How do you run a kickstarter?

Talking with Donn Stroud the creator of Ruination Pilgrimage

So, I’m pretty excited about this one. Donn Stroud, a long time friend and collaborator of mine, founding voice in Mothership, is doing a medieval horror game called Ruination Pilgrimage. It’s on kickstarter right now, check it out. This is a genre I absolutely love, stuff like Diablo, Claustrophobia, Hell Dorado, God’s Demon, and even more recently Between Two Fires, the Christopher Buehlman novel that has really blown up in the RPG world this past year. I wanted to talk to Donn about running a kickstarter and how to build a successful gaming company over time.

Sean: So hey, thanks for doing this man. I know some of the basics of what influence you but what other deep cuts went into making this game? This is a genre you’re pretty passionate about.

Donn: One of the first things we talked about when we met was Claustrophobia. I remember walking the dealer hall at some GenCon (maybe 2013), and you asked what board game you should pick up. Then I probably raved about Claustrophobia for the next 3 hours. That idea of going into Hell and fighting demons (or playing the demons) really hit the sweet spot for me! 

You definitely just hit on some major influences above. I totally have you to thank for turning me onto Between Two Fires. I enjoyed it so much I started writing Ruination Pilgrimage the day after I finished it so thank you for that! I really love the interplay between Heaven and Hell (probably all those years going to church as a young impressionable lad). I’ve always liked a lot of clergy in my fantasy so Judith Tarr’s The Hound and the Falcon trilogy is high up there on the “Appendix N” of RP. If  you’ve not read that, it’s about a changeling monk who grapples with his place in Christendom and eventually ends up in Constantinople and Rome. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is pretty high up on my list too. A time traveling historian is accidently sent back to 1348 and has to deal with life during the bubonic plague. It’s a great and really tense read. 

Finally toss in a couple movies like Black Death, The Witch, and Apostle that combine horror and religion very nicely even if not strictly middle ages, and you’ve got a lot of the DNA that went into Ruination Pilgrimage. So all of these inspirations take place on Earth and are semi-historical, but I realized fairly early on that I wanted to set this in a different place. I didn’t want to import real historical maps and timelines and sit there arguing about who knows more about this stuff while gaming. Do you think it’s easier to flesh out a futuristic game/setting because of that conflict between how much players might know about history? Does it have different challenges? Mothership was left really open as far as setting. Did you have a reason for that?

Sean: I know what you mean – I really love historical settings but I know next to nothing about history and when prepping I’ll constantly get paralyzed by like “okay what uh what cities were near here and uh what’s the population of like a village?” Basically I just know next to nothing about how any time period other than our own works and so having to answer questions on the fly about like 16th century France would just kill me.

So that also fed into how we built Mothership which is like the tech works like it would in an 80s movie and then you can salt to taste. I think Wardens that know a lot of hard sci-fi stuff can take it in that direction, but Wardens who have just seen Aliens once or whatever can also get on board. But the point of that game was to go broad and be a tent pole kind of game for our line, so it was really important that there not be too many restrictions on the setting. That’s the enduring success of D&D in my mind, that it’s just kind of kitchen-sink fantasy anything goes, which is just about the easiest thing to create for.

So how are you handling that in RP? Is there like a Jesus and a Christian church and that sort of thing? How specific are you getting with the real world analogues?

Donn: The biggest real world analogues that I wanted in RP are the hierarchy of angels similar to Abrahamic religions, the demons of the Lesser Key of Solomon, and the concepts of Heaven and Hell. These are subjects I find really fascinating which is probably not a surprise to anyone who knows my previous books. In 2019 I wrote and published The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion. I had come up with a weird angel generator a couple years before and had kind of set it aside for a bit. ( I think we were probably working on Mothership: Dead Planet around that time) James Pozenel and you came in for the assist on completing the “angel book.” 

Basically, LKttCL generates multiple aspects of religions from the heralds, to relics, to observing sacred rites, and even holy quest generators. But it was just a supplement to insert into other systems, specifically Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games, but more broadly most d20 RPGs. It was great for what it was and it’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. But as soon as I started writing RP I realized that this was going to be a setting where I could use my ideas written about in LKttCL and implement them in the actual body of the game and not just extra flavor on top. I would be able to bring in some of what was scrapped in the cutting down of LKttCL and get it in there. For example, after reading a Hellboy miniseries called The Crooked Man that used the idea of consecrated ground preventing evil beings from attacking in a churchyard, I jotted down some rough ideas for mechanics on something like that. They didn’t make it into the final book because it just didn’t fit right with DCC. Here was a chance to incorporate all of that. I soon realized that instead of just a setting book, I would probably need to open it up into a whole system. Which is ironic because I would always rail against all the RPG systems coming out all the time. But I guess sometimes, even though someone might vow to never add to that deluge, you just do it. Was there ever a point in the early stages of Mothership that you thought of just writing a Cassette Futurism type setting and base it on a D&D clone? And do you think there’s a logical point in jumping from adventure, setting, or supplement into a full blown system?

Sean: Yeah I think the thing about new rules is that as a publisher is that you want to control your destiny as much as possible. The recent stuff with the OGL just goes to show that being tied to someone else’s game doesn’t make sense. My thing that readers of this newsletter will know I’m always on about is that you have to support that game, if your goals are to make money, which they definitely aren’t and shouldn’t be for everyone. 

I never got too close to doing a D&D clone for Mothership, largely because Casey G. had already been there and done that with the superlative Stay Frosty. Stay Frosty was so good I almost didn’t make Mothership. And then after that the closest I got was stealing the “don’t roll to-hit” from Into the Odd, but I didn’t know Chris McDowall at the time and would’ve felt bad about it because ItO was just finding its legs. Chris has now since told me I should’ve just stolen it.

I actually think designing an adventure first is actually the absolute best way to do it honestly. This is what tripped me up when trying to design null.hack was that I got caught up in all these systems and then I went to playtest and I was like uh uh, I don’t have anything to play.

We’re always learning more about the publishing side and by the numbers it turns out that 5e PHB sales just absolutely dwarf adventure sales which make next to nothing. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, like the adventures are bad, and generally four people are going to buy a PHB for every one copy of Curse of Strahd or whatever that sells. 

But beyond that, I think that designing good adventures is harder than designing good systems. And you might as well get to the hard work first. You learn more about what your game should be and what its needs are. It seems backwards to me to design a system in search of adventure. Systems are a dime a dozen, but I have maybe only 3 or 4 adventures that I truly love, that I’d run time after time after time. 

So that said – what are your plans for adventures for RP? Does the kickstarter come with a starter adventure? Do you have a grand campaign in the works? What’s going on in your home campaign?

Donn: So you and I chat quite a bit and I’ve definitely heard you say “support your new system” a bit over the years. Naturally it’s wormed its way into my brain and sits there repeating the advice sporadically in a klaxon howl. 

When RP was just a little baby there was a convention here in town (Ucon Gaming Convention 2022) so I signed up to run an early playtest. I had a couple pages of the game and sat down the day before to write a little adventure. I’m definitely no expert in writing starter adventures, but I focused on heavy setting vibe, a chance for every class to be important and needed, a little side jaunt to get some upgrades, a little social conflict, and then the final confrontation with a note: if session finishes early, put trapdoor behind the altar going down underneath chapel. They hit the three hour mark and were still in good shape so I improvised an epic ending underneath the old church with summoning circles and some grotesque body horror. And it all worked. They were laughing and retelling the best bits and talking about how they enjoyed the setting, adventure, and system. Success! I went home and started hitting the game harder. Would I have continued if the session had been miserable? Probably but not as fast. It was really nice to know pretty early in writing RP that it was going to pan out. 

Now that was a long story just to say yes, there will be a starter adventure that will come out with the book. I’ve cut, redone, rerun, polished, etc. that one. I’m toying with the idea of expanding it out into a couple sessions if there’s room in the Adventure Book (working title). I’ve invited a bunch of people on board to write mini adventures for Ruination Pilgrimage which will be a fun and crazy adventure in and of itself. I’ve got good friends, I’ve got people who have written stuff I really love, and I’ve got some long-time collaborators. I want a bunch of different voices adding to this world. I’ve written adventures with other people and alone, and I think teaming up yields a better product. 

Short answer is yes, there will be a whole separate adventure book to get when backing the RP rulebook and it could have as many as 14 adventures in it! 

As far as my home campaign goes, my in person group has been around forever and they’re really good sports. They’ve actually been subjected to a couple different sessions of rolling up characters as things change and testing out specific things to make sure they work. But they’ve been doing this for a couple years now because James Pozenel is also in this group and tests material he’s working on to publish for Horseshark Games. So with two people testing material, sometimes play starts to be work and maybe a little less fun. Have you had that issue where fun and work kind of clash? If so, how have you gotten past it or dealt with it?

Sean: So yeah burnout is a real thing. You’re constantly drawing from this inner well and it refills very slowly while you’re working, I’ve found. For me the fun part comes and goes, this is a job, it pays my bills. So whether I feel like doing it or not, I have to do it or we don’t have food! That’s a pretty big motivator for me and I think one of the key differences between being a professional publisher and a hobbyist – if it’s your job, sooner or later you have to ship. I get distracted really easily so my thing has been to always have a lot of projects going at once and always be chipping away at them. So like for instance, this is the kind of stuff I want to work on:

• Mothership: My bread and butter, I’m always trying to make Mothership bigger and better. I think it’s good to have a home base game or project that you always want to work on.

• null.hack: Cyberpunk Mothership, this used to be a standalone game but I’ve folded it into the Motherverse as a way to both get it done without distracting too much from Mothership and also (ta-da) support Mothership more. This scratches all that urban crawl city planning cyberpunk itch that I have constantly.

• Heist: My modern day crime/robbery game. This is probably my favorite game to play/run that I work on. The system is done and I have a pamphlet for it, but I want to do something pretty ambitious with the game and rulebook so it has to wait a bit until I have the resources for it.

• SPIRAL: My paranormal investigation RPG that I’ve alluded to on twitter a couple of times. Another horror game, I’ve moved this forward a little bit at a time and I have big long term plans for it. I work on this when I’m feeling like doing something more modern day and a little more experimental.

• Monster At War: This is like a hellboy weird ww2 tactical action rpg that’s just meant to be a bunch of fun and explosions. It’s got a system similar to Savage World and I turn to this when I want to do more violent encounter stuff.

• Hollow Valley: Hardcore zombie survival game.

• Psycho Elite: MGS tactical espionage style action.

• Dungeon23/megadungeons: I’m kind of always working on giant megadungeons in the background as a way to just cleanse my palate.

Okay so like, that’s a LOT right? So my workflow is usually something like: work on Mothership a bunch, ship a project, bounce over to SPIRAL, dig in for a few weeks, then bounce back to the next Mothership project for a season. When it gets colder I find myself wanting to do more D&D type stuff and so I bounce into a Megadungeon or some OD&D style thing for a bit for a week or two, then back to Mothership. 

This has worked really well for me for the past few years and it means that I always have something new to show. The challenge has been that we had our second child right around when the Mothership boxed set launched on Kickstarter. So this last year has just been absolutely brutal. Just getting everything done on Mothership has been very very exhausting, plus I’m not getting sleep, plus, because the boxed set is such a big project it means that I can’t bounce to other projects, it’s too distracting. So instead I bounce between Mothership books: the Player’s Survival Guide (for rules itch), the Warden’s Operations Manual (advice and theory), Shipbreaker’s Toolkit (for a more technical kind of system problem solving, more rules), Unconfirmed Contact Reports (art direction and layout), Another Bug Hunt (adventure design) – this keeps me pretty busy. But it means once this boxed set ships I’ll need to take a long break for a season from Mothership just to let the well refill.

Luckily, we’ve got other Mothership projects in the works so the game can stay supported while I focus on my kids for a bit and just regain some lost energy and rest so that we can do some of the huge stuff we have planned. But it’s a lot! And I don’t know if this is the exact right solution. But it’s worked for me and keeps me productive rather than spiraling and immobile, so I think it’s been good for me.

Speaking of. I think very far down the line when I’m developing a game. Maybe three or four books ahead. I’m always trying to think like okay how do we build into this new phase? The boxed set is a good example since the original 0e zine we designed with the intent that it would eventually be in a box. We moved our timeline up by about a year just because so many people were making sci-fi horror after Mothership came out that I felt like we needed to keep up the pressure, but the vision stayed the same. And everything we’re doing now builds to the next five years of releases. What about for RP? What’s your vision of like, if this book takes off what’s the next five years look like? What’s your grand plan for making this game as amazing as it can be? 

Donn: That is a big load and a lot to juggle. Especially with 2 young kids.

My five year vision isn’t mapped out, but you and I talk a lot about forever games. If you write a game you love, you want to play it and add to it forever. RP is shaping up that way for me. In part because I’m able to take previously written stuff that was started at one point and left behind. Things I was excited about but got pushed to the side for other projects: a weird fantasy setting based on Roadside Picnic and one set in Hell. All of these projects can be pulled into this one. I’m pretty sure most of us have notebooks (or phone notes) filled with ideas and rough starts. 

So my five year plan is to keep releasing material for RP. Hitting my old notes, and pulling everything that has intrigued me and excited me into this setting and system. I think no matter how well the game does on crowdfunding, I’ll always enjoy writing in it and will focus most of my time there. I’ve taken on a lot of different projects the last couple years, and it will be nice to focus on one thing. And also maybe some Mothership stuff that’s been in the works for a long time. Luckily, they’re very similar as RP uses the Panic Engine. 

Sean: Yeah I think about this a lot. Essentially like if you’re going to do one thing at least design a game that you would want to play. A game that you’d be more excited to play than pretty much any other game that already exists. That way if you publish it and it doesn’t sell at least you’ve made yourself something you can use for the rest of your life. That’s how I think about design a lot of the time: running towards yourself. There’s this pull to make your game like some other game because that’s what you think people like. But you’re a person who likes things and you have way more information about your own taste than you do about other people’s. There’s that Steve Jobs quote about how do – hold up I’m just going to google it, this isn’t live or anything – Okay, so Jobs said “People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that aren't yet on the page.”

And like, obviously Apple does market research, he just implies they don’t rely on it or whatever. But my point is more that you are probably way better at knowing how to design a game for yourself than you are at knowing how to design a game for some imaginary group of people, or worse, other designers on social media. You start designing for what you think people will like or what will get good reviews or what won’t get you yelled at or whatever and it just becomes a mess and you publish and then you never play! If you’re going to please anyone, at least please yourself.

I think between publisher and writer you definitely prefer the writing side, is that right? I think a lot of designers get trapped in this world where they publish because they feel like if they don’t then no one else will. But you’ve been published by TKG, by Exalted Funeral, and you’ve also done your own stuff. I feel like you’ve found a bit of a balance there. With these relationships in place with publishers, how do you make the decision between whether you want to pitch something or keep it for yourself?

Donn: I do prefer the writing side more than publishing for sure. Publishing is still kind of an unknown to me. I question most of what I’m doing while I’m doing it, but always love the product when It’s done. There are parts of it I enjoy like writing art briefs and putting everything together into the finished product. The part that is the worst for me is marketing myself and my product. At the end of the day I also just kind of like to be in charge of everything and grow my catalog, you know?

As TKG has grown, how have you handled maybe handing off some of your previous duties or are you still doing the bulk of it and writing the books for the boxset? 

Sean: Yeah this is tough. I read a book called The E-Myth Revisited which helped me a lot. Its core thesis goes something like: you work in a bakery, you love baking cakes but your boss sucks. He sucks so bad, he’s such a fucking idiot, oh man you hate him. So you quit! You’re gonna make your own bakery and it’s going to rock.

But it turns out what you like to do is bake cakes. What you do not like to do is “run a bakery.” They’re completely different things and the sort of allure of not having a shitty boss draws a lot of people into this territory where they’re running a failing business because their real skillset, the one they’re equipped to do, they’ve had to leave behind for this new job (managing people usually) which they are bad at.

The big thing I sort of took away from it was “you have to work ON your factory as much as your work IN your factory.” Basically like you have to be improving the processes and systems you use to get things done just as much as you actually do the work of running the business. You have to be able to step back and say “okay what’s not working here, what needs to change.” Which can be really hard if you’re drowning in the day-to-day work of operations.

So for me what this means is like:

First, hire people to take over specific repeatable tasks. 

Basically only hire someone to do something that you can train them to do step by step. We’ve done this in two areas: Customer service and third party product coordination. In both cases I’m able to say here’s how this job works, here’s basically every situation you’re going to encounter, here’s how many hours it should take, come back to me with any problems.

In both cases, this has saved my ass. And for Tyler and Daniel who do these jobs they know very clearly what’s in their purview, what the expectations are. They don’t run into the kind of “you need to wear 12 hats” thing you get with a lot of small businesses.

Second, I had a colleague show me this matrix once that changed a lot of things for me.

Basically whatever task it is in your company, you should be able to slot it somewhere on this chart. Managing people, marketing, project management, production, manufacturing, customer services, social media, advertising, kickstarter, game design, writing, layout, art direction, etc. etc. All of these are skills that publishers need to have in the organization somewhere.

I don’t know where the tipping point is but the more things that are in your “I hate doing / I am bad at” box, then the harder your job is going to be as a publisher and the more you should consider seeking out other people to work with/for and see if your skill set fits in better somewhere else. This doesn’t mean never self publish something ever again, it just means like know yourself and what you hope to accomplish.

The larger you get the more certain skills (people management, project management, business development, etc.) become more important and you sort of have to decide okay am I going to go out and learn those skills? Am I happy with where I’m at? 

You and I have mutual friends in the boardgaming industry, Travis Worthington (Indie Boards and Cards) and Steve Buonocore (Stronghold Games) they merged a few years ago and it’s another one of these things. Not only did they as individuals have different skills on these charts but their organizations found different places on this chart. One company had better reach, the other had better production or pipeline management, etc. So the best course for them was this merger that seems to have turned out pretty successfully.

This isn’t going to matter for most people – specifically those of your publishing games as an artform. For you, my advice is just: do the work, focus on the materials, process process process, have some other job for money, and just keep at it. That’s a whole other side of the world from the stuff I’m talking about which is about if you want to do this as a career these are some of the things you should consider.

I want to end this interview moving more to the art side rather than the business side. As a writer, I think Neil Gaiman said something like every project has its own superstitions that you need to build. Do you have a routine or a process that keeps you creating? How do you write a Donn Stroud adventure, essentially?

Donn: I actually don’t have a routine or process except my overactive brain keeps coming up with ideas. I’ll put them down in either my phone Notes or an email draft. If I keep building on it, then it kind of builds momentum, I sit down and start writing. 

I just found this weird thing I wrote in an email that just says “edible, weird, wondrous, incomprehensible,” and I think it was from a twitter thread from several years ago about what I feel needs to be in an adventure. Which is weird, but I must have been feeling it back then. But those are actually four things that I find interesting and tend to put in my adventures. If anything, I may have a bad habit of making places to explore and wander through. Players can interact with the place and its fixtures and even uncover why it is the way it is, but there’s maybe not enough to do and certainly not enough social aspects. That’s where I usually have a developer or coauthor come in and help out with things that are lacking. 

The main thing that I might do well is take my inspiration from everything. The Isle of the Plangent Mage was inspired by this piece on NPR about the Navy using sonar in the ocean and how it damages whales and may cause them to beach themselves. I said, “but what if it was magic and caused by a wizard?” Then the other parts of the Undertower are based on experimental music of the 60s and 70s. Parts of Dead Planet are from a dream I had as a teenager. Lesser Key has a lot of real world religion and mythology and Forgotten Rites started with smelling a fairly ripe dead mouse (I used to have snakes as pets). Basically, EVERYTHING can be used as inspiration. 

Sean: Yeah that’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you is you have this wide range of interests, but especially just your fascination with biology, marine biology, plant life, that whole thing. I think you more than anyone else I know kind of have that Gygaxian Naturalism thing going on that James at Grognardia always talks about. You’re always interested in ecosystems and how things got to be the way they are. How do you scratch that itch in a game about celestial beings?

Donn: That’s actually a great question, and I’m excited for people to see where I’ve gone with this. I’ve got a real love for parasites ever since I read Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex. Yeah, parasites are gross but also really fascinating. So in RP there’s a class of demons with very parasite-like behaviors. Krownes get into your head and start eating your brain, slowly replacing it with their mass as they grow. Your memories are now theirs. Your body is theirs. Eventually at the height of the infection/possession, tusks, horns, tentacles, and all manner of growths burst from your cranial orifices ready to infect more bodies. This possession can infect whole abbeys, courts, or villages before it’s discovered. If these possessions are caught early enough to save the infected, priests *and* surgeons are required to remove the demon from its host. These demons are loosely based on the tongue-eating lice of our oceans. 

Sean: That’s awesome. I’m really excited about the release. Speaking of, your Kickstarter is funded and is now moving into stretch goal territory. This is your fourth or fifth kickstarter that you’ve run, I believe. What have you learned overall after running so many campaigns?

Donn: AKA everything I do wrong or forget to do right is what this section is called. And yes, this is my 4th Kickstarter campaign. It’s essential to have that “notify on launch” page ready and spread far and wide long before your actual launch. I think probably 4-6 weeks before launch would be ideal. I wasn’t so good about that. A really good first day is essential, right? 

• Try to have your page perfect upon launch so the first time people see it, everything is there. But if you don’t, it can always be edited and added to. I’ve added a couple things to the Story page to update it as I have questions coming in via comments and messenger. 

• Give your fulfillment date a good amount of padding. Something always comes up especially when you start adding contributors and stretch goals. Don’t overload with stretch goals if you haven’t planned them out. Make the stretch goals things that add value. 

• Sometimes you won’t make everyone happy and that’s ok. Just do your best, be professional, and you don’t have to bend over backwards to accommodate. Some of these moving pieces are tough to figure out when you’re new (and even when you’ve done a couple). There are so many different hats to wear, and some of them just won’t fit. Sometimes it’s better to farm some of this out. I don’t usually, but I’m stubborn and try to do it all myself. 

• I always have a number in my head for my own cutoff. “If I have to ship more than 800 packages, then I’ll have someone else handle fulfillment.” I haven’t hit that point yet so I haven’t had to look into everything that may entail. 

• International shipping is not cool unless you have some amazing partner overseas but even then with duties and VAT and carrier services. Good luck to anyone braving that. 

• Basically, only some of this advice is good for some of you. I tend to go for a really hardcore DIY do-everything-from-my-basement sort of style. Some people want to just do at-cost printing from a POD service and let printing and fulfillment be handled that way. It’s way easier for sure. 

• Spread the word anyway you can, but I don’t think the answer is dropping links in the same spot on social media every single day. Be tactical. Do podcasts. It helps if you’re starting with an audience even if it’s 20 hardcore fans. The bad news is you can’t just come up with a really great idea, get some really expensive art, and just put it out on Kickstarter and sit there knowing it’s just the greatest thing ever and “why isn’t this taking off.” Building your audience is an organic thing that usually takes time. Start small, network, support your peers, be helpful, and put out the best work you can. That’s my biggest take away, that's why it’s in bold. 

But I’m definitely not an expert. How do you normally do things?

Sean: I think you’ve nailed a lot of the big points. I have a lot more to say about this, but here’s some of the important stuff that’s come up over the years.

1. Don't do a Kickstarter for digital only goods. Do a print release. It's easily 4-5x money. If you don't want to deal with the logistics, talk to someone who will. 

2. Anchor your prices. This means you need a cheap tier and an expensive tier, then put your most profitable/core tier dead smack in the middle. People will skip the cheapest and most expensive tier outside of edge cases. If your standard offering looks like the most expensive tier, people will default to something cheaper because they don't want to think of themselves as "deluxe customers." If you don't have an expensive tier, create a bundle of all your old products together.

3. Offer something small, physical, and free for backers who back in the first 24 hours. The first 24 hours are the most important of your campaign as they set the momentum and tone for the campaign to follow. It will be your highest day followed by 48 hours before your campaign ends.

4. If you can afford to, meaning you're regularly running kickstarters that net 20-30k, start talking to backerkit about doing advertising with them. Note: this will only work if you start offering products in the $50+ range, so a hardcover or boxed set or something. Google terms like ROAS to start getting into this. You’ll need to know all your costs and what you think an average pledge will be like.

5. Run kickstarters for 30 days. Period. Even if your lowest day is $100, if you cut out two weeks you're walking away from $1,400. 30 days is the standard because that's how long it will take for your marketing to start being effective and for word of mouth to spread. You might think you’re being clever running a two week campaign cutting out the dead spot in the middle, you’re not. You’re losing money you’ll need to run your business.

6. Have stretch goals. People don't want to deal with it but this is core to how Kickstarter works. Design your products with this in mind from the start. Paywall off content and then add it in for the KS. Price your products with the printer assuming all stretch goals included from the start so you don't have to do any math during the kickstarter.

7. Structure your campaign page to start with a giant image showcasing all your products and the prices. Don't start with text. You need a giant ad right up front that helps someone make a purchasing decision. A big splash with the price slapped on does the trick. Images images images.

8. Videos convert. Two minutes absolute max. Share the selling points only.

9. Don’t kickstart a bundle. It splits your audience and devalues your product. Kickstarters are about backing the new thing. At a con you want bundles. People see 3-4 pamphlets they’re like how good can they really be? Just do the work and turn those pamphlets into one book and tie things together a bit. 

10. Launch in the morning, 8am CST, launch on a weekday. We prefer Tuesdays because of Tuesday Knight Games, but in general we’re just trying to avoid monday/friday. You want it early because you want to have a full day of marketing, people talking about it, etc. And your first 24 hours are going to be huge, don’t make most of them during the middle of the night.

11. Put up your preview page as soon as you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s a year before the KS. This gives you a place to point people to and collect follows. Oh you went on a podcast to talk about your KS? Now what? How do they follow along? You can use those follows to start doing some predictions. Start with 30% of your follows will back your kickstarter on day one, so now you have a target for your day one goal. You can start to get some idea of how successful your kickstarter might become.

There’s a lot more and each of these deserves a lot more space, but I think that’s a good place to end it for now. Donn, thank you so much for talking, and thank you for the amazing copy of Between Two Fires you sent. I absolutely love it. Best of luck on your campaign.

Donn: Thanks man, we’re sitting at about $19k right now which is the biggest campaign I’ve ever run. I’ve had so many ideas for adventures for RP during this campaign, I just can’t wait to get it out there.

You can follow along with Ruination Pilgrimmage here, I highly recommend checking it out.

I’ve got a lot more news about Dungeon23 coming up! So if you’re still trucking along, hit me up, I’d love to see your maps and keys. If you’ve fallen behind or quit, no worries! You can always just add in a handful of empty rooms and catch back up. I was about 5 days behind this week and caught up in an afternoon. Progress, not perfection!

Until next time!