Fan Club “Blog” #9: Ending Season 1, What's Next (Patreon)

Hey! Hello. Hi.

I'd like to thank all of you patrons for your patience during a quiet month with NO content at ALL! You were very brave. Mindful. Noble, even.

First off, I should explain that this wasn't the result of me banjaxing my time management- quiet stretches are going to happen on the Patreon from time to time as I prioritise my work and my personal life (and my home RPG nights!!) over keeping a constant flow of content on the Patreon.

I wanna talk a bit more about that: This project is a marathon, not a sprint!

I'm regularly left squeaking in shock and delight at the positive response to Quinns Quest, but the error that this success lays me open to is if I bow to this pressure to produce more content, which will set expectations that I'm always going to be churning out content, which will end up burning out my creativity, my love of the project, and my love of TTRPGs.

Which is a frightening proposition! But because I've been working as a YouTuber for 13 years (and a journalist for 8 years on top of that) I know the medicine you take to delay it from happening.

If I want to do Quinns Quest at the highest level I can, with the most passion I can, for years (which is surely what's most respectful to my supporters here on Patreon), what I need to do to achieve this is to regularly take my foot off the gas, check in with myself, and not let the frenetic energy around the channel & the heat shimmer coming off my beloved Patreon community coax me into stressing out.

Y'all are NOT gonna make me stress, you hear me?? I won't allow it. 🙅‍♂️

That said, I have been working slightly too hard and stressing out recently. 🤦‍♂️ Let me walk you through what's coming up on the channel in the next couple of weeks, the rest of the year, and the far future. And then just for fun, I'm gonna share a few private thoughts about the TTRPGs I've been playing.

THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS

The sixth and final review of Quinns Quest season 1 is basically finished and will be published on the week of October 7th. It feels like a miracle that you folks haven't guessed what game it is yet, but also that makes me really happy! The fact that this title has mostly flown under folks' radars means I can do my favourite type of review- "Here's a game you've never heard of, it's one of the best games ever made."

Couple of reasons I'm not releasing the video sooner:

(a) From watching Quinns Quest's analytics and comments, I've learned that the rhythm my viewers respond best to is longer videos that are published less frequently. Mothership was the biggest video I've done with the most attention to detail, and the traffic has been in a different league to the reviews before it. Conversely, when I publish videos too close together, I can see the TTRPG community getting confused and fatigued- they haven't even finished reading the last book they ordered, and now I'm muddling their passion by telling them to get excited about something else.

The good news is that this means the final review of season 1 is another super long video!

(b) Another reason for the delay is that the video is getting an extra sprinkle of pixie dust from a specialist video editor who I'm paying so the season can go out with a bang. 💥

THE REST OF THE YEAR

So, big announcement: The reason I've been stressed recently is I've been recording an official Quinns Quest Actual Play series where you can hear me GM with some of my closest friends.

This is the perfect example of what I was talking about at the top of this blog post where because there's a lot of excitement around Quinns Quest, I panickedly take on more work (and then my when my friends see me they take one look at me and begin asking questions like "Are you okay" and "What's wrong")

It was never the plan to do an official Quinns Quest Actual Play. I have stated in multiple interviews that I did! Not! Want! To do one!

But clearly I don't know myself too well because slowly a little idea became source of excitement, and then before I knew it I was asking industry thought leaders for advice & buying microphones.

(There's another factor here, of course, which is that there's a ceiling to how many TTRPG reviews I can produce and the number of reviews people want to watch, so when it comes to producing more content for the Quinns Quest audience, I had to do something different, and an Actual Play was the natural fit.)

I don't want to reveal the unique twist for the series because I'm not sure when we're going to be able to launch it, if ever (I'm still waiting for feedback from my audio producer after listening to the first batch of episodes), but I will say this:

Recording this Actual Play series absolutely, bruisingly, comprehensively kicked my ass.

Turns out that GMing a game you're not super familiar with for a podcast format where you want to perform at the pinnacle of your powers, in sync with your players? It's the mental equivalent of going for a 2 hour run. It's shattering. Myself and my players all couldn't believe how tired we were after each day. And then just more generally on a creative and technical level, there were so many best practices to learn and internalise, and a very delicate artistic dynamic I had to learn to build and navigate with my players.

Super interesting! But super tiring. I'll be excited to share what we've made with you, which will hopefully be in 2024, and I'll be excited to record more episodes if the series has legs, but my god I'm glad to not be thinking about it anymore 😂

THE FAR FUTURE

Now that I'm mostly done working on Quinns Quest Season 1, it's only natural I'm starting to get excited about/stress about Season 2 (it's like an 80/20 split at this point).

I think the earliest we're gonna see S2E1 is February 2025. Some notes on what to expect from Season 2, in no particular order:

I'm gonna take every ounce of time and Patreon funding I need to examine and strengthen the show from its foundations upwards. From lighting to costuming, from SFX to recurring segments, I want to set myself the task of going through every building block of the show and asking "Is this all it can be?"

I am 90% sure that Season 2 is going to have more episodes than Season 1. I'm looking at my review shortlist and there are just too many phenomenal titles that I can't not cover. It's simply not an option. The games are tooo goood

The analytics have spoken and I am their humble servant: The reviews themselves will be, on average, longer than in Season 1. Big, thick scripts! Self-indulgent tangents! Segments on dice systems that feel WAY TOO LONG when I'm watching them in the edit but apparently people watch in fascination so what do I know!

One episode will be a roundup of TTRPGs for just 2 players, which will be both a super fun episode to write and a great chance to get a load of designers on the channel who aren't men.

And finally, just to round this post off...

WHAT GAMES U BEEN PLAYIN' RECENTLY QUINNS

Ohoho. Well, this week we had session #10 of Stonetop!

I have no words for how much I love this RPG. Or rather, I do have words, it's just that I want to save them all for a review in season 2 that will arrive when this game is finally declared finished by the team behind it, which should be early 2025.

Your lil' Patreon briefing is that it turns out that I'm not emotionally 'done' with traditional fantasy RPGs where players can twat a monster with a sword, it's just that at some point my bar for swords'n'sorcery became so high that you'd need a pole vault to try and clear it. Stonetop is that pole vault. It's a wild, wonderful thing.

Fun trivia- I think Stonetop is going to be the TTRPG that I end up playing the most sessions of before I review it, not because I strictly need to (although it is designed for campaigns of 30, 40, 50 sessions) but because I just don't wanna stop. You can't make meeee

I also just had session #5 of Triangle Agency!

Playing this has been a bit of a wild ride. I mean, part of that's by design- this is a focusedly unhinged game that doesn't just have the single most demented ideas of any RPG I've ever read, it also has maybe the most ideas full stop.

That said, in play it's felt a bit like a soapbox car that is constantly crashing, sending its component parts flying off into the spectator stands. Each time this happens my players and I do the conversational equivalent of turning the car right-way up, re-attaching the steering wheel, and clambering back into the car. Then we're back on the road, having the best time ever, then we go careening into a design ditch again.

Triangle Agency is good! And it's interesting, and it's very, very funny. But I (naively) thought it might be coherent and clear in addition to containing Every Single Idea the Designers Had, and that was for sure optimistic.

Finally, I just had my first every session of the current draft of Mythic Bastionland.

Now here's a game that's coherent and clean. Despite taking place in a grody world of ill-equipped knights and rotten curses, Mythic Bastionland works like a Swiss watch.

I've never played a game that's this generative and off-the-cuff (the GM and players are expected to monkey-bar between randomly-rolled improvisational prompts for characters, locations and threats), but my players and I took to it really well. I went into it totally up front with my players, saying "This game's a little less orthodox and I'm fine if we wanna consider this evening just an experimental one-shot", but by the end we all wanted to commit to a campaign. Lovely stuff.

OKAY, THERE'S YOUR UPDATE

Thanks again for being understanding about this little still spell on the Patreon. Let's make this a teachable moment, though! If it's quiet on the Patreon and the channel, I promise it's not because I've abandoned you. But I do think I could be doing a better job of communicating, so I'll work on that.

Beaming love from the UK,

Quinns

xx