Overview of my Kickstarter Project

I just finished posting out the pads of Character Sheets from my recent Kickstarter today, and my next Kickstarter is due to start tomorrow evening.  That makes now the best time to write up about my experience of the Kickstarter process.

For reference my project can be found here.  It should remain on the Kickstarter site indefinitely.

The goal of the project was £300
It achieved £338
Kickstarter then took their cut and I ended up with £299

I expected to be left with slightly more than that but I missed the fact that Kickstarter stick VAT (Value Added Tax) of 20% on to all their fees.  For my next project I'm budgeting for the fees to come in at 12% instead of 10%.

After the project closed Kickstarter then spend 2 weeks collecting, but mostly just holding all the funds.  For me this bit was a real drag.  After you have the excitement of seeing you project get funded you get left in a kind of limbo for a while.  However, the 2 week wait did mean that none of the payments failed to come through, as any that didn't go through first time (I think 2 out of 31 in my case) Kickstater kept retrying.  At the end of the two weeks I got an email to say that they had transferred the funds and when I check my bank account the following morning they were there.

The printer already had the print ready file and I'd signed off a proof so the pads were printed within a few days.  I collected the pads in person, which I would always recommend when getting anything printed (if the order is too big to collect then you should be at the printers to check the job as it is being done) and then had them all posted out the same day to backers.

I estimated all my costs before the project and the actual costs were within £20 of my projections.  The breakdown of the actual costs is as follows:

Printing 100 50 Sheet A4 pads £160
Fuel used to collect the pads £10
Postage £143 (I spent an extra £50 here to upgrade all the postage for all the overseas backers)

Total costs £313

That means the project made a loss of £13.  However, I still have 37 out of the 100 pads left so it should break even once I've sold a few of those.  For very little extra outlay, I could have increased the print run to 250 pads but that would have left me with 5 boxes of pads to store instead the not quite single box full that I now have.

Timeline of the project

-10 Days Start project setup on Kickstarter
-3 Days Submitted project for Kickstarter approval
-1 Day Kickstarter approve project
0 Days Project Launch
+1 Day Promote project on blog and forums and by email
+30 Days Project funding period ends
+35 Days Send surveys to collect addresses
+37 Days PDF rewards sent to backer
+40 Days Final print file sent to printers
+41 Days PDF proof from printers received and approved
+44 Days Kickstarter transfer project funds to my bank account
+45 Days Funds hit my bank account.
+45 Days print order placed
+47 Days pads printed
+48 Days pads collected from printers
+48 Days pads packed, labelled and posted to backers

Hope that helps anyone out there who wants to know more about the Kickstarter process.

My next project is due to go live on Kickstarter tomorrow night.  I'll post a link and further details once it's up.

Otherworld Miniatures Dungeon Adventurers Range

Otherworld Miniatures are launching a range of no less than 48 minis in their new Dungeon Adventurer range.  Development of this substantial range is being funded by an Indiegogo campaign.

http://www.indiegogo.com/otherworldDA

The image below shows sculpts of the first four adventurers and I have to say they look really great, with bags of personality and real dungeon-ready equipment.

Character Sheets Update

I am planning to spend a bit of time this weekend working on extras to go with my printed pads of Character Sheets.  The campaign for the pads is running on Indiegogo - it has still got a good way to go to reach its goal, but it would only take another 25-30 backers to get it there.

Anyway, here are the extras that every backer will get in print and as a PDF.  Plus, as an extra incentive I will email the PDFs of these to all backers regardless of whether the campaign reaches its goal.

1. Printed Pocket Mod containing everything required to create a first level B/X character including full 1st level spell descriptions.
2. Printed Pocket Mod containing an expanded list of equipment complete with descriptions.
3. A reworking of the classic 1978 Advanced Character Sheet (see details here and here), originally produced by Games Workshop.

The Cheapest Character Sheets in the World?

Following on from my last Character Sheet post the bidding on the 1978 shrink-wrapped pad of 50 sheets ended at £132 ($208).  In 1978, Games Workshop sold them new for £1.50, giving the seller a return on the original investment of 8,700%!!!

However, another bidder just manged to snag these Character Sheets for just 99p.  They are actually photocopies of the same ones mentioned above.  For my money, the fact that they are photocopies makes them even more Old School, as that's what most of my Character Sheets were back in the day.

As soon as Oubliette 8 is out next week, I'll devote some more time to the Indiegogo Character Sheet Campaign.  I'm going to include a bonus PDF with the sheets as well as a few additional printed materials.  More details next week, but I will be sure to include a newly-created PDF version of this 1978 Sheet.

The Most Expensive Character Sheets in the World?

I don't know if these have already set a record high for a pad of Character Sheets, but at £114 ($180) plus shipping, they are certainly headed that way.  If you are not prepared to spend quite so much on some Old School Character Sheets, why not head over to my Indiegogo Campaign and grab a pad for a fraction of the price?

In fact, for $180 you can have 3,000 of my OSR Character Sheets.  However, I can't guarantee they will bring quite the same rate of return should you decide to put them away for 34 years before listing them on ebay (if they did though, they would be worth over $6,000!).

Exciting Times in the OSR

I always look forward to new developments in the OSR, but I think we are really heading for a great year with some of the projects already here.

For a start we've got zines - lots of them - and more on the way.  Even if some of them only last a few issues, they are a great testament to the health of our corner of the hobby.  My go-to resource for anything to do with zines is the page Matthew Schmeer maintains on his blog Rended Press.

We've also got some great crowd-funding projects.  I'm in on the following ones at the moment (if I had more funds I'd go for lots more of them).

Random-dungeon-generator-as-a-dungeon-map
Dwimmermount
Appendix-n-adventure-toolkits-dcc-rpg-modules
Barrowmaze
OSR Character Sheet Pad

Funding is finished on the first 2 campaigns in the list, and in the interests of full disclosure, that last one is my own campaign.