TWA Dispatch #2: Fall Update 🇬🇧🇺🇸

Hi there, 

it’s time for a new Dispatch from the depths of the maelstrom that is our editorial process. If you missed the previous episode, you can find it HERE. It proved a little divisive: we had some unsubscribes, but multiple people also reached out to tell us how much they appreciate a candid look behind the scenes of a small TTRPG publishing venture. We also got some collaboration proposals, and that’s nice. So, if you’re still here, you’re one of the good guys.

What is this thing? It’s a longer newsletter we send only when we have something to say, pulling together all the threads of what we’re doing, for whom, why, and how. I’ve promised to keep the marketing bullshit to a minimum in this series, so we’ll also come clean when things aren’t going the way we’d like. You’re taking the time to read this, and I’ll respect that with honest assessments. Let’s begin.

Our First Essen

The first thing worth mentioning is that, for the first time ever, my business partner Luca and I attended Essen Spiel in Germany. Partly out of curiosity, partly because some friends in the industry were going, and, not least, because we need to step up our international presence soon and figure out whether it makes sense for us to have a booth there next year. Even though the event is mostly about board games, we found time to meet a bunch of friends and partners (manufacturing, publishing, etc.) to shake hands and see if there’s something we can do together in the future. We also showed our published games to a select group of people who might want to do something with them, and while hope is a tricky thing, we have a good feeling about how it went.

On a separate note: while our core focus remains TTRPGs, we’ve never ruled out doing a proper board game in the future. I can think of one or two of our IPs that could work in that format, and our recent experiments with boxed products, cards, etc. are all groundwork for learning how certain components behave and what kind of work they require. Any thoughts on that?

(Below, we get what we deserve: I get a throne, and Luca gets the Monopoly jail.)

We Have Two Games in Print

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know we didn’t launch any new crowdfunding campaigns in 2026. While a continuous cycle keeps us in business thanks to much-needed operating cash flow (essentially, what we need to pay ongoing bills, invest in new projects, pay people, etc.), we ended up in a situation where delays on projects in development started stacking up.

This creates massive headaches, because if a game’s deadline keeps getting pushed back, everyone’s availability becomes hard to reconcile. For example: if the writer takes four extra months, on paper we now have more time for illustration and layout. In practice, the illustrator and layout artists have to shuffle other jobs around, or they may not be available at all for months, because those slots are already taken. 

It also means our running costs keep piling up (I’m looking at you, accountants!), fulfillment gets delayed, and people can’t move on to the next project. Or technically they can, but shouldn’t, because launching something new before the previous thing is wrapped up is usually a bad idea. And on and on.

In short: we really needed to take a break from crowdfunding and focus on wrapping games up. The good news is that WE DID, and both Bitter Chalice and Dirt City Blues are now printing.

The less good news is that a whole new phase starts now, one that has nothing to do with the games themselves: the timeline for getting the stuff into our hands, and then into backers’ hands, is a bit muddier. Because guess what, even once they’re manufactured, these games need to get on one or more boats, trucks, planes, etc., and if you follow the news even slightly, you know there’s never been a worse time to move things around (except maybe during COVID, I guess, which we also had to face and overcome).

So I’m not exactly sure WHEN we’ll be able to complete fulfillment, but after Essen the date range that is coming into focus is January-March 2027, depending on which part of the world we’re talking about.

For now, here's an unboxing as proof that this stuff exists.

You can still get into the first wave of shipments from HERE and HERE.

The Land of the Free is Now Ours

In the previous Dispatch I mentioned we were trying to solve distribution in the USA, a key market for us, despite someone trying to make it incredibly hard for people to afford our games there.

Well, good news: we’ve reached a deal with Studio 2, and bit by bit our games should start appearing in American retail stores from 2027 onward. That date is tentative: the first order hasn’t come in yet, and once it does, it takes about 60 days before anything shows up in stores.

Two notes here. First, it’s a great relief to finally have some shelf space there: we’ll take all the visibility we can get, especially with an audience we can’t reach directly.

Second, I’ll make absolutely sure that 1) backers of our campaigns get the stuff first, 2) some items we sell directly (exclusives, event-only stuff, etc.) never reach retail, and 3) you’ll generally get the best prices directly from us.

As important as this deal is in the grand scheme of things, we still absolutely need you to show up when we sell directly, through our shop or crowdfunding, because we, so to say, want ALL of your money, not just the meager % a distribution deal gets us. It’s a good compromise, I think.

September is the Driest Month

I gotta be honest, this September was completely dry for us. Sure, we didn’t release anything new and we’re in between projects, but our web sales were just abysmal. Were the Summer Sales too good? Have I forever ruined the perceived value of our games, when all I wanted was for people to have a good gaming summer? We’re talking about a 90% drop from September 2025. And it’s not just sales: traffic is WAY down too.

I honestly don’t know if it’s the overabundance of options, the fact that our evergreen games are now “old” (they are not, FFS: Valraven came out this year, and it’s a great game influencers simply haven't picked up and reviewed yet), AI killing search, AI bots killing traffic, or people simply being out of money because the world frankly sucks right now thanks to 12 or so billionaires in a death cult. It could be all of the above!

Anyway, if you feel called out, we have a pretty decent Halloween promo running right now, so feel free to chip in (use the code HALLOWEENTWA202620 at Check Out). The games are great, I promise.

(October was much better, don't worry.)

A Few More Tidbits About Royalty

I mentioned it in the previous Dispatch, and again, I promise a proper presentation once I have more art to show, but: 1) Royalty is our next project, 2) we’ve slightly updated the placeholder page on BackerKit Crowdfunding, and 3) I’ve finally had the chance to sit down with the team and plan out the campaign a bit. Right now everybody knows what they should be doing, I’ve already translated the juicy Quickstart (which comes with a very fun Affair to play), we have the first layout tests and, in short, we’re getting ready for a proper unveiling. If you haven’t yet, follow the project HERE: we’ll have more info, visuals, and surprises for followers soon enough.

Hint: if you like how silly Broken Tales can get, we think you’ll love Royalty.

Our Stuff is on RPG Trader Too

Let’s be honest: DriveThruRPG is long overdue for some competition. Everybody uses it, and I can’t deny it has delivered some financial satisfaction over here, but that site is BROKEN. Besides keeping a huge chunk of every sale (35% in our case), it’s also a pain to navigate. But wait, I hear you say, didn’t they revamp it recently? They did, but only on the user-facing side. On the publisher side, it’s still the same 1995-looking backend that’s just terrible to work with.

So we were happy to learn there’s something new in town, and that something is RPG Trader. Besides friendlier fees for creators, it has a bunch of really, really nice features we’ve been sorely missing, and while right now it’s a bit like Local Cola trying to outdo Coca-Cola, maybe bit by bit we’ll get there.

Most of our catalogue is already there, at the cheapest prices on the web (undercutting even our own store, tbh), and it would be great if you took a look. I know, there’s a sunk cost in switching, and some of the big guys aren’t there yet, but WE are, so soon they’ll get jealous and come too.

Now a serious question: are you using it, or planning to? We’re thinking of using it to distribute complimentary copies for our future crowdfunding campaigns.

Monad Echo World

Last but not least, BackerKit has launched a new feature called Worlds, which gathers projects around a specific system or setting. We were asked to join and saw it as an opportunity to launch a World for Monad Echo games, the system we use in the vast majority of our TTRPGs (Bitter Chalice has its own system, for good reasons). The cool thing is that a World isn’t just a glorified search filter: it also lets other creators who use Monad Echo in their own games appear right next to us. We know there are a few community Monad Echo projects sitting idle on your hard drives, so maybe this will nudge some of you to try the long, hard path of crowdfunding.

For everyone else, you can download the Monad Echo SRD (CC 4.0) here.

And with that, we’re done for this Dispatch. Hope you liked it, and feel free to reply to this email to let us know what you think.

– Tommaso