What started as a humble contest became a hugely successful one which morphed into a humble PDF, then a much better looking one that was downloaded more than 4000 times!
As a follow up to this, my friends at Tabletop Adventure shared my wish to see this great GM resource be available in print form but financing a color print run is expensive.
You haven’t heard about the One Page Dungeon Codex yet? It was my first major RPG project:
The Deluxe 2009 One Page Dungeon Codex is an anthology of the best entries of the 2009 One Page Dungeon contest, coupled with essays by the creators of the One-Page template and myself on its creation and use in role playing games. The 21 dungeons found therein cover a wide creative range, from the classic retro-80’s look of D&D modules (and video games!) to lavishly decorated manors and awesomely hand-drawn dungeons that redefined the definition of “one-page dungeons”. It also features 4 exclusive pieces of artworks representing the contest winning entries.
In order to bring you this product in physical form, we settled on the Kickstarter program and started a 2 week campaign to raise the money to get the book in the hands of people. We tweaked the program to allow people to get their hands on their copy (copies) for as close to the actual cost of printing and shipping as kickstarter allowed us. In essence, we’re using the program to allow us to take pre-orders of the book and raise the capital for color printing up front.
We need to raise 550$ to get the project rolling and at the moment of writing this, we already have had 4 backers (in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that my mother is one of them and I’m not ashamed) backing a total of 155$. The options are:
- Supporter(3$): Don’t need the book, for whatever reason? You can still support getting this print product out to the RPG community. Your name will appear in the list of acknowledgments in the book. Also, if you come to the Tabletop Adventures booth at GenCon and make yourself known to us, we will thank you in person.
- Dungeon Fan (30$): Receive a color copy of the book, personally inscribed by me, and mailed to you in the US. Your name will also appear in the list of acknowledgments in the book
- Tech Savvy package (35$): Same as Dungeon Fan, PLUS a CD which includes “The One Page Dungeon Codex 2009” and all 112 of the original entries to the One Page Dungeon Contest.
- Far, Far Away (40$): Same as Dungeon Fan, mailed anywhere in the world.
- Tech Savvy package 2 (45$): Same as Tech Savvy package, mailed anywhere in the world.
- Local enthusiast (110$): You may choose to receive 4 color copies of the book, or we can customize a package of books and CDs just for you. The books may be inscribed or not as you prefer, and we will mail them to you in the US. In addition, your name will be featured prominently in the list of acknowledgments in the book.
- Global Enthusiast (150$): Same as local enthusiast, mailed anywhere in the world.
- And others…
As an incentive to get you to join and support the first serious endeavor in RPG publishing I was a main part of, I decided to throw in an extra little bonuses. All participants (including the 3$ supporters) will get an electronic copy of the revised version of the one page Font of Sorrows that inspired this contest.
Please note that this is strictly a non-profit endeavor, funds will be used to print copies and ship for the kickstart supporters and any extra funds will go to print extra copies to give away to the community (charity auctions, gifts, prizes, etc).
I wish to thank, on top of the original contest team, my friends Micheal Wolf of Stargazer’s World as well as Vicki and her crew from Tabletop Adventures for having spent so much post-contest time and effort on this project.
You want to get your hands on this piece of RPG community history? Click here. Hurry up, it ends on July 19th so we can have them printed by August.
I thank you all for your generous support.
Cover artwork: Mark Allen
Post Publication Edit: Over at The Alexandrian.net, our approach to financing the project is being questioned. I hope that people know me enough to understand how straight I like things to be. When I say that we’re aiming to get you the book as close to cost as possible it involves the credit card charges and kickstarter “slice” that I don’t want Tabletop Adventure to foot since they’re all doing this as volunteer work (they could do other things with their time) .
Any money that comes from people donating more than the asked for price or those going for the 3$ option will go toward printing more books that will be given to charity auctions or as prizes in contests. I also plan to ride the first print run and purchase about a dozen books so that we can sell some at the cons I will be over the summer.
I hope this clarifies things and I’m more than happy to answer questions if you have them.
Oh and in better news, we’re just 100$ away from our goal! That’s so cool! Please help us make this project a reality!
Thanks.
We had a sample copy of this book printed and it is very nice, with glossy pages and good color; it caught a lot of attention at our booth at Origins. We hope we can print enough copies to have a few to just sell at GenCon, but there’s no guarantee of that. A lot depends on the success of the KickStarter program!
I edited the post (see at the end) to address “concerns” voiced over at the Alexandrian.net website, I hope it clarifies some aspects of the projects finances.
I’m not trying to be a jerk in any forum. I’m willing to believe that the interior financial dealings you’ve put together for this project make perfect sense everybody involved on the inside of it.
But from the outside you’ve turned a fun little community contest into a for-profit venture that you’re funding through publicly solicited donations. That looks weird. It raises questions. Questions which aren’t fully answered when you say that you’re selling them via donation at cost but in a way that will fund additional printing for marketing copies.
Like I say, there may be some perfectly logical reason why all of this makes more sense than just selling preorders from Tabletop’s website. But nobody out here can see it.
When we (Tabletop Adventures) saw the great results of the One Page Dungeon Codex, we were very excited. I personally have spent hours putting out information about the free downloadable version. We hated to see it stop there, though; as gamers ourselves, we really wanted to see this beautiful book in print. When we started to check into it, though, there were issues.
We looked into one print on demand service, and discovered we do not have the software we would need to work with that company’s system. (We – TTA and the Chatty DM – still hope to make the book available through print on demand eventually, but hated to leave it in limbo waiting for things to work out at some undetermined point in the future.) Next we contacted our local printer, who gave us figures that were significantly higher than we had expected, since we had not worked with color interior pages before. We had no way to know if people would want to pay that price, even for a good-looking book.
Taking preorders seemed to be the logical way to handle things but that ran into another snag – the Tabletop Adventures website as yet has no store of its own. On the Internet we have worked solely through other sales sites, and so don’t have a way to take orders ourselves. It’s on our list for future development, but was not something we could set up in a few days. We could have invited people to just send in orders, but I think if we had asked people to e-mail us their credit card numbers, they would have been justifiably concerned!
The KickStarter program seemed like a good alternative. It has a secure way to process credit cards, and we could offer various shipping options. There are fees involved, but they are significantly less than those of any other sales site with which we work and they seemed a reasonable price to pay for reliability and security.
[At this point I looked at the post on The Alexandrian, so some of this information relates to the comments over there, although I confess I did not read them all.]
I evidently caused some confusion with my remark about hoping to have copies to sell, so let me clarify that. It was my hope that the KickStarter program would reach its full funding (which at this time it has) so that a print run of the book could be done. At that point, even though Tabletop Adventures could not afford to finance a print run all by ourselves, we could afford to add some copies to the print run above and beyond those paid for by the pledges of supporters. THOSE copies – entirely paid for by Tabletop Adventures – would then be available for sale at GenCon (or other conventions), for people who somehow missed the chance to participate in the KickStarter program.
Those supporters who pledged money above and beyond the reward level they requested – and there have been some – should rest assured that any books paid for with that money will be DONATED to good causes in the gaming community. One possibility would be charity auctions at conventions; another might be an “RPGs for Troops” program. This policy was settled on well before The Chatty DM made the blog post above.
If anyone else has questions about how and why this project has developed as it has, please feel free to e-mail me directly at: editor [at] tabletopadventures [dot] com.