089: Leveraging Kickstarter for fulltime game design with Chris of Evil Pigeon Gaming

Courtney: [00:02:00] Alright, welcome back, friends! I am here with the founder of Evil Pigeon Gaming, Chris Craven. How’s it going, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, it’s going good. Thank you so much for having me.

Courtney: I know, I’m I’m excited! It looks like you’ve [00:03:00] got some really interesting projects that you have done over the last couple years. So, excited to get into those, but To just kick things off, can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you got into gaming?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So, I was always, I was always a nerdy kid, always kind of daydreaming. I discovered D& D books in my kind of early teens when 3. 5 Ed was out, and just bought the books and read them. So I just thought they were just really cool. Didn’t have enough friends to play. But read lots of the books and then kind of started actually playing in university and just never looked back.

Courtney: Tell me about your very first campaign that you actually got to play once you had friends to play with.

Chris: It’s funny because D& D was actually like the fourth or fifth TTRPG I actually played. I think the first was Savage Worlds, or the superhero variant of it. And then I played a couple of World of Darkness [00:04:00] ones Mage the Awakening, and some other kind of sundry ones, a couple of superhero ones. And then it was randomly, it’s a local card game shop.

Some friends were playing Storm King’s Thunder and needed an extra player and pulled me in.

Courtney: I feel like it’s so rare for me to find another person that didn’t start with D& D.

Chris: I’m glad it’s not just me.

Courtney: Yeah. Mine was Malifaux, Through the Breach, which like no one seems to have heard of, but it’s still one of my favorites, but it’s still fun to be like, Ooh, you didn’t start with D& D.

This is awesome.

Chris: think I’m familiar with the models, if I’m thinking correctly. They have fantastic models.

Courtney: Yeah. Yeah. It started as a miniatures war game, like a very small version of Warhammer where you’d have an army of like five to 10 characters and Then in 2013, they kickstarted an RPG, and My husband and I backed it, and [00:05:00] I just, I love it.

Chris: Nice.

Courtney: What are you playing right now?

Chris: I have two small children, so sadly, the number of games I’m in has dropped a little especially as all the people we played with got jobs and things like that. I’m currently DMing some D& D, 5th Ed with a couple of friends: all new players, actually. It’s the first, it’s three of them, it’s the first campaign or TTRPG any of them have played. Which is nice, I get to be really lazy and reuse all the tropes.

Courtney: It’s funny to go from like, oh yeah, I’m DMing to a bunch of new people, to yeah, I get to be lazy.

Chris: So, like, they’ve never seen a mimic or a shambling mound, it just, everything blows their mind.

Courtney: That’s awesome. Yeah, one of the groups I’m in is also a whole bunch of new players and I’m, like, the only experienced player, so it’s been very, like, hmm. I think we’re gonna tag team teaching you everything. Especially the one person that decided to be a wizard for their very first [00:06:00] TTRPG.

Chris: admire the gumption., I was, my first character was a barbarian, so I was like, yep, let’s just be as simple as possible.

Courtney: we tried to convince him, it did not work.

I Would love to transition into just learning about your journey from playing all of these different games and then getting into D& D and then starting to create and publish supplements.

Chris: It was kind of on a whim, to be honest, when I first started, because I’ve, I’ve always been interested in being creative and writing, and I’ve had a couple of attempts at writing novels and Got them finished, but then nothing ever really happened with them, and then it was about three years ago I saw on Kickstarter. It was I think Apothecaria by Anna Blackwell. Fantastic game, by the way. It’s a solo, kind of, potion making [00:07:00] witchy game. And when I came across it, what struck me is this this is a person making this. Not some big company or massive team. This is just one person who did this. And while I was on the Kickstarter site, I saw the Zine Month thing coming up, and I was like, you know what? I could, I could have a go at that. And I put my first one out for a tiny target of 500 pounds. It didn’t fund, it got to 350, and I thought to myself, that was so dumb, I’d have done it for 50 quid, and in fact I did just do it afterwards anyway. I went back to it and did another project later in the year and then just kind of had it as a side hustle for a while and at the time I was training to be a teacher, which is lots of work and very draining, and I’d had a really bad day kind of towards the end of the year, and I was like, Oh, I could just give this all up and write my books full [00:08:00] time.

And I was like, Could I? And I went and did some maths and I was like, Oh yeah, I actually could. And made the leap.

Courtney: I did not realize you were doing this full time.

Chris: Yeah, full, I’ve been full time for, I want to say 18 months, might be longer. Time’s become meaningless.

Courtney: Okay, well, this is exciting because I have so many questions.

Chris: Fantastic.

Courtney: So walk me through then, like, how you actually made that transition. Did you just stop teaching all of a sudden, or did you kind of finish out the year?

Chris: I don’t know how it is over in America. In England there’s, there’s three school terms and I’ve, I’ve had experience kind of lecturing before. So the first term was really easy for me because that’s where they’re kind of teaching people how to present, which I’d already done. The second term was a bit harder, because there was a lot more work.

And then the third term, the, the workload was just [00:09:00] so huge. I was getting really stressed, and also trying to do, you know, a second job. And when I kind of made the decision that it was just, I could earn as much as I was as a teacher, doing something a lot more fun. Frankly, a lot, a lot less, you know, demanding on my soul. I just kind of the next day I went in and said, yeah, I’m, I’m just going to stop. There’s, there’s no point, you know, keeping doing this. I finished, there was, it’s kind of in two parts as becoming a qualified teacher. And. A PGCE so I got the PGCE because I just needed to do one more essay for that. But yeah, I just went in one day and said, yeah, I’m, I’m quitting. I think eight weeks left of the year and I was just like, nah, it’s not worth it.

Courtney: I mean, that does seem like a big risk.

Chris: Yeah with Kickstarter, every project is, oh, maybe this is the one where no one backs it. But I’d, in the kind of 12 months before the decision, I’d made about a [00:10:00] teacher’s salary. Doing it part time, and I figured if I went full time, I’d be able to kind of expand it.

Courtney: Yeah, so just looking through, you know, all of your created projects list on Kickstarter, it seems like your very first one was cancelled, the second one didn’t make it, but then everything since has

Chris: Oh, the cancelled one. I didn’t I didn’t realise naively that you couldn’t have two projects at a time, and so I launched two, one got cancelled cause you can only have one yeah, and then yeah, the other one didn’t make it, and then it Went up.

Courtney: What did you do differently with, the, Second slash third one that you, took away from your first failed Kickstarter.

Chris: So I think the first thing I did is I, I set the target much lower. ’cause I was, I was planning to write it anyway for fun. So I set it the target’s, 50 quid. And just did that. And that funded for about 600 pounds I [00:11:00] think. And then the next one I. I. did some Facebook ads, but I don’t think that was the reason.

I think I just got really lucky. It kind of went a little viral, and the Night Market did about 8,000 pounds. It was only about 12, 000 at the time. And I kind of just hung on to that, like I got a bunch of them on my email list and just rode that wave. Because fortunately, the night market was very well received by those backers.

And then I just, they just kept coming back. Like when I was going through the lists of things to send out and so on, I’d recognize names time and time again.

To begin with, I was doing the normal tiers and then like a really high end one of have something of yours in the book. And there are a couple of people who did that, like, three projects on the trot. Which is incredibly flattering.

Courtney: Yeah, I always love that where you just [00:12:00] put that super high end one and you’re like, maybe? And then you’re like, oh my gosh, you just bought the whole book, basically.

Chris: Yeah, and it’s also, it means I get to be a little lazy, because then that’s one thing I don’t have to think of because normally as well, because they’re coming at it with a completely fresh brain, they’ll give some absolutely incredible ideas, right? I would never have thought of that so yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s lovely being able to collaborate with my backers and my fans in that way.

Courtney: Okay, so before we dig into processes and stuff, can you give me an overview of All of these different projects that you have done.

Chris: Just a quick run through of what they all are? Okay, so, the, funnily enough, the, the one that is, that got cancelled where I had those two initial projects and went, One win, not the other. The cancelled one is actually, I’ve come back to it, it’s now the one that I’m funding on [00:13:00] Kickstarter. The, let’s go through the first one, was it was Wrath of the Wild.

It was kind of a, what if druids decided to become eco terrorists and and there was the Halfling Food Festival. It was a travelling food festival run by halflings that you could just plop into your games. The Night Market: Fantasy Midnight Black Markets Flotsam Fair, another travelling food festival. Show, kind of half above water, half below, with kind of like a fleet of boats with attractions and things like that and merfolk underneath. The City Attractions Package, just how to spice up your cities like with zoos or aquariums and other sites of interest. Undead Unicorn Invasion which was kind of an apocalypse in a box to, you know, Plop Onto Your World. Folio of Familiar Faces, so that was a set of NPCs that had branching, level up options and ways to bring them back when your characters inevitably [00:14:00] killed them. Codex of Crime, allowing more crime in your games, three volumes of Inventory of Improving Items, which are magic items that level up. There’s quite a few of them, I think there’s like 20 in total. Junkyard at the Edge, huge, like, hexcrawl location in this kind of junkyard where everything that’s lost and forgotten ends up. Plethora of potential partners, so, NPCs to use as either romantic or platonic. Connections for your players. Tome of Witches, which I actually think is my favourite. Witches, well, if you just want more witches in your games, there’s a bunch of witch NPCs all stacked up. Discussions on how to get that witch, witch hunter dynamic into a game that already has magic. Which is trickier than it first seems.

A couple of new classes. What else have I done? Looking back at my shelf Compendium of Constructs. That was my first big A4 one, which is all about constructs. And then a couple of smaller digital only [00:15:00] ones that are like 101 NPCs, 101 shops, that sort of thing. I think that’s it. Oh, and currently funding Servants of the Mimic Queen, which is a campaign full of mimics.

Deep breath. That was a lot of them.

Courtney: so only a few. And you’ve done all of this in the last 18 months?

Chris: Not I would say the last three years, I was only full time the last 18 months

and kind of producing physical copies. Before that, it was just digital.

Courtney: That’s a lot to do in three years.

Chris: Yeah, I have quite a fast turnaround on making the books when I Children aside, who love them more than life itself, but they do slow down the creative process. But when I sit down to do, the standard kind of length of my books is about [00:16:00] 120 A5 pages, thereabouts. That’s kind of like a four to six week start to finish writing for me. So yeah, I just daydream a lot, so I’ve got a lot of stuff to squeeze out of my big head.

Courtney: Well, yeah, I’d love to dig into your processes for, your next project. like, Where do you tend to pull inspiration from and, just walk me through all of the steps that you take to get ready for publication.

Chris: So, what I tend to do is I’ll have a big like, OneNote drive with lots of pages with maybe 20 or 30 projects that one day I’d like to do. And any time I have an idea for any of them, I just plop it down. And when one of those kind of reaches a critical mass of ideas, you know, already there, I’m like, There, I’ll go, I’ll do you, and I’ll, Try and, try and find some similar books or films, you know, that cover the [00:17:00] same sort of themes.

So if I was doing a vampire one, I’d go watch Interview with a Vampire and so on. And then I, I start by bullet pointing out main areas I want in the book. So with The Witches 1, it would have been I want set of witch NPCs, the new classes, the new spells, the discussion at the beginning of how to handle Witchcraft some alternate setting ideas using witches heavily, and then I expand those bullet points out, you know, successively to fill the book.

Courtney: It’s so interesting, like, how varied your content is. yeah, I mean, You mentioned earlier that you have a quick turnaround. What does that mean to you?

Chris: I think for me, it’s, I, I just write quite fast. It’s, I don’t think any faster than anyone else. Definitely not. But I just, I’m able to get it down quite quickly because [00:18:00] in my, prior to teaching, I worked with an events company, which had when the events were going on, they were quite large.

It’d be maybe five people. five or six thousand people at them, which meant very intense bursts of work. So I got used to being, being able to kind of do things very quickly for those deadlines. So yeah, generally I’ll, I’ll sit down with my laptop when I’m doing work and I’ll have the, the empty pages kind of ready.

So I’ll be like, this page is this witch the next page is her background. And so. It’s I don’t have to think about the structure. I start with the structure, so I can then just get the ideas down.

At points, I’ll have the whole book with empty pages, just going, I know it’s gonna be on this page, I know it’s gonna be on this page, and I think I’d go insane if I tried to just write it from an empty document.

Courtney: I love organization, so I am all for this, structure. So [00:19:00] what about when it comes to like layout and art and all that fun stuff?

Chris: So, with the A5 ones, The, there’s re, there’s less art with, with an A four book, you need kind of some art to break up that large, double spread less. I personally find lesser an A five often have, if I have any art which norm normally I do, it’ll be kind of a full page next to something relevant. So with tome of Witches, I kind of did something a bit different and rather than. Art, I used actual photos of models who were kind of witchy and layout, I, I, this, this is a bit of a confession, because everyone I tell this to kind of winces and vomits a little in their mouth. I write my books in PowerPoint and I do all of the layout in that because it’s just really easy to move text boxes around and [00:20:00] I just

go, here’s a new slide, these are where the text boxes are, write it.

Courtney: Okay, honestly, I think you were the first person that has told me that PowerPoint is how they do their layout. That’s really

Chris: I think I

might be the only person ever to do it.

Courtney: mean, PowerPoint does have a lot of good features to it.

Chris: I, I used to make kind of motion cartoons with it in secondary school. I just put all of, I do it frame by frame. And have it go to next slide with like a zero second interval and it just whipped through. And you can make games with it, it’s an incredibly versatile piece of software. And I just kind of, I latched onto it fairly early and never let go, and now I do everything in it.

And everyone I tell just clutches their head.

Courtney: Okay. Well, I’m about to get ahead of myself here just because like, I know that you have like actual [00:21:00] print publications. So are you using PowerPoint for that layout? How does that work?

Chris: So, you can export as a PDF and what I did is I got the print kind of template from the printer I use, which if you’re in the UK it’s Mixum. I’m not paid for it but they are excellent and I really recommend them. And I just kind of put that into PowerPoint and I have a little box that goes around the outside that’s my bleed I know to stay inside and then I delete all the bleed boxes, export it.

Send it to them, and it works. It surprises me every time, but it does.

Courtney: yeah, so let’s actually dig into these print books a little bit more. You said that it used to be all digital, but then you started doing physical printings. So that transition.[00:22:00]

Chris: So, it was the first few I did, because I was teaching at the same time and kind of still finding my feet as a new parent, with my , And Kickstarter was entirely new to me as well, and I just did not have the brain space to work out how to make printing work. I was concerned about the financial risk of needing to

carry The stock and dealing with all of that, because if a project funds for 50 quid and you’re just doing digital, that’s fine.

That’s fine. But if it funds at, you know, 50 quid and you’ve got to make some print copies, then you could be looking at a loss. And part of The reason I set it so low is I find People are far more likely to back a

project that’s reached its funding goal, and that means I reach it pretty much [00:23:00] instantly, and then there’s that less hesitation, and then I end up actually just funding better as a result.

But yeah, it was after about a year I kind of started dipping to my toe. I didn’t actually do print copies of what I was funding. I did over the course of about three Kickstarters, get a physical copy of our first one that did really well, The Night Market. And so yeah, the idea, I think it was over, Sun Dead Unicorn Invasion, another one, and Photo of Familiar Faces you could sign up to get. a copy of the Night Market, and then I did the printing over the summer with three Kickstarter’s worth of orders, and that seemed to go well, so I just carried on, carried on doing it.

Courtney: Yeah, that’s really interesting to add on a physical copy of a different book.

What made you decide to do that instead of what was currently funding? You

Chris: when I because at this point it was still [00:24:00] only a year in I hadn’t had enough kind of very successful projects to be to have the confidence in myself to kind of just go for it, and I knew the Night Market was a big hit. because it had done 900 on the first one and then a lot of people have bought it as add ons in subsequent Kickstarters.

So I was fairly, also I had a kind of a pre made market with people who have the digital copy and might want a physical copy to go with it because I personally, I love a physical copy of things. And if backed something I really liked as a PDF and then they did a physical copy, I’d probably try and pick that up. So yeah, that was kind of the rationale behind that.

Courtney: know, that makes sense. It always helps to have a more viral product,

Chris: Yeah.

Courtney: but these days you do offer print versions of what’s currently funding?

Chris: Yeah. So what I’m doing at the moment is kind of [00:25:00] doing alternating doing one that has a print copy and then a smaller one kind of in between just while I catch up with the logistics of the previous one and then go for my next slightly bigger project. So, Right now, Servants of the Mimic Queen is funding, that’s gonna be a big meaty A4.

And then when that finishes, I’ll launch I think it’s gonna be 101 Shops and Items, which will be about 50 pages A5, digital only, for about 2 or something like that. Just to kind of keep the momentum going and keep building the audience.

Courtney: feel like that’s really smart, honestly, to just have those like smaller ones. Well, yeah, I mean, it just, it makes sense because logistics of fulfilling a physical product is so much more of a hassle and so being able to keep funding coming in while you’re dealing with.

Chris: because, because that’s The thing with Kickstarter, the, when [00:26:00] you, you start your funding and if it’s say 30 days, you’re not going to be seeing any money for minimum seven weeks, like the four weeks of fun of funding time, and then three weeks while Kickstarter collects the funds, make sure there’s no chargebacks and things like that.

So smoothing out that curve and making the income less spiky across the year is helpful.

Courtney: How often are you aiming to launch a new Kickstarter?

Chris: So my plan at the moment is to do about 10 a year with around about five of those as kind of physical products. With, yeah, those, like just little two pound, here’s a hundred things, over 50 pages between them. That is. Sometimes a little tricky to keep up with. Occasionally I’ll be like, okay, I’m going to drop this project or push this one back.

Because I’m just For the parents [00:27:00] out there, kids just do not sleep well, and I am half the time just a zombie. And some jobs, if you’re really tired, you can still do them. Like, when I was mailing out all the books, didn’t matter how tired I was, I could put a book inside an envelope. If you’re writing, you might just have to delete everything if it’s really bad.

So, some days I’m just like, no, today’s not a writing day. I’ll just sit and feel bad about it.

Courtney: I don’t have kids, but I do still have those days where I’m like, I tried to be productive, but it’s just a wash.

Chris: I, maybe the kids have nothing to do with it, maybe I’m just secretly lazy, and I’m only now discovering it, and I’m using them as the excuse.

Courtney: Hey there, great excuse.

Chris: Yeah, to the teenagers, that’s gonna be my excuse for everything.

Courtney: That’s wild, though, to do 10 Kickstarters a year. Even if you’re not doing physical product for all of them, that’s still just, like, that’s impressive. That’s a lot of [00:28:00] work.

Chris: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah, you’re just right. It’s What kind of the hope is, is if It depends how, well they do. If one went absolutely massive, I’d be able to slow down for a bit

because I’d know that bills were covered for a while. I want all of them to be as good as they can be, so I don’t kind of skimp when one doesn’t do as well, but it just means that once it’s done, I then have to go on to the next one quickly. Because as well, I’m, I’m a one man team, so kind of everything.

Courtney: Yeah, for sure. I mean, on the one hand, that keeps the budget down, but still, it’s so much work.

Chris: Yeah, oh my god, what I’d give for a marketing person. Or just, yeah. Yeah, a marketing person, really, that would be amazing.

Courtney: There’s a reason that social media coordinator is a full time job.

Chris: yeah. I’ve recently [00:29:00] started TikTok, and it’s just doing 10 second videos once a day. That’s a lot of brain space. Especially to do it well, which I’m not.

Courtney: Hey, entrepreneurs. I love introducing you to new creators every episode, but I could really use your support. I would love to invite you to join our Patreon page, where you’ll gain access to behind the scenes content, add your questions to upcoming interviews, and you could even receive a shout out on our site in an upcoming episode.

To learn more, go to lightheartadventures. com slash RPG. And now back to the show.

Okay, wow, I’m still just blown away by how much work is going into all of these things. Do you give yourself breaks? Do you ever have a time to take a break?

Chris: No, I’m, it’s, it’s always something I’ve been quite bad at in I, my dad had an incredibly [00:30:00] strong work ethic Potentially an unhealthy one, but a really strong one, which I think has rubbed off onto me and I’m really bad at taking breaks. At some point, there’ll be enough books where I can go, okay, I’m gonna stop writing them for a while and just market them and kind of give the brain a bit of a rest from constantly creating.

But on the plus side, it is quite a fun thing. Like, it’s It can be hard work, but it is fun. You know, I was doing it before it started making good money. I was doing it just for fun in the evenings. And when you start a new project and you’ve got all those fresh empty pages and you can just choose the funnest thing to write about in the project.

That’s, that’s nice.

Courtney: So yeah, now that you’re doing this full time, what does a typical week look like for

Chris: you?

Chris: Love to give you a really sensible answer here, but it’s so, so changeable [00:31:00] with kids, because one of the main reasons, the reason I wrote this was Left my previous job before I started becoming a trainer to be a teacher is I was having to go abroad on quite short notice for tech conferences fairly regularly, which when we’re expecting a child just wasn’t going to work.

I wanted to be really present, you know, to help my wife and, as much as I could. I wanted to be there for the kids and, be a really present dad. And so how the kids are and, you know, how everyone’s doing is very changeful. So there’s not good routine. If, if the kids are away for a bit, as they sometimes go and visit, like, their gram in London, it, it will normally look like I’ll get up, and I’ll just sit, and I’ll write, and I’ll write some number of pages.

If I’m doing an A4 one, maybe three pages, and then that’s my brain [00:32:00] done for the day. An A5 one, maybe six. But it’s that every day

Courtney: Of course, having a two and a four year old is going to make having a set routine difficult.

Chris: If they would have the decency to wake up at the same time every day, ev even if it was six, if it was consistently six, I’d get used to it. But occasionally it’ll be seven 30 and it’ll lull you into a full sense of security.

Courtney: How inconsiderate.

Chris: I, I know, I dunno how pg, I dunno how pg the podcast is, but I, I have some choice words for when they wake up at four in the morning.

Courtney: Yeah, understandable. Well, at what age do they start school in the UK? Okay.

Chris: old, the oldest one has started school and it’s incredible.

it’s mainly it’s just that extra routine because now it’s a lot easier to handle one child because my wife works from home as an artist, but is the [00:33:00] kind of primary childcare. And when there’s two of them around, I try and come down every couple of hours to give her a break and tap in because they’re demons.

Lovely, but very energetic. But when there’s just one, I can then largely take the entire day until school pick up. So yeah, in a couple of years when they’re both in school, chef’s kiss.

Excellent.

Courtney: So for your physical product, are you fulfilling those orders yourself?

Chris: So until about a month or two ago, I was so I would. Order two or three to check I’d done it right and they weren’t upside down or anything, then I’d do the big order. Normally about three times what I’d actually sold, so I’d then have some for future Kickstarters and for expos and stuff. And then, yeah, I’d print out all the labels, I’d stick them to the envelopes, stuff them all, take them to the [00:34:00] post office. Made the post office very angry, because occasionally, every couple of months I’d turn up with 200 parcels. But now I’ve actually found a fulfillment company who approached me which was lovely, and even though I have to pay them for doing it because their rates are much better than what I can get as a person on my own, I end up, it ends up being about the same and I don’t have to spend an entire week stuffing envelopes.

Courtney: That’s interesting that they reached out to you.

Chris: I think they had, they were, they already did something to do, it was kind of like sample boxes. In a slightly different industry. And they were at the UK Games Expo, drumming up business. And I was incredibly grateful. Because, yeah, they came up and I was like, Yes, I would, I would love someone to do that.

Because I hate it. And they, they did it and they’ve been really good for I don’t know, when [00:35:00] I send parcels, I don’t know what the postman do, because the number where, at the other end, someone will say excuse me, it’s been broken in half, can I have another one? And it’s been savaged by wild dogs or something. And that’s not happened with them, so yeah, they’re doing really good.

Courtney: Do they keep inventory, like, at their warehouse, and do the orders just go directly to them now, or how does that work?

Chris: As it was the first time I’d used them, I sent them everything over for, I think, two Kickstarters that had gone back to back with just a couple of spares. That all went really well. So, what I’m probably going to look to doing is moving the majority of my inventory over to them. And then as well, when I get my, some traffic to my online shop, which is there and I just have yet to advertise it because I’m horrible at keeping track of everything They’ll just handle all of that, and I’ll never have to

send another parcel again.

Courtney: That’s the dream.[00:36:00]

Chris: Yeah,

Courtney: Oh, this is so cool! Thank you for letting me, like, nerd out with you on all these, logistics questions. Because

Chris: no, no, I love it. I was kind of the logistics guy at my previous job so yeah, love it.

Courtney: Yeah, I used to head up fulfillment for a jewelry company, in their warehouse, and so, anytime that I get to be like, hmm, so how did you do this?

Chris: Show me your spreadsheets. Yeah,

cannot, cannot beat a good Excel sheet.

Courtney: Cool. So you mentioned your TikTok earlier and, you know, I was perusing that and it looks like you’re trying to do a bunch of like DM tips, but can you just tell us a little bit about your channel and what your goals for that are?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So really what I’m trying to do is use it as a way to reach more people and share the message about what I’m doing and, you know, my stuff. And I’m still, I’m still in the early days. I’m still kind of finding my [00:37:00] feet with what works, but largely I just, I sit down and I’ll just say an idea at the camera. So, one that did reasonably well is, I was like, you can, you can spice a, a seasoned group of adventurers, they know, or players even, if you say, ah, and you describe a Shambling Mountain, they know exactly what it is. So I was like, spice it up, give them a wolf, but actually it’s got the stat block of a hydra. And when they think they’ve killed it by chopping its head off, another wolf head comes out and there’s two and that’ll, that’ll throw them for a real loop. I also recently did an interview with another TikToker who has far, far more followers than me, so like 200, 000, Diana of the Rose, who, so, and I’ve been putting clips of that interview up. Lovely, by the way, she was, she was really nice. I’ve, I’ve, I’m two for two on lovely interviewers. You are the other one, by the way.

Courtney: Thank you.

Chris: But yeah, just sharing my ideas and thoughts and trying to reach more [00:38:00] people with my stuff.

Courtney: How often are you trying to put videos out?

Chris: I’m currently aiming for two to three a day but they’re, the beauty of TikTok is they’re and the editing. Trying to do a, even a YouTube video a week would be A hell of a task but with TikTok, I sit down on like a Friday morning when one’s in school and one’s at nursery, and I’ll record like 20 or 30 videos just back to back, and then just every, every day I’ll go, let’s have that one, upload it, cut off me taking a breath at the start, put some captions on, and it’s good to go.

Courtney: Yeah. I briefly thought about doing YouTube and was like, hmm. No, I don’t think I want to do that.

Chris: Although, I have, as with YouTube, I’ve just I’ve been putting all the short all the TikToks up as

YouTube Shorts. This is zero [00:39:00] effort. So we’ll see how that goes.

But yeah, long long form on YouTube. God, I don’t have I don’t have the editing skill.

Courtney: I used to work with some people that would do the videos for content creation we were making for the video game world. And I was always so impressed. I was like, man, I took a video editing class once and I don’t remember much. Also, technology’s changed since then. So.

Chris: Yeah, there are just some skills where even if I don’t have it, I understand how someone might acquire that skill. And video editing is just sorcery to me. Like, how how do you work out how to make it look good? Witchcraft.

Courtney: Okay, so, before we run out of time, I love to talk about challenges, which I know that we’ve kind of Touched on some briefly already, but just looking back over the last three years slash 18 months of full time, what are some of the more like unique challenges that you think that you’ve faced?

Chris: I think a challenge I’m facing [00:40:00] right now is the market for these sorts of things is becoming incredibly saturated, and standing out is quite difficult. Plus as well, I mean, cost of living crisis, people have a little less disposable income, so that makes for the extra competition is quite a challenge to be seen amongst all the other admittedly fantastic projects. I think a lot of the challenges I face are quite, common to a lot of creators of just having to wear so many different hats of a web developer, a marketer Yeah, and the fact I’m solo doing it definitely makes it a bit harder.

Courtney: What Are some of the things that you’re trying to do to help yourself stand out? I

Chris: I’m trying to be a lot more better with my newsletter. So when I first started, I was putting out kind of free content for the [00:41:00] newsletter. When my daughter was born, that took a bit of a dive off for a while. I’m trying to get back into that and, you know, give them regular free things. Get on TikTok and YouTube Shorts to You know, draw in some audience that way. I’m also, I had a brief flirtation with Patreon, and I’m looking to get that going again. And hopefully with an aim to kind of transitioning to doing fewer Kickstarters and more stuff on Patreon, so there’s kind of that regular income. Because to be honest, I mean, if I wasn’t having to have the stress of putting the Kickstarters up and wondering, I can actually produce more content, you know, for a lower price for everyone. So yeah, those are the things I’m kind of trying to do.

Courtney: agree. I think that Patreon, as long as you can keep up with, the monthly production, that it is, More stable, it’s less stressful than having to build another Kickstarter [00:42:00] page and like doing all of the updates for it. So I can definitely see how that would be a good transition for sure.

Alright, well, to flip it around, what have been some of the more rewarding parts of this journey for you?

Chris: I think one of the single most rewarding thing probably two, the first was getting the first physical copy of something I’d done through the post, and actually holding something, because I’d wanted to be a writer for over a decade, and suddenly that’s what I was making money from, my writing, and here was the physical proof of it that I held in my hands and And then the, the other really rewarding thing was, I was at the UK Games Expo I think for my second year, and someone who had bought The Tome of Witches the previous year came back to the table and started gushing about how wonderful they’d found it, how, and, it sounds like I’m making this up, but they said it had transformed their [00:43:00] game. And that was, that was really, really cool. Wonderful to, to hear that someone had, one, I’d, been able to do something nice, , for them, and they’d got something from, but also that, that kind of validation that what I’d done was good that was, that was really moving.

Courtney: That’s amazing! Well, as we wind down do you have any other upcoming projects that you want to talk about

Chris: So, depending on when it the episode airs I think the thing that will be funding at the time will be 101 shops and items, depending on what you ended up end up finally calling it, where there’ll be a list of, here’s a bunch of different shops to make your shopping trips more interesting.

And each shop will have, an NPC with a, a bit of a backstory and a fun item. So I think there’s like John T’s B Emporium. Where it’s just a shop that sells lots of honey, but also bee grenades just to kind of [00:44:00] make shopping trips a little more interesting. But the one that’s coming up that I’m very excited about is going to be in January, which is going to be the Player’s Almanac, which the new Player’s Handbook is really good. But because they’ve changed how backgrounds work and things like that, there aren’t a lot of backgrounds anymore. There’s, I think, 16 or something like that. And so I’m going to be producing a project that is going to be a really cool project. Detailed resource for people looking to make player characters with a whole load of ideas story a load of new backgrounds, feats, races Again, what they’ve done with the rules, with the new Player’s Handbook, found really good. But suddenly that means there’s a lot less content to draw from, and if you’re an experienced player, you want that kind of novelty with your players, and so I’m hoping to give that with the Player’s Almanac in January.

Courtney: no, [00:45:00] that sounds really interesting. It has been, I don’t know, a weird transition. I feel like in my group we are One of my groups were deciding like, all right, we’re going to go ahead and switch in the middle of our campaign.

But a lot of us are races that aren’t there

Chris: Mmm.

Courtney: that aren’t options. So I feel like just having like a more, a resource like that will be really helpful for folks.

Chris: That’s what I’m, what I’m hoping.

Courtney: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, yeah, I’ll drop links to The Kickstarter that should be funding at the time that this drops out in the show notes.

Chris: you so much.

Courtney: But where else can people find you?

Chris: The best place to find me is either on Kickstarter, on my profile there on Linktree as Linktree slash Evil Pigeon Games, I think or on itch. io, which has got all my PDFs for everything I’ve done. And if you sign up to my mailing list, you get a free book of Primal [00:46:00] Dragons which is like 20 or 30 pages with a whole bunch of new dragons.

Courtney: That is quite the email freebie.

Chris: I write a lot.

Courtney: Thank you so much for coming on. At this point we’re gonna go ahead and wrap up the interview portion. Gonna stop recording. And then start recording again to do a fun little quick question blitz for patrons, where I’m gonna ask you ten sillier questions and we’re gonna go from there.

Chris: Well, thank you so much for having me.

Courtney: Of course, this has been a real treat.

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