Brackish Draught

Everything I Know About Making RPGs

This blog post is inspired by a panel I was on at Sabrecon in 2025. Unlike most panels, we ended up with two and a half hours to talk about making RPGs with a small group of people. After filling the time, I felt like there was still so much more basic advice that we never got a chance to discuss. This blog post is my attempt to actually put it all on paper for someone who wants to read it. A more reasonable blogger would have broken this up into a lengthy series of posts, but I’m making it a single wall of text because I have a deep appreciation for the absurd.

Usual disclaimer: I’m no expert. If you want real top-tier advice, check out Explorers Design, Skeleton Code Machine, Break My Game, or the Dice Exploder podcast. I ran a single small but successful Kickstarter in 2024. The RPG industry changes so quickly that some of my experience is already outdated, and will only get more outdated. That said, I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to other game designers about their experiences, and if nothing else, perhaps this blog can serve as a record of what it was like to have been a small RPG creator in the RPG golden age of the mid 2020s. I think it will be fun for me to look back at it in a decade and see how my opinions have changed.

Setting Expectations

There are two good reasons to make RPGs:

  1. Because you want to make games for the sake of making games.
  2. Because you want a game that does something specific for your home group, and you haven’t found it yet.

It’s not worth making RPGs for money or fame. You can get a little bit of both from them, but you will make money faster working any minimum wage job, and the total number of people in the world who care about RPG designers is tiny. There are very few people who make a full-time living out of RPGs, and like a lot of creative professions, it’s not an easy life. Like any other creative professions, it’s only worth pursuing as a full-time job if you love it so much that you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else. Personally, I’m not planning to quit my day job.

That said, I absolutely think games are worth making for their own sake. Game design is fun, game design can engage and express the totality of human emotion like other creative arts, and, in a world that grows more gamified each day, the act of making your own game gives you insight into why that world is designed as it is.

One neat side benefit of making RPGs is that you can get to know a community of very nice and interesting fellow creators, just as you can from any other reasonably social hobby.

What should I make first?

If you want to make RPGs, there’s a good chance you already have an idea of what you want to make – and you should just go ahead and do that. The only people worth making an RPG for are yourself and the people you personally game with. It’s not a good use of time making something you think the market or fans will want. If you don’t really care about what you’re making, it will show.

That said, if you’re looking for inspiration or have a lot of ideas and don’t know where to start, I would recommend starting small and working your way up. Begin by making a one-page RPG or some content for another game you like: a single item, a creature, a short adventure, some optional rules. This will help you learn the process, get comfortable with sharing your work, and meet other people who can give you advice. From there you can work your way up to larger projects.

I see a lot of designers starting by trying to make their own RPG system. This is fine, but it’s worth spending a little time to consider your other options. If what you really want is to write about is an interesting world you’ve built, think about writing it up as a setting for an existing RPG system. If you have an interesting premise for adventures, think about making a campaign or collection of scenarios. If you want to make your own system with original rules, think about making it a hack of an existing system. There are lots of advantages to working with other systems. You’ll find tested mechanics and an already-made community ready to help you.

Hacks and Third-Party Content

Before you start working with another RPG system, look for an SRD and their policy on third-party creators. An SRD or “System Reference Document” is basically a guide on how to modify a game: if you find one, it’s a good sign the original designer is friendly to people building on their work. For working with games by single designers or small studios, go ahead and reach out to the creators: not only is it polite to ask permission, but they’ll usually be delighted that someone is engaging in their work, and may offer help or publicity. Larger publishers will usually have policies on their website about using their work. Read them carefully!

Some designers will release all of their work under some version of a creative commons or open gaming license, letting anyone remix it however they want. Some, especially older and larger companies, will charge a license fee. I’ve also seen terms along the lines of “you can build a new game using an 'engine' from one of our existing games for free, but if you want to make third-party content in the world of one of our existing games, then there’s an approval process and a fee.” Some of the biggest players in RPGs, like Chaosium and White Wolf, have official third-party content programs that provide resources and infrastructure, for a price.

Here are some popular RPG engines that have been released under an open-source license, meaning anyone can hack them:

While Apocalypse World is not technically under a Creative Commons license, its creators are extremely supportive of hacks and it is one of the most hacked game engines in existence.

Here's an excellent longer but far from exhaustive list of open game engines: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-list-all-the-open-games-systems.909369/

A little bit of self-promo: my own game Fear & Panic is Creative Commons and should be easy to hack.

The Reading List

Here’s a reading list of RPGs that can help expose you to a lot of different design ideas. It’s not an exhaustive list of must-reads or a list of the best games; those tasks are beyond me.

Other Sources of Inspiration:

One interesting thing I’ve heard people say, and said myself is, “there’s nothing I want to make that other people haven’t already done better than I could.” I think that feeling is a sign to go top up on inspiration from outside the world of RPGs, maybe even outside the world of popular speculative fiction. Go read something that most other people haven’t, maybe something very old or very niche. Go read some nonfiction – history, anthropology, science, current events. Listen to a podcast or watch a movie if you don’t feel like reading. Or engage viscerally with the world in which you live; go to a concert, go to a performance, go on a walk, volunteer for a cause, do some gig work on a weekend. The real world is full of strangeness beyond anything fiction can dream of.

Actually Making The Game

Start by figuring out what you’re making before you worry too much about layout, art, or specific word choices. If you have good ideas, keep notes of them, and if you’re a visual artist, draw what you feel like, but don’t commission art or design your book yet. A lot is going to change over the course of design. You want to at least finish the mechanics before you worry about art and layout.

Feedback and Playtesting

Share what you have with other people as early and as often as you can. Sharing your work will give you original insights, save you time on noticing problems, and give you motivation to keep creating.

Run playtests as soon as you have something coherent enough for players to understand. The sooner you start incorporating the things you learn from playtesting into your work, the easier and more effective it will be. I personally believe that a mediocre game designer who incorporates playtest results into their work will make a better game than a talented designer who doesn’t playtest.

When playtesting, it’s just as important to pay attention to what players do as it is to pay attention to what they say. Look for answers to specific questions. Don’t ask, “is this fun”? Any game with good friends will be fun. Ask, “does this mechanic incentivize the type of play I want”? Ask, “did you feel like you had meaningful choices in moments of peril”?

There’s an old adage about playtesting: “When people tell you what’s wrong, they’re probably right. When people tell you how to fix it, they’re probably wrong.” Trust your players on things like how a game made them feel, and be receptive to their suggestions, but it’s ultimately up to you to decide if it’s a problem and how you want to fix it.

Writing the Game

At some point you’ll either be satisfied with your work or too tired of it to keep reiterating. Then it’s time to write up a final version. Try to write clearly and accessibly unless you have a reason not to. If you can say something just as clearly in fewer words, do so: shorter works are more likely to be read thoroughly, need less time for layout, and cost less to print. If you have complicated rules, include examples. Unless you are deliberately trying to be coy, it can be very helpful to include some explanations of why certain rules are the way they are, either throughout the rules or in a separate chapter near the end. Don’t try to write so precisely that you eliminate all possibility of a rules-lawyer twisting your words. You are writing a textbook that people have to find fun to read, which is enough of a challenge – don’t try to also make it an ironclad legal document.

A specific piece of writing advice included in homage to game designer Greg Stolze: avoid using the future conditional. Instead of saying, “the conductor will charge $5 a ticket”, say, “the conductor charges $5 a ticket”.

Releasing The Game

At this point, you need to decide how your game is going to be released. Each answer sets you down a very different path when it comes to art, visual design, and business.

No Release

There’s nothing wrong with this! If you’re making games for fun, you are not obligated to share them with the world. You can run them for your home table if you feel like it, or maybe leave your notes in a shoebox for future generations to discover. It’s certainly the least stressful.

Blog Post

The easiest way to share your games with the world is through a blog. You can post little pieces of design as you come up with them, or just drop an entire system in a blog post. You might post a link to a PDF or a Google doc that you continually edit, like GLOG.

One advantage of sharing games through a blog is that you can easily get comments. One disadvantage is that you will need regular effort to remove bots from those comments. You can always use a blogging platform without a comment section, but then you miss out on feedback and community. Another disadvantage of sharing games by blog is that it’s very difficult to get paid anything this way. You do always have the option of taking content off of a blog and later publishing it another way.

Patreon/Ghost.io

Patreon pioneered this business model, but after some creator unfriendly moves, people have been seeking alternatives like ghost.io. People pay you a monthly subscription, and in exchange you give them whatever you feel like – playtest copies, full finished games, random thoughts about game design. This is a great option if you already have at least some dedicated fans, but if you already have some dedicated fans, you probably don’t need the advice in this blog post.

Online-Only PDF Release

There are two major online marketplaces for RPGs: DrivethruRPG (DTRPG) and itch.io. DTRPG is an older, web 1.0 style site that takes some effort to create a store page on, while Itch is a newer web 2.0 style site that is extremely easy to use.

You can post games on both sites as free, for sale, or as pay-what-you-want. If you use PWYW, you can set a minimum price, or you can set a minimum price of $0, in which case most people will download your game for free but people will occasionally pay you. On Itch, you also have the option of selling a game but having “community copies” available for free. Some creators say that even when distributing a free game on Itch, it’s better to use PWYW $0 or a price and unlimited community copies. This is because people downloading free games don't count as purchasers, but people downloading community copies or paying $0 do, which will allow you to send them messages later if you have new games to announce.

I use Itch for most of my work. I don’t currently use DTRPG, although I plan to at some point. DTRPG has a larger number of users but takes a much higher cut of sales – as of right now, DTRPG takes 35% of all sales, or 30% for creators who sign an exclusivity agreement. Itch lets the designer choose how sales are split, all the way up to 0% for Itch and 100% for the designer.

I’ve heard anecdotally that DTRPG customers generally have higher standards for production quality and will hand out bad reviews to work that seems amateurish. Itch, on the other hand, is a site that thrives on people sharing early drafts and neat little things they made. If you’re trying to sell a game in any quantity on either site, it’s going to need art and layout, which we’ll get to below. If you’re just sharing something for free on Itch, you can get away with just converting a Microsoft Word or Google doc to a PDF. You should still post some kind of art for a thumbnail and a page image; just grab any relevant public domain image to use. I’ll also get more into public domain art below.

If you’re a really cool person, you’ll release your games in ePub format as well as PDF. EPub is more accessible, uses smaller file sizes, and doesn’t have deep connections to Adobe Inc.

Unique Webstore

You can build your own website and webstore to sell copies of your games. I have no experience with this, so there’s not much I can say about it. I imagine that it will be more difficult for people to find your games this way, but it will give you some independence.

This is offered as a service by DTRPG and some non-RPG-specific outlets. You upload a print-ready file (usually a PDF), and when a customer purchases a copy, DTRPG prints a single copy of your game and ships it to your customer. The advantage of this is that you can have the fun of seeing your work in a physical form, and there’s no financial risk to you. You won’t have unsold copies of your game sitting around. There are some real downsides, though. You will make very little money this way. The printing cost per copy will be high, and if you raise your prices to make more than a couple dollars after printing cost, your work will be much more expensive than other games. You will still need to make a game with high-quality art and layout that will look good when printed. You will not be able to do quality control, and the quality of POD books tends to be lower than traditionally printed books. You also will not be able to use any interesting printing options like recycled paper (although there is a sustainability benefit to not printing any more copies than will be purchased).

Handmade Zine

This might be the coolest option for distributing your game. Make your own physical copies. At its simplest, you can print off your game at your local library or office supply store and hand-staple it together. Use a zine template and a rotating stapler to make a basic staple-bound booklet. (Rotating staplers cost less than $15 and will save a lot of time and effort.) If you’re into handcrafts and enjoy working with physical media, there’s no limit to how complicated you can get: stamps, hand-drawn illustrations, calligraphy, riso printing, building your own printing press, sewing your own bindings.

You can give away, trade, or sell zines at gaming conventions, zine festivals, and art fairs. Some bookstores and libraries are also interested in zines. These will usually be smaller independent bookshops that focus on community building, and they will be willing to purchase zines directly from creators. These days, it’s common to see the word “zine” used to refer to any printed RPG that’s digest-sized, staple-bound, or both. It used to refer specifically to amateur fan publications. There’s also an entire world of non-RPG zines out there. For simplicity, I’m using zine in this blog post to refer to printed games with some handmade element.

Zines are very hard to put a price on. Their handmade, DIY nature makes them more valuable in some eyes and less valuable in others. I’ve seen zines of similar length and production quality selling for $2 a piece, $15 a piece, or being handed out for free.

Submission To A Publisher

So far, everything I’ve mentioned has been some kind of self-publication. This is not the only option. Existing RPG publishers put out requests for content all the time, whether it’s for a periodical magazine or a new book they’re working on. You can always look on the websites of your favorite RPGs and RPG publications to see what they’re taking submissions for. If your work is accepted, it’s guaranteed to go in front of an existing audience, and the publisher will handle a lot of business tasks that you would otherwise have to.

It’s easy to forget this is possible with the dazzling array of self-publication options available today, but I think more people should probably try it. That said, I don’t have any personal experience with submitting work to RPG publishers, just a few very old rejection letters from fiction publications. Definitely look elsewhere for advice on dealing with publishers, but here are a few key things to remember: read the submission guidelines carefully, treat every rejection letter as a step closer to publication, read the contract very carefully, and always be paid for your work.

Commercial Print Run

This is much more accessible today than it ever has been, but it’s still the most complicated and risky way to produce an RPG. You are now firmly in the territory of running a small business, and if you do not sell most of the copies that you print, you can lose money. At this point, your visual design, art, physical design, and business decisions all influence each other. It’s challenging to organize this information in a linear blog post, since everything is circular, but I’ll do my best. Let’s start with visual design.

Visual Design

You can get away without doing much visual design if you’re distributing a game for free, but the audience will expect it if they’re paying money. A lot of people who self-publish RPGs do it because they love visual design. If that’s you, then you already know more about this than I do. I’ve had to learn a bit about visual design. I found it a rewarding skill to develop, and I’ve done it for some of my games, but if I was doing a serious crowdfunding campaign I would still hire someone else who has more passion and skill at it.

You have 3-4 competing priorities for visual design: legibility, tone, advertising, and cost. There’s no single right way to prioritize these. If all you care about is legibility, that’s not too difficult. Use good, easy to read fonts. I’m fond of Atkinson Hyperlegible Next: it’s a free to use font that was developed by the Braille Institute to be accessible for readers with visual impairments. Do not use “dyslexia-friendly” fonts; they’re pseudoscience and do not actually help dyslexics. Give your pages nice, wide margins. If you’re printing full size pages (8.5x11” or A4) consider using two columns on each page; if you’re printing half size one column is fine. Make section headings large and legible – but it’s fine to use fun, less legible fonts for them. Use page numbers and a table of contents, but also break up the text with illustrations. Illustrations can serve as visual signposts; someone who doesn’t remember the page number of a relevant passage might still remember that it’s a couple pages past the picture of the troll driving a minivan.

If you take away only one thing about visual design, do not use a textured background or an image background for your text pages. Do not try to make your pages look like they are printed on parchment or newsprint or old faded paper. Even if it still seems legible to your eyes, this visual design choice will make your game too difficult to read for many people. It breaks my heart how many times I’ve heard people say that they liked a roleplaying game but couldn’t play it because the textured background made it too hard to read. It’s okay to do a background for title pages, handouts, and the occasional flavor page that has a limited amount of text, but the majority of the text in your game should be black text on a white page or maybe white text on a black page.

Visual design is an important way to convey the tone of your game. Even without including illustrations, visual design is a powerful artistic medium. Consider the differences between text formatted as the script of a play, an alchemical diagram, the output of a vintage computer terminal, or an office presentation. Those are extreme examples, but even subtle choices of font and spacing all convey tone. Unfortunately, I do not have this level of skill at visual design, so you’ll need to learn it somewhere else.

Visual design is also your game’s best, final, and sometimes only tool of advertising. It is what someone sees when they look at your game while browsing a bookshelf or a convention table. Part of that advertising is conveying a compelling tone, but there are a few other things that matter. Make sure your name is visible somewhere on the cover; when a book doesn’t have a recognizable named author, people sometimes dismiss it as a low-effort corporate production. Speaking of which, it never hurts to show that your work is free of AI content, both with words and a nice symbol like the one by Hinokodo. Sharp, contrasting colors are good at catching the human eyeball and making a game stand out in a cluttered environment. Anything you do that makes your game look different from other games on the shelf can also help.

Your final consideration with visual design is cost, which shows up in two forms, color and labor. Color is a recurring cost. If you use color, then every copy of your game that you print will have a higher cost. Most printers will offer three options for printing books. In order of least to most expensive: Black and white only, color covers and B&W pages, and full color printing. Labor is a one-time cost. If you want better quality visual design than you can do yourself, you’ll need to pay someone else to do it, and it won’t be cheap. There’s a reason many of the most prolific and successful self-published RPG designers are people who enjoy visual design at least as much as game design, and who do most of their own visual design.

I am a firm believer that visual design is more important than illustration, and that’s not a slight against the power of illustration. Without good visual design at the center to bring together your text and your illustrations, neither one will look their best. With good visual design, you can make an incredible-looking game using only Creative Commons artwork or the most basic sketches. The “0 edition” of Mothership from 2018 is an excellent example of this. If you have a choice between commissioning artwork or paying for quality visual design, I think that visual design will give you more sales for your money. At the same time, it’s worth learning as much as you can about visual design yourself, so you can collaborate better with anyone you hire, provide better art direction, and understand what you’re building when you put together a published RPG.

In 2026, the best design tool for most independent RPG publishers to use is Affinity Publisher. I’m sure this will change over the next 5-10 years, but as of today, Affinity is a free and powerful piece of layout software that is not too difficult to learn, and it is increasingly an industry standard. The free version does not include any AI features, although a paid version does. Its major competitor, Adobe Indesign, requires a regular subscription fee that may be more than an amateur creator’s entire revenue in a year. Indesign will also aggressively push AI features from the moment it’s installed. The major reason to use Indesign is that it is a standard at larger corporations; some people may have experience with it or free subscriptions through their day jobs. There are some open-source alternatives, and I encourage anyone who feels strongly about using open-source software to check them out, but they have steeper learning curves. For very small projects, it’s also possible to throw something together in Google Docs, Canva, or Microsoft Publisher. Even if you plan to hire someone for layout, I recommend learning enough Affinity to do simple tasks like changing the print run number before a second printing. That way you don’t have to pay someone when you need to change five words in your own game.

Illustrations

I’m making the slightly awkward choice to say “illustration” and “artwork” instead of art because the pedantic voice in my head won’t stop reminding me that every part of this process – game design, writing, visual design, even advertising – is art.

This is very much a skill I don’t have. If you have any ability as a visual artist, just skip this section, you know more than I do. Let’s say you don’t have any ability as a visual artist. That’s okay, you have lots of options! Some people find that looking at or planning illustrations helps throughout their creative process, and if that’s you, go for it. If that’s not you, then it usually helps to wait until you have the text of your game more or less finished before you go looking for illustrations.

There are three major categories of illustration for a published book: spot art, page art, and cover art. Spot art refers to small illustrations that can be sprinkled through a text. Page art is a full page illustration, and cover art is what it sounds like. You also want to think about thumbnail illustrations and banner illustrations for online distribution. A crowdfunding page will need a banner illustration, while an Itch page will need both a banner illustration and a 630x500 pixel thumbnail for displaying your game as a search result. (DTRPG just uses your cover for this because it’s formatted differently, but I wouldn’t recommend using your cover as an Itch thumbnail.)

Just like with visual design, illustrations have a major role in communicating tone and in getting people to pick up and play your game. You should be thoughtful about what you communicate with the illustrations you choose to include.

The easiest option for illustration is to use public domain artwork. Incredible artwork from most of human history is free to use from a variety of museums, libraries, and national institutions. There’s also plenty of recent artwork that has been released into the public domain by its creators, under licenses like Creative Commons. Make sure you read the licenses carefully on each piece. While a 17th century painting is in public domain, the scan of it uploaded by a museum is not: that scan is only public domain to the extent the museum has released it. Not all Creative Commons licenses allow for use in commercial works, and most require some sort of attribution. Be wary of big accumulator sites that may list work as Creative Commons even if it’s not. I was burned once when a supposedly Creative Commons font I used turned out to be very much copyrighted.

Here are some excellent guides to finding Creative Commons artwork to use:

Another option you have for free illustrations is to go take some photographs with your phone. Technically you are creating your own illustrations here, and you might not be as good as a hobbyist photographer with a lens collection, but it’s not that hard to take some photos that are good enough, especially if you add a filter or dither the image. (I don’t know much about dithering, but a friend recommends Dither Boy.)

If you’re not seeing what you like in creative commons artwork, you might consider purchasing an artpack from an artist. Artpacks are collections of already completed artwork, for sale at a much lower price than new, commissioned artwork. You can find art packs for RPGs on DTRPG, Itch, and artist websites. If you’re browsing on Itch, make sure you’re looking specifically for artpacks in the physical games category, since Itch will also have video game assets.

Artpacks for RPGs are a subcategory of stock art, which has existed in some since at least the 1920s: various kinds of already-extant visual artwork for sale for a discounted price. You can look for stock art from outside the RPG world as well. As always, be sure you read the licensing terms very carefully and understand what you’re buying.

Commissioning Artwork

The first step in commissioning artwork is to find an artist whose style you like. I like to browse Itch and DTRPG and look at cover art. If I see a cover I like, I check the credits of the game for the name of the artist. Sometimes I do the same with bandcamp and album covers. You can also find artists by looking into local visual arts communities; it’s always neat to work with someone who lives nearby. In 2026, if an artist reaches out to you first, they are probably a scammer.

Commissioning artwork is a business transaction, and it’s one you have to take seriously. Art isn’t cheap. You are hiring someone to spend a meaningful amount of their life working on your project, in exchange for a meaningful amount of money. You are also risking time and potentially money; there is always the possibility that an artist does not finish the art. Some artists are very professional and will be experts at dealing with clients (you), but others are not, and if you want to avoid issues, you will need to take responsibility for the business relationship.

When approaching an artist, you should ask if they’re open for commissions and ask them if they have a rate sheet and a standard contract they can share. You can also tell them a bit about your project and even share a draft for them to look at. If they have a rate sheet and a standard contract, that’s a really good sign, but plenty of skilled artists won’t have those.

Once an artist agrees to work with you, you should discuss the basics of what you’re looking to buy: how many pieces, their size, their complexity, and if they’re black and white or color. Bring lots of references: illustrations from the artist’s own portfolio or from other artists that are similar in size, level of detail, and style to what you’re expecting. You should discuss timing: shorter deadlines cost more. You should discuss licensing: are you purchasing the right to use the artwork for a single print run, or are you purchasing all rights to the artwork? Do you plan to release the artwork as Creative Commons? You should discuss workflow: if there’s something you don’t like about the final product, what number of revisions are you allowed to ask the artist for? This is where the “right answer” is to have lawyers create a contract. I am not a lawyer and nothing in this blog should count as legal advice. In practice, lawyers are rarely involved in commissioning art for independent RPGs in 2026, because the total amount of money changing hands is usually in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars.

I can give some relationship advice. If you want to have healthy relationships with your artists, you should make sure you both have a clear mutual understanding of the following before the artist picks up a pencil: the scope of work being commissioned, which artistic rights are included in the purchase, how much the artist will be paid, how they will be paid including currency and payment platform, when they will be paid, when they will deliver the art by, and how much you will communicate while they are working on the art. This should be in writing so you can refer back to it later, because neither of you will remember it perfectly by the time the art is done. It should not be a text message. It should be an email or PDF so it can’t get lost.

After you’ve come to a written agreement, the artist should share some basic, low-effort sketches with you to show you what they’re planning to create. This is when you can go back and forth, sharing more references and having deep, fruitful conversations about what you would like the artwork to look like. Everyone is different, but in my experience, most artists like lots of references and specific requests. When sharing references, make it clear what about the reference you particularly like: it is the style, the color, the mood, the expressions on the character’s faces, the shapes of the buildings, etc. This helps make sure the final work will be to your satisfaction, and if you’ve done a good job of picking an artist in the first place, the kinds of things you’re excited to see on a page will be the same kinds of things they like to draw. That doesn’t mean you should micromanage every detail in an image; ideally you’ll share enthusiasm for the work and be able to bounce some good ideas off each other in the early sketch stage.

Once you’ve told the artist you’re happy with an idea they’re proposing, they’ll go ahead and work on a final piece. They may check in with you at a couple steps along the way, and you may have agreed on a certain number of revisions, but as a piece of artwork gets closer and closer to completion it takes more time and effort to make changes. Once the piece is done, you’re limited to the number of revisions you agreed on at the start of the project (most likely 1-2); use them wisely, if at all.

Sometimes, an artist doesn’t deliver. They might get sick, have family issues, or have any number of reasons why they can’t complete your piece. This is bad for everyone involved, but it’s a risk you need to be aware of before deciding to commission artwork. It’s also why having good relationships with reliable artists is so valuable.

Color, Size, Quantity

The larger or more complicated a piece of artwork is, the longer it will take to create and the more it will cost. If a piece of artwork is in color, it will cost more, take longer, and you are committing to the more expensive option of printing in color. The more pieces you commission, the longer it will take an artist to complete them all. You can always commission multiple artists to work simultaneously, and that’s normal for longer books. Of course, the more artists you hire, the more likely it is that at least one will be unable to meet a deadline. With multiple artists, you may want to coordinate your art direction to make sure the final book has a coherent visual style. This isn’t required, but some gamers really value coherent visual style, and are vocal about it.

If you’re going to commission a single piece of illustration, I would recommend starting with the cover. That’s the one piece of art more people will see than any other. A good cover illustration works with your visual design to be a good advertisement for the game. A good cover doesn’t need to be a complicated piece. It just needs to draw attention and communicate something about the game. I’ve seen expensive, detailed commissioned cover artwork fail to draw attention, and I’ve seen stock art with a nice sharp color contrast succeed at grabbing eyeballs. I’ve personally found that a color cover and black-and-white interior art is the sweet spot for my own work.

Physical Design

There are three major forms of binding for books: staple, perfect, spiral, and sewn. Some printers will talk about Smyth-sewn binding; this is just the most common type of sewn binding. Don’t bother with spiral binding; it’s easily damaged, does not pack or store well, costs too much for what it is, and is the most environmentally damaging version of binding.

Staple binding is cheap and excellent for shorter books, but it doesn’t work well for books with over 60 pages. One downside of staple-bound books is that they don’t have a wide enough spine to display a title, so they can’t show off their title on a shelf. A store will need a magazine-rack style display to show them off.

Perfect binding uses glue. It’s very common, and it does give your book enough of a spine to show off a title. Perfect binding is good for books that are longer than 40 pages.

Sewn bindings are considered a luxury or high-end binding option. They’re very durable but more expensive than the other binding options. Sewn bindings are also best for longer books.

There are two major page sizes for a book: half size and full size. Unfortunately, the US uses a slightly different paper size from the rest of the world, so there are really four sizes. The US full size is 8.5” by 11”, also known as letter size or magazine size. The US half size is 5.5” by 8.5”, also known as digest size. In the rest of the world, full size is 297mm by 210 mm, almost always called A4, and half size is 210mm by 148 mm, almost always called A5. They are just different enough that you cannot print a book designed for US paper sizes on international paper sizes.

A5 and digest sizes are very convenient and portable. I would recommend them unless you have a work so long that you need to reduce the page count, or you want to include diagrams so large they need a full size page. I personally design my games in A5, because I print both in the US and UK. The US printers I used charged more for A5 than digest, but the UK printers I used charged the same for both. You may have a different experience with the printers you use. Paper comes in a variety of weights; thicker paper feels nicer and is more durable, but costs more. You can usually get a sample pack from your printer. You can also go to an art supply store and feel different paper weights there to get a sense of what you’d like for your book.

Any paper your printer uses should be FSC certified. This is a basic supply-chain certification that the paper materials were not harvested illegally, in violation of human rights, or in a particularly environmentally egregious way. It is extremely common, even for the most affordable paper options; I would not trust a printer who cannot meet the bare minimum of FSC certification. If you are printing in the EU, don’t bother checking for FSC certification, because they already have much stricter regulations in place.

If you would like to be even more environmentally friendly, you can use uncoated paper. Most printers default to paper coated with a thin layer of a clay and plastic mix, which gives it a smoother feeling and glossier appearance. Uncoated paper has a rougher feel and might remind readers of old comic books or phonebooks. Coated paper makes printed images look a little sharper, but I’ve found that in practice, modern printing techniques are good enough that I can’t tell the difference. When I put books printed on coated vs uncoated paper side by side, it’s harder to see a difference than I expected it to be. As a material I would recommend uncoated paper, but due to a lower demand, the price can be higher at some printers. The same goes for recycled paper – it’s easy to find a printer who offers 100% recycled paper, but the price will be higher. It’s up to you if the cost is worth it to you. My personal belief is that printed RPG books are a luxury; I try to make the PDF versions of my games affordable, but I’m fine charging more or making a little less profit on the printed versions.

There are some really interesting alternative types of paper like sugarcane paper and linen paper, but I’ve personally never found one that is both affordable and available from a printer I’m considering working with.

For book covers, I’m only familiar with paperbacks, not hardcover. If you print a staple bound book, you can save a lot of money by not using a cover. You just print the cover art on the front of the first page. Because this saves both an additional material and an additional step of the printing process, it will lower your costs significantly. If you do this, it’s worth using a nicer, higher weight paper for the whole book; the increase in paper cost will be more than offset by the savings from not having a cover.

You can still use a separate cover for a staple-bound book, and you’ll need one for a perfect bound book. Your cover will need to be thicker than the rest of the book, and it may have an additional finish. I strongly recommend getting samples from your publisher of their cover finishes before choosing one. The most common options for finishes are gloss or matte. Gloss is shiny and hard; it looks a little cheaper but it has the best resistance to water and stains. Matte is softer and I find it has more of a luxury look and feel to it, but it’s less resistant to water and stains. You can also use an uncoated cover, which will just be an extra-thick piece of uncoated paper. This has the least durability, but I’ve found it’s still fine for most purposes. I think an uncoated cover is great for a self-contained game or an adventure that might only be played a couple times, while a coated cover makes sense for a corebook that might be frequently referred to by players with greasy fingers.

Finding a Printer

There are two major kinds of commercial printing: digital and offset. Digital printing is a bit like a larger-scale version of your office printer. Offset printing involves making printing plates for each page – it’s a bit like what most people imagine when they think of a printing press. Digital printing is cheaper for small print runs, while offset printing has a single high price to create the plates, and then can print any number of copies at a very low price. For print runs of 500 copies or less, digital printing will be your only option. Offset printing starts to show cost savings somewhere around the 1000 copy mark.

Some bad news: if you live in the USA, your friendly local print shop is probably not very good. Normally I love buying local, but I’ve heard nothing but horror stories from people using local print shops, in a variety of towns across the US. You can expect the highest possible prices along with poor customer service and very limited printing options. I don’t know why this is, but I suspect it has a lot to do with economies of scale. Your local print shop is running a couple small digital printers, potentially paying an urban rent, and likely deals more with promotional materials for businesses and weddings than with book printing. You will probably have more luck working with a regional or national printing company. I don’t want to recommend a particular company here because my previous favorite took a turn for the worse recently, but get on social media and ask RPG designers in your area who they use; they’ll usually be happy to talk and share recommendations or warnings. If you don’t live in the US, this may not apply to you; printing may look different where you live.

Printing is generally cheaper outside the US. Even the UK and Canada can print books with at least the same quality for lower prices. You can find much lower printing prices in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. Personally, I like to print books as close as I can to the customers. I can only speak to the English-language RPG market. The largest market for RPG books in the English language is the US. The second largest is the UK, the third is Canada, and there are at least some people interested in buying and playing English-language RPGs almost everywhere in the world. I use a US-based printer for the books I’m planning to sell in the US; this is how I get the shortest delivery distances, cheapest shipping costs, and avoid any paperwork involving importing or tariffs. I could probably increase my profits by using an overseas printer, but as someone who has grown up in a country shaped by the costs of offshoring industry, I’m not eager to start doing it myself.

On the other hand, I do use UK printers for the books I plan to sell in the UK and internationally. I am able to do this because I’ve worked with some truly excellent partners in the UK who can help facilitate that side of the business, including Peregrine Coast Press and Patchwork Fez Games. I’d strongly recommend reaching out to Peregrine Coast Press if you’re not in the UK and interested in selling there (Patchwork Fez is more specialized in a specific brand of horror, but if that’s your vibe you might reach out to them instead). Why do I print my books for international sale in the UK and not the US? Because it’s cheaper to ship from the UK to any other country on the planet, including Canada and Mexico. If I regularly sold more copies, I might also think about getting a printer and partner in the EU to handle the stricter printing regulations that they’re putting into place.

Splitting up print runs like this does come with a cost. The larger the print run, the lower the cost per unit. If I printed the entire run in one country, the cost per unit would be lower for me, but then the shipping costs for my customers would be higher. Similarly, if you print both hardcover and paperback versions of your game, it will cost you more. I would always recommend printing a game in only one format at a time; pick whichever you feel is best for your game. If you run out of copies and need to do another print run, then you can switch if you feel like it.

One final piece of advice on picking a printer: order a test print of a few copies before committing to the full run of books. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as receiving boxes of books and realizing they don’t look the way you were expecting.

To Crowdfund or Not?

Here’s the big question. Crowdfunding will make you anxious and miserable for months. It will force you to run your small business to deadlines and expectations that will make it very much a second job and not a fun hobby. With that in mind, why does everyone crowdfund?

  1. Some people only shop for games on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Backerkit, and Crowdfundr. Since you can only crowdfund before you release a game (sort of), if you ever want to reach these gamers, you have to crowdfund your game.
  2. If you do not have the money on hand to commission art or pay for a print run, and you want to see your work in print, then crowdfunding provides you with a way to do that.
  3. Crowdfunding gives you the best data you can get about how many books to print. It’s not good data, but it’s the best you can get, and this is such an important decision that having any data at all is useful.

Some more info on that third point. The fact that the cost of printing each book drops with the size of the print run is the core mechanic of the printing game. If you have a small run, your books will cost a lot to print and you will have to sell them for a high price, which reduces how many you sell. If you have a large run, you can print them cheaply and either lower your price or have more money to spend on things like art. If you print too many books and don’t sell them, then you lose money, and may have boxes of unsold books filling up your living room (or worse, that you have to pay someone else to store). A crowdfund gives you a minimum number of physical copies purchased. There’s also a rule of thumb that if you print twice the number of games you sold in the crowdfund, you’ll probably be able to sell most of them in a year or two. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s better than nothing.

This might be a comically long blog post, but crowdfunding is still too big and complicated a topic to really get into here. I would refer anyone to the Stonemaier guide; it’s written for board games, but much of it applies to crowdfunding as well. Web of the Gigantic Spider provides a really interesting monthly RPG crowdfunding data report.

I’m going to give a few crowdfunding tips here, but this is not an exhaustive list:

The more you have completed before you launch a crowdfunding campaign, the more successful it will be and the better your life will be. Ideally, you should at least have the rules finished and the text of the game completed. If you can have the book already laid out and ready to print, then that’s the best possible world. If you need the crowdfunding money to commission artwork and layout, that’s okay, and it’s what crowdfunding was invented for, it’s just going to be a little more stressful.

For a smaller campaign, you can save money by handling fulfillment yourself: ship the print run to your home, package them with your own hands, and ship them at your local post office. If you do this, there are mailing services like PirateShip that can help with the cost. If you'd rather not turn your home into a shipping warehouse for a while, you can hire a third-party fulfillment service. My personal favorite is Indie Press Revolution, also known as IPR, an exclusively RPG operation run by people who have a personal passion for supporting independent creators. IPR does international fulfillment, but they're located in the US, so for the games I printed in the UK I had Peregrine Coast Press handle fulfillment. I couldn't recommend either of them enough.

Distribution

Maybe you didn’t do a crowdfunding campaign, or maybe you did and it’s all wrapped up. You’re selling your PDFs online, and maybe you’ve put your physical book on your webstore as well. How else can you sell your printed books?

You can sell it in person at conventions and local art fairs. Check your local laws; you may need a license for this. Start with small conventions to get an idea of how many copies you can move in a few hours; big conventions can charge over a thousand dollars for a stall. This is a great way to hone your sales pitch and meet people, but it probably won’t move that many copies.

If your friendly local game store is cool, they may be willing to buy your game directly from you. It never hurts to ask, but if they’re not interested, don’t pressure them. You can expect them to pay 50% of your MSRP – that is, the price that they’ll be charging customers. They’ll ask you for the MSRP, to make sure they’re not selling it for much less or much more than it’s being sold elsewhere. After crowdfunding (where you keep 90% of revenue) or direct sales to customers (where it depends on payment platform), this is the next best deal you’ll get in distribution. That remaining 50% of the price goes to pay the game store’s rent and keep their doors open. Depending on how popular your game is and how popular the store is, you can expect to move between 3-4 copies a month and 3-4 copies a year at your local game store. You can also reach out to small webstores like Tabletop Bookshelf or The Pit of Infinite Shadow in the same way you would reach out to your local game store.

If you want to sell more copies than that, you will need a distributor. A distributor will sell your book to stores around the world, and probably on their own webstore as well. They’ll also take their own cut of the revenue, on top of the cut the final seller takes. At the end of the day, you can expect to lose 60-70% of the final sale price of the game to intermediaries, and that’s before sales and discounts. This is why you should price your game so you still make a profit at 30% of the retail price! When you reach out to a distributor, they will offer you a contract. At this point, it’s worth bringing in a lawyer to review the contract with you. Remember that you can always request a change in a contract before you sign it, and you can always walk away. Be on the lookout for contractual terms that require you to buy back unsold books; I’ve heard a few horror stories about those.

Indie Press Revolution provides distribution as well as fulfillment services. They're a great first distributor to work with while learning more about the business of games. While this is not legal advice, they are the one distributor who I personally feel comfortable signing a contract with without a lawyer involved.

Advertising

Crowdfunding websites, distributors and your local game store can make your game available for purchase, but they won’t really make it move. You need to do your own advertising.

I’ve never done traditional advertising, so I can’t really give advice there. I know there are people who take out ad campaigns on social media platforms, and sometimes they see results, but I’d rather not deal with that.

One thing I’ve found very effective is giving out review copies. Free review copies are worth the cost! I look for bloggers, podcasters, actual players and game reviewers who like games similar to mine, and then I send them a free copy. If I think it’s a really good fit and they make their mailing address public, I’ll just send them a copy in the mail. If not, I’ll send them a PDF. If I go to a convention, I try to have review copies I can hand out in person. Always be polite when sending review copies, and expect that most of the time you won’t hear back, or you’ll get an answer that politely says, “I’ll see if I have time to get around to it!” Honest reviews are usually not 100% positive, but that’s okay – it’s good just to get your name out there. (If I ever get a truly scathing review I’ll take it as a point of pride.)

Get some business cards – they’re surprisingly cheap. You can hand them out at conventions or meetups to any interested gamer so they remember where to look for your games.

It’s also worth talking about your game in online communities. I use Bluesky, and I’ve found that simply having positive interactions with other RPG people on Bluesky, even when I’m not talking about my own game, can lead people to click the link in my bio and go download some of my games. I use Mastodon as well, and I’m active in both large and small RPG communities on Discord. I used to get some reliable interest from my favorite forum, Yog-sothoth.com, but alas it closed down this year. While I don’t do it myself, I think becoming part of the RPG communities on reddit, facebook, tumblr, or the larger still existing forums could pay off. Don’t just drop an announcement that your game is on sale – share your creative process and get people invested in it at every step.

If you’re seeing a theme, it’s that I only do advertising to the degree I enjoy. You can always do more advertising and networking. You can always trade more of your hours for more sales. But there are diminishing returns, and you have to find the balance in your life. On the plus side, there really is no better feeling in the world than hearing an actual play group run a game you wrote and have a memorable time with it.

Awards

Awards can be a useful tool in advertising, networking, and helping curate the world of RPGs. There are a variety of awards in the world of RPGs. Most of them are only available for games that were published in the previous year, and most of them require you to submit your game. Very often, the answer to “why didn’t this incredible game win an award?” is, “because the designer didn’t submit it for consideration”.

Even if you don’t think you’re going to win – and nobody thinks they’re going to win – it’s worth submitting your games to some of the major awards, like the Ennies and the Origins award. You can also look around for more casual community awards, like The Awards. I know quite a few people who have received nominations or awards for games they made early in their career, and which were not runaway successes in crowdfunding. It’s a lot of fun!

And that's all I know.

But I hope to learn a little more all the time.

If you enjoyed this blog post, you can find my work here, see my social media accounts on Linktree, and subscribe to this blog via email or RSS feed.

Sincerely,

Lyme