The Blacksmith’s Guild

The Blacksmith’s Guild is the leading magazine for third-party content for Draw Steel, a competitor of Dungeons & Dragons. They’d been around for about a year when I started out doing game design for them, product development, user testing, and technical writing. During that time, I learned that now that they had a good grasp of how to produce the magazine and were ready to increase their reach.

We did some research and determined that having a crowdsourcing campaign and promoting it on social media is actually more effective than simply posting about an upcoming issue. The crowdsourcing campaign reaches more people because the platform promotes it, people can easily set a reminder for when it goes live, and because it runs for an entire month, it stays top of mind a bit more easily than a social media post announcing the release of a new product.

Once the crowdsourcing project was live, we created social media posts calling out the selling points of each article in the magazine. Matt Colville, owner of MCDM, the company that produces Draw Steel, even commented on one of them.

Our initial goal was to raise about $500, and we finished with about $2300 from 86 backers. This was enough to cover not only issue seven, but two more issues as well. Currently, we’re working on refining our strategy to generate enough to fund six issues with a single Kickstarter at the beginning of the year.

Adventure Design Consulting

Thanks for reading this far! I’m still updating this section.

Adventure Design Consulting is a service I’m spinning up to leverage a lifetime of tabletop roleplaying game (ttrpg) experience to help hobbyist gamemasters design better adventure modules.

Customer – The target customer for ADC is a hobbyist gamemaster running ttrpgs, like Dungeons & Dragons, looking to improve their adventure module design. They devote much of their discretionary time and income to their hobby and want to improve the skills necessary for running a ttrpg. Perhaps they are looking to run ttrpgs professionally eventually, but that’s not the primary reason they are looking to improve. They simply love gaming and want to run a better game.

Purpose – The purpose of ADC is to help hobbyist gamemasters to improve their adventure module design, in much the same way someone might take guitar lessons as part of their hobby of playing guitar. The service aims to help improve the overall gaming experience that clients provide to their players, making it more fun for everyone.

Brand Values – ADC believes that improving adventure module design is good for the hobby in general and for individual gamemasters specifically. better design increases the satisfaction of gamemasters making adventure modules and makes the game more fun for players. This works to pull new players in and reduce attrition in gaming groups and the hobby.

Voice and Tone – ADC speaks with a friendly, enthusiastic tone. When establishing expertise, such as in blog posts, the writing is clear and direct. When looking to expand reach, ADC leverages the founder’s copywriter background to create fun social media posts designed.

Brand Story – L.E. (Chip) Grabowski, the man behind Adventure Design Consulting, started playing ttrpgs and designing adventure modules around age 14. Since then, he’s made adventure modules for a variety of game systems, helped others design adventures, and just generally spent a lot of time thinking about what makes them fun.