I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.
If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)
As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
Myself and others are reliant on a 2-second reblog to be able to support ourselves as artists, you and your 10 followers are where it starts.
you were not of sound mind when you typed this
i love you oldish vocaloid songs. i love you more than um. uh. was gonna say rwby but probably not. i love you vocaloid from specifically at least ten years ago. and also after. okay so ive come to the conclusion i may or may not just like vocaloid as a whole.
aromantic and interested in shipping in much the same way people are interested in superheroes. like man wouldnt it be cool if dating was real. id love to imagine what i would do if dating was real. here's my tierlist of the best kinds of dating. number 4 may surprise you.
okay lancers
while hanging out with my bf tonight i am going to enter The Torment Nexus
in layman's terms i am going to be making several ll6 frames using the following supplements:
- Every Official Lancer Supplement
- Corsair Grunt-Works
- Shadow of Gehenna
- Eschaton Industrial Arms
- Systech AI Solutions
- Intercorp Licenses
if you have any suggestions of more lcp's i could use i would like them very much :)
it was funny
(checks latest posts)
...so have you recently been thinking about Men?
:p
My aro ace ass will say yes tentatively. One friend in particular
Okay so Silk & Dagger seems to be selling pretty well and it has definitely breached markets that Eureka has not which is awesome, I know this because I have been getting tumblr asks about it from people who have never read Eureka.
At the time of writing this, March 12th 2025, we have made $605 total and still need to make about $1,050 in income this month to stay alive, so here's hoping we can make that in the next 20 days or so. If you can lend us your financial support, please do so, and if you can't, you can still help a ton by reblogging our posts, talking about us, and downloading our games.
We have a ko-fi and patreon too.
I’m making this a separate post because the original is funniest without context, but for real you have no idea how stressful this is. The reason why relates to this post
As independent artists making a living from our art, it isn’t enough to just make good art, especially when that art is a TTRPG. TTRPGs are not a respected artform, not even by the primary consumerbase. It’s so dire that it takes us making a lot of long posts just to convince people that TTRPG game design is real at all, that a TTRPG’s rules can be written a certain way on purpose to have intended results.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has good game mechanics, on purpose, but having good game mechanics is only actually a selling point to a shockingly small percentage of people who play TTRPGs, so those good game mechanics won’t sell the game, at least not as much as we need to continue operations.
But no matter how good your art is or how respected your artistic medium is, just making good art is not enough to make a living. Because the truth is, art doesn’t make money at all, social media does. The best, most overtly good art in the world only makes as much money as the number of paying customers that you can reach. All the money we make through Eureka is because I’m out here on tumblr busting my ass to get these notes, followers, etc.
Money is tight, we need to finish Eureka, and we need a new release like Silk & Dagger and Death Bed to get multiple major revenue streams and diversify our market reach in order to make more money and, like, pay my bills, but I can’t work on either of those right now, because I have to spend at least one work day a week entirely focused on social media or else no amount of progress on our real projects means anything, because otherwise they won’t sell.
It’s a little bit like being disabled - or rather kind of an extension of being disabled, since if I was more able-bodied I could work a “real” job that has a steady paycheck - my actual survival depends on other people liking me more than anything else, it’s a popularity contest, and not only I’m particularly strong in, as an uncharismatic, abrasive aspie with strong opinions about the very medium art that I work in, in an environment where openly disliking an element of the art that someone else engages with is considered not just a personal, but moral attack.
If you think this actually does make reblogging hot goth elves on tumblr sound pretty stressful, and want me to make enough money to continue to make TTRPGs for a living, there's a bunch that you can do to help even without spending a dime.
Follow us on tumblr and bluesky
Reblogging/retweeting/whatever our posts on these sites, even if you don't have many followers, makes a huge difference and is actually how we get most of our new fans and patreon subscribers.
Talk about us!
Play our games, tell your friends about them, make posts about your adventures or characters from our games, make homebrew stuff, etc. Like with the social media posts, this is the only way the word gets out about who we are and what we do! Without word-of-mouth, we're dead in the water.
Subscribe to our Patreon!
You get monthly rewards such as Eureka updates, adventure modules, short stories, previews of new games, etc. It also gets you into our patron-exclusive discord server!
Buy, or just download, our games on Itch.io
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy
Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1
Eureka: The Fanservice Files
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG
Edge Hedge Arena
Money helps a lot, but even just downloading them for free gives us a boost in the algorithm and gets more eyes on us!
Donate on Ko-fi How this helps is pretty obvious.
Buy our snoop merchandise
We only get a small cut of this, but the stuff is pretty cool, and they're good conversation starters!
no sales for 5 days..