Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[hyzmarca]

I'd like to do this at least semi-professionally. Which means paying contributors competitive rates, buying art, and everything. I could probably use a print on demand solution for physical copies.

My lack of industry experience is a problem, though, since I'm not sure what competitive freelancer rates actually are, or how to go about dealing with artists.

[Shatner]

My lack of industry experience is a problem, though, since I'm not sure what competitive freelancer rates actually are, or how to go about dealing with artists.

Artists are not to be involved lightly.

[Lokathor]

Well, like I said, I know one professional artist that's already interested in the project. He also said that he knew other industry folks would be very interested in such a game.

Now, the actual rates might still be a problem. The amount of art that you'd be able to get in will probably end up being the being the biggest or second biggest money sink on the project. If people are buying copies via print on demand then the print costs are mostly being offloaded onto them, and the money you'll need upfront is mostly for good art and writing.

[Krusk]

If people are buying copies via print on demand then the print costs are mostly being offloaded onto them.

That would be my recommendation. You could seriously go to some print on demand site, add 5$ to it, and give me a real price that I pay you. Then pocket the 5$ and I wouldn't even care.

I'm sure someone around here actually has helpful insight and not wild guesses though. My real recommendation is to find and listen to them, not me.

[Artless]

You'd be looking to get print and web rights as well as rights to use artwork in promotional material. From personal experience a rough idea of pricing for quarter to half-page illustrations can go from anywhere from 100 to 500 dollars, depending on the complexity of the image and a handful of other factors like size on the page, color, aesthetic, etc. Full pages and spreads would be something like a grand, grand-and-a-half plus. You could easily negotiate around that, but that's ballpark range for professionals. Personally I don't give as much of a shit about pricing illustrations as I do about the subject being interesting, which is probably why I'm so bad at it in a professional sense.

Not to be a shitter but I'm also interested in doing work with the book; I occasionally do sketches and paintings for warm-ups that ape from concepts talked about in the thread and if you think I could help out at all I'd be happy to.

[Dean]

Frank how big are Gug in your imaginings? You seem to talk about Gugs as really titanically powerful but my knowledge of them doesn't line up with them being any kind of war engine. As far as I know they're just pretty tall and they have venus fly trap faces.

[Username17]

Frank how big are Gug in your imaginings? You seem to talk about Gugs as really titanically powerful but my knowledge of them doesn't line up with them being any kind of war engine. As far as I know they're just pretty tall and they have venus fly trap faces.

They are like six to seven meters tall and have eldritch fields, making them Giant-sized and require heavy weapons or mighty magics to take down. This is in between Yaoguai (who can fit into your house) and Kaiju (who can step on your house). Giant enemies can hide behind your house or stomp on your car, and include Cthonians, Ghasts, and Wendigo.

Yaoguai (Dimensional Shamblers, Byakhee, etc.) are boss monsters for civilians and mooks for heroes. Giants are boss monsters for heroes or mooks for zords. Kaiju are the main enemies for mech pilots and well beyond what super soldiers and witches are normally capable of handling. And of course, below the Yaoguai are cultist-tier opponents who you can seriously inconvenience by shooting them with a gun or hitting them with a tire iron. That's for stuff like Ophidians, Tcho-Tcho, and Mi-Go out of power armor who are basically just dudes.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

If people are buying copies via print on demand then the print costs are mostly being offloaded onto them.

That would be my recommendation. You could seriously go to some print on demand site, add 5$ to it, and give me a real price that I pay you. Then pocket the 5$ and I wouldn't even care.

I'm sure someone around here actually has helpful insight and not wild guesses though. My real recommendation is to find and listen to them, not me.

Lulu can do hardcovers for about 25 bucks, depending on exact pagecount and such. For a "complete game" RPG book that's a good price for the end user compared other RPGs, and even if you stick 5 or maybe 10 bucks margin onto it to make back art/writing costs that's still a pretty good price point.

[Red_Rob]

Frank how big are Gug in your imaginings? You seem to talk about Gugs as really titanically powerful but my knowledge of them doesn't line up with them being any kind of war engine. As far as I know they're just pretty tall and they have venus fly trap faces.

One of the things about converting source material from one property to another is you sometimes need to alter things slightly to fit the needs of the new setting. In a world where the conceit is that monsters from the Mythos fight giant robots you need to scour the existing Mythos monsters for things that wouldn't look out of place going go toe to toe with an Eva. A giant sized, multi-armed humanoid beast is too good an opportunity to pass up, so of course it gets the ability to survive hits with military grade weaponry even if in the original source material this seems like somewhat of a stretch. Similarly even though the only original reference to the Dark Young is, I believe, an ambiguously worded section that could be describing a Shoggoth, in this they receive an awesome-upgrade to become Kaiju-strength monsters that can grapple a 20 foot tall warmachine because that's what the setting requires.

Honestly, Cthulhu popped when rammed by a tramp steamer. By all rights the military hardware of the 22nd century should be able to keep him as a constant cloud of green gas with minimal effort. But having Cthulhu burst whenever he is hit would be lame, so in Sentai Ftaghn I assume he can take multiple rocket volleys without flinching.

[Meikle641]

If people are buying copies via print on demand then the print costs are mostly being offloaded onto them.

That would be my recommendation. You could seriously go to some print on demand site, add 5$ to it, and give me a real price that I pay you. Then pocket the 5$ and I wouldn't even care.

I'm sure someone around here actually has helpful insight and not wild guesses though. My real recommendation is to find and listen to them, not me.

Lulu can do hardcovers for about 25 bucks, depending on exact pagecount and such. For a "complete game" RPG book that's a good price for the end user compared other RPGs, and even if you stick 5 or maybe 10 bucks margin onto it to make back art/writing costs that's still a pretty good price point.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/pub_pod_cost.php

[Username17]

So Ophidians. We are going with the Central American Yig, and thus a Central American Valusia. But that leaves a bunch of Mythos snake people unaccounted for. Egyptian Setites, Zimbabwean Lamia, Southeast Asian Naga, and so on and so on.

One possibility is to simply ignore all that shit and leave them off the table. Another possibility is to write in a bunch of Valusian colonies all over the world. And yet another option is to have Ophidians as a player character race by announcing that the various non-Yig serpent people in various corners of the world are mostly part of the Union now.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I would combine options two and three. The colonial thing makes a lot of sense and consolidates the conceptual space for snake men. But having some individual Ophidians and one or two breakaway colonies join the Union is good material.

[hyzmarca]

But the biggest issue in copyright is that copyright doesn't protect characters, it protects stories. So once you're changing the setting to the 23rd century and using all original text, it's not really clear how much anyone could say about it unless you use some of the trademarks.

You're actually wrong about that. The use of a unique character from a copyrighted work in a different setting is considered a derivative work in copyright law. And copyright includes he right to control the creation of derivative works. That's why Conan Doyle's estate fought so hard to keep Sherlock out of the public domain.

And indeed,the entire McFarlane vs Gaiman fiasco was centered around the copyright of specific characters.

What copyright doesn't protect is stock characters. Therefore Sherlock was copyrightable, but detectives aren't. A character needs a number unique identifying traits.

arcanotechnicians

I'd personally like to avoid the use of the term archanotech and its derivatives, as well as other terms that are unique to Cthulutech. Not for IP reasons, but just for extra intellectual integrity and to keep Cthulhtech ripoff alegations to a minimum.

I mean, Lovecraft Ripoff, sure. Anime ripoff, certainly. But you know, this is only lightly inspired by Cthulhutech's basic idea of anime-Lovecraft mashup.

[Username17]

Arcanotech is from Shadowfist/ Feng Shui. It's something that's been used in RPGs for more than a decade before Cthulhutech was written.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Arcanotech is from Shadowfist/ Feng Shui. It's something that's been used in RPGs for more than a decade before Cthulhutech was written.

-Username17

I wasn't aware of that. Still, I'd like to minimize shared terminology for reasons of perception. But I'm not particularly in the mood to debate or brainstorm terminology at the moment.


Anyway, I've been doing some research. And damn, freelancer pay sucks.
I'd like to be able to offer around .05 cents per word at least (actually I'd like to be able to offer 20 cents per word but that probably not reasonable, the only place I've found offering that much is Tor's website).

Assuming 320 manuscript pages at 250 words per page, that put costs at at 4,000 just for writing. I could reduce that by cutting down pages (which night be reasonable, this is just an initial guesstimate) or by paying freelancers less (which I don't want to do because I'm a decent human being, industry standards be damned).

Add 1000 for cover art and that puts us at 5000 before we get into interior art and editing, typesetting, layout.


At a hypothetical ratio of one interior image every 4 pages and 100-500 per image that's an extra 8000-40,000. The simple solution there is to not use so many images. One image every 8 pages would cost 4000-20,000 at those rates. One every 16 would cost 2000-10000.

10,000 to 15,000 is probably reasonable, once factoring in editing and interior art.

I can reduce art costs by trolling Deviantart for desperate people who are willing to work for a pittance, there's no shortage of them, but I'd rather pay a decent wage even if the artist is willing to work for peanuts.

Stretch goals can pay for more art.


Rewards are a bit sticky. You see, the value of a reward relative to the donation determines the difference between a donation and a sale in the IRS's eyes (if I offer a $30 book as a $30 reward the IRS considers that a sale, if I offer it as a $60 reward the IRS considers it an overpriced sale). Sales are taxed as income, donations as gifts. There's a major difference there.

There is also the issue of reward cost. A few Kickstarter projects have been screwed by offering rewards that they couldn't afford to fulfill. Which is to say, offering a physical book as a low-tier reward is a really terrible idea for a project like this because I'd have to eat the print costs and if a significant percentage of backers go for that tier then it'll eat up the majority of the funds, leaving little for the actual project.

While a number of kickstarters do have rewards tiers that offer the actual product for the retail cost of the product, at that point the Kickstarter just becomes a means to collect preorders

[Lokathor]

I was personally interested in Tome and After Sundown stuff because it was Open Content (totally open for AS, and open enough in the case of Tome stuff and being OGL derived and so on). Would Sentai Ftaghn also be an open content situation where we could make wikis, derivative works, etc?

Perhaps open text and then the art stays "product identity" (to use an OGL term), so that people buy the book when possible?

[rapa-nui]

I would be willing to back this project, but I'd need to see a lot of mechanics laid out in-full before doing so.

If I'm going to pay that much for a game to get made, it needs to be something very intuitive, smooth and with a high depth:complexity ratio.

We talk a big game here at TGD, but can we actually put together a system that works across three tiers (civilian, heroic, kaiju) and faithfully lets me: punch Cthulhu in the face, poketrain my byahkhee and cut up some cultists with nanowire?


Also, what's the tone here? I hope we're keeping it kinda grimdark. I don't want to finally get a copy of the book, turn to page 165 and see a picture of a honest-to-god catgirl staring back at me.

[hyzmarca]

I was personally interested in Tome and After Sundown stuff because it was Open Content (totally open for AS, and open enough in the case of Tome stuff and being OGL derived and so on). Would Sentai Ftaghn also be an open content situation where we could make wikis, derivative works, etc?

Perhaps open text and then the art stays "product identity" (to use an OGL term), so that people buy the book when possible?

I can't imagine why it wouldn't be open.

[Username17]

So word back from Brian Lumley.

Dear Mr. Lumley,

I am a minor author working on a collaborative science fiction project where, among other things, mankind is at war with monsters under the ground. I was wondering if I could have your permission to have these creatures be specifically Cthonians as an homage to your work.

Thank you for your time,

Dr. Frank Trollman

Dear Dr. Trollman--

Yes, by all means but don't change my descriptions or mention any other of my characters or connecting material.

Best--

Brian Lumley

I'm a little unclear where descriptions end and connecting material begins, but seemingly we have the same "kind permission" to move forward with Cthonians that Chaosium does.

Anyway, some discussion on book size and contents seems needed. A book like Street Magic or Arcane Power is usually about 140 thousand words. A bullshit book like White Wolf's Dogs of War or Midnight Roads is less than 100 thousand words but generally not less than 70 thousand words. A really bloated game book like Shadowrun 5th edition is about 300 thousand words and a crazy bloated book like Geist is longer than that.

Now, game books in the 21st century suffer from a lack of economy of text. 300 thousand word shovelware outings are absurd and unnecessary. But we're still looking at probably somewhere between 140k and 200k words. You'd probably want to pay around 3 to 5 cents per word, meaning that writing wouldn't be weird to cost $10,000. It could cost less, but that should be on the table as a possibility. Art can similarly run high prices, higher prices than the text. A picture isn't worth a thousand words, it's worth like two to six thousand words.

Now, a $20,000 outlay for writing and art is certainly doable, and the kind of thing that can be made back via kickstarter. At $10 for a pdf and $10 plus printing costs for a pdf and a physical book, you're looking at 2,000 basic level 1 or 2 backers to make back production costs. An obscure indy project can often get 3,000 sales and a failed Shadowrun book like Runner Havens used to sell around 20,000.

The real issue for Kickstarter is stretch goals and backer gifts. Remember that a commissioned piece of art is like two to three hundred dollars, so if you offer people to demand art pieces for any less than that you're actually losing money (unless you can figure out how to get the commissioned art to be stuff you'd hope to include anyway, in which case you're defraying costs). A good example might be to allow people to demand a five hundred word box text on any part of the world they want to see more detail on in the final book. That is like a $25 commission for writing, so if it's a 30 dollar surcharge over and above the price level of getting a book, then we won't be losing money even if we end up with a lot more people than expected pledging at that level.

A lot of Kickstarters get themselves into trouble by promising things that they can't economically deliver if an unexpectedly small or large number of people pledge at one level or another. That is something we can avoid by plotting things that scale.

-Username17

[Grek]

Other things you might offer as Kickstarter rewards:

-Mercy From Your Lunar Overlords: We have a long list of cities that may or may not get destroyed in the First Earth-Moon War. Pick one off of the list to be spared destruction, subject to availability.
-Acceptable Amounts of Collateral Damage: We have a long list of cities that may or may not get destroyed in the First Earth-Moon War. Pick one off of the list to be destroyed, subject to availability.
-We Can Rebuild It: A whole bunch of cities got rebuilt after the Earth-Moon War. Pick a name off the list of cities people voted to destroy and it'll be rebuilt after the war.
-Your character, as created by you the backer using the official rules, gets included in a NPC Supplemental Companion PDF as a sample NPC.
-A 500 word writeup of an adventure hook of your choice, to be included in the DM's section as a campaign idea.

[Username17]

Anyway, on Arcanotech. I of course used to be a Shadowfist playtester and was at one point the Shadowfist champion, so I have written stuff about Arcanotechnicians for more than a decade before CthulhuTech was a thing. When I think Arcanotech, I think this:



CthulhuTech almost certainly chose to use "Arcanotech" because it's a cool word and at that point Feng Shui was abandonware. Still, if you want to distance yourself from CthulhuTech (totally reasonable of course), there are a number of options.

Xenotech



Magitech



Ancient Tech



Something Else

Many portmanteaus are unused at this time. Cthonitech, Eldritech, and so on.

Personally, I throw my vote behind Arcanotech because it's what I've been calling that kind of thing since high school. But I'd be OK with people calling it something else instead.

---

In any case, the mechanic I think we should use for the Supersoldier is have a limited set of upgrade slots with the option of having one piece of Arcanotech (or whatever we call it) in each slot. I have a little fluff rant about how arcanotech doesn't play nicely with each other and has to independently interface with the body, but whatever. The deal is that you can have the Red eye upgrade or the Blue eye upgrade and not both.

What that means is that the number of upgrades available for Super Soldiers is 5 times the number of slots. So if the slots are {Legs, Abdomen, Heart, Left Arm, Right Arm, Eyes, Skull} we do 35 entries. If we add a "Spine" slot, it goes up to 40. If we also add a "Lungs" slot, it goes up to 45. And so on.

The other thing it means is that if one of the items that goes into one of the slots ends up being "mandatory" (in the way that Wired Reflexes and Smart Links were in 1st edition Shadowrun), then that creates 4 trap options per mandated selection. It's actually OK if you are required by min/max law to take one of the Heart implants, just not OK if you are required to take one specific Heart implant.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Arcanotech is probably the best. Xenotech is entirely too alieny, magitech is entirely too JRPGy, eldritech sounds slightly worse than arcanotech, and anything that is not a portmanteau is dumb.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Arcanotech is a good term, and the only reason to abandon it would be to distance the IP from CthulhuTech. But I think we don't want to distance it, we want to invite as much comparison as possible, if only for the free publicity to the target audience.

[virgil]

There's also Cryptech, Lovetech (works for magical girls, and reference to Lovecraft), X-Tech, & Clarketech; at least as far as variations off the top of my head. Hard to disagree with the cultural inertia for arcanotech, though.

[rapa-nui]

ArcanoTech is fine, but a few (terrible) alternatives for your consideration-

AgnosTech

ElderCraft

EldritChraft

MysTech

Teknosorcery