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.