Frugal GM Review: The Sandbox

As a small publisher wannabe I have a vision for producing what I think will be some great RPG products that people will love. Of course I am cognizant that a) my appetite for this may be far larger than I can stomach and b) I don't know what I don't know, so there is a helluva big learning curve.

This is why I'm developing a bit of a publisher crush on the folks over at Sine Nomine Publishing. Not only do they put out some fine products, but they are more than willing to share their institutional knowledge. So far it has been my experience that most of the folks that want to "share their knowledge" are people that really have way too high of an opinion of themselves and want me to acknowledge their self-appointment as someone "important" I should be listening to. They also tend to try to pollute my various social media feeds....

...no thank you.

Sine Nomine Publishing, on the other hand has pretty much just put their advice "out there" and really hasn't promoted it, or at least not that I've really seen. I pretty much had to stumble into it, starting off with The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu when they included some cool publisher-useful info. That review got me a comment or two that led me to A Brief Guide to Small Publisher RPG Production (some awesome other stuff at that link...), and now on to The Sandbox.

While there are two RPG articles, the bulk of this "irregular journal" is about plotting & running a successful Kickstarter, from a production point of view. The article covers a bit of the same ground as A Brief Guide..., but damned if it isn't needed in this day & age.

I have a particular project that I was considering as a Kickstarter and I'm somewhat happy to see my initial plan is close to The Sandbox guidelines, but I'm not going that route. Even if you aren't ever planning on using Kickstarter the advice in this article is top-notch, or at least it feels that way to me. I have to remember point b) from above, after all.

All I have to say is thank you Sine Nomine Publishing for sharing your experience with the rest of us. I think they seem to get that we are all in this hobby together and bringing up the quality for one of us helps the group as a whole. Even if you aren't a writer, editor, or artist, you might get a great bit of insight off of The Sandbox. At the price of Free (as in beer), it'll be one of the best c