u/Alternative_Rest7215

Interested in learning what Salvage & Sorcery is all about? check out this cool video!

DTRPG is celebrating their yearly Christmas in July sale, and most Blackoath titles are discounted. Go grab a few cool games!

New YouTube video! This time, I go over the different Patreon tiers and their benefits!

El Verkami para Dioses Máquina del Paraje Noxiano está en marcha!

Want to learn what the narrative skirmish game for one or more players Warlord Ascendant is? Check out the video!

Alone in the Dork has a new video series playing Warlord Ascendant 2e, my co-op narrative skirmish game for one or more players!

Interested in Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse but don't have time to research about it? This video is for you, then!

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Today I released The Arenmist Forest, the first expansion for Riftbreakers 2e. Riftbreakers was crowdfunded in 2025, and it did fairly well, at least for my standards. It also sold well after release, slowly but surely positioning itself as my third most-successful game (after Ker Nethalas and Across a Thousand Dead Worlds). I was of course really happy about it, and immediately started working on the aforementioned expansion.

And today was the day. To be honest, I've been dreading its release. Not because I don't think it's a fantastic book (it really is, the art is incredibly good and Richard Kelly, the author that often helps me, wrote most of the text and killed it as usual), but because I went a little bit overboard and spent way too much on this 80 pages long book. Hiring a writer isn't cheap (at least if you want to pay them livable wages, not the shameful amount authors are paid in the indie RPG scene as a norm, but that's a whole different post...), and art, as we all know, is not really cheap either. And that's fine, I don't think they should be. People spend years honing their respective crafts and they should be compensated for it. The problem is, I am a one-man operation, one that exists largely thanks to the success of Ker Nethalas, so when I spend too much on a game (and I really went over-budget with The Arenmist Forest), it's truly a gamble. Recently, I had done basically the same thing: Choir of Flesh, another quite successful crowdfunded game, had its first expansion released (Apocrypha), one that I spent on more than I should have, and months after its released I've barely sold any copies.

This brings me to what I want to discuss today: expansions very rarely sell enough to make them worth the effort (be it financial, personal, and in time). And this is not something I am experiencing as a failed RPG author/publisher or something like that; as a matter of fact, Ker Nethalas and its expansions sell pretty well, and Across a Thousand Dead Worlds has done well too with its couple of expansions. I've been living out of publishing RPGs for the last almost three years, exclusively, so I am certainly one of the few very, very lucky ones that "makes it".

Across the entire tabletop industry—from tiny itch.io designers to major publishers—the same rule holds: everyone buys the core book, but only a fraction buy anything else. Even in the broader TTRPG market, supplements make up a minority of total revenue (28%, according to WorldMetrics). For indie creators, the drop‑off is even sharper. Despite the landscape being fragmented and comprised of mostly authors doing this as a hobby or a part-time job, the reasons are structural, not personal. So even if it's easy for me to take it personally and think I'm doing something wrong when my expansions rarely even sell a small fraction of my core book numbers, that’s not a failure... it’s the baseline.

So why does this happen? The way I see it, there are several reasons:

• Player drop-off happens, fast: Most groups don’t stick with a single indie system long enough to need more content. They play a few sessions, enjoy it, and move on. I feel this is actually exacerbated in the solo RPG scene. I see it in myself, the eagerness to try new systems and being able to do so alone pushes me to jump from one game to another.
• Content overload is real: Players are drowning in systems, settings, and splatbooks. Expansions feel optional because they are optional.
• Indie Culture Rewards Novelty: The indie scene thrives on experimentation. Players want the next weird, clever, beautifully designed game, not the fifth supplement for a system they played last year.

So with this in mind, why the hell do I keep trying? Well, to be honest, it is mostly because I actually love the games I write, and I want more for them. Unless the signs are really, painfully clear (looking at you, Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate), I tend to take a risk and release expansions for my games because I always have more to add to a game. I am in the privileged position of being able to do this thanks to the success of Ker Nethalas; every successful Ker Nethalas book finances another game's expansion. There's also always the hope that a game will suddenly click with people, and that the expansions will sell enough for me to keep writing them. This appears to be the case with Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse, although it's still early to see (I'm optimistic about the game's future, though!).

Unless it's really a kind of sunken cost fallacy type of situation, I like to support my games because I think it shows that I care, and that I believe in my own work. If I'm not willing to take risks, who will? And yes, most of the time I end up feeling sad and with my pockets much more emptier than when I started, but you never know when I'm going to find myself with a second Ker Nethalas in my hands!

All this is to say: If a game I release sells enough, I'm willing to take the risk and release an expansion. I did it with Choir of Flesh, and now with Riftbreakers 2e. If the expansion sells enough (and when I say enough I simply mean it covers production costs), I then release a new one. That's it, that's the decision process I use to see whether I should continue working on a game line or not.

I'd love to hear other authors' opinions on this, and to learn why they choose to move on with new games instead of pushing forward with the same one, but I can't imagine they are any different from the ones I've listed here.

So my question for you today is: do you tend to support a game and buy all its expansions, or do you prefer to collect new core books?

check out this new video series, where Gwydion explains what makes Blackoath games interesting and unique! This time: Ker Nethalas!

I just released a short video going over everything I'm currently working on, and what you can expect from Blackoath for the rest of 2026!

I know a lot of people are curious about using VTTs solo, and there are already quite a few solid fan-made modules for Blackoath games. Furthermore, the official Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse modules will be ready to launch soon, so if you want to check them out, now's a good chance to grab the program at a discount!

Alone in the Dork starts a new gameplay video series for Riftbreakers 2e, check it out!

In case you're interested, I'll be having a live Q&A for Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse later today! Drop by if there's anything you'd like to ask me