unreasonable, but it’s still more than the market currently supports.

If we look at the retail model, the physical retailer takes about a 50% cut while the digital retailer takes about a 30% cut. So for every physical book I sell, I make about $21.50.

Every PDF that is then sold under that $43 mark is undervalued respective to its physical counterpart. However, the market currently demands that PDFs are sold at about 50% of the physical. So even if I’m selling them directly, I’m making less off of them.

Let’s start with the direct-to-consumer model, where I have the greatest control over the product. In that case, for every hardcover I sell, I make about $43. That right there becomes the baseline “worth” of the PDF. But the consumer by and large refuses to pay that due to a perceived lesser value.

Let’s say I have a 300 page hardcover book that I’m selling for $50. To have that printed and shipped to me, it’s about $7/ea right now if I’ve got an order of at least 1,000. I’m going to ignore various considerations here to keep the numbers round.

It costs about $8-$10mil for a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl. So if you’re a company that’s willing to spend that kind of cash, why the fuck then would you use your slot for dogshit AI that makes your product look terrible?????????

I’ve been mulling over ideas for a “business card dungeon” for like 6 months and the thought to make it folded never crossed my mind. Good shit here.

Even if we factor in those initial printing and shipping costs, you're only looking at about another 10% difference, which does vary depending on scale and type of product. But the more units you can afford to produce, the cheaper the per unit cost becomes.

DriveThruRPG takes a 30% cut, as you've said. With the nice round numbers, that would mean digital copies should only be about 20% less than their physical counterparts, but the market currently doesn't accept that, which is the root of the problem I've identified here.

After costs are recouped, the revenue split is usually 50/50. The additional shipping costs to send the units out are paid directly by the consumer and any additional handling costs not covered under those fees come out of the publisher's 50% share as their standard operating costs.

Under normal circumstances, those are the costs I would have been paying anyway, so the publisher covering it doesn't change anything. I could print, sell wholesale, and double handle, which drives up the costs of course, but those are messy details not suited for the limitations of a thread here.

So when I work with a publisher or storefront, and I've worked with several, the typical process is that I provide them a completed file, they pay for the printing and shipping directly to their warehouse, and those costs are then deducted from the revenue until it's paid off.

But beyond personal preference, that perceived additional worth of that book in your hand is only the worth of the paper its printed on, and that ain't much.

Where physical production is tricky is that you need that cash up front. You can space out the costs of art and editing over a longer production period or through profit sharing, but when it comes time to print you need that sum of money on hand. That's where pre-orders generally come into play.

I can go on Mixam right now and get 100 copies of a 40 page zine printed for like $1.50 each. Let's say I spent about $2k on art and editing, not even counting for my time writing and doing layout. For those 100 zines, the per unit cost would be $20 (assuming no further prints).