I’m making this a separate post because the original is funniest without context, but for real you have no idea how stressful this is. The reason why relates to this post
I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die b
As independent artists making a living from our art, it isn’t enough to just make good art, especially when that art is a TTRPG. TTRPGs are not a respected artform, not even by the primary consumerbase. It’s so dire that it takes us making a lot of long posts just to convince people that TTRPG game design is real at all, that a TTRPG’s rules can be written a certain way on purpose to have intended results.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has good game mechanics, on purpose, but having good game mechanics is only actually a selling point to a shockingly small percentage of people who play TTRPGs, so those good game mechanics won’t sell the game, at least not as much as we need to continue operations.
But no matter how good your art is or how respected your artistic medium is, just making good art is not enough to make a living. Because the truth is, art doesn’t make money at all, social media does. The best, most overtly good art in the world only makes as much money as the number of paying customers that you can reach. All the money we make through Eureka is because I’m out here on tumblr busting my ass to get these notes, followers, etc.
Money is tight, we need to finish Eureka, and we need a new release like Silk & Dagger and Death Bed to get multiple major revenue streams and diversify our market reach in order to make more money and, like, pay my bills, but I can’t work on either of those right now, because I have to spend at least one work day a week entirely focused on social media or else no amount of progress on our real projects means anything, because otherwise they won’t sell.
It’s a little bit like being disabled - or rather kind of an extension of being disabled, since if I was more able-bodied I could work a “real” job that has a steady paycheck - my actual survival depends on other people liking me more than anything else, it’s a popularity contest, and not only I’m particularly strong in, as an uncharismatic, abrasive aspie with strong opinions about the very medium art that I work in, in an environment where openly disliking an element of the art that someone else engages with is considered not just a personal, but moral attack.
If you think this actually does make reblogging hot goth elves on tumblr sound pretty stressful, and want me to make enough money to continue to make TTRPGs for a living, there's a bunch that you can do to help even without spending a dime.
Follow us on tumblr and bluesky
Reblogging/retweeting/whatever our posts on these sites, even if you don't have many followers, makes a huge difference and is actually how we get most of our new fans and patreon subscribers.
Play our games, tell your friends about them, make posts about your adventures or characters from our games, make homebrew stuff, etc. Like with the social media posts, this is the only way the word gets out about who we are and what we do! Without word-of-mouth, we're dead in the water.
Subscribe to our Patreon!
You get monthly rewards such as Eureka updates, adventure modules, short stories, previews of new games, etc. It also gets you into our patron-exclusive discord server!
Buy, or just download, our games on Itch.io
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1
Eureka: The Fanservice Files
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG
Money helps a lot, but even just downloading them for free gives us a boost in the algorithm and gets more eyes on us!
Donate on Ko-fi How this helps is pretty obvious.
Buy our snoop merchandise
We only get a small cut of this, but the stuff is pretty cool, and they're good conversation starters!
