Head First with OSWOR (ft. Nikita Lapkov)

Check out OSWOR and Nikita's work: https://coppershaman.com/

What happens when you design a game for the first time? What happens when you bring that game to one of the biggest tabletop conventions in the UK, and it goes really well? 

Here to answer these questions, and tell the story of how he designed his first game, is Nikita Lapkov of Copper Shaman. He's a London-based game deisgner, and we met at Dragonmeet, where he eagerly handed me a copy of his game fresh off the printer. 

Thank you to Nikita for telling this great story! 

Find Nikita: 

• On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/coppershaman.com
• On Itch.io: https://laplab.itch.io/oswor

You can find out where to follow the show, and find my games, here: 

https://mixuppixels.com/

This Podcast is a part of KiwiRPG!
For information on Kēmu Whakatau o Aotearoa, see their website at kiwirpg.com

Thank you for listening! Please share this show with a friend, subscribe, and rate it on your favourite podcast app. 

Transcript

Alex 0:01

This is Wait to Roll That Again. My name is Alex. I'm a game designer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, but based in Vienna. This is a conversation I can't wait to get right into with Nikita about a moment I think we don't capture enough in the tabletop role-playing space, the moments after someone has designed their first ever game. So I hope you enjoy this conversation.

SPEAKER_03 0:22

Hi, my name is Nikita. I'm based in London, United Kingdom. And I am very much a beginner designer for tabletop role-playing games.

Alex 0:31

And you say beginner, what defines a beginner to you?

SPEAKER_03 0:34

I feel like, I mean, especially as the kind of like, well, first of all, the beginner is in terms of time, right? So I've been at the hobby probably for two, two and a half years. Um, and that's like from the start of hey, DD is kind of cool to right now. So I I feel beginner definitely in this regard. Um, but I also feel beginner in terms of um how much I have seen in the industry and how much games I've played and how much mechanics I have absorbed into my uh background, in my cortex. So yeah, I mean it's some of it is definitely like imposter syndrome because you see all of this, there's so many cool people in the RPG community, and they they make up so much cool stuff. So uh it's definitely part of that. But I mean, admittedly, I'm very young to the hobby as well.

Alex 1:21

So I think that's so cool that in such a short time you've gone from hearing about and discovering your your interest in this to stepping really across to the other side of not just running games or anything like that, but actually sitting down to build something of your own. Uh, what was that sort of process like? How did you get interested in actually getting to the design table?

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Yeah, I think at least I would assume it's um an a common story where my D campaign that's been running for slightly over a year has finished. And once I I got kind of burned out by the end of it, to be honest. Uh, I was very tired. And uh I took some rests and um the question pop popped up like what's what's next? What do I do after that? And I realized that it's definitely not DD. Like that that was the that was the moment when I started um watching Queen's Quest, for example. And I've learned that there is actually so much to the uh tabletop world uh than DD. So I definitely want to try something else. Um and I've been playing around with the idea of writing a book. So I've uh I'm a software engineer by trade, and um I started writing a book about software engineer because to be honest, everything else was scary. I was like, uh, well, if I if I'm if I'm doing a new thing, if I'm uh writing a book that I've never done before, well, at least I want to write it in some in something that's something that's my area of expertise. That lasted for one or two months, I think. I I wrote a couple of chapters and I actually almost signed a deal with a publisher. I went into our what? Yeah, it was kind of crazy. I I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I had the sense to cancel. I had the sense to not sign anything. And uh because I mean internally, I was like, what am I doing? I want to write at least something that's like fantasy related, right? And software engineer is as far as you can get from there. So that there was that, and uh, after the D D campaign, I was kind of thinking like what kind of like I wanted something completely different. I was inspired by lots of actual play um shows, obviously, by Dimension 20. I'm a huge fan. Uh, me and my wife, we have seen probably all the seasons that they're uh in existence. And I was so excited by the fact that all of these worlds are not standard fantasy. Well, at least most of them are. Like the one of the most popular seasons of Dimension 20 is fantasy high, where you basically see a bunch of teenagers playing in a kind of fantasy world, but it's not DD. So it's not not the standard setting. And I was wondering if I can make an unstandard setting as well. So I I sat down, I looked up fantasy name generator, I picked a name for a continent, and it was um Oswor, sounded the most reasonable one. And I started writing it down, and that's at some point I realized that there is more than just the setting there. Uh there is there is more than the general like scaffolding, and I want to do more with it than just to run it. I want others to see it as well. And so this like book story and making your own setting story, they kind of collided together. And I was like, well, let's make an RPG book. Uh at least let's try to.

Alex 4:27

It is a classic story, but it's a it's a good one. You know, it's not I'm not too much longer in the whole game design space than than you are. In fact, I started designing my first game in 2023, so not that. So you're you're a veteran. I'm a veteran. Yeah, yeah, sure. So, Oce War is an OSR game designed in the tradition of Into the Odd. It's a zine with a gorgeous cover depicting a really strange world and three distinct character silhouettes on the cover that each represent one of the game's three ancestry options. In the distance, there is an airship which discharges a powerful solar weapon at the ground below. So, where did this game come from?

SPEAKER_03 5:20

I think like part of it was I got I got really, really tired by the Tolkienist fantasy. Sure. And I wanted something fresh, I wanted something unusual. And um I originally come from Siberia uh myself. So Siberia, for those who don't know, is a region of Russia that's very cold. Uh lots of pine forests there, and it's kind of like the later addition. Well, relative to history, it's a later addition to um Russia, I would say. Uh so it has like this wild uh aspect to it. And it's uh what's I think most interesting and stuff that not many people know probably about Siberia is that it's actually a mix of a huge number of cultures. So kind of like the Soviet Union tried to unify as much as possible. Uh, but if you look at it, there's just like mini countries inside Siberia almost. So they each have their own language, their own culture, and it's been always fascinating to me. Um, so that's why I kind of took Siberia, like my roots and uh the culture around me as an inspiration for Oswar.

Alex 6:23

Oswar is a really neat game. There are those three uh distinct cultures that do draw from that Siberian inspiration, a world rich with potential for adventure. But what I think the game does that I appreciate the most is hone in on what matters most about a game, what it is fundamentally about, the rainbow that the designer chases as they develop it out.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

So I think that uh I mean the game is a bit like when you read it first, it's a bit depressing. And uh I mean it there there is an emperor, he's kind of a dick, and uh you you like you get this world in an undesired state. But the game, and I think that I could have reflected more in the text, honestly, is ultimately about hope. Like the even even before I wrote almost any text for Osborne, I wrote down that it it will be a hopeful game. Yeah, and the hope comes from maybe it's maybe it's not jovial immediately, maybe it's not funny or happy immediately when you open it, but the joy comes from the persistence of the people. So despite all of that, there is still the cult of Carno, which is the like revolution-building um uh organization in the world. And not only that, they're actually quite successful. So like the book says that hey, they are well funded, uh, they have a lot of influential people among them, and you are part of this group and you're trying to bring change. And the game, probably a bit straightforwardly, but it does mechanically say that after you completed a mission, uh, here is what happens. Like the one of the uh access, they like uh it would be with the people, with the guilds or something else, something good happens. Something bad may also happen in response, but you're progressing, you're bringing hope to people, you're changing the world around you for the better. And I think if not directly jovial, then this is where the joy comes from uh in the people of Osware and in the game itself.

Alex 8:20

So let's get into the meat of this conversation. Nikita is a first-time game designer, so I was fascinated to hear his approach and how it might have lined up next to mine, or differed completely wildly. Uh, I think you'll hear from some familiar angles, but I was also very surprised by a lot of what we talked about. I hope you'll enjoy the rest of this full conversation with Nikita.

SPEAKER_03 8:46

The kind of the first version was me basically writing a bunch of text in a markdown file. I opened the markdown file, I wrote a bunch of notes, and at some point it kind of became a little bit unwieldy. Uh so I I thought that maybe, and I was also, again, like this is the thing of like constantly doubting yourself, I think, kind of played into that. It was kind of daunting to get to the markdown file every time. Like it was just this wall of text, and I was and there was no concrete direction, nothing tractable I could do immediately. So I was kind of like postponing that again and again. So to fight that, I'm a very visual person, so I decided to just well, let's lay out this. It's not a complete game by any uh stretch of imagination. Let's just lay out it, see how it goes. And it actually really helped. So I downloaded the uh I unfortunately forget the name now, but I downloaded the uh template for Shadow Dark Adventures because that was my kind of gem at the time. I was like, well, I mean, Shadow Dark looks kind of cool. And I opened Affinity Publisher, laid out maybe eight, eight pages, maybe ten, uh, of like A5 format with pretty big text. And it really helped because it kind of brought this image of a book from my head onto the screen. And it also allowed me, like when people asked, when when I was talking to the multiple artists, then when people asked what the author is about, what's the vibe, I could just send them this like very early version that wasn't playable, there were no rules there, just the background on ancestries and basic information about the world. That really helped. But at some point it got really constraining as well. Because, well, there is a reason you write first and then you lay out, because there is like you you you're forced to basically jump between pages all the time. And if the text doesn't fit into the page, well, tough because you have the next one and uh they start to conflict. So I moved on to Google Docs. I wrote a couple of pages there, I mean a couple, maybe I don't know, 40. Yeah, I was writing there and editing there. I do a lot of my work in Google Docs, so it was kind of hard at the beginning because you see, like again, for me for me at least, the way my brain worked is that I saw the screen, it looked like work, so it is work, and literally just changing the fonts helped. So after I changed the fonts, it no longer looked like work, and I was like, Yeah, okay, I can write it. That's a great tip. Yeah, I mean it's it was so it was so silly, but it really worked wonders for wonders for me. I was I had no problem opening the dock now, and I was writing, writing, writing. So after that, I uh purchased uh template from um explorer designs. Clayton they have uh yeah from Clayton. Uh they have a template. I used that, worked wonderfully. This this grid saved my sanity. And yeah, I laid it out. I have a I had a friend of mine. So at the time I was already working with DC Stowe on the cover. I also had a friend of mine uh whose name is Paul Redd. He did a couple of small pieces inside the book. Uh he's a like starting who he's an artist who is starting out, and he graciously agreed to do a couple of pieces. So I was working with them, and at some point I contacted Fistful of Inc., which is the printing house in the UK, and I was like, Well, I have a PDF uh and it's uh from Affinity Publisher, can you print it? And turns out that the answer is yes, and the price was reasonable. So it kind of snowballed after that, where I got the 50 copies from Fistful of Inc. And I had an actual physical book on my hands, which was kind of insane.

Alex 12:17

Yeah, how long was that process actually?

SPEAKER_03 12:20

Uh I think the last push, like since since the moment I bought the um layout template from Clayton to the moment when I actually held uh copies in my hands, I think it was like three weeks. Wow, three weeks. I don't recommend it. The reason it was so rushed is because I realized that I could actually talk to people on Dragon Meet. So I was I was go I was planning to go to Dragon Meet in any way in any case, but I then I realized like less than a month before that, uh, that actually I could talk about my game there as well. And uh so I contacted the um uh logan from uh Fist Following, who was extremely helpful and graciously agreed to print on an um like faster than he usually would. Uh so I was like, well, I have like two to three weeks to lay out this thing, and if I don't, well, I won't have physical copies for Dragon Meat. So uh it was a couple of long evenings and was kind of uh again, don't recommend it, but uh it worked out in the end.

Alex 13:20

Yeah, I guess my follow-up question is what role does pressure play in your game design process, like stress and a deadline. Was that yeah, you know, you don't recommend it, but was it helpful?

SPEAKER_03 13:31

It was immensely helpful. Having a deadline in your in your head definitely helps. Like it's it sped up a bunch of things, it also brought clarity in a couple of pla places because when you're constrained by a deadline, like you cannot question yourself infinitely, right? Like if because if you will, you'll just not meet the deadline. So at some point you're like, okay, I'm making the hard decision. I'm not sure if it's right or not. I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I'm just making it because I don't have time to do to do otherwise.

Alex 13:59

Yeah. Yeah, but but it's definitely helpful, especially I mean, it's it's kind of a privileged position, I guess, to have an external deadline, right? When you're starting out in in your game design sort of uh career always feels like a weird word to say, but it you know, your time doing game design, often it is a solo practice. So to have someone like um Logan from the printer, that is actually a really useful thing uh to have that relationship and have you know a friendly pressure from that sort of professional relationship.

SPEAKER_03 14:28

Yeah, I guess I mean I didn't want to put Logan in a position where he would do like he would be forced to do a print in like two days. So I mean it's uh like this social friendly pressure actually helps a lot.

Alex 14:40

So Dragon Meat then, and Dragon Meat is where we met as well. Um what were your goals going into the convention? Because conventions are a huge deal in the in the RPG space, I think, um, and probably not talked about enough for their potential. So, what what was your mindset going in and why was it so important to you that you had those physical copies?

SPEAKER_03 15:01

First of all, why co why why physical copies are like important, at least to me? I think part of it is just like I spend my life looking at screens, and it's taken a majority of my life to look at screens because I I'm and I'm in an industry that does that. So to have something tangible in your hands, physical that I can touch was important to me personally because I was like, well, not only I created something, that something has a physical manifestation that here it is in front of me. Second part was just some something that people have to decide what they do with. So when you it's it's the same principle as business cards, I guess. Because if you give a person a piece of paper, um well, they when they arrive home, they'll need to make a decision um if they want to throw it away or not. And same decision applies to a book, maybe in a greater extent, because when they arrive from Dragon Meet, they will have or a copy of Osware and they will need to make a decision. Well, do I read it or do I throw it away? And um if you leave like an email or your phone number or something, they people just can just ignore it, which completely understandable. People are very busy, but the you having this like physical thing that they need to contend with was the main goal. And it was also a way to show commitment because um I was planning to come to like one of my goals for Dragon Meat was uh going to publishers and going to the stores uh that can resell my work or maybe help me with something. And saying that, hey, not only did I write an RPG, laid it out, I also bothered to learn how to pr how to contact the printer, how to process everything. So like I actually went through some steps to get there. So I think it's it buys a certain level of well, maybe I will listen what this guy has to say. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but at least that was my impression when I was going to Dragonite that that will help. And I think it did.

Alex 16:51

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a memorable thing when someone starts telling you about a project and then reaches into their bag and pulls a copy of that project out for you to have a look at, which is what happened to me, right? Um where we talked about it, and then all of a sudden I was holding this. And I was like, oh, this is real, this is cool, what a cool cover, you know. It's it makes sense. And so so how was Dragon Meat for you then?

SPEAKER_03 17:11

It was awesome, it was completely crazy. Bonkers. Like I I went with my friend James, and I think James is now my unofficial PR manager. Because you know, James is the person who goes into a room and everybody knows that James is there. So like every like he talks with everyone, he is very like social. Uh, I'm not saying that I'm not, but James is like really 110 and 10% above me. Uh, so he was my wingman basically. James talked to a bunch of people. Like, I I barely had the time to respond to all the people who James brought to me to talk to to talk about the game. James is amazing. I'm eternally grateful to him. So my goal was to again talk to publishers, see if they want to publish my book, how naive I was back then. It's very funny. Uh, but it wasn't funny then. Um, and I mean talk to the stores as well. I wanted to uh actually sell Osword to a couple of people. And last but not least, talk to people in the RPG community. I mean, it's uh it's the place to go. Everything is online these days, and having an actual physical place where I can meet people, not only read their messages, but read their body language, their expression, their like have an actual human connection with them was invaluable.

Alex 18:29

By my understanding, the the game has been stocked by a few stores as well, like Leisure Games has stocked it, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:35

Yes. Right now we have Leisure Games, we have Beyond Cataclysm, and recently I got a message from uh folks at Peregrine Coast. They put it up on their website. And also I think we have co-op um copy-paste co-op, the uh people behind um oh god, what's the name?

Alex 18:54

EcoMophos. Yes, thank you. So it's in a few places. What has that experience been like? Because that's that's direct sales stuff, you know. Are you selling it wholesale, I imagine, to them, or or are you doing it on a sort of a co-assignment basement based?

SPEAKER_03 19:07

It depends on this. It depends on the store. Some people are happy to buy um like so. I'm with each of the stores, I only had 50 copies. So I was kind of like trying to place them strategically. And each store got, I think, from five to ten uh copies. And some stores do cassignment, so that's where you and I'm I'm saying this because I didn't know what cassignment is. So I've only recently learned so the the model is that um you get give them book the books and they give you back the percentage of sales. Uh if there are no sales, they give you get zero. If there are some sales, you get like 50% or so uh of the retail retail price. And uh some stores were happy to buy five copies as is. And it felt kind of weird because, well, first of all, uh everybody is super friendly, everybody's so nice. Like honestly, I didn't expect that. Like everybody was like, Yeah, this look this looks really great, the cover is amazing. I was like, Yeah, thank you, thank you so much. And uh um people were just like, I I mean, you could tell that I was selling, and I definitely put an effort, but after probably like second to third sentence, that they were like, Yeah, sure, we will buy the book. And I was like, What? What are you serious? Yeah, um, so yeah, it was awesome and uh surprising and a bit frightening. Uh I issued my first ever invoice. Uh that was kind of weird, but yeah, like I mean, some stores expect you to do that um for like official documentation reasons, but I felt uh very surreal like like opening Google Doc and doing my first actual invoice, like Googling how to do invoices in the UK.

Alex 20:46

Oh man, invoicing is I don't do it in a personal capacity for for games, but work stuff, invoicing is crazy, I don't like it.

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah, yes, like suddenly it just it was weird because suddenly I went from not just a person playing games, but somebody who could actually invoice somebody else. Yeah, yeah. Um, because I sold so it was crazy. Like I my wife was a huge support, um, which are not grateful to her. Um, but it was my my brain was kind of fried like every time I made a sale. Like I would make the sale and I would recover for the rest of the day. Trying to comprehend what happened.

Alex 21:22

You mentioned your wife, uh Maria, right? Um what you you you give a special thanks to her at the at the end of the book. Uh what role has she played in supporting you and and uh why was it important to you to to include that that special thanks, that message at the end of the book?

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Uh I think because every time um I was kind of doubting myself and I was unsure if I should should go and write a book, do an RPG, stuff like that, go to Dragon Meat, try to sell my RPG, maybe. Every time she was the biggest supporter. She was always like, Yes, absolutely, you should do that. And she was always excited, she was always there for me. And um I mean that's it's something I'm not taking for granted. And something I'm very grateful for. So like the I felt it felt right to include her in the book, not only because authors usually do that, because her actions actually directly contributed to the fact that I made this book. Because maybe I would have doubted myself longer. Maybe I would have missed Dragon Meat. Maybe something else would happen. But uh yeah, she was always kind of like on my side and supporting, and I'm very grateful for that.

Alex 22:21

Yeah, it's really great. It's a really special thing to have, you know. Alright, so let's talk about the post-Dragon Meat moment. You've so that's at the beginning of December, or yeah, right at the end of November, right at the beginning of December. What happens after that? You've you've kind of hit this major milestone of of attending, meeting a bunch of people, and getting your books in the hands of publishers and game game stores and other people in the space. What next?

SPEAKER_03 23:05

Yeah, so three things happened almost simultaneously. So, first of all, I realized that I burned out of Oswald. So I was again like this is the problem of deadline work and doing really intense stuff for um like back to back, which was like making the book, printing the book, like talking about it in Dragon Meet, post-Dragon Meet, making sure that everybody got the email who needed to get it, everybody responded to it and stuff like that. So it was like living and breathing Oswor for almost a month non-stop. Um, so I definitely felt like I didn't want to do that anymore, and I needed a break. Um, so that's the first thing. Second thing is that work got kind of crazy. Um, nothing really major or stressful or dramatic. It just I needed to do uh a bunch of uh travel for work and uh a bunch of negotiations and stuff like that, and it took a long time, and uh it was kind of like in a limbo state, and lots of my um sort of effort went there. And uh the third thing was slowly but surely realizing that I've picked the wrong system for the book. That was crazy. Like I I already sold the book, right? Like I at least the copies that I printed. And at this point I realized that yeah, this doesn't work. Like I I read through the book, and it wasn't, you know, like maybe some people would get, uh, and definitely me in the past would get, thinking that hey, what I done is shitty, like it's not worth anyone's attention. It wasn't like that. No, it was like I did solid work, I could see definitely like parts of it I really enjoy. The game system, the into the the fact that it's based on into the odd doesn't work at all. So it doesn't work not in the sense that into the odd is bad. No, it's just a bad feat for Osware. Oh, interesting. What made you come to that conclusion? Just that I think the parts of Waswar I was really excited about are almost like roleplay and social stuff. So it's finding out who are the people that populate Osware, uh, what they live and brief, what are their internal conflicts. And dungeon crawling that's that into the audio is really good at is almost kind of to the side. So I was at some point almost feeling like I'm trying to find connection between all of this like storytelling stuff in Oswor and dungeon crawling. And I kind of like I'm forcing this connection to happen. Uh where systems like uh Blades in the Dark, Spire, and uh all of the others like PBTA, like systems that have come from PBTA, from this school of narration, of storytelling, um stuff like that, would would have probably would have probably let Oswor shine more. So like it's still a playable game. I'm not saying it's not, but you would not get the same kind of exposure to the world and to the people inside of it, I think, if you would have played Oswor right now. So that was kind of like a big realization that happened.

Alex 26:00

So you have this realization. What do you decide? Do you decide to do anything about it? Yeah, I mean, first of all, in December I was just like, well, I need rest.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 26:10

Like the December, right? Yeah, yeah. First of all, it's December. It's the it's the month to like lay on the couch, watch TV, and do nothing. And I think it was like almost like the catchphrase that was kind of popping uh out everywhere on Blue Sky, on Rasco, like everybody was like, go watch television rest. And I was like, Yes, that's a great advice, honestly. Um and then in January, I was kind of like, Well, I've taken vacation, I've I'm well rested, what now? And that's when kind of like the ideas about the second edition of Oswor started popping up. And um, I was like, well, first edition was fun. It definitely like I learned a lot from it. I mean, I met so many wonderful people, you included, and uh I'm I'm I'm here thanks partly to the fact that Oswor happened. Um what's next? How we can how we can do it better? And um since then I've been kind of slowly exploring, getting sidetracked by different projects, uh getting back to Oswor, getting sidetracked again, uh kind of this in this loop where I want to understand what I want from Osware uh second edition, if it will ever happen.

Alex 27:15

Yeah, that's a really I think I believe strongly in the power of the second edition. Um my my first game also went I published it digitally only and then was like I need to change this whole thing. Which, you know, I resonate with that. Um for sure. Yeah, it's it's it's really interesting how it takes the benefit of hindsight to see that sort of stuff. And obviously you were working on a on a very kind of tight timeline because you were leading up to this big event, but um but now you have space to sort of think about it and be more introspective. So how do you think that that space and and time is going to affect your your process?

SPEAKER_03 27:53

I started tracking things in Trello, man. Like it's uh Trello, yes, it's the case. I I just at some point I realized that there is so much I want to explore, play with, and experiment. Uh that just it's impossible to have to hold this in your mind all the time, or just even like in Apple notes or something like that. So yeah, I think one of the like key things about Os4 Second Edition is that it will not be rushed. So I will take my sweet time with uh playing games because you know, like it's I think the design in games took such a large chunk of my time in November and December, and think about design constantly before that as well. Uh so I I want to return to playing games, I want to run a couple of games, which I haven't done in ages. Um, and through that, explore different systems because like I played Spire, I I I ran Spire, I played Blitz in the Dark. I have now I now have a better idea of what the systems are good at, um, what maybe is lacking, what I want to change. So I want more of this exposure. And I think like part of the work on Osware last year was that um even without the external deadline, I felt like I had to do something because I I was kind of trying to play catch up uh with the rest of the industry. Because again, that there's so many more knowledgeable folks, and it's very hard to not feel overwhelmed um being in the same kind of like space as them. And I think it's just fundamentally a broken approach. Like they you you can never catch up to somebody who is years ahead of you working in this mindset. So it's I think this year, and OSFOR is a great example, is asking less of myself, um, giving yourself this space where maybe right now it's interesting to work on Ospore 2nd edition. Maybe I will work on something else. Like right now, I'm working on the like uh online publishing solution for RPGs. Like they that's that's something that excites me. Maybe I will work on that a little bit a little bit. But it's this space, this like I think like a lot of times you you get this uh advice to be bored, and I think it's the most valuable advice I ever got in my life. Like you you need to be bored before you get to creative stuff. If you just jump from one creative stuff into another constantly, you'll just burn out, which is what happened to with me. So yeah.

Alex 30:09

As an aside, we're in a very remarkably similar place with our sort of game design trajectories, which we can talk about off mic more as well. But I think that it's the approach that I I believe strongly in this approach, you know. I think you can't create constantly under pressure, you know, it doesn't help creativity in that in that way. At the end of December, you wrote a blog post selling RPGs doesn't work, which I think is a really interesting thing to have happened after this sort of experience. So what drove you, yeah, what drove you to writing that that uh that that blog post and and and and what do you think it says about or what what learnings have you taken from reflecting on that?

SPEAKER_03 30:48

Before Dragon Meet, like the day before, I think we we we we met on Muppet Meet. So like the for uh folks at home, Muppet Meet is um very, very small kind of conference for tabletop industry uh run by Soul Muppet Publishing. Soul Muppet Publishing, that's it. It was an awesome space where I met lots of people who are specifically all minded towards TTRPG industry. So like in Dragon Meet, you meet both like players, GM, like all of them. Uh players, GMs, creators. But here you have like a concentrated place where you can just talk to uh folks about shop, which is was which was really nice. And um one of the panels was uh a completely unexpected one. Like the one of the panels was um I don't remember the name, but it was basically uh a person who runs free sales. Well, I I think it would be uh incorrect to say runs, but a person who is one of the uh people working on free sales studios, um, who is an anarchist, there was a journalist who I think was a communist, and I think there was a couple of more people who I don't know the political allegiance to. But it was basically like um lots of people from the left uh sharing their opinions in the sort of the mirror of um DTRPG industry. And it was a bit eye-opening. I mean, I yeah, like a lot of hard questions were asked about uh well, we are in the late stage capitalism, how do we survive? How do we um make art in the um in a place which is fundamentally hostile to art and fundamentally hostile to things that don't bring abstract value or dollars into pocket? So it was I think it was more influential to me than I expected uh in initially, because I mean I was already left leading before that, and I was like, yeah, I mean, all of the things that you say me make sense to me. This panel was like, well, now that we have talked about it, what do we do after that? And I was kind of thinking about um, well, how current platforms serve us? How does crowdfunding service, how does selling RPGs directly uh through websites and stuff serve us? And um the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like, well, they don't work at all for for all the reasons, even like ignoring completely the reasons in the article. If you ask every like if you pick a random person who is into the RPG industry, uh renowned or not, and ask how's the money, they'll just start laughing at you because the money is probably not great. Um, they uh either have most often they have a second source of income. If they're not, they're working maybe for a big publisher, or maybe they're so wildly successful that you know this is their so like the wild success in TTRPG is considered making basic salary from your art. Yeah, which is insane. If you would ask this, like you for imagine like a group of university graduates, and they're like they they have this job board where they have I don't know, software engineer makes this amount of money, stable job. Um, I don't know, a blue-collar worker, maybe less stable, maybe less money. You can you you can you could again there's a whole I'm I'm making it look like make picking a job is a choice, and it very much isn't. So I just want to highlight that. This is like a very uh isolated thought experience. But on this board, there is like TTRPG designer, well, money maybe. Like when? Sometime, man. Like, I don't know, like nobody will pick that would pick that job, and I think it's that's terrible. That's like uh a huge failure. And I was constantly thinking about how we can make it better. And the the article is basically like a brainchild of this thought process, uh, where I arrived at well, the only thing to make it better is universal basic income for artists at least, and that's what we've seen uh, for example, Ireland do. And the closest thing to universal basic income, especially across different countries, is Patreon. But Patreon with the idea that you don't subscribe to get stuff, you subscribe to support the creator and let them give give them that space, that financial cushion to create. So yeah, that's where it came from.

Alex 35:08

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting way to reflect on the industry as a whole, because no one's making money. I mean, there's you know, there's of course exceptions to that statement and and and big ones, but but you know, you see you scroll through it and no one's making money. But maybe there is a brighter future. So what does the future hold for you? You're in this sort of step back, playing things, letting yourself get inspired. Where um where do you want to see your focuses over the next little while? Like what do you what are you really hoping happens over the next little while for you?

SPEAKER_03 35:43

That's a really good question. It's a tough one. It's a it's a tough one as well. I mean, I would love to see this online RPG publishing um happen. So it doesn't have to be successful. I just want to release it. I just want uh for people to have an easy way to have a bunch of marked up markdown files and publish it as an RPG online, not necessarily PDF, uh, just like a website, a place to call your own. Um and yeah, I mean it's I I would love to land. I will be okay if second Osfor, or if second edition of Osfor doesn't happen. So it's not on my like just the heart desires list. It would be fun if it happens. And I also have some ideas for um for a separate RPG system that I've never I I didn't talk about it anywhere, so it's it's kind of like all of my in my head, but I kind of want to explore. I think I I one of the posts in my blog talks about like emotions instead of stats. So I kind of want to explore that a little bit more, where instead of like traditional, where here's a number representing your charisma, here's a number representing your strength. Well, maybe we should maybe we can move past that um a little bit and uh maybe there is a game system there, maybe not. Uh, but I mean very much like the theme of this year is less expectations from myself. Uh nice. I think I think that's the core. And if something nice comes out of it, then wonderful. And if not, I had fun.

Alex 37:03

Great, great. Well, thank you very much um for this wonderful conversation. I think we'll probably wrap it up here. Um, where can people go to find your your work and follow you as you do this sort of nice exploration stuff?

SPEAKER_03 37:16

Yeah, well, uh first of all, thank you so much for having me. Um, you could find me on online. Uh it's CopperShaman, uh Copper as a metal, shaman as in uh weird guy in attend uh.com. Uh it's both the website and it's my uh handle on Blue Sky. If you want to go look directly at my work, it's uh L A P L A B lap.heo. But all the links are on the Copper Sherman website anyways. So yeah, I would love for you to check it out.

Alex 37:50

Thank you for listening to this wonderful conversation with Nikita. Again, my name is Alex. You can find all the details for the show in the show notes below, as well as where to find Nikita's amazing work. If you want to learn more about the show, find other places to support me, you can check me out on mixuppixels.com and follow me everywhere at MixupPixels. Thanks so much.