A strange thing happened this weekend. A friend of mine came up with the idea that he wants to start producing games under his company. He asked me to help, which I’m grateful for, but also a little hesitant. I’ve been looking into game design and starting my own company for a couple of years now, and have come up short based entirely on my monetary situation.

This business idea does present me with at least the option to produce games, but it comes with a cost. Partnership is a scary concept to me. Especially when its not my company and someone else is MY partner. I would love to design a game, have it produced and make money off of it, but I’d much rather do that off of a loan so when I make a good amount of money I can pay the loan and get a good profit. A partnership would mean that no matter how much work I do, how much I put into things, how much of my personal sacrifice goes forward, I still only get 50% with no chance of “paying off” my “loan”.

Yes, getting a partner with an established company means that I don’t have to do THAT part of the company building, and yes I realize it’s his money going into things, but my fear is if I put forth 100% of the work toward a project, just because my partner funds it, he gets 50%.

If the cost of the project is say… $5000, and the finished product brings in say $10,000 after the cost, I would get $5k, and he would too, for doing nothing more than putting the money forward (that was paid off first, before the split). Now what if my product does REALY well? You know, that 1 in a million idea that everyone loves? If I make a million dollars off of what I put 100% of the effort toward, and only cost a fraction of that to produce, suddenly I’m paying him half a million dollars just for having money available?

But that’s just my “worst fear” scenario. I know I’m good at what I do, but not “million dollar project” good … yet.

After focusing on the negative for so long, I may as well look at a few of the positive potentials to this partnership plan. The idea that I will soon have the ability to get my name out there and recognized is an amazing thought. I would love to be able to go to a GenCon, or something along those lines, have people walk up and be like “Lord Xtheth? Can I have your autograph?” “I love that game of yours!” “Can I buy your book?” so on, and so forth.

The fact that I don’t have to have my own money to begin this venture is also a great opportunity, and I do strongly believe that I will make money in bundles with the right few ideas and support from my partner.

Well, that’s it for this week

As always, thank you for reading

Lord Xtheth

Random thoughts upon the dawn of a new blog

I’ve been considering writing my own blog for quite some time now. It has crossed my mind many times over the past couple of years since I joined ENworld, I just never had the push to write one until now.

A thought occurred to me however: What should I blog about? The quick answer I guess would be “anything I want”.

I will try to make this blog something I do regularly, as I am also trying to train myself to write more often, to get myself into more of a writing mood and break my writer’s block I’ve been in for a few months.

One of the major ideas I had for this blog was to make it a design journal. I’ve been writing adventures for various Role Playing Games for years now, and have wanted to get into it professionally for a couple if years. Writer’s block and money issues have prevented me from publishing anything thus far, but hopefully in the future this will change.

I’ve recently begun trying to teach myself the fundamentals of web design, which is proving to be slightly harder than I originally thought it would be. I’ve been considering getting a “web design for dummies” book even though there are free websites out there that essentially tell you the same thing, though the Dummies series does make for good reference material.

The Podcasting bug has hit me lately. I’ve gone through the steps to set up an actual play podcast much like the ones presented by Nerdbound and RPPR. I’ve actually begun a sort of team up with Nerdbound, and will be an official unofficial NB-esque podcast. Neil has been helping me out a lot with the initial set up of things as well as giving me pointers as to how I can get people interested in a podcast-based game session (which I found out is slightly more difficult than starting a normal session).

On the subject of podcasts, this last Sunday I participated in a pickup game of Trail of Cthulhu Ran by Nerdbound Neil. It was a very interesting system, very simple, easy to learn and didn’t take anything away from the whole Cthulhu experience that I’ve known and loved in other Cthulhu based game systems.

Well… there it is, I finally got around to writing my first Blog entry. Hopefully this will make me popular on the internet, and then I can get all that internet money!

Thank you for taking the time to read!

Lord Xtheth