Do games live and die on their core books? Or can a thriving third party creator scene keep them from failing their death saving throws? Christopher John Eggett explores the world of third party modules, adventures and even shower curtains for some our favourite roleplaying games.
What does a healthy roleplaying game look like? I’m not talking about one where the core stats are your BMI and half-marathon time – rather something like a game’s constitution save, the thing that stops it slipping into oblivion and out of the TTRPG culture’s collective consciousness.
How would we even work out the stat value we were using? Would it be the number of core books sold or how much it made on Kickstarter? Or would it be something more organic, how many people are playing it – or even – how many people are busy creating new content for it?
Certainly one way of quantifying the latter is to look at the prevalence, or not, of third party content and how vibrant a community exists around programmes like Dungeons & Dragons’ Dungeon Masters’ Guild or Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository.
The latter are places where game masters and would-be game designers alike can upload their work, created for a specific system, for all to use. More often than not with these programmes there’s some kind of deal with the dragon/dagon to be had: you get to use the good name, mechanics and monsters of, say, Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu, and in exchange you give up a slice of your earnings. Whilst it can be a nice little revenue stream for publishers there’s a lot more than just money going to the licence holders here – with every new adventure published they’re receiving a fresh transfusion of blood into their game and a boost to its vital signs.
Launched in 2018 The Miskatonic Repository, a space where Call of Cthulhu scenario writers can share and sell their work officially on DrivethruRPG, had its 150,000th sale earlier this year. We spoke to Michael O’Brien, one of the owners of Chaosium, about this milestone and what he thinks it says about the health of both the game and the industry at large.
‘Hundreds of independent creators were involved in getting to this significant milestone, many of whom were publishing a TTRPG title for the first time’ said O’Brien, ‘there's even a dedicated Storytelling Collective stream for first-time Call of Cthulhu creators. Today you'll find a thriving and dynamic community of Miskatonic Repository creators, with groups on Facebook and Discord to support each other and share ideas.
‘Creators can draw from our published works, and we provide templates and art packs which they are welcome to use,’ he explained, ‘unlike a standard third party licence, there's no approval process and community content creators don't pay any up-front licensing fees. Instead, you can publish when you want, and there's a revenue split of sales.’
This split gives 50% to the creator, 30% to DriveThruRPG – who host both the Miskatonic Repository and finally a 20% slice lands with Chaosium. This is the same split as creators get on the DM’s Guild and many other similar programmes hosted by DriveThruRPG such as the Free League Workshop or Modiphius’ 2d20 World Builder program.
Notably many of these programmes provide additional resources for would be game designers and Chaosium’s focus on helping new writers is especially important. It’s fairly well agreed that it’s harder to write a Call of Cthulhu scenario than a dungeon crawl, as for something to be satisfying to investigate it has to make at least some sense. There’s generally less ‘thinking’ involved in a spike trap.
And naturally, there’s a variability in the quality and ambition of the content too. Not everyone is ready to write something like Mike Mason’s recently released sandbox epic, Arkham, or Lynne Hardy’s Regency Cthulhu, and that’s more than fine, says O’Brien. ‘An advantage of releasing as a PDF means a creator can get feedback from readers and playtesters and update their work. Some creators might initially release their work using minimal art, or stock art, and then use the money they've made from sales to then engage the services of an artist or mapmaker for an updated version.’
This idea of creating work that can then be improved upon as the funds come in, is one that today matches Chaosium’s own publishing methods. Often the company will release an adventure as a PDF first before the final print run, with those buying the PDF getting that money off any subsequent hardcover. It’s one of those moves that respects the process and allows more involvement of the community in the final stages of any official output.
And furthermore, in the case of Chaosium at least, all of this is backed up with more support in the shape of the Miskatonic Playhouse podcast and Miskatonic Repository Con – the latter of which is fan-run and focuses on showcasing work from the programme to a wider audience.
In the muddy history of Dungeons & Dragons there is an amusing fact about standalone adventures: TSR wasn’t the first to publish one for their own game. That honour instead goes to Wee Warriors and their 1976 ‘Dungeon Master Kit’, Palace of The Vampire Queen. With just a few maps with terse room descriptions, and unnumbered maps for players, Vampire Queen doesn’t seem that far away from much modern indie TTRPG output and certainly its spirit lives on today.
While we think of modern licensing around adventures as something which is publisher led – the truth is that people always have, and always will, make stuff for games if they like them enough, something canny publishers do well to take advantage of. Sean McCoy, the designer and publisher of Mothership, places much of both Dungeons & Dragons’ and his own game’s success on the ready availability of third party content.
‘It's hard to overstate how important the third party scene has been for Mothership. This is something we pictured very early on. Essentially we looked at D&D and the effect of Judge's Guild, Goodman Games, Critical Role, Dimension20, as well as the OSR writ large and it's very clear that so much of D&D's success is outside of TSR, Wizards or Hasbro.’
Importantly, a little like Palace of the Vampire Queen, well regarded modules for Mothership were hitting tables almost as soon as the game existed. With scores of new fan made rules, modules and more all available for the game’s ‘zero edition’, published well before the official 1e edition raised a chest-bursting $1.4 million dollars on Kickstarter.
‘1e is interesting because we started tinkering with the big rules changes almost immediately after the 0e zines started coming out,’ says McCoy, ‘particularly with combat, wounds, hits, armour, that kind of thing. Without the community, without the support and the early excitement that encouraged us to keep writing for the game there wouldn't be a 1e. 0e was originally just an ashcan that I did to scratch a creative itch. The fan response and the third party response made us continue to invest in it.’
Certainly Mothership hit my own deep space sensors through exploring the work of Luke Gearing, a games writer and designer whose work on modules like Gradient Descent for Mothership or Acid Death Fantasy for Trokia! is rightly regarded as some of the best out there. Gearing has since joined the Mothership team as a full time writer and is working on a book, tentatively titled Wages of Sin, which focuses on bounty hunting and crime in the game’s world.
While the Mothership team might be busy working on their own official expansions to the game, and express a love and debt to the third party scene, we wonder if games that rely on independent creators tend to develop a different style of play.
Because games like Mothership, and the similarly successful MÖRK BORG, make use of so many third party modules, do they end up with a more modular feeling at the table?
‘Ultimately there are no rules besides house rules,’ says McCoy, ‘Gary Gygax really tried hard to codify AD&D as like a monolithic thing that you could describe from the top down, that there could be an official way to play. I think this goes against the natural strength of tabletop games versus say video games. Video games can really hand pick this experience due to the nature of the medium. But even then, it's hard to dictate – people can play games for all sorts of reasons outside of the designers' intents. With tabletop games it's a feature not a bug that every table is playing the game differently. “Salt to taste” makes the recipe better.’
Of course ecosystems like the DM’s Guild have another effect on both the modules that people publish, and the people who publish them. They have the potential to turn a hobby into a business.
Kelsey Dionne is the writer and designer behind The Arcane Library and creator of the RPG Shadowdark and a whole host of acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons 5E modules. Publishing work for D&D and her own game is now Dionne’s full time job and, with the recent release of Shadowdark, she’s become not only the writer of third party modules, but a licensor of them too.
‘My work in the third party scene has transformed over the years from writing a lot of 5E adventures to now being the licensor of a large third-party scene for Shadowdark RPG,’ Dionne tells us. ‘So one could say that I participated heavily in a third party scene, and then created one.
For Dionne, it’s clear that third party creators are vital for any game’s continued good health, though she also recognises that there is a something of a conflict in the way that writing for bigger systems is incentivised and the inherent DIY spirit of the roleplaying game scene.
‘More than anyone, the people who write for and play a game are the ones keeping that game alive,’ she says, ‘TTRPGs can be a hobby, or they can be a business,’ says Dionne, ‘so when you decide to bring business into the hobby, you have to change your mindset a bit about how you approach your work. You're no longer just a writer; you're a marketer, a networker, and an accountant.’
Still, even if the change from amateur to professional requires some changes in attitude Dionne believes that it has to come from a place of genuine passion.
‘I firmly believe your best work must come from a real interest in what you do, and so there's a "genuine" way to go about that and a "calculated" way,’ the designer explains, ‘the genuine way is always better, and that means that you have to be honestly interested in the trend. I'm just as fascinated by new ideas and new movements as anyone who follows the TTRPG space, so I hope that allows me to stay genuine.’
Dionne offers last year’s Dungeon23 project (created by Mothership’s Sean McCoy) as an example of a trend that she jumped on. While she didn’t complete the mammoth task of creating a 365 room-a-day mega-dungeon, experiences like this are what keep the scene fresh for creators.
These trends can be plugged into for business reasons too – we’ve all seen with Kickstarter’s ZineQuest event how each year a substantial percentage of game designers involved will often coalesce around one or two games such as MÖRK BORG, Mothership or Old School Essentials. Riding the hype around a hot game makes good sense for smaller creators looking to get themselves noticed in what is often a crowded market whilst also keeping those games buoyant with fresh new content.
For Dionne though the biggest change she has seen in her time in the third party scene is the switch to a more decentralised approach to distribution and publishing.
‘I've noticed is the hobby moving toward a more democratised community where Do It Yourself culture and self-publishing are now very common. The advent of Kickstarter, print-on-demand, and eCommerce has made it much more approachable for individuals to publish material than it ever was,’ says Dionne, whose Kickstarter for her own game Shadowdark pulled in over $1.3m in funding.
‘I think freedom and creativity have skyrocketed, and we, the lovers of TTRPGs, are now benefiting from a new renaissance of making and sharing TTRPG material that would have been impossible even 20 years ago.’
One of the most gratifying experiences of my own brief game design career was when I discovered that the indie game actual play podcast The Rolled Standard had used my own MÖRK BORG rules for what happens after you die as part of their campaign. It was a single, silly idea that I jammed onto a page of A4, but they picked it up and ran with it for a good session or two.
I had thought that having put something out into the world that a handful of people downloading it would be enough of a pay off, but here I learnt the true joy is actually having people play your work. It turns out I’m in good company as for MÖRK BORG’s creators, Johan Nohr and Pelle Nilsson, the true health of any game is simply whether it’s being played.
‘I’m not sure if every game needs 3rd party material to be considered healthy, but for our type of game it can certainly be a good measure of community involvement. Maybe not the best. That, I think, is having a lot of people play it,’ says Nohr.
Nilsson talks about the way MÖRK BORG grew, with their early expectations being that they’d print it themselves as an underground zine – before speaking to Free League when the numbers simply got too large. For him control of the ‘product’ isn’t really his problem. ‘MÖRK BORG is now a monster and we don’t have much control… which is a good thing, and we are still humble,’ says Nilsson, ‘I am really happy that 3rd party creators succeed with their MÖRK BORG materials; the beast is still, after some five years, doing good.’
They may have relinquished control but still MÖRK BORG’s ongoing success owes much to their initial, and indeed continued, approach to the game. That is one of generosity and excitement towards the community of players and creators that developed around it, even long before physical copies of the core rule book landed in people’s hands.
It might simply be that MÖRK BORG invites this with its easily comprehended vibe, low rules-overhead and plenty of space to fill in. But the game’s creators embraced that enthusiasm with the result that by the time those first copies of MÖRK BORG did drop through people’s letterboxes there was already a vibrant 3rd party scene based around it.
A good example of this is Svante Landgraf’s Overland Travel module – one of the first pieces of 3rd party content that was available for the game. It filled in a ‘gap’ in the game, something that many expect to play their TTRPGs. When Nohr and Nilsson saw all of this work being put in by the community they decided to take some of it and make it ‘official’.
‘We got so hyped to see people making stuff for our game that we offered to help him get it “official” looking: design it in our layout style, illustrate, edit and republish it for free download on our website. And so, MÖRK BORG CULT was born,’ Nohr explains.
‘It was a concept where we turned community-made material into a kind of semi-official, free-to-download product that felt just as official and “canon” as the core book. Eventually, we gathered a bunch of these hacks and modules, together with new stuff by Pelle and me, into the zines, Feretory and Heretic.’
The community content was still freely available on the website, and the authors were able to sell their work as they wished without MÖRK BORG corporate’s big wigs (two gentlemen in Sweden) taking a cut.
‘In time, however, we reached the point where the submissions inbox filled up faster than we could curate it and so we decided to open the third-party license completely and encourage people to publish their things without having to go through us as a middle-man. That’s really when the dam broke and shit got out of control. An avalanche of third-party material. We really had created a monster,’ says Nohr.
There’s a sense nowadays in indie games that one of the main ways of keeping a game alive is to make sure that people are always producing new material for it. This might just be a folly however after all, does MÖRK BORG really need overland travel rules? Or special rules for what to do if you’re dead? Of course not – but as long as there are so many intentional ‘gaps’ in the text, there will always be a natural urge to ‘fill’ them.
Still, Nilsson and Nohr do both stress that it’s ‘totally fine’ for a game to exist without this continuous flood of content, and that a game can simply exist as a singular artifact. ‘I don’t think creators and publishers should need to feel stressed out about having to create a third-party community program just because they made a game,’ says Nohr.
Third party modules sometimes exist in tension with the ‘core’ works of any given game. There’s a sense that they’re at once the entire lifeblood of a game’s good health, but also that they’re often ‘not really canon’, almost like they are some kind of unofficial fan fiction.
Whilst roleplaying games may be described as an ongoing series of agreements about how the world you’re playing in works, for many games there often comes a point where you people want a consensus on what is happening, where and why and third party content can potentially muddy those waters. There are a few different approaches to whether a third party creation is ‘canon’ or not.
‘Nothing produced in community content is “canon” or “official”,’ says Chaosium’s O’Brien, ‘and that's a feature not a bug. This means community creators are not constrained by canon in any way.’
The supposed danger here is that writers might feel hemmed in by the lore of Arkham as set out by the core books. For others there’s a much more free-wheeling approach.
‘For us it was always important that when a player gets the core book, it is their game and world,’ says Nilsson, ‘that is one reason why I wrote the setting a bit open-ended; fill in the answers yourself, it's your call. Then, of course, when we release official stuff many take that as “canon”. But we never say “we think you misunderstood that thing about this”. Everything is cool.’
Nohr is a little more direct, ‘Who cares! There is no canon! Don’t listen to us. No, but seriously, whatever happens at your table is your canon. No matter where you got your material from.’
Yet there is undeniable connective tissue when authors are creating in the same world.
‘We don't do any canon really,’ says McCoy, ‘third party works are as much canon as anything else. We talk about table canon a lot. We try to put easter eggs and connections between Mothership modules, but there's no "official setting" for the game as it were. No canonical system or factions, it’s all just grist for your table.’
Despite its relative youth MÖRK BORG probably has the widest, and indeed wildest, range of third party products available beyond adventures and add ons. Certainly few other games have inspired the production of vinyl records, action figures and shower curtains.
‘We have a thing for turning puns, memes and in-jokes into fully playable material,’ says Nohr, ‘Hell, look at CY_BORG, which pretty much started out as a pun. A lot of times, someone jokes about “Wouldn’t it be fun to…” and shortly after, someone has made a compatible product of just that. I think that’s the source of all the third-party mugs, shower curtains and scented candles. Honestly I don’t think they’re really being sold, but that’s not the point.’
The designer’s favourite pieces are those which don’t try and emulate the MÖRK BORG style directly. Nodding towards the likes of red-and-white occult and religion themed Abyss of Hallucinations series, cassette-and-app game Sword of Hailstone, and Forbidden Psalm – a miniature wargame with its own set of independent creators writing for it.
‘When we do more stuff in the future I think a design goal will be to not look like official MÖRK BORG,’ says Nilsson, ‘we need to challenge ourselves and not ever feel bored; that would immediately show off in the end result.’
If there’s no consensus on canon (which is of course, how it should be) we turn to the only thing that everyone definitely agrees on. That the best feeling is simply having your game played.
‘Now in its 43rd year, the Call of Cthulhu RPG is bigger than ever, and the Miskatonic Repository and its vibrant creator community has played an important role in that growth,’ says O’Brien, ‘fans will often include Miskatonic Repository titles when they're talking about memorable or favourite Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns. Given the game goes back over 40 years, that's a testament to the quality of the independent material being produced.’
‘The biggest compliment I get is when people run games of Mothership, particularly if they run them in public like at their local game store or local convention,’ says McCoy, ‘I was at a reading for the poet Kaveh Akbar recently who talked about the opportunity cost of reading a novel. How humbling that is. The opportunity cost of learning a game, prepping for it, teaching others, onboarding new players, running games, it's massive. There's so much you could do with your time.’
‘To then take that a step further and start writing, publishing for the game.’ continues McCoy, ‘it's an immense honour. We're an industry where new products are constantly pushing out old ones. Life is short. If Mothership will survive me it will only be because other people have added to the conversation.’
And maybe this is what we should take away. That a thriving third party scene isn’t a measure of how alive a game is, just how much people love it.
Brave Call of Cthulhu’s Miskatonic Repository here
For more on Mothership's 3rd party licenses dock at mothershiprpg.com
Join the MÖRK BORG KULT condemn by visitng morkborg.com
And to delve into Shadowdark check out thearcanelibrary.com
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 6 (August '24)