Product idea

Icons

You should never produce a product without some idea of the market. However, I don't know if there's a market, so I'll just describe it here.

Most online gaming modules are done lovely PDF documents, with layout and page design and all of that. Expensive but fun to do. I can't do them well, but I can appreciate the work that goes into choosing the page layout, the background image, the font, the size, whether there are columns, the artwork, and all of that.

I can appreciate it, but I can't do it. Not that good.

So I'm willing to lean into the fact that I buy far more gaming supplements than I can actually play. I mine them for ideas.

With that in mind, a series of adventures and campaign modules for superhero games done as ebooks. They're in ePub format, they're searchable, they reformat when you change size, you can alter the text, and you can link them out the wazoo. Most phones have an ePub reader (or a .mobi reader) of some kind.

Yeah, there are still maps but they come in a sketch format so you can see where the important things are, and the rest is up to you. Because, dude, it's going to be on your phone. It's something you'll read when you have spare minutes.

And, yes, you could totally run a game off one of these if you wanted. Structurally, they'd steal a lot from the Ars Ludi discussions with a “Here's a summary, here's the basic setup, here's each scene complete with the interesting schticks you could do.”

And there's still artwork: the cover has to be nice, and there are still portraits of individuals, usually head and a bit of torso.

There'd be room for some kind of story in the back if you wanted.

Plus there should also be accommodation if you want to run it solitaire.

And, having said that, now I'll do some desultory market research.

This week’s supervillain: Palimpsest

Any supers

“So Count Crisis, he hires a lotta guys, right? And I got this bum leg but I'm pretty good at electronics and computers and stuff, so I'm working the Conquer Center when the Justice Four show up, right?

“Now I know that the Justice Four are bad news for guys like us, but Count Crisis, he doesn't want to hear it. I mean, he killed Lenny for suggesting maybe the Count shouldn't kill the guys on the beach by setting off the Rho Bomb. So when I saw that the Four had made it past the Rho Bomb and the Interrobanger, I booked it. Took the escape capsule, so later Count Crisis was kinda surprised it wasn't there when he went to escape. Anyway.

“The capsule doesn't go up, like I expected. It goes down. Down into a second secret base, one we didn't know about. I mean, it was guarded by that shape-changer lady, but I got the drop on her while she was being a cat. She's in the neural neutralizer room and mostly she's fine, but the Count wasn't big on labelling things so sometimes I hit the wrong button. I found a labeller so mostly that's fixed.

“There's a lotta stuff here, Ethan. I mean, a lot.

“Anyway, I'm making this offer. You get, what, eight other guys. We figure out enough of this stuff for a couple o' heists, enough so there's ten million for each of us. We pop it into secure bank accounts and live off the interest.

“Big score, but I gotta remind you: The stuff isn't labelled. We're probably gonna have some casualties before we do the heists. Still, we stick to a hundred million total, that's an annual of five hundred thousand each. I dunno about you but I could do a lot with five hundred thousand a year.

“Whadda ya say?”