Being a ttRPG Producer: Frankensteinosaur for Starfinder/Shadowfinder (Patreon)

The ttRPG industry doesn't have really standardized job terminology. Words like Author, Contributor, and Writer are sometimes synonymous and other times a specific company has distinctions between the three. A Developer may be someone who sees a product through every stage of its existence, or may just be someone who gets "final draft" text into a form ready for an editor. And an Editor may also do that job, or may be quite rightly split into different jobs for Acquisitions Editor, Developmental Editor, Line Editor, and Copyeditor (each of which may or may not do the same thing as a person with that title would in fiction book publishing).

One thing I've often done as a Developer, and as the Publisher for Rogue Genius Games, is a job that's often called Producer by other ttRPG companies. That is, to make sure all the people you need to put out a product are contacted, contracted, overseen, and kept on schedule. A producer may or may not also pitch products, write outlines for them, and find freelancers available to write, edit, illustrate, and lay them out--when I have done producer-like jobs in the ttRPG industry, I've been responsible for all of those tasks at some time or another, but never all of them on one project (with editors and illustrators being the tasks I've been least often asked to find people for).

So, let's play producer for a monster for this blog post. I follow actual-play actress, cosplayer, gamer, and model VVowsers, and am a big fan of her creativity and talent. If you follow me on Twitter/X you've likely seen me promote her work there, because I believe a crucial part of being someone's fan is expanding the reach of their media posts. On August 3rd, she posted the idea of a "Frankensteinosaur." I immediately wanted to feature that here on my blog. So, I assigned a producer (myself) the task of making that happen.

Since that concept is one that VVowsers came up with, the first thing I did as producer was contact her and see if we could come to terms on using her name and concept. One thing I often bring to a producer role is that I have contact info for many people, and I'm good at negotiating. In this case VVowsers was super-excited by the idea, so that part took less than a day.

To be able to pitch how I wanted to use the idea to VVowsers, I had to have a succinct description of how the blog would present her idea. As producer I'd normally have pitched something to the publisher and then taken it to the licensee once it was approved, but since I am both publisher/producer that was easy. I decided on taking a two-topic approach -- both an article about the work involved in producing something, and presenting an actual Frankensteinosaur as a Starfinder-compatible OGL creature. But that meant "Frankensteinosaur" needed to be PI under the OGL, so I made a note to ensure that happened. In this case, the note was to myself, but if a separate developer or editor would have had final look at the article before it went live I'd have sent them that note.

Next, I needed art. Jacob Blackmon is great at both this kind of design and the timeframe I was working on, and luckily he was able to fit me in. That also meant writing an art order, which I did. If there had been a separate writer or line developer for this product, I'd have brought them into the loop on the art order, since I want the art to match the final creature's text description. I decided to make this a size Medium monster, and picked the popular "raptor" form of dinosaur to be the base for our stitched-together monstrosity.

I've worked with Jacob a lot, so I knew I could just hit the high points with my art order, and he'd let me know if anything looked unclear, and had an excellent sketch/feedback stage. For the curious, this is what the art order was:

"Frankensteinasaur: A velociraptor that is stitched together from different corpses of that species, and has some kind of electricity attachments on its neck or head (same purpose as the neck bolts on the classic green-skin flattoop Frankenstein's Monster design, but cooler than just bolts.)"

That got me this --

I was floored. That's amazing. But... could it be better? And, by the way, the real question is "Could I have added anything to the art order to bring this closer to exactly what i wanted, since Jacob did a f'ing amazing job with what little I gave him?"

I asked for one more set of stiches on it's left foot, and approved the sketch. So I got this version for colors.

Again, flippin' amazing. I sat on this for a few minutes, before realizing I wanted something more mad-science-y (which I have never mentioned in the art orders). I literally did not know what, and while I assured Jacob I adored the piece overall, I asked if he had any way to just give it a more chaotic, not-normal-science feel.

He sent this.

Yep, that's the one! Perfect!

Okay, so I had permissions, I had a concept. I had a schedule... which was immediately shot down. See, I wanted the article to go up Monday of the following week, but my writer (me), editor (me), and developer (yep, me) all have health challenges, and the publisher (me) insisted I use them, but was at least reasonable about what that might do to the schedule. I know this all seems silly, given I'm the only person involved in this step, but keeping track of when things are supposed to be done, how far along they are at any given moment, how much adjustment the schedule can survive, and fixing it (somehow) when those don't line up is a huge part of the producer job (and for developers who also handle producer tasks).

Next: Contracts. Do NOT do a project of any kind without contracts. It's okay to have line contracts (Jacob and I have several, for example, covering different lines of products and different sets of art commissions), and for extremely casual projects an extremely casual agreement can be fine. But do NOT work on a project with things involving other people unless you have SOMETHING spelling out who does what, who gets what, who makes final decisions, and so on.

This isn't just for covering yourself in case of legal disagreements. In fact, it's not MOSTLY for that (but if it comes to that, a good contract is a huge help). The main use of a contract in the ttRPG industry is to have a place and format that spells out who is doing what, when, how they are getting paid, and what happens if any of those things doesn't go as agreed. More than once. I have set up a contract for a project that gets delayed by months (or --sobs-- years), and when it gets picked up again no one remembers what was agreed. A contract fixes that. (A contract should also say what happens to your work if a project gets delayed for years, and if you are already paid for it, the answer 'nothing, that's the publishers issue once you are paid' is fine, as long as it is spelled out.)

The next step of the process for me when producing is an outline to hand to the writer creating it (often along with their contract). The level of detail of that outline is going to vary based on a lot of factors, including if the writer is someone in-house at the company publishing or a freelancer, if the entire piece will be written by one person or a team, and so on. If it is a team, how coordinated can they be, and how cut up is the project? It's much easier to have something written by multiple people if each one gets all of a given section. Some sections can be split up fairly easily because they are made of discrete sub-sections, such as equipment or creatures or (in games that have them) feats, spells, psychic powers--anything where each short entry has little effect on the whole section. (Though these are exactly the places you need a good developer, to make sure you don't up having overlap, redundancies, or contradictions.)

As it happens I was the writer, so my outline wasn't much more than what I'd written to pitch to VVowsers, but a few details still needed to get nailed down before writing began. One big one was what Challenge Rating (CR) the Frankensteinosaur would be. In a full nook, you often want a broad spread of creature types, game function (foe, ally, underling, bystander--with the ratios based on the needs of the game's play style), and threat level, which for Starfinder is broadly represented by CR.

Picking the CR for this was hard for me. On the one hand, something this cool should be dangerous. On the other hand, the higher the CR, the fewer groups will ever get to play with it. (Though I can see writing a whole article on how GMs can, and maybe should, use Starfinder's Mech rules to fix that... but that's not THIS article). Once I realized I had spend more time worrying about the "right" CR that I had writing the art order for this, I just saw the last creature I'd put up on this blog was CR 7, so I made this CR 8.

Sometimes, as a producer, you need to be pragmatic.

As it happens I actually ran into an issue with that as the writer, and the solution I came up with (the 'Dangerous' special quality, on which there shall be yet another whole blog) is one I'd definitely clear with my producer if I was writing this project for someone else.

After the piece was written it needed to be edited. Since this is just my blog I did that myself, but self-editing is a practice I'd advise against if I was producing for a more significant product for some other publisher. Then it went to layout (in this case, web-layout), and needed marketing text (both the preview nonmembers see and what was going out to social media), and decisions made about ads (in this case the links I put at the bottom of many blog posts). Depending on the company a producer might be responsible for marking themselves, or it might be one more thing they need to coordinate.

And that's it! Unless some issue comes up after the product is out, in which case if you are the producer, it's in your best interest to have good notes about who said what, when, and why. (See "contracts," above.)

The Ad

I mentioned part of the job of producer can be deciding what ads go with a product (or finding out what ads the publisher wants and making sure they go in). In this case, I'm trying to keep it simple.

I have cancer. It's expensive. Every tiny donation helps.

Fundraiser by Owen Stephens : Help Owen K.C. Stephens Fight Cancer