Answering Your Juicy Questions
Results of the Q&A
To mark 3k subscribers, we did our first Murkdice Q&A! You provided the questions… so here are the answers.
“…getting started as a TTRPG designer and finding your audience. What do you think the best way to just get something out there and into peoples’ hands is?”
I do have some advice, though its mileage will vary of course. I’m assuming you’ve not published much or anything, you don’t have an audience, and you’re not looking to spend a ton of money.
Visuals are everything. Let me repeat that. VISUALS ARE EVERYTHING. People’s decision on whether to give your work their time or not is 90% driven by its appearance. High quality visuals can be very expensive to achieve if you don’t have illustration or layout skills
If you are not an art or layout person don’t despair. I didn’t have layout or illustration skills before starting to make ttrpg stuff. There are some options.
Learn layout or illustration, ideally both. This might be the biggest favour you can do yourself. Remember: bad layout with cool art still sucks, cool layout without much art is still cool.
Find art and layout collaborators who are new to those skills and willing to work for a profit split.
Use free or cheap resources to provide layout and illustration. For layout without heavy lifting, get
’s template. Use public domain art or purchase affordable stock art for illustration.
For sharing your work, share in communities you are active in and your work is suited to. Think about who your work is for, get it in front of them. Don’t expect quick results, this is a long game!
Another option: send your product to some relevant publishers and see if they will help you publicise and distribute it. Just don’t get your hopes up.
If you mean getting started as a TTRPG designer in an online content sense, Lyndsay says:
Consistency is the key to keeping your content out there long enough for it to be widely enjoyed and for it to find its audience. There is very little point to releasing anything if you’re not willing to commit to keeping it up.
So in the beginning, I would choose a project to work on that you can keep up for six months. Whether that’s daily on social media, weekly in a newsletter, or every couple of weeks for a blog release.
“Do you have any homebrew rules for Cairn or other Odd-likes that you like to play?”
MurkMail articles aside (I use stuff like Supply Die and Wounds Without Crunch), there are some things I tend to do with most Odd-likes:
We don’t roll initiative. Whoever acts first, goes first. When in doubt, players go first.
I don’t use traditional reaction rolls. Either I have a specific reaction table for creatures, or I already know its psyche in much more detail than a reaction roll can provide me with.
I don’t use morale. I’m pretty clued up on how the opposition thinks. My goons flee whenever it makes sense, which is often.
I tend to group items into ‘kits’ e.g. climbing kit. These typically fit in a slot, and help us avoid being too granular about equipment.
My homebrew rules for systems are often about simplification or trimming things.
I’ll sprinkle in more specific rules if I think an adventure or scenario would benefit from it.
“Do you prefer writing adventures/games by yourself or with a creative co-writer (excluding editing)?”
Overall, I tend to enjoy locking myself in the ivory tower and being allowed full creative jurisdiction. That’s probably because:
I tend to have a pretty specific vision for projects and I struggle to compromise on that vision. Just ask the poor editor.
I am picky about prose and love work to have a consistent voice.
I tend not to actively draw from tropes or references. That can make communicating a base vibe for another writer difficult.
That said, my experience working with
was fantastic. Odinson did some supplementary writing for our zine. It was a lot of fun. We were so aligned on our vision, plus Odinson is just a great person to work with.“Lyndsay, what do you think is an unappreciated linguistic trait in Luke’s writing?”
Luke is, first and foremost, a prose junky. The man needs to get writing some fiction books. Often for newsletters, particularly the free ones, I edit Luke’s words down to a form that’s intuitive and easy to understand to suit the skim reader.
Luke’s natural way of writing is more suited to people who are sat comfortably, ready to immerse themselves, and are willing to think things over deeply, like in MurkMail Premium.
Even once I’ve whipped the free newsletter into line, it’s never lacking in rich descriptive examples and always has a great rhythm. The ease at which he whacks this stuff out never fails to impress me.
“What other genres would you like to see the OSR expand into?”
I’d love to see some of the following:
Something centred around medieval court intrigue. I want the backstabbing politics of successions in an OSR form.
Hard sci-fi. I love hard sci-fi (hence my game Void Above). I want to see more exploration-centric hard sci-fi games in the space. No FTL, no aliens, though humans can still be horrible to each other of course.
Straight-faced post-apocalyptic stuff. No mutants or zombies, no special powers because of radiation, give me unforgiving survival without fantasy.
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions, we had good fun answering them!
Catch you next week, Murklings.
Read our other free articles on Substack. Come chat on the discord.
Thanks so much for answering my question, and with excellent advice.
It was a genuine privilege to work with you on "Keytower." Thanks for sharing this!