One year as a full-time RPG developer!

One year ago, give or take a week, I decided to take the leap and drop my day job (which I was already doing part time) and focus solely on Blackoath Entertainment. It was definitely scary, but I had reached a point were if I wanted to be able to do more, I really needed to focus solely on RPGs. So far, it's been working out great!

I had a moment of panic at the realization that I had to make this work, though, and decided to start the year by working on an SRD for a new skill-based D20 ruleset that I called Skill20, and after spending a stupid amount of work on it, thanks to Alan Bahr's advice I realized that it didn't work out as I had hoped. This was my first time trying to write a ruleset without a game, and I generally write rulesets based on a theme, trying to adapt the rules and mechanics to what I want to achieve with the game's setting. So writing rules in a "sterile" environment was super hard, and the result was not good. The experiment can be found here on my Patreon, and I suppose someone could use it as the basis for something, but it's not great.

Skill20 did serve a purpose, though: it worked kind of as the skeleton for Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate, even though that game turned out to work better without skills (oh the irony...). But the big event of this year was undoubtably the Geek Gamers' Ker Nethalas video. For reasons neither Deborah nor I can explain, her video went viral, and it really put the game on the map for a lot of folks. Hell, it's still her second most-watched video in her channel! And it has become my biggest success (followed closely by Across a Thousand Dead Worlds). I can certainly say that the success of KN has both saved Blackoath and become its foundation. I say saved because due to all the production issues I had with ATDW (stuff I talked about a lot already), I had a big hole in my finances, and I only managed to cover it thanks to KN. Furthermore, the game's success allowed me to cover a lot of the projects that came after it!

This year hasn't been all great things, though. I had the last blow in a series of blows with ATDW, as you all know. Losing all the books and cash from US sales fortunately didn't hurt me as badly thanks to KN's success, but it certainly was not a pleasant thing to go through. I've always been a control freak (which is why I do everything I can myself, even when it comes to things like music, all my current bands are one-man projects), but the constant betrayals and issues I had with ATDW have really convinced me of doing it all alone even more. I have no problems hiring folks and working with them, but I'm done with partnerships for the time being. This also means that for the foreseeable future all the new crowdfunding campaigns I have planned will be distributed by me directly. I know this will make me lose potential non-EU customers, but since all my games are always available via Amazon/DTRPG, I'm fine with people getting my games as PoD books.

But like I was saying, this has been overall a really positive year. I'm doing what I love full time (and it's almost literally full-time, as in 16 hours a day, since I essentially do nothing else from Monday to Sunday), and I do it on my own terms. Blackoath has experienced growth (the number of paying Patreon members has nearly doubled in a year!), and this has allowed me to invest much more back into my games. I'm sure you have already noticed the increase in quality when it comes to art. And I'm just getting started, wait until you see Across a Thousand Hollow Vaults and Sacrifice 2e! They are going to be very difficult to even match in the future.

So I just wanted to thank you all for your continued support, and for letting me work on RPGs, since I literally couldn't do it without you. I promise I'm giving it my all, and will continue to do so. 2025 is going to be a leap in quality, and I have a much clearer vision of what I want to do with Blackoath Entertainment. As a matter of fact, I have most of the year already sketched out, and it's going to be full of cool games.

Thanks once again for making this first year as a full-time RPG writer a reality!

-Alex