Hexcellency: The Lich Convention

That’s right: I published an adventure on DriveThruRPG.

It’s been a rollercoaster. A big one.

The writing part was fun, but the art part and the layout and the legal stuff, that was quite an ordeal.

I’m not going to talk about the adventure in and of itself here, but rather look at the process of creating something worthy of being put up for sale online. I might post about Lich Con III, the adventure proper, at a later time.

So here we go.

Like I said, getting the idea and writing a first draft — that is where most of the fun is. You write the whole thing down. Thirty-seven pages? Bravo, well done! Then you click Select All, and put it in two columns with a nice gutter down the middle. But nobody has made a word processing application that can handle columns. We’re getting ready to go to Mars but we’re still unable to fix columns; and I’m not the only one complaining about this: the Internet is full of articles and tutorials on how to make columns behave.

Another headache is learning to put a different watermark on every page of your document. Not as simple as you might think. That is not a good memory for me. And page numbers, Christ; it completely scrambles the entire layout that you just spent seventeen hours creating.

You also need to consider your PDF options right from the get-go, it’s crucial.

If you’re only going to make $100 with the finished thing, why would you spend $100 up front for PDF software that you’re never gonna use again after that? Do it for free in Word 2007 or 2010 or LibreOffice. Why did the “publish as PDF” function disappear from Word? Isn’t that one of the main uses for a word processor? It’s like having a garage where they can fix your entire car — except for the breaks; to fix the breaks you need to go to the other place where they specialize in brakes and nothing else.

It makes no sense.

Cassi Mothwin said that she needed to add one page in her game, which she made in Affinity Designer if I remember correctly, and that the “new” page completely fucked the formatting of every page that came after that until the end of the document.

The exact same thing happened to me… in Word 2007.

My question to you is this. Why pay $69.99 for Affinity Designer if I’m just going to have the same annoying problems that I already have in a free, sixteen-year-old word processor?

You want us to buy a design program? Make a design program that works.

But let us move on to a different kind of ballache.

Can you use proper names, or can’t you?

Someone said that nobody can copyright the names of a Roman god (Orcus) or a Mesopotamian deity (Tiamat). This is great, but are you absolutely sure about it? Because everybody who says anything about trademarks or copyrights or fair use also says, “I am not a lawyer, by the way—”

Getting a clear answer is very difficult indeed.

Lawyers are not on social media. They don’t interact. They don’t share.

Go fuck yourself with your nulla culpa, brother. You suck.

It’s a sharing economy, but only for the poor and the middle class. Don’t expect the rich to share anything, ever.

There is a game called Dark Places & Demogorgons, and a supplement (not for the same game) titled Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom…

So you CAN use proper names.

Or maybe you can’t. Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom is nowhere to be found on DTRPG now. It’s been removed. What happened? Cease-and-desist? I don’t know.

Perhaps it was taken off the site for reasons completely unrelated to the name Acererak.

And then there is Sly Flourish. He uses the words “Dungeon Master.” Those words are forbidden, aren’t they?

Again, never a clear answer.

That’s what the lawyers want. Keep everything in constant flux, and keep the people guessing.

That’s why I chose to use Orcus’ Greek name, Horkos, and Tiamat’s Akkadian name, Ti’amtu. I’m okay with that — more flavor, actually. Gandalf famously said that he was called by many names throughout Middle-earth. I’m pretty damn sure Tiamat and Orcus experience the same phenomenon on a whole other multiplanar level.

Someone told me that WotC keep using the names Acererak and Bigby and Strahd to prevent them from falling into the public domain. How can a character (Acererak) fall into the public domain a mere 15 years after the death of its author? And how can Strahd become public domain when Tracy and Laura Hickman are still alive and kicking? And how come the name Boccob, which WotC hasn’t used since they bought TSR, hasn’t fallen into the public domain? It’s hard to separate the nonsense from the facts.

This is another sneak peek from Lich Con III. It’s a cool handout.

Now here’s something crazy. One indie game designer on Twitter said that they invest six hours of work per product they put up for sale on DriveThruRPG.

To me, six hours is a blog post. Lich Con III is in the hundreds of hours of work, perhaps even a thousand. I didn’t count. I mean, it was at least fifty hours just grappling with those goddamn columns in Word and LibreOffice and WordPerfect X6 and watching YouTube tutorials on How To Make Columns Behave in Word.

Six hours per product? This person is simply putting blog posts up on DTRPG, there is no other explanation. This week, two new monsters. Next week, three new adventure hooks. Next week, a new relic.

It’s a paying blog.

Good for them.

Maybe we’re the dumb ones over here, blogging for free.

The original OSR blogs were all free. I discovered them back in 2013 and that’s why I started to write my own — on Blogger, where most of the OSR blogs were hosted. I jumped on that bandwagon. I do not regret it. It was nice. I made new friends. I learned tons of stuff.

When Covid hit, I knew I would not be able to run games for a long while, and so I decided to jump on an entirely new bandwagon. Indie TTRPG writing. That scene really blew up during the lockdown.

Then they announced “One D&D” for 2024.

Then Musk bought Twitter, and a sizable chunk of the TTRPG community went away.

Then they announced a new OGL.

It wasn’t ideal, and my timing appeared to be exceptionally bad — but what is done is done. I probably won’t be jumping on the next bandwagon, whatever that may be, but perhaps the next one after?

So what now?

I have more articles lined up for this blog, including another post about tabletop role-playing game publishing that’s coming. I also have a few new ideas for adventures, but I won’t invest too much time and energy into it; first, let’s see if Lich Con III can reach Copper best seller status, right?

This means that for the first time in nine years, you, the reader of this blog, have a way to financially support it if you want. You’ve been reading for a long time and like this stuff? Consider “donating” $3.99 so I can keep rambling about old-school role-playing games for the foreseeable future.

Even if you don’t intend to actually run Lich Con III at a table — you’d still have it in your PDF library and can read it sometime and have a good laugh.