I’ve had some time to reflect on my experiences this past October at Big Bad Con 2024. The act of selling my game in-person, at a booth, was both thrilling and humbling, and showed me how much I still have to learn on my entrepreneurial journey. I’ve spent the months since then reviewing my marketing course materials and developing a new strategy, which I’ll share soon enough.

More importantly, the game experience at BBC was nothing short of incredible. I ran games of Dread and my own Wandering Crows (to rave reviews, I might add), and I played Gloomhaven (as part of its playtesting), Candela Obscura (which I’ve wanted to try for a year now), Nocturne Symphony (an in-development Castlevania-inspired adventure game), and my absolute favorite, Under Hollow Hills, in which you play members of a fairie circus traveling between the worlds, making trouble as you go. The variety of stories that I had a chance to help tell, and the emotional journeys that I went on as a result, were amazing.

Since then, I’ve been wondering how to get more people to play indie TTRPGs. To be clear, I love D&D. It was my intro into this amazing hobby, for which I’ll always be grateful; some of my favorite memories are from D&D games with my family and friends; and I am always ready to sit down and play with someone, if they want. And it is also very complicated. As a result, getting started can take literal hours, and I have to do a lot of work supporting less experienced players, which in turn distracts me from my storytelling. Plus, while some players want a deep role-playing experience, others want tactical combat, which sometimes hampers fun storytelling. Finally, a lot of potential players are turned off by the game’s (admittedly well-earned) reputation for hack-and-slash stories.

Indie TTRPGs address all of these problems. First of all, they usually focus on telling exactly one genre of story, which helps everyone at the table understand what type of story you’ll tell. The breadth of genres in which they facilitate storytelling is profound, from traditional fantasy adventure to horror, heist, exploration, drama, and even romance. Finally, their rules are often (although admittedly not always) much simpler than D&D’s rules, meaning that you can create characters and start playing faster. In Wandering Crows, for example, character creation can be done in less than 10 minutes the first time you play, and less than 2 minutes after that.

Absent a million dollar marketing budget, I’ve decided that I’m going to do the next best thing: Run the games myself. This year, Jared Mullicane, the designer of Tarotweaver (and a friend of mine!) and I will collaborate to run free drop-in play sessions of various indie TTRPGs (including our own, but also many others) in venues around Sonoma County. I’m incredibly excited by this, because I’ll not only be raising awareness of the rich diversity of stories that our hobby facilitates, but I’m also going to get to play a lot more. I’ll share more details, including our project’s name, dates, and how to support us, shortly.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for an indie TTRPG, can I suggest that you try out Wandering Crows? It’s fast, fun, and easy to learn, and if you have questions, I’m happy to answer them!