The Invincible QuickStart arrived this week and, hot on the tails of it, we discovered that the system has some obvious homage to TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes and, if I say so myself, a lot of DNA similar to my Enhanced book for Twilight 2000. It itself was heavily influenced by our unreleased game Beyond Human.

Enhanced provides a framework for super soldiers in the Twilight War, based on alien particles discovered in the aftermath of the Tunguska Event. From these mutagenic agents, the Americans build heroes at their secret base in Raven Rock and the Soviets build monsters which roam the forests of the Urals.

So, I dug out the Enhanced book and the Beyond Human texts and cadged together a quick Character Generator for Invincible.

It’s about 95% compatible I’m guessing. Allowing the creation of Characters that will easily function in Invincible. The differences I can see are…our Hit Points are slightly higher as we retain Endurance in the mix….and that’s the major one.

Should whet your appetite a little more for what’s coming.

As mentioned elsewhere I’m about to start a Witcher campaign at my local club. I’m going to use YZE rather than Interlock though. Why?

Well that’s the Interlock character sheet and this is the YZE one we will be using.

In response to this post on Reddit.

Please don’t take this as any more than a spirited devils advocate in the spirit of debate and jocularity. I’m not disagreeing with you per se or saying you’re wrong.
This isn’t a defence of that other thing but it is maybe being a little honest about what it means to be an indie. It’s not all roses and buttercups and problems won’t be solved by putting away a few dollars every week.

Services like Fiverr are pretty terrible for sourcing art…particularly because there’s a good chance that when you pay your money, you’re just getting a “prompt engineer” anyway. I had a long relationship with an artist from around 2001 and just last year he switched to using AI to do the “groundwork” and allow him to focus on the specifics of what clients wanted. Why? Because he wanted more clients. So, I found a different artist.

Art is easily the single highest cost of my books and that includes my time in the commissioning process for free. It’s much more expensive than the writing. I mean, a small book might require 10 pieces of art – with very little re-use available to you. The next book might require another 10. By your numbers that means a cost of between 750 and 3000 per book on art. (it’s usually higher because commercial licenses tend to be higher for some reason and ten is a low amount of art).

For the indie (lets say the hundreds of one-person-bands out there bringing their RPG heartbreaker to life) that art cost is paid out before the book is finished; so before the book has a chance to earn a cent. Even if you’re not printing physical copies, you’ve months of writing and editing and planning and commissioning and hoping it delivers. You hope you’ll make back the investment in art alone because for many it is something they do after a day processing Excel sheets, or stacking shelves or backbreaking outdoors work – the real work which pays the bills. They would love to create and just live on the proceeds but that’s not going to be for everyone; the industry, like most industries, can only support so many rockstars and getting that right vibe isn’t for everyone.

Sure, you can spend months on a crowdfunding plan but knowing some folk who had successful kickstarter campaigns personally, one quipped after a few beers – “failure is better than success if you don’t make it big”. His kickstarter was enough to deliver the product to backers as long as nothing went wrong. And maybe he should have absolutely flooded Facebook/Insta/Reddit with adverts (as I saw some other company do recently).

And then, to top it all, you get a sense of how much you can charge. I am well aware that I self-limit – but that’s because I abhor fame and recognition (this isn’t my therapy session, dammit). So, you build the book over a few months, engage with people for testing and readthrus. commission and pay for art, then do the layout and post the finished product. 30-50% of cover price goes to the aggregator (meanwhile Apple is being hit for charging 30%). And out of what’s left you hope to cover the art for the next book. Which means probably 1000 sales. Probably more if you engage in promotions. Meanwhile you’re already to writing the next one while fielding piracy and people who think, without reading it, the book you’ve poured passion into isn’t worth a cup of coffee. Even better when they use a public forum (like Reddit) to tell a million people their opinion based on not reading it.

And that’s if you’re just trying to break even on cash. Survival wages in my part of the world are about €25,000. I’d have to be selling literally 20 times more books to earn that. (hey…and that’s the dream, right? I’d love to be able to sit here and hallucinate wildly onto paper every day). And the art costs would go up. Actually it might be cheaper to literally hire an artist with a salary than do commissions. And selling 20X more books? That means targetting one of the bigger markets like D&D or CoC. (and I don’t want to do that). D&D would seem to the obvious one – but everyone thinks that – so being specialised into a little niche kinda works. The D&D market is 20x bigger easily….but there’s 100x more competition for those precious leisure dollars. That would mean much more time spent on promotion – the bit I don’t like.

I’m very glad my TTRPG sales are funding artists and not my life.

Nothing more demoralising than seeing the proportion of gamers who think “artists should be paid” (oh, 90%?) and the proportion of gamers who set the PWYW amount on DTRPG to “zero” (oh, probably 95%). That’s some slap-in-the-face irony right there. One of the nice things about a little credit on DTRPG is that when someone in my creative community makes a new book, I have no problems dropping $10 on it even if it’s PWYW ($4).

To give a concrete example; in the last six months I sold 145 copies of one of my PWYW books…bringing in a grand total of $26.27, of which I saw…$18.30. The art cost for that book was about $300. A sunk cost because it’s an into to a later book (the one I just dropped more cash on art for) and I figure that’s 145 people I can send an email to and tell them about the next book, right?

Piracy is absolutely rampant in the industry as well. Never mind that web site that was eventually taken down (one of my early RPGs was on there and was evidently painstakingly scanned) but Scribd too? I don’t know how that site survives. And it’s not that pirates wouldn’t have bought the product – one of them did – but they also thought it was better that others didn’t have to. Kick in the nuts there.

Just this week I spent about $1000 on art. Not enough art for the books in the pipeline but then I needed a new laptop and so I’ll find the cash a little later. That will bring the total for art spend this calendar year (first six months) to around $2000 – that includes two stock art/photography subscriptions. The sales for books in the same period brought in $1514. Now the obvious response is “make better books” (which is pretty insulting) or get better at sales (which I have no interest in doing). That does include a Promo by DTRPG which sold one of the best books at a significant discount.

So that was $2000 to support art sources, and about $1000 in fees to DTRPG.

Buit I’m also running at -500 for the year. Whoops. Maybe I suck at business.

I’m not even going to address printing. A lot more work and you make even less. And the main sites for distributors take 80% of cover price. Out of the remaining 20% you commonly have to commission the art, lay it out, print the book and ship it to them at your cost. (and this is why I’m not on IPR – not their fault…but I was royally screwed by Key20 back in the day when they sold my books, kept the money and to get any remaining stock returned, I had to pay for shipping it back). Paper is bloody heavy.

So, it’s not easy….but it is enjoyable. As long as I’m not relying on it for the mortgage or to put kids through college then it’s a creative outlet that pays an artist a chunk of cash every few months. Maybe it helps them not have to have a dreary office or shelf-stacking job or goes into their kids college fund.

That’s worth it.

Also. Buy indie RPGs. Sermon over. Welcome to my TED Talk. etc

So, someone asked about a T2000 game today but specified they weren’t interested in paying. Odd request, I thought, but I could run one.

“So, it’s not apocalypse sorrow, the theme is about building and restoration. About 20 years after the Fall. Someone has the idea of setting up a centralised postal service so it’s a “limited sandbox”. PCs are the first recruits. Inspirations would be the movies “The Postman” and “News of the World”. Some episodic play and some development in-game.”

Then I revealed it’s on Discord and with Discord dice rolling and using a Whiteboard for some TOTM.

“Oh? It’s not on Foundry?”

“No, I don’t like Foundry.”

“Well, never mind then. I don’t think I could play a game that wasn’t on Foundry”

So, I’m a bit gobsmacked.

I don’t like Foundry. Some people love it; I just find the setup to be tedious. And then the implementation to be buyggy. I was something simpler. Something that can run on a tablet without complaining.

This map is based on the 1402 Kangnido map, drawn by Korean scholars. I’ve overlabelled it freehand with some details (those aren’t in the finished version obviously).

Welcome to Xiángguó (祥国), the Auspicious Kingdom — a land of scholars, strategists, and sword saints. Here, the brushstroke holds the same weight as the blade, and power moves in silence, poetry, and ritual. From the wind-scoured banners of the northern steppes to the rain-drenched canals of the south, Xiángguó is a realm bound by tradition and haunted by its own perfection. Everyone knows their place —until they don’t. Beneath every decree lies a compromise. Behind every silk screen, a scheme.

As a player, you are entering a world where elegance conceals tension, and every word has history behind it. You might play a magistrate balancing law and loyalty, a wandering sword sage with too much past, a spy who speaks better with her silence, or a river witch who remembers names the empire has forgotten. Xiángguó rewards patience, perception, and precision. The rules are old, but the cracks are widening—and if you move with the right kind of grace, you just might redraw the lines yourself.

It’s worth noting that I have scads of content on the Patreon and heaps of it for free.

http://patreon.com/lategaming