PTFOOO: No new content today!
In lieu, a mini-AMA/open thread
Hey folks! Just a brief, out-of-fiction note to let you know I’m going to punt this week’s episode to next week. I knew I wanted to take a week off soon-ish, and I realized it would be better to drop a week between Session 6 and Session 7 than right in the midst of our adventures with the Hillfolk. Next week we’ll return to our regularly scheduled adventuring with Padrig, Anwen, and Vahid and reveal which side plots we’ll be pursuing.
Retrospective
Since I’m taking this week off, I thought I’d also engage in a bit of self-indulgent retrospective: With the closing of Session 6, PTFO:Stonetop has run 30 episodes over the course of seven months. I haven’t run a word count on every single episode, but a rough estimate of 3,000 words per episode puts the total word count of the series at around 90,000 words, which is about one-half of one Fellowship of the Rings.
That’s a lot of words to slog through, so I want to take this opportunity to thank you. It’s been a ton of fun to write, and it wouldn’t really work as a project without the input that readers provide in the comments and reader polls — there have been multiple times where the reader votes have taken the story in an unexpected direction, helping me to check my assumptions about how things should unfold, which is exactly the dynamic I enjoy most around the gaming table.
Any Questions?
While I’m on a break this week, I wanted to invite y’all to ask any questions you might have. I try to respond to every question people post on the episodes, but if you’ve got any questions kicking around in your head that haven’t fit into the post-episode discussions, feel free to drop them in the comments and I’ll reply. I’d be happy to answer any questions about the process I use for solo-roleplaying, about the Stonetop campaign itself, the worldbuilding (some of which is the excellent Jeremy Strandberg’s and some of which are my own additions to his foundation), or any hot takes about the topics currently roiling TTRPG Twitter this week. Anything that interests you, really.
If you’re reluctant to comment on a substack publically, you can use this anonymized form below — if folks use this option, I’ll share the question and answer in the comments below or in the housekeeping section of the next episode, whichever makes more sense.
Thanks again for reading! Next week, we sojourn with the nomads.
Here's a question from the AMA form: "Do you feel like small creators like yourself suffer from the current state of tabletop games?"
To answer this, first I have to articulate what I see to be the 'current state of tabletop games.' There are a lot of ways to look at this, but I think the thing that seems most clear to me is that TTRPGs have a glut of all sorts of content -- of systems and settings, of Actual-Play style content, and of peripheral content like dice, modules, designed documents, etc.
A big part of the reason for this is that TTRPGs are an idiosyncratic space where a very, very high percentage of the consumers are also creators. To play a TTRPG obligated you to create something, usually -- at minimum a character, and beyond that, you can create everything up to an including a custom game system of your own to play. People very reasonably look at the vast majority of TTRPG (particularly D&D) content out there and say to themselves "I can do better than this," and then there's very little stopping them from going out and doing it.
As a result, there are a ton of creators vying for the attention of an audience who are largely creators themselves, so it's hard to distinguish one's self enough to attract an audience at scale -- whatever scale looks like for you. I get the sense from looking at TTRPG Twitter that other small creators like me feel this squeeze -- they work very hard, and produce some very good work, and don't tend to get the rewards, either social or financial, that they feel the major producers in the space are getting.
Personally, though, I do not feel this squeeze. It would be fun to have an audience 100x the size of PTFO's current audience, but it would not be 100x more fun, and it would certainly come with a lot of headaches, so I could take it or leave it. To have critical mass, I think this project needs about 10-20 people responding to the polls, and we have that. Everything else is gravy.
I'm really curious as to what you feel overall as a writer in this specific niche. What would you say your purpose or mission statement is?