Chris Saunders (00:22.838)
Welcome to Nerdpreneur, where we have fun conversations with people making money with their nerdy passion. As always, I'm joined by my co-host, Frank. And today we have a very special guest. He is a long time writer and game designer and the co-founder of Storytellers Forge, Rick Hines. Welcome to the show.

Frank (00:31.458)
Hello.

Rick (00:43.735)
Hello.

Chris Saunders (00:45.778)
Great to have you on Rick. This is actually your second time chatting because this is like our official chat on Mike though. Excited to get you on the real show. And for everyone who doesn't know you already, what is your nerdy passion?

Rick (01:00.283)
my nerdy passion is definitely metal music and coffee, which somehow translated into me getting involved in both authorship and the TTRPG industry and then thus launching into building a massive studio. Because I mean, when you try to replace your blood with coffee on a regular basis while listening to metal lyrics that you can't understand anyway, it's perfect segue towards being an author.

Chris Saunders (01:26.738)
I feel like some of your themes within the adventures that you have written are kind of metal influenced as well aren't you working on something right now that's kind of like heavily based on my kind of evil in some capacity okay all right.

Rick (01:39.095)
Yes, yes. So, I mean, music is actually a massive inspiration for my life. And it actually was the hallmark of what started off everything that would eventually become Storytellers Ford Studios. Many, many years ago, I used to work in concerts at Chicago and I had a bunch of metal friends over at my house and they're all band members from all these like famous metal bands. We're all drinking mead as you do. And we...

They were talking about how hard it is to get metal music out there. And at this time, I'm already dabbling with being a writer. I already had published my first book and things like that. And I was like, guys, I could run an entire campaign to your album. And they were like, everybody got really quiet in the room. Everybody started looking at me and I was like, shit, I'm gonna be writing a full campaign book now, aren't I?

And then it transpired into one campaign book that spawned into a second transmedia property where we ended up partnering up with different bands and even a larger orchestra. And then our current project, which is the Dark Carnival, is utilizing and collaborating with the band V is for Villains to create this Be Evil, but Be Magnificent campaign storyline novel music type thing.

Frank (03:04.546)
What was the TTRPG that was this metal-inspired project? What was it called?

Chris Saunders (03:04.798)
Very cool.

Rick (03:10.359)
The first one we did would be the Red Opera, Last Days of the Warlock, and then it was followed up with a campaign called The Black Ballad, which is the perfect game to run after you TPK your party. And that one we got to work with not only D'Amorte, we got to work with Symphony X and even Mike Pittman from Riot Games, the crew behind Pentakill. that was so awesome. And we released that one and then...

I was looking at the Dark Carnival project and I was like, this one, we want it to feel different and I need to find a band that embodies over the top villainry. And V is for Villains is a convention band along with the likes of a really of Ulterra, Proto Men, and they have this great following and they do this synth wave industrial style music, which I thought was an interesting pairing with D &D.

Chris Saunders (04:04.638)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (04:09.143)
and we partnered up with them and we're going to crowdfunding pretty much right away even though their soundtrack is you know behind the scenes it's mostly done so um

Chris Saunders (04:19.834)
awesome i've been getting in the synth wave a lot more lately so i'm gonna check those people out right after this one of the things i really love about all these campaigns you designed or worked on and is the music side of it i thought that was really interesting because it's not just this last one that has music not only inspired but also like accompany in the actual adventure right like there is stuff to do like this was the same with the.

Warlock when you did the red opera and they also had like the ones you just said I mean I sirens how but you music like there's all these things that were music is parallel towards the adventure is this a is this normal or is this just you. Okay.

Rick (05:02.039)
This one's definitely a just me thing, because I write to music, right? And I can't write a novel. have soundtracks for every character I storytell to music. And actually, over the Dark Carnival, and I suppose we can come back to this later on, we kind of found our studio's guiding light that our brand is we make immersive TTRPGs in a box.

that always come with like novels, teas, coffees, and things like that based around the campaign, usually designed in conjunction with these other partners. And even the books that our studio is publishing, one of the projects that we're gonna be publishing is Cthulhu Drent written and designed by the team Action Fiction. The reason we picked them up to help and aid with their publishing

is because they had the band Cthulhu Dreamt and already a novel being written with this experimental TTRPG and I'm like this fits everything that we want our studio to do. We want to do cross transmedia collaboration in our projects. Let's just go big on these projects and so that's it's I think it's going to be every single project we do. I mean I'm even working on

taking our audiobooks and turning them into scripts and then working with music composers to make custom soundtracks for novels at this point to go along with it.

Chris Saunders (06:30.216)
That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it really is something that enhances the entire experience. I produce an actual play podcast where there's a score behind it, right? And the raw files of people playing versus the one where you actually score it and add in sounds and actually make it, it's about that exact word immersion. It's about creating something where you get suck.

into it and music has that incredible ability to evoke that for people. You just mentioned something that I think is really interesting in your process where you write to music, you come up with soundtracks for characters. Can you talk a little bit about your process and how you, how music, well, it doesn't have to be necessarily about music, but what is your process for creating a great adventure?

Rick (07:19.991)
Jeez, ask the author on how you design a great adventure. All right, everybody listen, we got about two and a half hours in this. yeah. So, okay, let's say usually comes up with like the title, you know what you're writing anyway. Usually if I'm hired by another studio to write something, I kind of know what it's about. I am pleased to announce I get to work on, I got to work on the official Crow TTRPG, right? And.

Chris Saunders (07:23.39)
Yeah, yeah, we've got you the rest of the night, right? No.

Frank (07:25.006)
Hahaha

Chris Saunders (07:46.222)
wow.

Rick (07:47.083)
that was like my nerdy dream come true from a goth 90s rick and so that one was easy there's the crow they have an iconic soundtrack you just pair the two together and just put that on repeat while i start outlining and just play that for the the rest of the night or the rest of the month as you write that adventure for other things like the red opera or the black ballad i would listen to a lot of diamortes music or the

Pesco and orchestra music in theme with the vibe that I was shooting for. My novels are completely different though. I will when I'm doing long-form fiction I will take characters and I will literally spend hours upon hours just exploring the depths of the internet, Spotify, Pandora, you know anything to find music in the right vibe lyric or not and

Then I'll see if I can find music videos of it. And if I can, and the music video still hits when I watch it that way, I usually bake it into a playlist and I'll have playlists for every character. And then whenever I'm writing that character's chapter, I'll have like certain songs that I'll like go back to and pull that character stuff up. Importantly though, none of the music can be in English or understandable.

Frank (09:10.902)
Yes, I was going to ask about that because writing with actual words is so distracting when you're hearing a language you understand.

Rick (09:18.923)
Yep, that's actually why I'm a big fan of like metal and folk metal and but I have like French pop. I have, you know, anime soundtracks up the wazoo of like, here's this character's song and I'll listen to, you know, Bollywood or, you know, like the crazy where they take the Wakanda band where they'll take the music in ancient Japanese style and then mix it up to modern covers.

And so I'll listen to music from all across the spectrum based on which character it fits their vibe. And once I have the music, that's when I really start outlining. And then my outlines are pretty nuts. I will have entire spreadsheets with every chapter scene by scene, because then I'll also do something where I'll go back through and I'll write commercials for every chapter.

as if I'm going to sell that in copy or make it like a part of a shadow run universe. Even for things that aren't cyber punkish or related in any capacity to something that's very capitalistic, I found that making commercials in fun, cheeky ways about my chapters actually give me really good taglines or like quotes or help me like brief the end of a 200,000 word project.

Frank (10:45.314)
I was going to actually ask about that because the log line of writing a script is usually pitching the project to producers to give that distilled idea of what the story is. Is that kind the idea of this commercial side of things is to create something that's a concise summary of that chapter.

Chris Saunders (10:45.672)
There's.

Rick (11:05.899)
Yeah. So when I published my first book, it was through a company called InkShares. And even though I never ended up following through down that sort of Hollywood plan of, take your book to go get scripts made for it. I learned the process of writing a treatment through that publisher, right? And that treatment, you know, it's a nice one, one and a half page synopsis of your entire. Your bit. was very difficult to ask an author.

to take his 140,000 word novel and condense it down into a treatment. But since I start off very small with sort of the snowballs and I have all these commercials in place, I found that pivoting off of those into what my book is about, or even my adventures, was really handy. And surprise, I did not realize this at that time, but four years later, that would come in extremely handy.

or that would be extremely handy for me when you have to go do crowdfunding and write marketing and ad copy. And I already have a bunch of like grabbable lines ready to go. So now I almost sort of plan anything I'm working on with the idea that I'm going to write the back of the book copy here's advertising. And I actually have them built into my manuscript template so that they're just done when I'm writing usually to some crazy, you know,

Frank (12:10.006)
Hmm.

Chris Saunders (12:19.824)
Hmm.

Rick (12:30.027)
music that's playing in the background.

Chris Saunders (12:33.086)
There's a. It's interesting the way you're saying you take your chapters and then sort of reinvent them sort of in a in a way towards. Say marketing or as you mentioned before, you said like maybe putting it into a shadow run or something like that in order to be able to give it get it almost a different flavor. Do feel like that adds depth to understanding your plots and characters for just yourself? Because it gets you outside of.

outside of yourself in that in a sense going through that process is.

Rick (13:07.191)
I don't think it adds, I don't necessarily think it adds depth to me because I write very very very very strangely. How do I say this? Right. If I, if somebody reads or narrates an audiobook back to me or grabs a snippet of something that I have written I'll be like wait a minute I wrote that? What the hell? Because when I write I'm always, I almost roleplay in my head as the characters and I always have like a

Chris Saunders (13:12.306)
No.

Rick (13:36.247)
I am that character. And so as soon as I'm done with that chapter, I kind of forget largely the details of what I have written, unless I go back and read it through an editorial. And also by the time you get through eight rounds of editing, you're kind of done with the details of the book anyway. But the commercials and the marketing taglines that you write into the book, even just for fun for yourself, what they've turned into is a great spot to go to.

for readers to get an instant world hook, teasers, straight little catch lines. And even in RPGs, all of our RPG books, we always wanted to write with full flavor. We didn't want to write dry manuals or manuscripts. We will take them and we'll bake those quotes in front of like every section or every part. you cause sometimes what we write tends to get pretty diabolical or evil or cheeky. And it's all over the spectrum.

but we can fill an entire manuscript. instead of it saying, you know, here's this player class stats and text, we actually get to put in world, you know, flavor and letters in between them. And they're all kind of born from that. So in the RPG sense, it adds a lot of depth to the world because even if it's a player handbook or an adventure design or something for a storyteller to run, you can quickly look down and always have an in-universe grabbable quote or

Chris Saunders (14:39.39)
you

Rick (15:05.503)
a magic product that might have been invented. And there's no other context about the magic product sometimes just other than here's this commercial that could exist in this world. And that does allow the Storyteller to create the improv or even start doing like this session was brought to you by, you know, Brook and Talbots, you know, magical items.

Chris Saunders (15:24.412)
Yeah, yeah.

That's cool. It's kind of like throwing these anchors out that allow your readers to anchor into this world and really understand it from the writer's perspective by having these little moments. Have you ever read No One Wants to Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield?

Rick (15:43.923)
No, but I need to, because that's fantastic title.

Chris Saunders (15:46.11)
It really is. It's it's a I work with a fantastic copywriter. So he all he ever does is like write copy, write, copyright. I've never done anything fictional. But Steven Pressfield, he's this whole book is about how he spent years and years and years in advertising and writing ads. And he is most famously, I think, known for Legend of Bagger Vance is probably the.

his biggest novel because it a whole thing, but he's written dozens and dozens of great, great novels. And in this, nobody wants to read your shit. He just talks about how advertising really taught him how to keep people, keep people's attention every single page and keep people going back to the book and coming back to it. Cause nobody wants to read your shit is the foundational principle of the book. have to do that. So

From a writer's perspective, I'm hearing how you keep yourself in these states with the music. I'd love to know, do you have any tips on just keeping people hooked on the words?

Rick (16:52.917)
write more. That's honestly it does come down to it. You... I don't know. Yeah, because eventually you get better at your hooks, right? And I guess it does come down to, and I kind of agree with this, nobody wants to read your shit, if you don't find every chapter that you are writing fun and the concept of that chapter

Frank (17:00.184)
Just for practice? Like write more for practice or?

I see.

Rick (17:21.649)
is fun and you can't pitch that chapter to somebody in like two sentences and maybe you should rewrite that chapter or cut that chapter out because the truth is like you can write your first novel for yourself and then every one after that you want to write your story and your content but you gotta have an idea of where the hell this damn thing ends and that means you have a suspension meter to keep playing and it's like storytelling any game session

that anybody plays at a table, right? You you wanna end your game sessions even when you're rolling dice with a cliffhanger that your players are like, okay, when are we gonna play next game next week, right? Otherwise you just kind of fall into that campaign that never picks up again.

Frank (18:09.944)
You

Chris Saunders (18:11.72)
There are structures within storytelling though that I think if you're aware of them, you see them everywhere, right? Would you say that there are certain structures that you kind of anchor to? Like for example, genre, like, I'm writing this in Western genre, but I'm gonna combine that with a hero's journey. are there things like that that you put a frame on before you get into writing? is it just sort of like you discover it as you go?

and it emerges what it's going to be.

Rick (18:42.591)
No, I have a pretty structured method. think at some point when you first start off as an author, you can kind of maybe pants it. But once you start writing professionally for other game studios or even like multi-line projects, you need to keep some level of, nope, this is an organization, here's a plan. Because a lot of times what will happen is throughout running the studio and everything else that I have to do, you don't get the same benchmarks to sit on down and write and lose yourself.

or take your time and you have deadlines that are due. And so having spreadsheets that says today I'm going to sit down and I'm gonna write this chapter with this beat, with this commercial, here's my soundtrack, all designed ahead of time means that I can move down that line pretty regularly and consistently. And then when I take my mind out of it and get distracted by another project, if I come back to that, I know exactly where I left off.

Frank (19:37.326)
Do you think there's some of that that comes down to I do want to get back to Chris's earlier question about your process, but I also wanted to touch on that. Do you think it has to do with expectations that your audience that you know an audience has? Because as storytellers, we know that we're kind of hardwired from, you know, stories being told around a campfire thousands and thousands of years ago that our brains are programmed to like certain stories a particular way. You know, like Campbell, Joseph Campbell talks about with like

stories all around the world being told following certain arcs and heroes. Is there something in that like that we see in movies today that things follow in our

Rick (20:17.173)
lot of people default back to the hero's journey a lot and the various steps that there are for it. You can splice and you can cut that hero's journey up a thousand ways and we hear that a lot in western fiction in movies and types or the three act structure is really prominent as well.

Frank (20:34.808)
Right.

Rick (20:38.549)
You know, attended all of the panels. I've done all the workshops. I even went to college at one point. I'm like, I'm gonna take my nighttime classes to, you know, learn the story arcs and study. And yes, there's truth to all of it. It's found again and again and again. But it was summed up best for me on Twitter. Person walks outside. Other person hits person with a rock in Sue Chase. There's your there's your plot line. At some point, somebody's some random act of chaos is going to hit you with something.

you either have a choice as that character to do something or do nothing. And if your answer is, well, I just go back inside and close the door, well, that's the end of the novel. If chasing, you know, continues on, you can keep throwing more rocks until story ends. But.

Chris Saunders (21:26.75)
It's that steady action that keeps moving things forward. We had a similar thing in acting school, which was, and of course, because it's called acting, not, you know, enacting. Basically, right? You have to, you have to actually step into a scene and do something and everything you do on stage in some way has an action behind it, right? So, and that's what's captivating, right? Like, cause if you're just there and on stage and not doing anything, why the heck are you on stage?

Rick (21:53.185)
So the way that you put this into play in literary form, whether it be RPG design or novels, is every action should have consequences. Good consequences or bad consequences that are going to expand upon the world. And when you're writing an RPG adventure, you don't get to say, you get to like hint the consequences that are in a book, but you have no idea what the players are going to do. So you have to give them amazing hooks to...

lead them one way or another, but still allow like an open ending that might be there. And in a novel, you get to just put your mind as the character and say, this character is going to take this action and have this consequence, which I know may not be the best one, at least for that character, but it's going to make the best story. And so when I start piecemealing global or world events or

personal events for the characters and their consequences, it starts spider webbing into this big giant plot tree and then from there I can kind of pick, I like this thread. Here's when I write a book.

Frank (23:05.038)
You mentioned that I mean as as TTRPG, know home brewers ourselves. There is always that struggle of finding. Like what will my players want to do? Sure, I have an idea, but you touched on it and I kind of wanted to dive into that a little bit more. You never really going to know what all the players are going to want to do, especially when you're writing to a large audience rather than just your table. So you said you make really captivating hooks. Can you dive into that just a little bit more?

Rick (23:34.977)
Yes, so in the Black Ballad, the whole tagline for the book is you died now what? Right? And so we wanted to make an RPG because we're homebrewers ourselves and we wanted to make a campaign book that would fit with everybody's home table. Right? For like almost designed for homebrew GMs entirely. And so the book is spliced up, the storyline is into 10 chapters. It's going to explore the implications of what happens.

Frank (23:41.74)
Love it, by the way.

Rick (24:02.679)
or what are the consequences of resurrection magic in the fantasy setting, right? Because if you bring anybody back from the dead, then why would a king ever need to change his behavior for a hundred gold pieces? He can keep getting himself revived, right? He could just stay a tyrant forever. And so in chapter one, you know, the characters, you know, fall down, they've died, they have the consequences from their actions. They whether that they know each other.

or they're an existing campaign, or it's you're grabbing your friends from 20 years ago and saying, hey, remember your favorite characters? Let's all bring them to the table. This is their last ride. And so there's different ways to get into it. And, you know, right out of the gate in chapter one, the characters come to terms with their death. They see the new setting. They get a chance to have something familiar and have some food or like some quirky elements to them. And then there's an

very obvious call to action when they have to either save this cult or let these people die and then get involved to save a bar. And we found that characters are far more likely to save the bar and the tavern than they are the cult. And so you know we put the cult inside of the tavern, right? That was a thing that we were like, okay let's let's let's play Tessas. But at the end of the adventure, at the end of chapter one,

Frank (25:20.44)
Ha ha.

Rick (25:29.175)
when the music changes the sky literally turns crimson red and souls start raining down in mass over the entire setting of purgatory. And that's where we end the chapter and the players are like wait what's going on? They're really curious about that especially when the music starts ramping up towards the finale of chapter one. And the thing is chapter two the players they

ruling party of the realm is like, hey guys, don't worry, we got this. You don't have to do anything. Just go into town, get a house, get set up, you're going to be here a while. Don't worry, our guards got this, right? And so what ends up happening for like the first two chapters is the players kind of get settled into purgatory while things are continuously going bad around them. And what we've learned is that we will write with the Red Opera, the Dark Carnival,

Cthulhu Dremps and the Black Ballad, all of our games have these big cataclysmic world events that are happening in the background that are relevant to that person's city. And it can spiral out of control into a larger global or multi-planar or something like that if nobody does anything about it. And we straight up tell the storyteller, this is what happens if your players never do anything.

And every chapter this event happens and this thing is happening and the characters can get involved and or they could sit there and you know go to the house of the dawn and gamble some souls right like they can do what they want. It's just that there's consequences and the world starts changing things starts getting harder for them you know in the dark carnival we start stealing their loot and their memories and how much of them can we take before you're really willing to step up to the plate and actually fight this extremely bored patron.

Chris Saunders (26:55.252)
Thank

Rick (27:24.663)
And these things work really well for homebrew campaigns when you drop them in as narrative hooks because you as a storyteller can say, hey, we're going to spend six sessions, you know, just campaigning over here, doing what we're ready to do. And then when you're as a storyteller already, you could be like, this event happens. And the players are either going to react to that. They're going to ignore it. They're going to join it, or they're going to do nothing. And you.

right away can pick any one of those outcomes from just the top of your hat as an improv storyteller, right? If you remember to say, what happens if the players succeed? What happens if they fail? What happens if they do nothing? Or what happens if they betray it, like join sides with them?

Frank (28:16.096)
You've mentioned what I heard and please let me know if there's more. I heard there are micro hooks and macro hooks. The macro ones being that cataclysmic level event and the micro hooks being more like, hey, your memories are being stolen. Your possessions are being stolen because I'm more familiar with the concept of a hook with a micro level. It's like, cool, you came to town and you're looking to strike it rich. Like now go to the job board. You know, like there's that.

I you know, I think as storytellers it's great if we can add that bigger element of like this world is bigger than you and just to prove it There's a war between giants and dragons happening right over that hill. How is it gonna impact you? Let's find out like that's pretty that's pretty cool. Is there anything else in between in that if those were the breads in this burger Is there anything in between there as far as hooks because I know that there's more

but as far as hooks.

Rick (29:15.011)
there is. But I think that's probably where it comes down into the social element of the factions, the NPCs that you meet. We purposely design social stat blocks and role playing hints in our books. It's not very often seen, but we have like the role playing hints, the do's, the don'ts, like social challenge, like DCs and whatnot. But more importantly, we actually have factions and points and ways to get in bed with them and perks for

joining them and consequences for others because as these factions gain power, so allowing the players control over their immediate environment in a way is probably the best medium hook I can think of. Right? Because I mean if you think about it, if you have your group of players and they're in charge of the Rogues Guild in this city and there's that war between dragons and giants right outside, well what

Frank (29:47.278)
yes.

Frank (29:57.076)
Mmm, nice. Yeah.

Rick (30:10.177)
goods can the rogue guild start smuggling in? How are they going to set that up? Right? What can they profit from? And that's a little bit more than, you know, the personal hook that's like medium guild, like city politics type stuff and still underneath, you know, giant kaiju bottle happening over the wall.

Frank (30:25.068)
Right.

Frank (30:30.636)
Yeah, but it gives them that sense of control, like you said, and that's what everyone wants in their game is to feel like they have control, they're a hero, they're kick-ass in some way. Everyone wants to feel awesome. Even if their story starts off as, you all died, you had a TPK, and now here's your campaign setting.

Rick (30:49.025)
Yep. So no, I agree with that. I given sense that that's why we always have multiple endings in our books. We always have generally four canon endings towards the end for two reasons. One, in case players are Snoopy and they flip to the back of the book and they read all the possible outcomes. And there's like a fifth option that's always like, by the way, storyteller, here's the theme of the books if you want to craft your own and also, you know,

Frank (30:50.914)
Sick.

Rick (31:16.129)
Dear player, if you've read this section, just so you know, your storyteller is gonna do whatever the hell they want with this book. And then the second reason is the multiple choice endings really do allow the players to have actual control over the outcome of the storyline. In the Red Opera, you determine the fate of all warlocks. In the Black Ballad, you determine the fate of resurrection magic. In the Dark Carnival, you're going to learn to beat what it means to be evil.

Frank (31:21.42)
Yeah, nice.

Rick (31:44.755)
magnificent at the same time. You know because sometimes just being evil for evil's sake is just too boring guys you know. Yeah and Cthulhu Dremt is just a you know apocalyptic you know scenario where everybody dies at the end like all Cthulhu. You know but do you you know praise warship and

Chris Saunders (31:52.158)
There should be a reason behind the evil.

Rick (32:09.707)
go willingly into the other realm or are you gonna sit back guns blazing the entire time?

Chris Saunders (32:18.568)
The, I mean, there's so much in there around, you know, your structures that you have in place to make something great as a product for whether...

And this is something you've built your livelihood on doing that, right? Like this is what you do. And now you have a studio that is fairly sizable, that actually has many, has a catalog of things you've created and you've had your hand in. That's why we wanted to talk to you. We wanted to see like, how does one go from being that

you know, doing homebrew stuff for my table around here to now, in a sense, having thousands of people say, buy or purchase or buy into your idea and actually want to create something that's a business out of.

Rick (33:11.809)
So I definitely didn't start this endeavor thinking I was going to create a small business and start going down the path of like LLCs and contracts and storefronts and e-commerce and distribution networks and product manufacturing. This was not exactly the, you know, nightlife that I first imagined. You know, you generally, I started off as a writer, right? And I wanted to...

books and go to Barnes Noble and do my book signing and then write the next one and then go back to you know my nine-to-five job right and but as I think what happens with a lot of entrepreneurs or people that strike it out and take on more than they can choose or more than they can chew at first is you start having you start finding your niche right for me it was conventions I would go to conventions and I was doing really really well at conventions

And then I started partnering with artists to draw illustrations from my novels because that would help me out at conventions stand out a little bit more. And I really, really enjoyed collaborating with artists. And the whole time I'm freelance writing for other game studios. And I'm like, what if we write our own campaign book? What if I have all these art friends and I have all these, these things, let's make a campaign book. And so.

Thus, when you have the metal friends and I put all three together and I got everybody together and was like, let's go get a publisher. And we went and we got a publisher and that experience was very wavy and explosive by the end of it. And.

Either way though, we learned a lot of lessons about the nature of business, what it takes to manufacture stuff, and also the pitfalls of going into business sort of blindly, right? And because of my day job, I already was a project manager in construction. So I was like, okay, all of these creatives are brilliant.

Rick (35:21.835)
But everybody runs around sort of crazy at the same time and I have to hurt everybody and get everybody to work together to do a thing. Now, turns out, giving and getting out of the way of creatives and letting them do their thing and then paying them to do that thing is really empowering to them and they will turn out crazy awesome work and they get super passionate about the project.

So we started doing that and we crowdfunded and we were successful and the Black Ballad came out and then we delivered it and I was like, we have a studio now. And then it was like, okay, now what do you do? Is this just a one-off or do you go do it again? And we set up a distribution network. was like, screw it, we can do this. And...

then we did it again and now we're about to go to our third and we have a lot of projects that are in the works that are coming out in the next like two years. And even still today, even though we've only really been in business for about two years, we kind of just figured out, hey, this is what our studios brand is with our books and our projects. like, this is what sets us apart from.

you know, our beloved friends, because it's a very small community and all of us are making cool things. But I'm like, this is the one niche that we can do. We're a bunch of author writers or like author writers. That's, that's a horrible term and please don't edit that out because it's hilarious. we're a bunch of novel writers and so we're used to long form fiction ergo, we tend to write bigger campaign books.

Chris Saunders (36:59.729)
No.

Frank (37:02.252)
Nice.

Chris Saunders (37:03.762)
Hahaha

Chris Saunders (37:13.864)
That's, yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. There's so much in there around what you said, project management, right? Like that, you're leading a team down a road and very much like a dungeon master hooking people into doing their jobs, right? And making sure that things get done on time and all of those logistics. Could you talk a little bit about the crowdsourcing or crowdfunding, I should say?

experience and maybe what's different from your first crowd funding to the ones you do now? Were there things that really made a difference?

Rick (37:50.611)
yes. All right. So when I first started crowdfunding, I had an edge. I had already been a press writer for Geek and Sundry and Nerdist for a long time. And so my job was to actually interview other TTRPG creators and cover their crowdfunding campaigns. So I was very used to hearing the pitfalls that everybody else had done. So even before I started the studio, I actually called up and interviewed

Jaren from like action fiction games, know Matt over at major and press I went through and I was like hey what What do you got to learn and then they looked at me and a lot of times they were like Rick I'm I'm taking notes from you not the other way around like what do you what are you up to but early on I learned always know how you're gonna deliver your

right before you go to crowdfunding have an end goal in mind. And so even from the very first publisher I went to, I made sure there was a path that they knew how to publish before we ever went live funding. And before we even started storytellers forage, I made sure I had printers and distribution lined up before we went to crowdfunding. But I

have yet to crack the entire nut of is probably the same nut that every studio head will sit here and say, which is the marketing and engagement, right? You know, is what I love to get to the point where we could have our book completely developed before we go to crowdfunding. Yes, there are studios that have that. They have that luxury that they can say, we're going to publish this book, we're going to have it. It's a hundred percent done before they even go into crowdfunding.

that gives them a wealth of marketing material, the ability to say hey we're gonna spend six to eight months building up hype on YouTube and a marketing campaign and that's kind of how you get towards those you know million-dollar kickstarters. At the stage that we're at it's not quite feasible for me to have that kind of art budget on hand to finish it but we have gotten better. The Black Ballad

Rick (40:11.499)
We crowdfunded off just an idea and a dream and a lot of caffeine. The novels, Chronicles of the Crossing, that one, all of the manuscripts were written before we went to crowdfunding. And the same with The Dark Carnival. The entire manuscript was written and we already had some of the soundtrack done and we had about 15 % of the art done before we go to crowdfunding. So we're getting closer and closer to having the book completed.

Because the sooner you can deliver the book to people is the sooner they can start reading it, playing it, enjoying it. And also the sooner that you can be like, okay, this book has come out. Here's novels, here's music, here's soundtracks, because you can make other things off of that book more than just a game book. And, you know, I would love to do graphic novels or...

other kinds of storylines based off the settings that we're building. But we got to get the settings out there first.

Frank (41:15.847)
You're talking about using leveraging the skills, the other skills that your team has. You you just mentioned novels and you're just talking about how your team consists a lot of these novel writers. Is that a normal thing to create these peripheral kind of goods in a way, these peripheral products to crowdfunding projects? Is that a normal thing you see?

Rick (41:42.67)
I've seen it and I know that like Chaosome Games and Arkham Horror, they have a whole brilliant Arkham Horror line of novels. Even this, you know, choose your own adventure books that they have. And I mean, to me, the idea basically just came from what I grew up on. I grew up reading Dragonlance and, you know, old D &D novels that were titled Legend of the Five Rings or Vampire of the Masquerade novels. I loved those things.

And I don't see them that much anymore. I know that at the time that we're recording this, right now, D &D Wizards just released an excerpt from the new Ravenloft novel that's coming out. So they're kind of getting back into that as well. And the way I look at it, and both from a business person and a fan, as a business person, you can't just release game book after game book after game book because

Frank (42:14.254)
That's right, yeah.

Rick (42:40.501)
Realistically, when do we have time to play and use all that content? Right? It's not feasible. And so I don't want to have that company that's just like, here's this module, then here's this one, then here's this one. Especially for the size and the scale that we put into them. It can take somebody about a year to go through the black ballot or they just use it as a permanent setting. The other reason is

Frank (42:46.134)
Yeah.

Rick (43:08.959)
If we put all this creative energy and artwork and music into the setting, why not make it into novels? my hope is graphic novels. Or we had voice actors do script reads of things. And we partnered up with an actual play group that this group called Severed Threads. And they're a mix of professional storytellers and Ohioan Shakespearean actors.

They do the full makeup and they get the custom music and they pre-record their actual plays and do a full production with it. And it's like, okay, well this is really, really, really impressive. What can we do with this stuff? That's more than just, hi, here's a game book, right? Because we aren't writing in other people's universes, we're writing in our own. And that means we can...

Well, do what we want with it. So.

Chris Saunders (44:12.83)
How much does it cost to really, if I were to create just the game book and how much does a crowdfunding campaign need to make for anything to even happen?

Rick (44:23.415)
Okay, so that is, I'm going to answer this in two different tiers. Alright, so tier one is sort of your small, you're probably going to go print on demand, maybe it's a paperback style type supplement. You probably want to raise realistically in that 20,000 range. Now there are people who get by plenty fine underneath that, but when you really total up the cost of your website, your marketing, your

know, your time as a writer because if you don't put your own time in there you're like well don't have to pay any writers I wrote it myself. Well that's great you're you've spent your life capital to do that so what are you getting to pay yourself? And same goes with art well I don't have to pay my artists because they're either royalty based or they're you know my friend who's co-doing this with me we're just going to split the profits.

Well, if there are no profits left after you get done with marketing, your print run, your development, your shipment. So 20 grand for a small book can kind of get you there. The closer you get to 50, the safer it is, right? Especially with inflation and manufacturing and print costs and everything that has changed. mean, even Wizard of the Coast, their book prices are now finally going up to a realistic amount.

So you know we... $80 for a game book is is kind of where you're starting to see things finally settle in on. The other side of that is let's say you want to make that cool pretty full-color hardcover book you're looking at about $116,000 to $120,000 in crowdfunding and that is counting for you you know spending a

decent art budget, having an art director, layout design is more expensive than people think and it's very difficult to find a layout artist. Your print runs are substantial, but you can mitigate print costs based on where you print, although that's about to change or not change, we live in chaotic times. So, and then there's marketing.

Rick (46:42.793)
marketing and your stripe fees and your transaction cuts from the crowdfunding platforms, everybody gets a slice of the pie. So when your mom calls you up and says, my god, I'm so proud, you raised $150,000 on this crowdfunding campaign, you can be like, yeah, could I come over for dinner? Because I'm broke. Like at the end. But that's where you, that's where you have to have

Frank (47:04.681)
You

Rick (47:13.067)
bigger imprint than just a 30-day crowdfunding window. So if you think about it crowdfunding is only 30 days. It helps jumpstart your print run. That should not be the lifespan of the product that you're making or your business plan for that matter. Because if one of your crowdfundings doesn't hit and that's your only source of income as a small business, well then your only solution is to go do another crowdfunding campaign.

if that one doesn't hit now you're in double debt and you're starting to lie to yourself and play this Ponzi scheme right and the next thing you know you go belly up and then none of the backers get the rewards because you can't fulfill them and that's plenty of stories about that.

Chris Saunders (48:03.026)
Yeah, I mean, that's that is the risk of crowdfunding. We've all heard or backed something that just didn't wind up either delivering quality or just delivering at all. I'm curious, like you mentioned rewards when somebody puts together a crowd fund funding operation, they're essentially creating an offer for people. Right. And I always think about it through the lens of digital marketing and sales, which is my background. And I think about a really compelling offer for people to jump into.

And generally crowdfunding will have a series of offers. So they'll have like, can buy the base book for a certain amount of money and you can also then have all these other tiers of advanced rewards. I'm curious two things. One, what makes some really cool offers or compelling offers that people actually want to spend 500, 1000, 2000 or more. And I'm curious out of creating the full offer to say I'm going to

I'm going to, need to raise $200,000 or whatever that goal is, a million dollars. What percentage do you put at like, this is how many people are going to buy the base tier. And then here's where all the serious contenders are and how much percentage is that going to be? Is it like a 50 50 or is it kind of like a 30 70? Like I'm curious where, where do you, how do you think about that from the economics?

Rick (49:27.649)
So I tend to, I've moved towards keeping our Kickstarters, our crowdfunding's very, very simple. Generally four tiers, right? We have the high tier reward and the one that I think I will always default to, cause it's fun for us as creators, as always you get to be in the book in some capacity. For the Black Ballad, we let people submit themselves, they're dead characters. we actually hired a mortician.

to write official obituaries for their characters and put them in the book, right? And so stuff like that that's just fun, I think is a really good like high tier, because you only have one chance to get into the book. And so it is as exclusive as it can be, right? Events and other things can happen at any point that are out there, but getting into a book only can happen once when you're in layout process and you're doing that.

Chris Saunders (50:00.84)
Nice.

Rick (50:22.965)
So I think it's actually a fun, rare reward for crowdfunding campaigns. The second one is limited edition items for us is, and it doesn't matter what those are. think that's kind of universal, but things that I'm just not going to ever make again. And that for us at Storytellers Forge has become our loot boxes. That's where we're going to put in the soundtracks, the novels, the, you know, we're going to get custom tea or coffee made and throw it in.

know like your custom set of Dyson, we put it all in one loop box rather than give you like 50 choices to the side. Mostly because analysis paralysis is a real thing and I haven't found that it's any better to have the options all individually versus hey we're gonna throw it all in your box and just pick up that and you get everything.

Right? So we do that. Plus it's a lot easier on our end for logistics and we're a small team. So it's like everybody gets a box. Here you go.

Chris Saunders (51:28.454)
Yeah, one simple offer of like all the loot. Give me all the loot, right? Is there any loot you avoid or any loot you really embrace? I'm just... Yeah.

Frank (51:37.88)
Cause I'm hearing a lot of immersion, but I don't hear any candles yet.

Rick (51:42.679)
Uh, we have fragrances. We actually do, uh, like, like that's a, that's a new thing. That was actually what gave us our, our last piece of the puzzle was we partnered with mad lab studios because we were at a convention and our booths were right next to each other. And we were just vibing so well with everything. And they're like, you know, we have this like cinnamon fall apple, like nutmeg thing that's perfect for this. I'm like, can I put that into a loop box? And they go.

Frank (51:45.802)
Alright!

Frank (52:11.438)
Yeah

Rick (52:12.151)
Yes, and they go, we'll talk on Wednesday. We're already off to the races. It's like, um, uh,

Frank (52:18.222)
Have fun!

Chris Saunders (52:18.91)
There's some really great great candle makers out there in the nerd world. We've met a few of them at our conventions like ECC and and Fan Expos and stuff like that. Yeah.

Frank (52:21.774)
I love that.

Rick (52:30.775)
Plus 10 candles is like my favorite game ever. But to answer your question of what products I stay away from, I stay away from things that I can't have, that I have to go manufacture. To be honest, when we did the Black Ballad, I had this great idea to give everybody

Chris Saunders (52:39.134)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (52:56.201)
a bundle of five character sheets with their last will and testament and everything like that for free if you backed early, right? And it was like the shrink wrapped like thing and then like an ST screen and what was the other one that I had made? this map, this big giant fold out map, right? Things that you would normally see at on any crowdfunding campaign, right? And what it turned into is

Those three little items, the character sheet bundle that I was giving away for free, the maps and the ST screens, we had the absolute biggest nightmare getting produced done because we had to go to different people that could only make those specific things, which meant three separate freight shipments. And then we also lost one of them when the boat like turned sideways and they had to like send another one.

where I actually had to tell all the backers, was like, guys, the character sheets are free at our website. I'm really sorry, but you have a choice. I can delay this crowdfunding fulfillment by two months for the boat to get over here. Or you can just go without character sheets. It was like 99 % people were like, just give us the box. We can download the sheets and print our own. We're not really sold by them that much.

So I have a garage full of character sheets we hand out at conventions now.

Chris Saunders (54:22.93)
Nice, nice. Good reason to stop by your table, right?

Rick (54:26.271)
Yes, but that's that's why we have a lot of immersive stuff, right? Novels, Pokerdex, know, fragrances, coffees, teas, things we can partner up with people that have a lifespan beyond the box that are not necessarily tied to that product. Because another lesson I learned is if everything in that box is a hundred percent reliant upon that core book, you

can't mix and match later. Like, people like our Poker Dex, they like our Tarot Dex that we make, and the novels stand alone. But C.D. Corrigan wrote a novel about stealing memories, which is perfect for a dark carnival, whereas about stealing memories. And so it's very easy for me to pair those together, because the Black Ballad of the Dark Carnival share a universe, and I can grab this one and put it over here. So...

Chris Saunders (55:25.118)
That's neat, that's neat.

Rick (55:26.335)
learning how to a guy from a restaurant my friend works at this restaurant Portillo's and told me he's like when you start paying attention to restaurants and you walk in and you look at their ingredient menu you realize that all of their ingredients sometimes in good restaurants can be used to make every other dish in just some other capacity

Frank (55:47.623)
Such a good analogy, yeah.

Chris Saunders (55:49.886)
Yeah, because it's so like you want to be using you don't want to have waste, right? And, and that's that's especially apparent in the restaurant business where waste leads to ruin. And basically in D &D business, I mean, there's probably the margins may seem like they're higher than they actually are based on what you're telling us because the, you know, the $150,000 you need to generate just to break even on a book essentially, is is a lot right? It's a lot for people.

so what percentage, I wanted to go back to that. Do you know like what percentage would be say like lower tier versus say maybe the top, second, third, fourth, like, do you think about it like that? Or is there, cause there's some that also in the context is that some will be like, here's five, there's only five of this. There's a built in scarcity to this thousand dollar thing or whatever. Right. And so there must be a way of thinking through that, that you're saying I'm only going to give five of these, or I'm only going to give 10 of these.

Rick (56:46.881)
Well, so since one of them is based off of being in the book, that is always the limited tier of, hey, we're only going to have 10 of these, right? And that's just how much space we carve out when we're... We kind of plan it in the book that we're going to have that offering. So this is how much space we have. kind of know that. The other ones we don't really put a tier, but in terms of number of backers, it looks like a pyramid.

Chris Saunders (56:53.232)
Mm hmm. Right.

Chris Saunders (57:02.162)
Yeah.

Rick (57:15.093)
Right? It is straight up that way. In terms of where our support is as a business, it's actually the lowest tier and the second highest tier that really are bread and butter. The book itself, by itself, is just kind of there. It's like, dang.

Chris Saunders (57:38.942)
That makes sense. wondered, I figured that would be because if you're just barely buying the book, you're getting like the PDF along with it for free. It's kind of, you're just covering costs and a little bit more to get to get that. And then if you can convince them on that sexy box, right? Then that's where you're gonna see some of that profit coming in.

Rick (57:59.383)
Yeah, because you have, when you think about it, like the book itself, right? It's going to cost X to print. And then you have like the marketing and all the other fees that get tacked on there. Very little of that actually goes back into creation of the book. So the one advantage though of that tier being super popular is it just increases the quantity of your wholesale order. Ergo, lowering the entire run.

cost per unit and if you do hit certain metrics with it, even if you're not making money there, you kind of save overall. If

Chris Saunders (58:36.382)
That makes sense, yeah. Because if you get 10,000 versus 5,000, that's a huge difference in cost cutting, right? Yeah.

Rick (58:44.469)
And that's where the crowdfunding scales. I said you need like 150, right, for those pretty books. If you start getting above that, your static costs are starting to get taken care of, right? Your art only goes so high. And we put contributor raises into ours, like tiers, all of our contributors get like pay bumps and stuff. But after a while, when you start hitting up there,

your marketing is really your largest, you know, Kaiju size monster, but your actual production cost is, you know, it caps off after a point.

Frank (59:25.602)
I wanted to ask in this crowdfunding vein, what was a lesson or realization for you throughout these different projects that kind of felt like the level up lesson? Like, I learned this from this experience and now I'm using that in every.

Rick (59:43.719)
let's see the level up the I think one thing I will say is about how to restructure my tiers to keep them simple was a level up because I didn't start off that way. The other one was. Spending carving out two months and 10 pieces of artwork for our art team to make a trailer and 10 pieces of full production artwork.

so that we could design our graphics and our ads months before the crowdfunding campaign and actually make a kick-ass trailer because we could then mine that trailer for other social media content. that was, think, that right there's my level up answer, final answer.

Chris Saunders (01:00:35.774)
It becomes a pillar piece of content that you can then slice and dice or do reactions to or pull to. It's very similar to podcasting, actually. The way we do it is you can create pillar pieces of content and then slice them up into social media moments that allow you to create something bigger and build an audience.

Frank (01:00:35.939)
Do you?

Frank (01:00:56.898)
Are you saying that you spend two months in pre-production or two months in production? Like I'm just trying to understand if there's like two months of the logistics of it or it's the two months of the like, now it's done. Now we're gonna like, yeah, I'm just.

Rick (01:01:14.635)
I'm not sure which phrase would do this, we come up with, we actually go get our art director and our artists on board and we'll get them to get 10 pieces of artwork, the cover and everything designed. And then I give them to our trailer. Trailer art is David Grangio and David goes through and makes these beautifully awesome, like 3D rendered, know, trailers that use the art and tell the story. And we'll actually direct and create the whole long form trailer. And then we will chop that up.

Frank (01:01:26.721)
Icy.

Rick (01:01:44.579)
and grab stilts.

Frank (01:01:44.704)
I see. So it's a yeah, I did not ask my question very well, but it sounds like it's too much for a pre-production and a production stage where it's all being created and thought of at the same time and then put into all the different slices of pie that you're going to turn it into.

Rick (01:02:01.717)
And then that makes it really easy when it's like, cool, we can build our crowdfunding page. We have all these graphics, we have the ad assets, we can go through and do stuff and then I can set all the toggles. And now that it's one month before we're gonna go to crowdfunding, I could just start doing lead generation and just focus on socials and hypes and setting things up and partner collaboration rather than.

racing around trying to get everything slammed for approvals and hoping I calibrated taxes right.

Frank (01:02:35.212)
You

Chris Saunders (01:02:36.264)
So you just brought up lead generation and that was where I wanted to go next because crowdfunding does require an audience and there's many different ways to build an audience. There are some that where you collaborate with influencers or you do affiliate commissions. I've seen people do I've seen people run ads. I've seen people do all sorts of stuff to be able to build hype, right? Create, try to create viral moments, create a trail like

How do you think through that? What are the most effective ways around getting this lead accumulation part of it really nailed?

Rick (01:03:13.607)
still working on that. I will say that I've got a very surprising lesson that we did just learn. It turns out we struggle immensely to get people off of TikTok into a crowdfunding platform and I can't figure out why but we could have we could have people

Chris Saunders (01:03:37.278)
It's just hard to leave Tech Talk.

Rick (01:03:41.313)
have videos go hit easily on their own, you 50,000, 100,000 views, tons of comments, people favorite, like people in the comments super engaged, this is so awesome. my God, I can't wait to do this. And then you track it and you look at it and you're like absolute crickets in terms of conversions. Whereas via Instagram or YouTube shorts or Facebook, you know, it's very different metric, but we...

I still, and if somebody's listening to this and they're fantastic at getting conversions off TikTok, reach out to us, let me know. Because it's a puzzle we can't solve. Like how do you get people off of TikTok, right? No, organic, and we'll do the, you know, even the paid promo on TikTok, we tried that, right? And I know that it works for BookTok and getting me under the right BookTok feed is a thing.

Frank (01:04:20.45)
Are these ads on TikTok or organic?

Chris Saunders (01:04:22.909)
No, just.

Chris Saunders (01:04:33.114)
It's literally like the only thing I've ever heard work on TikTok is book talk. It's funny that like, because books are real. Book people know that you need to go buy a book. It's the thing, right?

Rick (01:04:37.973)
Right.

Rick (01:04:44.961)
So I wonder if it just doesn't work for crowdfunding, right? I wonder if it would work if it was right there in the shop or people could go to the bookstore and grab it or like off of Amazon, but.

Chris Saunders (01:04:56.078)
I think there's maybe something because of the e-marketing. Part of it is that there's a promotion going on, so you have to leave and then go fund something, which is not necessarily an immediate deliverable. But if you're selling the thing on TikTok, through a market or something, I've seen people do that kind of thing and have it work really well. So you could have the book and then be able to sell it maybe.

Or people could click a button and go buy the book maybe directly. I don't know. There's I've heard of things like that working in different industries, but it's usually again like lower ticket. It's not necessarily like people buying gems and jewels and things like that. Like or gems to like stuff like that. That it's not the same as as what you guys are doing, which is really creating a promotion, right? A promotion calendar and building up a launch into into this amazing, you know, Kickstarter.

Rick (01:05:50.327)
And what has worked well for us for lead generation? Conventions. Conventions, mailing lists, being genuine. Our Discord server is an actual community that we're slowly building out. We're storytellers on tech support, right? We actively, we actually are there because we are friends with some of the people that end up joining the Discord or their collaborators.

you know, even from other companies, there's a lot of ways to be friends, in, you know, sort of rising tides, lift all ships kind of thing, because our products are compatible. that's one, one way, but it does come down to, I will generally run just classic old fashioned ads and I will see what the cost per lead is. And that cost per lead metric I'm learning.

And marketing is not a skillset that I started off with. And I have a marketing guy that we work with from Ian from nine realms. And he's kind of been coaching me. He's like, okay, this is really good. This is not good, Rick. We don't want this. This one we want, right? Like he's walking me through all that stuff. And so it's a, I took a class, how to do lead generation trackable ads, all the full nine yards to kind of start teaching myself marketing.

which is a skill set that two years ago, I wouldn't even know where to go on Facebook to create that, right? And, you know, to explore then Google ads or does it make sense to run Amazon ads, right? And so I learned to start carving out your marketing budget, plan your lead generation, just as a test of how is your crowdfunding campaign really going to go when you do.

Chris Saunders (01:07:34.526)
Yeah.

Rick (01:07:46.921)
start hitting your mailing list, right? Is that something that people are excited for? Running play tests ahead of time tends to be very useful for us. For novels, I will release like sound bits and we'll start making, we're starting to make like audio clips and trailers and people doing like live reads, even if it's just me with a book doing narration from a chapter, right? Is a valid method to see like are people on the internet

enticed by this. Now granted if they weren't we probably still wouldn't pull the project we're just probably sending out the wrong message of what it's about.

Chris Saunders (01:08:27.046)
Yeah. So much of it is messaging, right? Knowing what hooks are going to work. find that least with social media or even TikTok specifically can be useful for that experimentation around figuring out what does resonate and then kind of channeling the things that do well there can then be used in marketing other places to kind of create better conversions. But you're right. Like getting people off TikTok, it feels like it's a very addictive app. So people don't want to, people don't want to leave that, that app at all.

Rick (01:08:53.249)
Yeah, I mean, I do it all the time on Facebook. I'll be scrolling through and I'll see an ad for some new Kickstarter. And because I'm also in the industry, I am totally gonna go snoop. And unfortunately that snooping backfires on me if they have a really good page. And I'm like, this actually looks cool. I'm gonna buy this. but I never do that off of TikTok. there's an ad, skip. I'm watching videos, leave me alone.

Chris Saunders (01:08:56.178)
And they make it hard to, they don't want you to.

Chris Saunders (01:09:11.272)
Yeah, yeah. Right, right.

Chris Saunders (01:09:20.122)
Exactly. Right. We all know we're just brain rotting on TikTok to begin with. So if you're in that head space, I feel like you're already in that head space. You don't want to buy anything. don't, you know, you're yeah, you're just like, this is to, to unplug, just show me some funny stuff that I can get, get into, you know? but yeah, it's interesting that that's the, that's that's a platform that doesn't seem to have, anything outside of it. Like business wise, I don't know.

Frank (01:09:30.4)
or make a decision.

Frank (01:09:38.936)
Kind of.

Chris Saunders (01:09:48.042)
I'd love to hear from people who are crushing it and making money or doing well with it, but I don't hear it very often.

Rick (01:09:48.32)
And it.

Rick (01:09:53.611)
Yeah, it is something that if somebody out there does know that like how that secret works, we worked with influencers, right? We've worked with some fantastic ones that were absolute treats to work with. You know, I've worked with other influencers that were on a different end of the spectrum, right? But the it just doesn't seem to translate.

into actionable stuff. What it does do is give you lots of cool social media content though to post while you're in crowdfunding and you need to think of something to write when you don't have a completed book. That that that's helpful.

Frank (01:10:36.096)
You, mean, there's so many types. We were talking about, you know, content and some that works well for us. There's so many different kinds of content that we can make. You mentioned earlier about a podcast idea that you worked on. That was before the recording. You mentioned some other different kinds of content that you've made. And I'm curious, the ways...

What are some of the ways that you like to engage with your audience? Because you mentioned Discord, you mentioned an email list. Given the sheer number of ways that we can engage with our audience, what is one of the more effective tactics that you have found? Whether it's the type of content, or it's the medium, like Twitch doing a long live stream. Is it creating these highly produced videos that are like a soft pitch of your settings?

Chris Saunders (01:11:29.694)
Thanks.

Frank (01:11:31.064)
What is it that you find tends to resonate really well with people?

Rick (01:11:36.407)
The one that, okay, resonates really well with people, conventions, panels, and live events for me are near and dear to my heart. do like 15 of them a year. That is probably where I do most of my engagement, right? I'm there at an event for four days. I post these big panel rooms or I run games and that's my primary one.

I actually like the creation of the polished final content, like the produced videos, right? Because to do, I know I'm supposed to go out there and record on TikTok every day and Instagram and do all the social media stuff, right? I just do not have the spoons to do it. just, it is, that is, and mad respect.

Frank (01:12:25.867)
It's so much work.

Rick (01:12:30.199)
to the content creators that can do that. I have too much to go, or I have too much to do in the way of logistics and product manufacturing and like book orders and printings and contracts that I am mired now behind the scenes with business being business, right? And so I have to rely on other people to start being able to handle those kinds of socials. So for me, it's very much my Discord.

my mailing lists and the final produced like content if it's not a convention because the trailers we get to put a lot of work and thought and fun and we get to showcase the talent of everybody on the team from you know me doing script writing to some voice actor like James or Jacob doing the read and the musicians and the arts and it's it's wonderful and then talking to people about that right and

we will do like launch parties and live streams and I'll toss in person launch parties. There's a great purgatory, themed bar out here in Chicago that I'll be like, okay, guys, we're gonna all it's the speakeasy, right? And I'm like, we're all going to get together at the speakeasy and have like, you know, everybody dress up. We're all going to get together. It's a great excuse for people to come in. People have driven from like out of state to come to the launch parties because as we start tossing better and better launch parties,

of fun to come to. And so we'll do those. And but we'll also do like the Twitch stream online and I have become a little bit less active on the daily social medias but I'm always present at the like launch parties or things like that. And then a lot of times people ask me a ton of questions. They're like Rick what about this thing you know or what's your favorite thing about this or how would this character interact with that character?

And then that gets fun stuff to engage with. I have given up any hopes of doing actual plays on a regular basis. I do not have the, you know, four to six hours a night or a week in the nighttime to do the record and all of that stuff. Podcast recording for me as well, like I'd mentioned earlier, was an endeavor that seemed like a very strong idea.

Rick (01:14:57.671)
in practicality is a lot of work. So props to you too. Because as you can attest to, there's a lot of work that goes into producing and editing a podcast. And so one of my personal lessons for me was to learn to let other badass people handle that part. And so.

Frank (01:15:18.88)
One of the reasons I wanted to ask is because you, you, can tell look for where's the bank for my buck. Where am I going to get the juice for the squeeze? Like what is going to give me that return for the time? Cause time is precious. You, you, I like the term you said, what was it? Life capital earlier. I'd never heard that. And I really liked that. And so you look for that naturally or maybe not naturally, but you look for it.

Rick (01:15:36.779)
Yep, life capital.

Frank (01:15:45.398)
And so I thought you might have something on that. And what I did here was that it comes down to quality content. is going to, it's either tickle or entertain or intrigue. What is the content that's going to do that rather than all of this content, making all of this content? And I sure hope that we're going that direction as a culture.

you know, because it is so overwhelming the amount of content that the algorithm asks of us. And it's not, it's not the humanity that I think we want. I don't think it's like, we love the idea of nerdpreneur because we want people to do what they want to do. That's what's so fucking cool. But if it requires us to slave ourselves to one post a day,

Like, my lord, that is not what we want.

Rick (01:16:41.153)
So I, okay, you did hit me on the I track, where's am I gonna my best bang for a buck? Yes, there's a reason why I know I'm like, hiring influencers is gonna translate into this thing, but it's not gonna translate into this thing, right? This kind of partnership is gonna translate into this thing that's really good, but maybe not this. I absolutely, so I...

have a background in stats. am a chief estimator and was in construction project management. So I do pay attention to, you know, return on investment. Where are things that, you know, we can get, which is why I think conventions are so important for me because at conventions, when you have FaceTime with people and there's a large crowd of people for me to engage with, you are cutting through all that social media noise. There is a sense of humanity there, right? Here are these authors. Here are these people.

Right? Like not only can you get your game book, they can autograph this thing for you and they can nerd out with you and then like, you know, grab a drink with you later. Right? It's that is a very, I think probably that's why I'm very successful at conventions. and the longer form media, because I just, what am I going to do post snippets of like chapter three?

on Instagram like over the course four times a week to meet the algorithm like it's guys we we write books they're inherently things meant to be played in person have experiences and do stuff so I'd rather create and that's I think where I'm getting to with Storytellers Forge we have this box that you're gonna get that's gonna allow you and your friends to play in person or online and have this experience literally in a box to cut away from.

the other things. Or if you're alone, there's a novel in there.

Chris Saunders (01:18:33.982)
There's a can we talk about conventions for a bit because you are not you were saying it's important for you specifically, but I think it's important just for the nerd industry in general. They are sort of these linchpins for nerds to come together and not just shop, but bring awareness to a lot of these things that are going on.

Rick (01:18:38.838)
Yes.

Chris Saunders (01:18:59.23)
You're not the only person we've interviewed that has said without conventions, we wouldn't have a business. mean, basically this is how we reach our people. This is how lead generation happens. This is how new business and new word of mouth happens. so, uh, for you guys going there without say a, well, let me, let's just figure out like when you go to a convention, what do you bring? Because you

have products you've sold in the past, so I'm guessing you probably have some things that people can buy at the table, but then there's also notice of what's to come. And where do you, how do you balance those two things? How do you make a successful convention for you guys?

Rick (01:19:40.161)
So when I'm at a convention, I ignore completely what's to come. It is entirely about what's out right then and right now. Yes, I will have a little QR code there for crowdfunding. And sometimes we'll say, hey, if it's live, I'll say, hey, if you back the crowdfunding, you get this art print for free. Because you're at a convention. You're at a convention to be there in person to find things that are there that you could walk home with. And I know at a convention, I am not going to stop, pull up my phone,

necessarily crowdfund something that yeah right like that's not that's not a thing but if I'm getting something for doing that right there at the show floor sure but I really don't focus on our the upcoming stuff is kind of like a reason to follow us on socials I guess is kind of like the the lead but it is entirely focused on here's the products that we have out right and we since I started off as an author like I began splitting

Chris Saunders (01:20:11.512)
Get it in two years. Yeah.

Rick (01:20:39.487)
a table with my artist friend, which is my little habsy table, and then going to Emerald City Comic Con and having my first artist alley table with one book and I had nothing else to sell. And then it kind of evolved to having art prints and two books and three books and then having game books that I would work on that I would carry with and then our own game books. And now we're at the point where we

For the past two years, we've been running where that we need two tables because we finally have reached that we need an exhibitor booth or we need multiple tables. And I need a booth partner, Courtney Penny, who's one of the other co-founders of the studio. She's in charge of like editing and she handles largely one whole half of the table. But this year at Otomis Central, Storytellers Forge is kind of leveling up again to the next point. It's the first convention that we're

partnering with in this capacity where we are now bringing out professional storytellers and game writers and other people that work in the ttrpg industry to run their games for con attendees and So rather than focus on just here's a bunch of D &D games We're actually gonna have like eat the right and you know Forteller and divination and you know ten candles games and dread games and all of these being run

by people who worked on them in some capacity. So people, when they sit down to play, will actually get a chance to play with somebody that was involved with that project. And we have two rooms in the Hyatt, and now we have an exhibitor booth. And it's probably the first time I'm going to a convention with a team of 20 people that are there helping tell stories at a convention to provide an experience for the show.

Frank (01:22:32.952)
That's a new level. AI game masters can't do that.

Chris Saunders (01:22:34.27)
Awesome. And so do you also have, like when you, I don't know what saying. So you're also going to probably do a panel or something at some of these cons or do you, does that factor into your marketing is like, oh, I'm going to apply to be a panelist on this specific topic. So then I'm also featured in the ad. Is that any part of the strategy going to these cons?

Rick (01:22:36.682)
Right.

Rick (01:23:01.943)
I think it's kind of just baked in inherently. I've been lucky enough to be invited as a guest to several conventions and that always comes with programming and even when I was touring with an author collective, it was very much ingrained. If you're a writer of books, everybody knows who the actors are.

Everybody knows who the voice actors are, where you can put up your placard and you have all the characters that you were that people watch all of the time. I can say my name, hi guys, I'm Rick Hines, and everyone's like, who the hell is that? I say, hey, I worked on the Crow RPG or do you know, know, Keek and Sundry or Universal Soldier, these things. And they go, shit, okay, yeah, I know those properties, right? And that's the merit of working on licensed fiction is...

I'm happy I get to work on Return of the Living Dead, right? And people know what that is. So you have to go on panels as authors. It's just, yes, right? Just sign up for some panel, join something. Because then when you go back to your table, people who saw you in the panel, if they like what you said, will generally find you at your booth.

I've done the stage shows at conventions and I will gladly do them. I said I don't do actual plays, right? Or, you know, do the streaming, but I have absolutely done the live on stage storytelling in front of, you know, a crowd of a hundred people. Like, that doesn't bother me in the slightest. And I will kill voice actors on stage, gladly. And that's fun though, because it's in person and then they can hang out with people afterwards. And that is a part of it.

And very recently in the past six months, remember how I mentioned that we have a marketing team guy now that I did? And he looked at me and said, hey, Rick, guess what? You've been making content for a very long time. You just never recorded any of it. Please find somebody with a phone. So I went to a convention and I made sure I took a bunch of videos and photos and things like that of like all the stuff I was doing at the convention. And then he looks at me and says, next time.

Chris Saunders (01:24:56.094)
Yeah

Rick (01:25:16.171)
buy something that's not a potato and please have Courtney record everything because I am terrible at it. So.

Frank (01:25:26.702)
You know, the camera on a phone, believe it or not, it does matter. it helps.

Chris Saunders (01:25:31.775)
And who's behind the camera also matters.

Rick (01:25:37.046)
That is a skill set I do not have and learning that I'm just like you know what it's not gonna happen guys I'm sorry I'm gonna go up there I'll run things I'll do things somebody else take some photos please

Chris Saunders (01:25:54.206)
Yeah, that's it.

Frank (01:25:55.49)
Well, if we're ever to con together, let me know, because that's my day job. I do camera work. That's my thing. It would be hella fun to be a fly on the wall of what Rick gets up to.

Rick (01:26:00.672)
Okay.

Rick (01:26:07.521)
the later the night goes at the convention. Yes, might. Me ending my night at around two o'clock in the morning is not abnormal. Maybe three.

Frank (01:26:11.182)
Hahaha

Chris Saunders (01:26:12.872)
We can totally, yeah, that'd be funny.

Frank (01:26:19.182)
Jesus. My bedtime's like 10.

Chris Saunders (01:26:21.15)
I feel like that'd be a fun series where you just like, you know, where we followed around various nerds and conventions and you then tell the story of the convention, but like the untold story of the convention. Like, did you ever see that Comic-Con, a love story, the documentary by Morgan Spurlock?

Rick (01:26:42.859)
Yes, I have.

Chris Saunders (01:26:44.07)
Yeah, he probably I mean most comic people probably have heard of at some point. It wasn't his biggest documentary because he did Super Size Me and all the other things that he did like, you know, sell me this whatever. But this was one of his lesser known ones that he did about it. And it was all about Comic Con. But it was told through the stories of all these different nerds who were different types of people going to that convention. And I loved it. It was like one of my first.

times I've ever even considered looking at a comic convention that night. Honestly, I've never been to one until I met Frank actually, but I'd seen this this video and they had like people who were trying to become comic book artists and what the process of doing that was. And then also people who were competing in the the cosplay thing, but were really good and high tier. And so they told that story and like

Some of it is very successful and some of it is not, right? Like people go there trying to get their hopes and dreams found and then some of them do, some of them don't. Anyway, it's a pretty interesting dynamic, but I always think that would be kind of a cool thing to go to conventions and tell those stories.

Rick (01:27:57.207)
the late night ones generally would prefer that there were no cameras involved for the next day. to answer your question, or not answer your question, to comment to what you had said about people going to Comic Cons to find advice. That is a thing that is very different for me now being on the other side of the table that people will come up to me all the time and be like, hey, I want to publish an RPG or I want to get into writing or.

Frank (01:28:03.86)
Of course.

Chris Saunders (01:28:06.056)
Comic-Con after dark, yeah.

Rick (01:28:26.923)
want get into the industry, where do I start? And I find that some of my most attended panels are, you know, usually how to not suck at storytelling or like the unchanged truth of GT RPGs, right? Like this, here's the actual state of the industry. Here's what we do. And here's a bunch of people that are living it and here's where you get started. And I will say that at one point at one convention, five years ago, somebody asked me at my table,

know what how to finish a book and get published as an author. Three years later he told me he published his book and I promptly went and bought his book and then had him sign it. like so it

Frank (01:29:09.091)
nice. That's the great thing about cons is, I mean, those experiences, those, yes.

Rick (01:29:17.591)
So that's for me conventions are just yes my bread and butter towards how I like interacting with people. You know yes I do a lot of them a year and doing 15 of them is starting to get a little spicy on the personal weekend time but at the same time I probably not gonna stop until you know I stop being invited so.

Frank (01:29:35.106)
Yeah, that's a lot.

Frank (01:29:43.608)
There's something rejuvenating about connecting with people at a con. There is something like sure it's exhausting and tiring and you know, being on the whole time is a lot. But when you have those connections and that human interaction on that level, there's something about it that's pretty rejuvenating.

Rick (01:30:02.423)
100%. I get home and I'm excited to write. Usually my best writing days are Monday and Tuesday, especially after a convention weekend, because I will get home and I'll be like, okay, one, I was gone for a weekend and my deadline has moved closer. And two, I kind of go by the method as an extrovert that I am, even though I'm a writer, I refill my social energy at conventions so that I can then sit at home and be alone.

Frank (01:30:17.064)
Hahaha

Rick (01:30:32.023)
and lock myself off in a corner and create.

Frank (01:30:34.062)
Right. Nice. Well, I feel like now is a great time to transition over into random roles. So, do you have that D100 ready?

Chris Saunders (01:30:44.008)
think it's a good time.

Rick (01:30:48.152)
I have two D10s which will serve as the classic Rifts or Vampire the Mask Raid percentile dice.

Frank (01:30:52.566)
Excellent.

Frank (01:30:56.696)
Perfect. So what this entails is we're going to have you roll that D100 a few times. The first time we will take that number, we will consult our very mysterious list and ask you a question. These are typically less serious and more fun, but sometimes they get downright mean. So go ahead and roll.

Rick (01:31:19.179)
begin this with a great classic number of 75 good sirs.

Frank (01:31:23.214)
Oh, a respectable 75. Do you have a tabletop pet peeve?

Rick (01:31:35.671)
See the problem is I don't know if it's whether or not I'm story I'm just gonna go with storytelling on the forever GM my tabletop pet peeve is hands-down Eating at the table

Frank (01:31:48.426)
You don't like people eating at the table?

Rick (01:31:51.017)
Yeah, that's my thing is like somebody's like, okay, it was all because I had one guy with a bucket of chicken sitting there at the table and he was making the lippy smacking noises and I'm trying to narrate this villain's art speech and it's just you hear him like licking his fingers and crunching on the fry and I was like, Adam, will you please stop with the fried chicken? And...

Frank (01:32:15.148)
I've built the suspense and you're ruining it.

Rick (01:32:17.815)
And then there's the smell and it can knock people out of whatever like finger yet. No food at the table. It's right now. I will be down with food and drink prior to game and we will make custom food there but at the table now guys and this already spills

Frank (01:32:33.954)
Yeah, the fried chicken. Fried chicken doesn't add to the catacomb immersion.

Rick (01:32:38.487)
Yeah, unless it's fried cobalt, I guess. But also somebody spills their drink on their character sheet, and then the whole weeknight's rude. Yes, no, food at the table. That's my pet peeve.

Chris Saunders (01:32:42.844)
Hm-hm.

Frank (01:32:48.11)
Ugh.

Chris Saunders (01:32:51.779)
Alright, so what, even ruffles or something like that? Like, no crunch?

Rick (01:32:56.463)
I imagine doing the whole diabolical monologue and the speech and in character and like unless that barred sitting there eating the chips in character like a hunk you go girl just you got this.

Chris Saunders (01:33:01.008)
Right?

Chris Saunders (01:33:06.234)
Yeah. All right, let's roll again.

Frank (01:33:08.908)
monologue at me.

Rick (01:33:13.399)
All right.

79.

Chris Saunders (01:33:23.442)
What is the most impractical use of the force?

Rick (01:33:33.815)
most impractical use of the force.

Chris Saunders (01:33:37.171)
Yes.

The thing that binds us, that connects us all together, the most... Above us, around us, below us, the most important force in the universe, what would be an impractical use of it?

Rick (01:33:42.089)
Yeah, the midichlorians that run through our veins.

Rick (01:33:57.655)
You know what's funny is I'm probably gonna say trying to see the future or using like that force foresight always seems utterly pointless because there is clearly no fate dictated in the Star Wars universe and it

Chris Saunders (01:34:13.758)
Right?

Rick (01:34:18.187)
the prophecies are always gonna be misconstrued. It is more practical to use the force to pick up your coffee cup from across the room to save you that 10 extra steps that it is to try to predict that the dark side is coming. Because guess what? It's gonna be there guys. You already know that. So that's my take.

Chris Saunders (01:34:34.802)
Yeah, and it's always like, you can't quite see it. They don't know because I don't give away the end of the movie. Of course, they can't. can't. Future seeing is not not valid. Valid reason.

Rick (01:34:40.095)
Right,

Rick (01:34:44.651)
You know, so, so foresight or danger sense or anything like that. Guys, you live in the empire. There's bad guys that got guns, they got lightsabers. They can't shoot worth hell. You gotta walk out of there anyway. Just, you'll be fine.

Chris Saunders (01:34:56.99)
Nice, nice. All right.

Frank (01:34:58.53)
Go ahead and roll one more.

Rick (01:34:59.891)
Alright. And 97.

Frank (01:35:05.294)
97.

Frank (01:35:10.08)
If video game mechanics applied to real life, what's the most frustrating thing that would happen daily?

Rick (01:35:20.917)
resurrection magic, restarting. Think about all of the people on this planet who pass away every day. And I know that that's a grim thought, right? But then imagine the very next day they were all back trying to undo the day that just got them killed and replaying their past day across the globe.

And then if somebody else died in the process, right, then they would have that perpetual loop. It would quickly despawn into just chaos. But chaos, it would keep repeating itself.

Frank (01:35:51.244)
That would be...

Frank (01:36:01.938)
That's crazy. I was thinking of like those bugs where you're trying to walk through a doorway, but like the way it was programmed, it's actually a wall and the art was put in the wrong spot. So you have to find the doorway somewhere where it looks like it's just a wall though. That would be, that's what my head went. You're on the next level. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, Everyone's in the same server and suffering from all these respawns. Yeah, that suck.

Chris Saunders (01:36:33.212)
like the edge of tomorrow, like way more. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Frank (01:36:37.184)
Yeah, Groundhog Day and everyone's aware.

Rick (01:36:39.959)
And even if you didn't die, that means you have to deal and you're aware that that person is Groundhog Dane their day. And you're like, great, which part of the domino am I supposed to be today? You know?

Frank (01:36:47.949)
Yes.

Chris Saunders (01:36:47.997)
Yeah.

Frank (01:36:51.392)
Yeah, it's like, let's all work together to get this person through it so we can move on and get to our next day.

Chris Saunders (01:36:57.822)
That feels like it was just an old Team Fortress. Team Fortress 2 server or something like that where everybody's just trying to survive. But getting picked off.

Rick (01:37:08.577)
Doesn't surprise me. Yep.

Frank (01:37:12.61)
Please roll one more.

Rick (01:37:14.039)
All right.

And 94.

Chris Saunders (01:37:19.635)
High rolls nice

Rick (01:37:20.971)
I I stick to the last roll as well would have been 75 so I'm my dice are like in a number so 94 is my answer.

Frank (01:37:28.055)
loaded.

Chris Saunders (01:37:28.35)
You should be playing a game, yeah. So what is the worst monster to get a romantic Valentine Day card from?

Chris Saunders (01:37:43.782)
Ooh, so sad. He couldn't even get a Medusa to like you.

Rick (01:37:50.135)
I any monster that wants to give me a Valentine's Day card I will happily accept. One, for two reasons. It proves that monsters are real and magic is out there, so which case I have a lot of hope. And two, I am such a random occultist nerd that just about every single monster out there that's given me a Valentine's Day, I will find a way to make that work.

Chris Saunders (01:38:14.91)
It's probably safer that way anyway, especially with like werewolves and vampires. You don't want to piss them off, right?

Rick (01:38:20.176)
Look, I'm waiting any day now for a vampire to find me cute and come knocking on my door. Let's...

Chris Saunders (01:38:27.094)
that's top-tier Valentine's monster right there. Everybody wants the vampire monster.

Rick (01:38:29.579)
Right, sure, but know, okay, fine. You take it all the way down to a mummy. Guess what? They still got ancient secrets, all right? know, slime monsters, even the arachnid spider girl, right? It's gonna be terrifying for me, but you know, I can find a way, all right?

Frank (01:38:31.916)
It's S class, yeah.

Chris Saunders (01:38:38.928)
Yeah. Cool place to sleep.

Frank (01:38:53.506)
Got a big heart.

Chris Saunders (01:38:55.19)
I like that.

Frank (01:38:57.858)
Let's go ahead and roll one more actually. We'll do two more.

Rick (01:39:01.843)
All right, nine.

Frank (01:39:05.646)
Whoa! Alright.

What's a nerdy purchase you regret but would totally buy again?

Rick (01:39:15.841)
The... ooh. So the problem is, the key word there is that regret.

Frank (01:39:22.988)
Yeah, do you regret any your nerdy purchases?

Rick (01:39:28.105)
I don't think I do. I mean, I may have spent a pretty, crap, no, wait, I do. All right, so I used to be really big fan of League of Legends and I have a lot of champion skins and riot points because the game is totally free, mind you, totally free.

Frank (01:39:51.031)
Frank (01:39:56.76)
You gotta support those developers somehow, right?

Chris Saunders (01:39:58.878)
Yeah.

Rick (01:39:58.953)
Right, and so I've got a lot of digital content locked and I still would buy it again, particularly after watching season two of Arcane and I totally did not not install Riot's League of Legends again to play and promptly eyed up a new Vi skin that needed to be on my account that I barely play.

Frank (01:40:24.334)
There you go, perfect.

Rick (01:40:28.009)
All right, and the last one, 32.

Chris Saunders (01:40:32.732)
Alright, 32.

If all dice rolls had real-world consequences, what's the worst thing you'd use them for?

Rick (01:40:46.077)
all dice rolls had real world, what the word, I would be.

I would certainly become a power gamer. I would find one stat that I always rolled really well on. no, no, guess it would just be a random dice. It wouldn't be a character sheet into a thing. It would be like, if I roll this D10, you know, this thing is going to happen or something like that, right? You know, right? I would, I would a hundred percent gamble. Like just.

Chris Saunders (01:41:08.594)
Wheel or wool? Yes.

Rick (01:41:20.777)
in a heartbeat. I would make bets with people for all the weirdest things, you know, and giving me a

Chris Saunders (01:41:28.626)
We're all one gold coin away from a real problem in the nerd community.

Rick (01:41:31.639)
Yeah, giving, yeah exactly, giving me any sort of superpower would quickly potentially see me spiral down towards some of the anti-heroes in my novel series where it's like, cool I can change the world because I will find some way to utilize that.

Frank (01:41:51.148)
Yep, that's up there with the worst. It's funny. Yeah, know, gambling really is that close to tabletop games. It's it's dice. It's still dice.

Chris Saunders (01:41:58.078)
Oh, I didn't realize that until my friend who I know has a like a preponderance for gambling and had never played Dungeons and Dragons before. And then during Covid, we all got locked up and we were doing like, you know, just doing games. And this is actually how I met Frank, too. But it was like, no, it wasn't you, wasn't you. But this was he was in this game. And it was funny because like, as he started rolling dice and like

Frank (01:42:18.729)
It's not me though.

Chris Saunders (01:42:27.036)
the GM would be like, you hit, you don't hit. you do hit. And he started to get the gambler in him. He'd just be like, all right, let's do it. Let's roll the dice. Like you can see it's like he's at the craps table again in Vegas, but he's playing D and D and not losing any money. Every time he hit, it's just, yes. And then how much damage am I getting? Right? Like there, I realized there is a real interesting loop gambling loop that gets triggered for people who have that. If you, if you can position it right.

Rick (01:42:55.831)
I have spent my time and will still continue spending some time in Vegas at that craps table so you know, I get it. The shiny math rocks that determine our fate.

Chris Saunders (01:43:01.598)
We're all fuckers for dice, right?

Frank (01:43:10.744)
Well, we're going to move into the third section here, is rapid fire. So here these are quick silly questions and I'm going to start off as always with Star Trek or Star Wars.

Rick (01:43:23.287)
Star Wars.

Chris Saunders (01:43:25.374)
Who's your, okay, Yoda or Obi-Wan?

Rick (01:43:29.825)
Obi-Wan.

Frank (01:43:33.058)
Why didn't Frodo ride the Eagles all the way to Mordor? Wrong answers only.

Rick (01:43:39.093)
Ooh,

Rick (01:43:44.599)
I can't say bad developmental editing Why didn't Frodo ride the Eagles

Yeah, halflings are natural prey to eagles.

Frank (01:44:05.474)
There you go, they're tiny and eagles are big.

Chris Saunders (01:44:09.16)
What's your favorite fantasy book? Excluding your own.

Rick (01:44:12.993)
King rap by Trinna Maville.

Frank (01:44:17.09)
off to look into that. Who is more evil, Dolores Umbridge or Voldemort?

Rick (01:44:21.911)
to Laura Sunbridge.

Chris Saunders (01:44:24.774)
What is the best munchie?

Rick (01:44:30.519)
serious.

Frank (01:44:34.904)
Best captain in the Star Trek franchise.

Rick (01:44:40.865)
to Star Trek.

Chris Saunders (01:44:42.526)
He said Star Wars, Frank. He said Star Wars. He's still going to push the issue. Three favorite pizza toppings.

Frank (01:44:43.182)
Thanks

Rick (01:44:46.241)
Mm.

Frank (01:44:46.324)
I know, but I'm still gonna ask.

Rick (01:44:54.007)
It's sausage Cheese is a default. It is not an additional topping. So sausage, geranara and

Barone, no roasted garlic

Chris Saunders (01:45:11.294)
What was the middle one? Jara Nara? What is that?

Rick (01:45:13.409)
Jake turn on our it's a like the hot peppers like melody.

Chris Saunders (01:45:17.612)
okay, gotcha, gotcha, all right.

Frank (01:45:19.342)
It's kind of like a pickled, it's not quite pickled, it's more like a relishy kind of a thing. I recently discovered it like this year. Yeah, it's not out here in the West very much. Anyway, sticking in the food vein, favorite ice cream flavor.

Chris Saunders (01:45:24.094)
Yeah, gotcha.

Rick (01:45:35.031)
Moose tracks. That's like chocolate, peanut butter, like dark chocolate type stuff, yeah.

Chris Saunders (01:45:40.138)
yeah. yeah, we got that in Canada. Moose.

Rick (01:45:45.227)
Yeah, we got it from you. We just imported it down. It's lovely.

Chris Saunders (01:45:47.806)
Predator or aliens?

Rick (01:45:52.801)
Predator.

Frank (01:45:54.924)
What character would you cosplay at Comic-Con?

Rick (01:45:57.857)
Judge Dredd, the Carl Urban variety.

Chris Saunders (01:45:59.39)
That's a good one. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. Not the Stallone? Are you sure? man, what's the best Dorito flavor?

Rick (01:46:09.056)
Cool Ranch.

Frank (01:46:13.186)
What alignment do you play in real life?

Rick (01:46:19.963)
torn. It's either lawful evil or lawful good or sorry lawful evil or chaotic good. One of the two. I have a set of rules right because I have this I have this whole rant about the way the nine alignment system doesn't work and the way that evil is is actually looking out for you into those around you and I that's a whole separate rant and I kind of wrote a lot about evil in our recent book and

the nine alignment scheme. So lawful evil by definition is you have a code of ethics. You are very doctor doomed. You look out for those who are around you. You care, you protect for them, you watch out for them, and you won't stray from your own path, but you're not going to accept the rules of society in all cases. And, you know, I think that's very telling of a lot of people probably right now based on political spectrums and, you know, and then chaotic good, you know,

hey if I if I could paladin I would paladin right? You know, be a good person but I think if of late I've gotta go with lawful evil.

Chris Saunders (01:47:29.928)
Lawful evil is such an it isn't it I think it's one of my favorite alignments because yeah, there's a there's a specific willingness to exist in society, you know, and and kind of work around it that I think lawful evil really can, you know, allows allows them to be in the party. I just find, know, if you're chaotic, you're going to just be crazy. Right. So

Rick (01:47:49.687)
Just, yeah, and just, you know, where it's at, right? You know, some people can earn so much money and shape so much and I'm not gonna play by those laws. Like.

Chris Saunders (01:48:03.494)
Yeah, and right as a spectrum, know, like, whatever. And like we can, yeah, what's right for this? What's right for this? I think there's, there's it's healthy for a lot of groups to have someone in that vein and they're in their party just to balance out the role play and the, and the strategizing. Yeah.

Frank (01:48:06.926)
You

Rick (01:48:20.019)
Yeah, you know, evil is such a defined concept by the nature of the world and society that they are looked at. And what might be considered evil to a society of undead necromancers will probably be considered very, different than, you know, your classic Lord of the Rings Hobbit Village.

Chris Saunders (01:48:41.33)
Yeah, so it's like.

Frank (01:48:42.274)
Yeah, what's too far for those that are already on the edge? Like, what do they consider as too far?

Rick (01:48:45.943)
Well, it might be like leaving, giving cupcakes to your freaking neighbor or, you know, bringing holy relics into the kingdom, you know?

Chris Saunders (01:48:52.636)
Yeah, necromancers may not appreciate natural birth. just only want undead birth. That's the only way you can bring life about is through undeath. And so, you know, if you have someone who's evil in that society, that really starts to make an interesting campaign, right?

Rick (01:49:04.063)
it's it's

Rick (01:49:11.479)
It's one thing I write about in all of our campaigns. I always try to define what is outlawed in this city. What does this society count as evil? And that's a benchmark for crime and what makes an underworld or an above world or how the society might operate.

Frank (01:49:21.462)
Mmm.

Frank (01:49:32.888)
Do you think of these things a lot, this is side question, do you think of a lot of your worlds when you build them with charts and Excel spreadsheets for like, not like statistics and graphs, but do you see like, okay, this is a question, these are like a series of questions that I need for every world and I have to fill in those cells.

Rick (01:49:52.459)
Yes, we call it the bibble. It has canonically been dubbed the bibble in our studio.

Frank (01:49:57.452)
because this is how I think. And I hear it when you've been talking this evening and I'm just like, this speaks to me. There's something deeper here that I understand.

Rick (01:50:05.751)
Yeah Courtney, she purposely named our studio master style guide the Bibble and it has become a beloved term for the behind the scenes document of you know what is the world and we have to fill these things out so we can give them to other writers.

Frank (01:50:27.683)
That's awesome.

Nice.

Chris Saunders (01:50:33.714)
What's your zombie apocalypse weapon of choice?

Rick (01:50:41.205)
I've thought about this one a lot and I am gonna have to go with a classic. I'm gonna have to go with a bow and arrow is my like want to go to default, but that gets very dangerous very fast. I think I'm gonna go with an axe.

Frank (01:51:02.582)
Lash through books you've read.

Rick (01:51:05.291)
Last three books I read were Slaying the Dragon, the History of TSR by Benjamin Riggs.

Chris Saunders (01:51:10.814)
I just read that by the way on your recommendation. I just finished it last two weeks ago and it's awesome. So yeah, you told us about that when we last chatted and I dove into it when I was doing all the recent episodes that we released. But yeah, good recommendation.

Rick (01:51:17.345)
Yes.

Rick (01:51:26.775)
Space Opera 2, as one of my friend's books that I picked up and read.

Rick (01:51:38.967)
What was the title of that one?

Rick (01:51:44.183)
Talos by Bryan Anderson and Talos was this cyberpunk sort of cyberpunk anarchist like butt spin on its head where they're like the terrorists where the punks are you're looking at from the corporate side and how they are disrupting society so it was an inverted fiction and it was good it was good so those are the last three that I've read

Chris Saunders (01:52:15.037)
Who's the best Spider-Man actor?

Rick (01:52:20.959)
I'm going to go with Toby McQuire.

Chris Saunders (01:52:26.216)
Perfect answer. Thank you very much. I keep saying it,

Rick (01:52:26.423)
you

Frank (01:52:26.51)
I can't believe there's so many people that like Tobey Maguire.

Rick (01:52:34.689)
Dude, we were just talking about his venom walk the other day after we saw Thunderbolts.

Frank (01:52:34.83)
Ugh.

Chris Saunders (01:52:41.522)
He's, yeah, he was tremendous.

Frank (01:52:47.052)
All right, this is going to be a charged question, but we talked a little bit about this earlier. Pizzas. What type of pizza? Chicago style, New York style or thin crust Italian?

Rick (01:53:02.295)
So in Chicago, the biggest misunderstanding is that we actually have all three. Thin crust Italian is like a breakfast or a nice little snack on your way to work. New York style pizza is what you pick up on the street when you're going to a next place. And Chicago style deep dish is what you invite for all your friends and family when they come on over and go to Pequod's. Please don't go to Giordano's. Right, if you're going to do this like a proper Chicagoan, the answer is all.

Chris Saunders (01:53:22.12)
Ha ha ha.

Chris Saunders (01:53:26.49)
that sounds right.

Frank (01:53:28.91)
Okay, of course.

Chris Saunders (01:53:30.886)
I can't wait to go to Chicago and have my pizza experience. All right, how many cats is too many cats?

Frank (01:53:33.25)
have pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Rick (01:53:35.467)
Yes.

Rick (01:53:39.111)
three.

Frank (01:53:43.776)
Now, I'm gonna ask another, this one's actually a tough question. Will there be jobs for writers after a...

Rick (01:53:52.747)
Yes, and here's why I think there will be jobs for authors. AI gets can get awesome. AI will eventually outstrip us, but people aren't necessarily going to follow AI. Eventually people follow authors, not so much books. They follow series, right? And those series are always written by somebody and you and that's

inevitably follow that author for better or worse as very well known by two very high profile authors sort of doing things that have ostracized them from their communities entirely. I mean come on, JK Rowling and Neil Gaiman, know, blow on up, but at the same time people followed them for years. know, Stephen King is a name because of Stephen King.

Eventually, when you and an author makes enough books and people fall in love with those books, they follow that author and they follow them through different stories in different places. I don't see that necessarily happening with AI to the same degree. Now, will authors... AI can write. Will AIs create fundamentally completely different worlds without prompt engineering?

Who knows, right? Will they ever twist artwork and make stories out of thin air? No, I don't know if they will. And if they do, great. Is that going to replace human authors? I don't think so.

Chris Saunders (01:55:37.854)
kind of tend to agree with you in many ways too because there's definitely power in the AI, but generally when you tell it to do something, it acts as a really good filter, if that makes sense. Like if you have a story and you say, can you add Western elements to it? It's really good at doing something like that, but it's not necessarily great at coming up with

twists and turns and engaging interesting stuff that on its own that I think it knows to appeal to humans. It might get to the point where it gets really good at that, but right now it still feels like it's more of a curation tool and needs to be curated by someone who understands the audience or understands what's like kind of the game master or the master storyteller to make it work.

Rick (01:56:31.639)
I think the two literary positions that are probably most in danger of being outstripped by AI sooner than anybody else are copy editors and language translators.

So those are two I can see of like, hey, polish off dev editing, right, which is the whole storyline editorial, right? But copy editing, it's as soon as AI can do copy editing in a Word document, I think that's a publishing game industry changer because the Chicago Manual style is a fix that rules.

Chris Saunders (01:57:14.91)
And imagine if like, you know, would an AI ever come up with the idea for your last concept of like what happens after your party dies, right? Like, are they really going to come up with something like that? That or is it going to be when you start inputting those ideas into it, it can play around with those things. It's still feel I feel like garbage in garbage out. Like if you're not a writer, AI is not going to help you. Yeah.

Rick (01:57:38.173)
Sure, and also right now, I don't think anybody who's actually writing has much to fear at the moment from AI because you can tell and it is so just...

Chris Saunders (01:57:45.715)
Yeah.

Frank (01:57:49.25)
The nuance of experience is missing completely from like, mean, cause part of what I love about your tagline being the campaign after TPK AI doesn't realize the significance of a TPK. It doesn't understand like how impactful that is, but also how there's kind of a chuckle to it. It doesn't get that and, or it doesn't get,

just the like when you tell or when you write a story about something that's heart wrenching that ties into a personal part of your life and maybe just a sliver that another human can relate to, AI doesn't get that nuance either because it doesn't have the experience to pull on. It just imitates.

Rick (01:58:29.747)
when it gets to AGI right and it actually becomes an artificial generative intelligence and can sit there by itself and conceive of its own novel idea of a story it wants to trap about like in its own existence right yeah then you know hey maybe I'll you know curiously take a peek but I'm not necessarily going to follow that thing's journey you know all through ever I'm going to be rooting for that thing to be like can you just make me a cyborg please let's go up give me the upgrades

Chris Saunders (01:58:55.496)
Yeah, right.

Rick (01:58:59.575)
you

Chris Saunders (01:58:59.634)
Hey, they were still great writers in Star Trek. you know, like they had wonderful, incredible AI in Star Trek, but people were still writers.

Frank (01:59:08.44)
Wait a minute, who in Star Trek was a writer? Like what fictional character was a writer?

Chris Saunders (01:59:15.014)
I'm sure there was definitely a story or two about a person writer. didn't Wesley want to be a writer at some point? Wasn't that his whole thing? Cisco's kids. Sorry Cisco kid wanted to be a writer.

Frank (01:59:22.366)
No, that was Cisco's, sorry, Cisco's son, but he wasn't a writer. He was a journalist, a reporter.

Chris Saunders (01:59:29.79)
very similar. Anyway, I'm just trying to bring up that there were writers that have in in the future. Are we going to have another Star Trek argument in front of a guest? No.

Frank (01:59:36.096)
Sorry you had to be here for this, Rick, but, Chris, come on now.

Frank (01:59:42.976)
We might have to, this is getting, this is out of hand.

Chris Saunders (01:59:46.29)
Well, Rick, this has been awesome and amazing to actually chat with you on mic about what you do and sharing all the wisdom and thank you so much for your time. We like to finish off our interviews though with something a little inspirational and there's so many people listening that would want to be doing what you're doing or at least working in their specific niche, bringing their passion to reality and making it a successful business. That's who we talk to and that's who our people are. I wanted to ask you,

For aspiring nerdpreneurs out there, what advice would you give them to move into their nerdy passion?

Rick (02:00:23.713)
Whatever you begin, always have that three year outlook to what you're trying to do. Because if you go and you get your first set of failures and everybody is going to tell you again and again and again, and probably on this podcast, every other person is like, don't give up early on because there is actually some element of truth to that, right? You start small and you just keep building up of what you are doing. And if after three years it doesn't work, well,

then maybe you'd be like, hey, I made a thing, I did a thing and you can still walk away before it's too late. But that's my rule. Or the second one is if you are going to create something nerdy for fun, imagine you were going to try to sell it and then start from that point. If you're going to take your passion, how are you going to get it to other people that are not your local family?

And if you start with that in your mind, it helps you envision where you need to go to get to that point.

Chris Saunders (02:01:28.252)
Love that, love that. Well, Rick, where can people find stuff from you, buy some of your awesome adventures, or what have you got coming up that people can help you guys out with?

Frank (02:01:30.254)
Nice.

Rick (02:01:40.439)
So the biggest spot you could find Storytellers Forge is StorytellersForge.com or SDForge Studios on just about every platform, including TikTok because we do actually post stuff there. YouTube is quickly becoming our primary. And this summer we have two awesome releases coming out. One of them is the Chronicles of the Crossing. Remember that Black Ballad, the Perfect Adventure after the TPK? We had...

Four novelists read the setting and then tell their own stories of full fantasy novels. We have war-torn mystery, have, you know, necromantic heist like rogue punk fiction, we have star-crossed lovers. So each novel is a different tale within the Black Ballad universe, the setting of the Sunless Crossing, about the perils of Purgatory, the adventures within there.

and all four of them releases a box set this summer, just in time to come out with D'Amorte's Black Ballad Heavy Metal album that the whole orchestra that pairs with this actually tells the story of the rivalry between two characters in the RPG that hate each other. And they got like the Doom Eternal Choir and like everybody else working on it. That's the full lyrical, like if you enjoy metal music, listen to that. but those...

The Black Ballad novel series comes out on June 7th and it'll be available everywhere. You can already start reading reviews of it online because the Goodreads arcs have already gone out. And then the other book that's coming out this summer is The Seventh Age Decay, which is my personal novel series. And my novel series is sarcastic urban fantasy about the end of the world after we bring myth and magic crashing back into us and playing around with that concept.

Chris Saunders (02:03:36.04)
Sounds awesome. Well, thank you so much, Rick. And thank you to everyone who's listening, tuning in. And as always.

Frank (02:03:45.784)
Keep it nerdy.