How To Succeed in RPGs

OK, so I am teaching a career studies class at the HS where I work, and I decided to use my experience the past years of producing an RPG to help students figure out their future career.

STEP ONE - Imagine your future self.

I used AI to make this picture of me (the hands are mutante gigantic)

STEP TWO - Get a plan for success

Once again, I asked AI. Lots of good advice for anyone looking to produce an RPG here.

Heck yes—nice momentum. A novel out and an RPG design contest win is already a legit foundation. You’re not starting from zero; you’re starting from “early pro.”

Below is a practical, industry-facing roadmap focused on visibility, credibility, and relationships (the three currencies that matter most).

---

Phase 1 – Turn your past wins into public proof

1. Build a single “home base” identity

• Simple website or Notion page:
  Theodore Bonnah – Author & RPG Designer
• Include:
• Your novel (with buy link)
• The contest you won (logo + short description)
• A short bio (2 versions: 50 words + 150 words)
• Contact info

This becomes the link you drop everywhere.

2. Package your achievements properly

• Write:
• 1-paragraph “press bio”
• 1-page designer CV (separate from academic CV)
• Frame the contest win as:

Award-winning RPG designer

That phrasing matters more than you’d think.

3. Collect social proof

• Blurbs from:
• Contest judges
• Readers
• Other designers
• Even 2–3 short quotes = gold.

---

Phase 2 – Enter the professional RPG + publishing ecosystem

4. Join the right platforms (seriously important)

For RPGs:

• Itch.io (publish small projects)
• DriveThruRPG (even free/pay-what-you-want)
• Discord servers:
• RPG Designers
• Indie Game Dev
• Specific systems (OSR, 5e, PBTA, etc.)

For fiction:

• Twitter/X (sadly still industry-central)
• Bluesky (growing fast for writers)
• Substack or blog (optional but powerful)

5. Become visible without being annoying
Post about:

• Your design process
• Lessons from the contest
• What you’re building
• Short threads like:
  “3 mistakes I made designing my first RPG”

You’re signaling: peer, not fan.

---

Phase 3 – Strategic networking (the non-gross way)

6. Make a target list
Create 3 columns:

• Indie RPG publishers
• Small presses
• Established designers/authors you genuinely admire

Aim for 20–30 names.

7. Warm networking > cold pitching
Before pitching:

• Comment thoughtfully on their work
• Share their releases
• Ask smart questions
• Be human

After 1–2 months, you’re no longer a stranger.

8. Go where deals actually happen
If possible:

• Gen Con
• PAX Unplugged
• Breakout Con
• Local game design meetups
• Online conventions & jams

At cons:
Your goal is not selling.
It’s:

“I design RPGs and write fiction. What are you working on?”

That’s it.

---

Phase 4 – Position yourself as “bestselling-capable”

9. Collaborate
Fastest reputation builder:

• Co-design a small system
• Write a module for someone else’s game
• Contribute fiction to anthologies

Shared audiences = growth multiplier.

10. Get on podcasts & panels
Pitch yourself as:

Award-winning RPG designer and novelist working at the intersection of narrative and game design.

Niche + credibility = bookings.

11. Engineer a “breakout” product
Plan one project designed to:

• Be very specific
• Be easy to share
• Solve a problem players have

Example:

• “A one-session RPG for burned-out adults”
• “A cozy RPG for autistic players”
• “Narrative system for language learning”

Virality comes from clarity, not size.

---

Phase 5 – Publisher & agent path (optional but powerful)

12. Query with leverage
Your pitch becomes:

Previously published novelist and award-winning RPG designer seeking representation…

That line opens doors.

13. Attend pitch events

• Online agent pitch days
• Publisher open calls
• Game publisher submission periods

---

You’re already closer than most people who dream about this stuff. The next step is just making the industry aware you exist.

STEP THREE - Reflect on the plan and your performance

REFLECTIONS

Initial comments

I feel very encouraged to learn I am a starting pro and not starting at zero. Still, lots of work to be done while juggling family and the day job.

 

Phase 1 – I have done so so with this and need to turn this into a routine, as well as organize my presence better.

Phase 2 – Some great ideas here, such as what I learned from mistakes. Doing alright here, have to restart X even though I hate Elon Musk.

 

Phase 3 – I just started making connections so have to keep momentum up. Just did a live session at a game shop in Vancouver, but need to go to events. Still, I will avoid the USA for now.

 

Phase 4 – I’ve been on podcasts, need to package myself better.

Phase 5 – I’ve made some connections with industry, but seems hard to get into. I plan to publish independently first, but would be up for working for a game design company after that.

 

Overall, the advice is a solid A. My performance is B+, so I need to catch up!

 

 

The Struggle of Finding RPG Art

RPG art for Nuna is tough.

Especially as an indie creator.

I asked Inuit artists to help.

No answer.

I got a graphic designer to help.

The AI tools in the program he used added fingers.

So I am doing the art myself.

Funny thing is, everyone who knew me as a child thought I'd be an artist.

My grandmother Phyllis Pritchard, my great aunt Jean Crane, my mother were all artists.

We have the gift.

Somewhere along the way I fell off the road.

It is nice to get back to it.

Everyday I am doing art therapy.

Makes the burdens lighter, the road brighter.

Nothing to see here

 

TGIF Moorcock + Nuna Art Attack

 Just scribbling away on a Saturday

The Old Moonbeam Road four

Tutauk

Титульный ледоход

Anonymous Stormbringer Q&A and Moorcock Psychedelia

I can honestly say that I write this blog mostly for myself and do not expect many replies. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that some anonymous reader lurking out there had left some very deep and delectable questions on my blog in May, which I totally missed due to work, life, and Nuna.

Whoever you are, I really appreciate you taking the time to pose such weighty questions. Here are my responses to your excellent questions and comments.

Behold the psychedelic glory of an old Moorcock cover. Care to guess what book this is?

Q1:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:14 PM

Hello. This seems to be your last post on pushing Stormbringer into balance and stronger narrative.

I’d like to share a few considerations and a silly request.

Silly first. How many fantastic stories have you read that involves a storm at sea and perhaps a ship wreck? How many myths have storms and ships at sea? I can think of a few.

I want rules for sinking ships in storm and rules for being thrown ashore in the middle of the night and waking at dawn.

A1: Waking up on a strange shore is such a common trope in fiction. The whole TV show LOST was built around it, I remember reading it in Umberto Eco's Island of The Day Before, as well as the Bard's The Tempest and Twelfth Night.

There is a supplement about ships for Stormbringer, but I don't recall storm or avoiding drowning rules. Since you end with the narrative trope of being washed ashore, I would say it is GM fiat in a good sense and might not benefit from being codified into rules that could kill PCs due to a shoddy Navigation roll. That said, way back in 2017 before I dove into Stormbringer, I wrote a post about turning death in D&D / LotR into a story hook HERE. I think this would fit the bill nicely, but would require limitations on use (number of times per session, place in the story arc, etc).


Q2
AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:33 PM

Moorcock(as Elric) vs. Stormbringer the rpg.

Moorcock is the story teller that we seek to experience in a story,

I want to stick to the first six books.

1) Moorcock began his mythology with the death of Elric. That blows me away. And his death might have been in vain. All the cosmic actors tricked by a devil in a sword, only to be tricked?

Moorcock the pulp writer had a three stage formula: the hero runs into problems, the problems get a whole lot worse and the hero defeats doom. No major player is to be introduced beyond mid point.

Moorcock is a moralist. He wrote moral stories. This is a hard concept.

A2: Aye there's the rub, we all want Moorcock at our table, but our stories are D&D derived hack & slash fests and none of us have the wits and erudition to draw from literary tropes on the fly.

Sticking to the 6 books makes perfect sense. As I noted in my research on Japanese media (available HERE), a work sets the conceptual basis in the first few foundational stories, then mutates into something unrecognizable as the entropy of success takes over.

Yes, moral stories are difficult when the game reduces moral complexity to black versus white. As I noted in my interview with Andy at BotR, Stormbringer the rpg replaces Moorcock's cosmology with theology, a huge step down in framework.

The way plans go awry in Moorcock's older books reminds me of Matt and Trey of South Park's story advice:

"Each beat of your story needs to cause or be disrupted by the next one."

Note that I did the same in my novel of the supernatural in Japan, Heisei Ghosts.

Q3

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Moorcock is not a world builder. Like any good writer he pulled from his own psyche ideas unique to him or reexamined. Moorcock’s scenes are a random generator of the psyche. “Need a giant. Giant will have ten arrows. Each arrow will be named after a form of suffering.
That sounds cool. That is good…”

https://lucasrolim.itch.io/salamandur-household


A3: I wouldn't say he is not a world builder, but just that he does it in a resonant, lyrical, stream of consciousness way, and not in a literal or cohesive way. If you read my Moorcock Bestiary post HERE (one of my best IMHO), you'll see that I was testing out this idea of creating monsters based on the human psyche.


Q4:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:39 PM

The above link is to a little rpg in the Moorcockian tradition that has random tables.
I’d like Stormbringer to have a chapter of Moorcockian tables in his voice, using some of his favorite words: saturnine, sardonic, chitinous, irony, melancholy…. Use spontaneity. Use speed.

A4: Ooh I am a sucker for a good collection of tables! I will pick it up! (NB If I can get Musk's bank to work and get over my revulsion of giving him money)

Q5:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:53 PM

I must have read this at some time, but I consider Elric (Eternal Champion in general)
to be psychedelic sword and sorcery. Moorcock has spoken of how he has hallucinate since a child. His mother might see a green velvet hat in a shop window and he would see a samurai helmet. Quite serious. Later as he used hallucinogenic drugs he experienced what could be considered chaos or awakened dreams.

His youthful writings have a raw creative that is unique to him. Moorcock drew a great deal from the Broken Sword, Ship of Isthar, Jirel of Jorel BUT Moircock was using drugs.

A5: It certainly is psychedelic, as I noted in my Bestiary posts. Considering he was writing in the 70's, Moorcock's use of drugs and the psychedelic nature of his writings are only natural. But there are writers who come from the same era who didn't stand the test of time, so I think MM had something special, a fusion of the psychedelic and mythic a la Campbell or Celtic mythology. Elric is almost a doomed elf from the Norse sagas, as is Corum.


Q6

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 3:36 PM

So his drug use contributed to his aesthetic.
Now here is an odd framework for Stormbringer, four types of drugs. This how Moorcock used drugs:

LSD - The grand concepts.
Cannabis - Relationships
Cocaine - Drive to complete.
Amphetamine - Speed

I don’t expect anyone is going to drop acid for a good Stormbringer session, but if look at the drugs as archetypes, then an early Moorcock story involves big ideas, human struggles, and a confidence the story will work, so don’t labor over it.

A6: I've gamed with stoned and drunk people, and it sucked. I never touch anything stronger than light alcohol, but if other people want to try whatever that is their lookout. Still, I LOVE the drugs as aesthetic and that would make an epic story or random table in and of itself.

What does MM make of this fentanyl induced age, with people folded on the sidewalk like broken lawn chairs? I surmise he'd agree with Philip K Dick in his preface to A Scanner Darkly - they didn't know what damage they were doing.

If we are linking drugs to Moorcock, what would the Elric characters consume?

Elric - Hash

Yrkoon - Cocaine

Cymoril - Shrooms

Moonglum - Pot & booze

Q7:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Lastly, a question on sorcery and how much thought need be given to it. How much sorcery is really present in the Young Kingdoms? Outside of Melniboné and the rare, like in RARE human sorcerer, all most none. Perhaps, an argument can be made for priests, but little is shown in the stories.

A7: Fair point, but a story and a fantasy game with no magic cannot have an equal appeal. In the Elric saga, the Melniboneans have made the pacts to access all kinds of magic (Elemental lords, Chaos lords), but their only rivals, the Pan Tangian sorcerers, pale in comparison.

As I posted earlier, for a game I would open up sorcery to all nations, and to any character willing to transform themselves to get it. This is what makes a game where you can play anyone different from a novel following one doomed protagonist. But the game has got to keep the threat of doom hanging over any magic dabbler's head and not devolve into pew pew fireball fights.

Great conversation, thanks for the thought provoking questions and come again!

Was Stormbringer The Wrong Name?

I've been thinking Stormbringer thoughts in my limited spare time.

What if Chaosium got the semiotics of Moorcockean game naming all wrong?

(NOTE - This is just a fun mental exercise about my first gaming love. I have huge respect for Willis, Stafford, Peterson and Campbell-Rogers and would not dare to actually accuse any of them of being 'wrong'. The games they made have stood the test of time, but are also products of their time before the RPG market became the demographic-targeted Kickstarting industry it is now. So in that light, and with tongue firmly in my cheek, I proceed in my analysis.)

Stormbringer is not the name of the protagonist, which is confusing for newbies, but that would emphatically come later with Elric! To be fair, these games came out when Moorcock's popularity was at its peak, so eliciting the albino and his runesword were not bad decisions. Then they made a D20 version during the 3E glut, when arguably younger generations of fantasy enthusiasts had also presumably moved on in their reading, and they chose Dragon Princes of Melnibone. Not the most resonant or representative name or ruleset.

Naming the game after the hero continued with Hawkmoon, and Darcsyide followed this trend years later with Corum (not Corum! I note).

Naming a game after an IP's protagonist is, on the one hand, resonant for hardcore fans. But naming a game after a single hero is limiting - Serenity is not named Mal, the RPG. Conan and James Bond seem to be the exception here.

The original FRPG games were named after their setting, so as to appeal to players as a site where they could be the heroes of new adventures.

Forgotten Realms.

Dark Sun.

Ravenloft.

Planescape.

All very resonant, mysterious names.

So what if instead of Stormbringer (or Elric! or Mournblade), which do not have popular appeal they once might have had, we named the next iteration after the setting instead of the characters?

Stormbringer et al become The Young Kingdoms. Hmmm, sounds like a Percy Janes novel. How about Melnibone?

Hawkmoon becomes The Tragic Millenium. Or maybe Granbretan. Sounds like an AI generated Beatles' album.

Corum becomes Bro-an-Vadhagh. Or maybe The Fifteen Planes. Not very enticing.

These place names were made in a highly literary mode, and thus are not as succinct or enticing as other game-only worlds.

But maybe Chaosium had it right after all. Both Stormbringer and Hawkmoon prudly bore a sticker proclaiming them part of The Eternal Champion series of games.

How about we use this as the game name, and choose a resonant subtitle + blurb for each setting?

The Eternal Champion RPG.

Book One - The Doom of Melnibone. The gods of Law & Chaos have chosen your world as their battleground. Whose side will you fight on?

Book Two - Granbretanne Invasion. Repel the superscience armies of the evil empire that seeks to overrun post apocalyptic Europe.

Book Three - The Sword Gods. Free your world from the Chaos gods who warp its very reality.

Now we're getting somewhere.

I need to get to bed.