Risus and Kickstarter…

This is from S. John Ross as posted to the Risus mailing list…

This year I’m likely to dip my toe into the Kickstarter pond. All the other gaming toes are there; I feel like I should bring an extra bag of Cheetos for being late.

I’m not particularly interested in the Kickstart-to-Produce-It-Then-Sell-It model. Maybe _someday,_ if I go crazy and decide to poke back toward retail (I still love the idea of selling Risus as a GM screen with Risus all over it), but for the most part I’m well clear of doing gamestuff for retail and don’t miss it.

I’m more interested in the Kickstart-to-Produce-It-Then-Give-It-Away-As-A-Free-Download-Forever model. And basically I’m interested in doing it for the smaller stuff … to build a library of single-evening free adventures for Risus, for example. I have a number of cool adventures I’ve used for conventions over the years, and a few other from private campaign stock, that would be worthy of bringing into production as PDFs … but they’re too teensy to bother with, really, as things I add to the Cumberland catalogue, while they’re too much work to do as a series of promotional freebies. So, they occupy a middle ground where Kickstarter would make sense: if the Kickstart says yes, then it’s all paid for and it’s a yes. If the Kickstarter says no, well, then I’ve learned that. These would likely be kickstarters on the scale of the small-to-middle hundreds of dollars, per-adventure (basically, the total costs on my end for PDF production, counting writing, “art,” maps, charts, page layout and so on add up to somewhere between $25 and $75 per page … add a bit for Kickstarter to take a cut, and that’d be the number).

We’ll see if it can happen. I’m certain I can make PDFs worth having and worth playing … and I’m certain the size of the Risus community would make something like a $500 Risus-Module kickstarter a shoo-in if folks _want_ me to make ‘em … but the question is: does anyone actually want me to make ‘em? :)

I’m busy finishing up some other stuff right now (including a very small Risus item that _will_ go in the catalogue) … but expect to hear more about this in a couple of months. In the meantime, comments, suggestions, warnings, horror stories and amusing but decidedly dirty anecdotes (to S John Ross and not to the Mailing List, plz&thx) are welcome.

This is very cool! I vote yes!