Hi all!
Welcome to new subscribers to the Twelve Pins Press newsletter, especially those who have come either from the Hieronymus kickstarter or the Twelve Pins Press website!
Spring has sprung, I say as I shiver in my London shared house which has a hole in the roof and mold everywhere. But in more exciting news, Hieronymus is finished and has been sent to the printers! And I also have another game out, To Honour and Obey, which I’m releasing today on International Working Women’s Day. I’m really proud of this one, as it’s my first proper solo endeavour, and deals with a lot of themes and mechanics I’m interested in at the moment.
Another exciting thing: I recently spoke with Kayla about my ttrpg design journey, influences and background on the podcast This Is Your Lifepath. The episode comes out today, so if you’re interested in who I am as a games designer, please give it a listen!
In this newsletter:
To Honour and Obey: Out now on itch.io!
Hieronymus goes to print: why did it take so long and why was it worth the wait?
State of the website: how is Twelve Pins Press doing?
What to watch in game design (aka why I love Navathem’s End)
To Honour and Obey: Out now on itch.io!
So, I’m more excited about To Honour And Obey than I have been for a game in a while. It was initially intended for the Anamnesis game jam in January, because I got the idea in my head and just wrote half of it overnight. But then it took me a while to finish it up to my standards.
It uses tarot cards, building on design skills I learned in The Witch of The Westmoreland. And it’s another Arthurian/Early Medieval themed game, but it’s a lot more introspective, dealing with the themes of isolation, feminine horror and historical womanhood.
To Honour and Obey is a solo game about an Arthurian wife. Your husband has left you, pregnant with his heir, to answer the call of adventure. But you are surrounded by wolves, and you will need to use all the skills and ingenuity you have to survive with nobody you can trust to back you up.
Aaand here’s the cover, in case you’re intrigued. You can find the game on my itch.io here. If it does well, I’ll try to put together a physical print run in the summer.
Hieronymus goes to print: why did it take so long and why was it worth the wait?
So, after a long time working on the project, Hieronymus, my hex-crawling RPG themed around the work of Hieronymus Bosch, is finally going to print.
The final digital version is already available and can be found here.
As an interesting post mortem, the project is several months late, but I’m so happy with the quality of the finished product that I can’t be too upset at myself. (Fingers crossed there are no big issues during printing)
We’ve added several new worldscapes, a whole bunch more historical detail, more playbooks, and an amazing layout; so to be honest, I don’t really know what we were thinking agreeing to get it out by the end of the year. A quick list of things that went wrong:
I didn’t check the estimated delivery time on kickstarter, so all my backers throught the game was coming in September (insane, impossible, what was I thinking). This was probably the biggest thing, and should just serve as a reminder to everyone; check your delivery dates on Kickstarter before hitting launch!
After that, editing and layout took a reasonable amount of time. But I underestimated how long layour would take, due to the complexity of the project and just how visual it was.
After that, it was an absolute nightmare gettting the print files approved. But if you’re dropping several thousand pounds on a print run, you need to get it right first time.
In conclusion, I’m pleased that we took care to make sure the game was of the best quality possible. But let it be a lesson to all of us: give yourself some extra time!
A page from the second edition of Hieronymus
State of the website: how is Twelve Pins Press doing?
Since we launched Twelve Pins Press, the website has been… up and down to say the least. What I’ve noticed is that I’m selling a lot fewer physical editions of games, since people can’t easily get them on itch.io.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem for me. It’s a factor of having to promote your games via multiple platforms; you can’t always promote them equally. And having the website solves my biggest problem, which is that fulfilling physical editions via itch.io has always been extremely laborious.
Having said that, I do need to make more of an effort to promote sales via my website. When I do that, we take in plenty of sales (aka, in December, with the winter sale.) But the website needs to make at least $25 in sales a month to pay the shopify fees, and for the last two months at least, it hasn’t done that. So, if anyone is interested in sharing around the Twelve Pins Press website … I do need to do some more work to break even.
I’ll do some research and put a bit more effort into it this season, and get back to you!
What to watch in game design (aka why I love Navathem’s End)
Finally, just before I sign off: do you ever see a game that you really want to succeed, and when it doesn’t make the big bucks on kickstarter, you’re furious and confused?
That’s how I feel about Navathem’s End at the moment. This apocalyptic RPG has a really fantastic take on forged in the dark design (I’ve played the first edition) and is one of the few visually striking RPGs I actually enjoy the content of as well.
With involvement from some of my favourite writers and designers, I’d ask anyone reading to just check out the kickstarter, and at least figure out if it might be up your street.
With that, I’ll sign off til next time, and I’ll be unearthing some more of my old google docs to work on.
All the best,
Laurie at Twelve Pins Press