A 2024 retrospective, but honestly, it's a rant.
Thank you, 2024, it was a pleasure, even if you kicked our butt sometimes.
2024 has been an intense year—one where we’ve done so much, often without catching our breath. This retrospective is honestly more for us than for you. If you’re just curious about what we’re cooking up, skip to the last paragraph. For the others, let us take a moment together to recap.
Who We Are
When we say collective, it’s not just a buzzword. We’re a group of people working without bosses or the typical prima donna “visionary genius” who makes decisions for everyone based on their morning mood. We plan our projects together, following a logical vision, but we don’t turn what is still a hobby into a game-making sweatshop.
Our organization is genuinely horizontal. Everyone works on what they love, leveraging their unique talents and proposing or following only the projects they’d enjoy playing themselves. There are no bosses, no interns, and no transactional relationships. You’re welcome to join the collective, but your name will only appear in the game’s credits. Here, we speak in the plural—there are no gold stars for the best students, and we won’t promote your solo projects. Leave your ego at home with your cats because we’re allergic to both.
Projects are managed fluidly, ensuring that all roles (design, QA, proofreading, translations, editing, art, etc.) are covered without forcing anyone to do something they don’t want.
Why Oddplan
Almost everyone in the collective has their name on at least one published TTRPG. Some have double digits under their belts, having endured this unforgiving industry for twenty years. We’ve experienced firsthand how hard it is to break into a sector where independent publishers believe they’re Hasbro while barely having the business savvy and budget of a lemonade stand.
We won’t elaborate here—more out of decorum than to maintain relationships with certain ISBN-carrying charlatans, but we’ve struggled to see our contributions recognized. Maybe we’re the problem, so we decided to stop playing by others’ rules and create something entirely ours. We knew no one would help us, especially in our home country, Italy, where we didn’t expect a single word of support to get us started. Spoiler alert: it’s precisely what happened.
We decided to do everything ourselves anyway, starting from scratch, and we remained fiercely and uncompromisingly faithful to our vision for role-playing games and independent publishing.
What’s the Plan
Our plan is simple: we want to get people playing games, sometimes sneaking in a bit of politics, and do it at the lowest possible price. Everything we’ve planned and created is based on this premise, and it will continue to guide our offerings in the future.
What We Achieved in These First Six Months
We began working on Oddplan at the beginning of 2024 but officially launched in May. In these months, we’ve set up the Substack you’re reading now, maintained our social media profiles, and, most importantly, developed and published seven products in our online stores. All of them are distributed using a PWYW model, with the highest suggested price being $10 for a nearly 200-page manual.
Some old-school economists and marketers are probably fuming with rage, but with all due respect, we don’t care. As we said, we’re not playing their game. We’re charting our course, consistent with what we’ve always done outside the TTRPG world in politics and civic volunteering.
To sum up, as Oddplan, we’ve published:
We produced four complete games, one adventure, one sourcebook, and a 60-page hack for one of the games above. You’ll find them on Itch.io and DriveThruRPG.
We also wrote and published six Toy Boxes—our playful little freebies offered in the monthly newsletters, including adventures, stat blocks, and rollable tables. Not shabby, if we may say so ourselves.
The Results
Starting from scratch in a language that’s not our own, we’ve gained 380+ newsletter subscribers with impressive open rates and thousands of monthly views. Our games have been downloaded 4,000 times from our stores, with Hellsquad being the clear favorite, followed by Blood Engine Essential. Financially, we’ve managed to break even with our latest releases, which is all we expected for these early months of pure investment.
But the most important thing for us has been finding a community on Substack that has made us feel seen and heard. It’s a space inhabited by designers, writers, and artists of extraordinary talent who are unfailingly kind and curious. After twenty years of self-congratulatory industry types, it’s been a breath of fresh air.
We’re cautiously exploring Bluesky but admit we have little time to dedicate to such a fast-paced and lively platform. We see great potential for creating genuine relationships there, but we’re still trying to make sense of it.
Our 2025
In mid-January, we’ll (virtually) gather around the table to finalize Oddplan’s annual plan. It will build on 2024 but with a couple of key differences. Every four months, we’ll release one paid game while keeping prices affordable and offering discounts to Substack subscribers. Free games and Toy Boxes will complement these in the interim months. We’ll continue to push our proprietary game engines, involve people in playtesting, build networks with creators with whom we share genuine connections and mock pompous publishers—because it’s hilarious.
Thank you for this incredibly precious 2024. We wish you an extraordinary 2025, especially outside role-playing games.
Toy Box: Candle Slime and Fyriam
A few months ago, we engaged the community on Instagram to gather ideas for a new Slime to feature as a freebie in this newsletter. Among the entries we received, we fell in love with Redstellarpeacock’s “Fyriam,” a candle-like, jumpy Slime that defends itself by creating bizarre and frightening hallucinations in its abandoned house. Our tireless Cristian Luna further developed and illustrated the brilliant idea with a fully developed monster entry.
You can find the Slime, ready to be included in your next adventure, by clicking the yellow button below.
As for the other slimes, you can find them in Vol Flint’s Guide to Slimes, which is available as PWYW on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. Happy hunting!
Yeah, before we forget, we will release the next free product in a couple of weeks, and subscribers will be the only ones able to access it for the first week.
If you want to be the first to know what it is, follow us on Instagram. It’s a cool account, trust us.
Great retrospective. I'm a bit in awe of all you've accomplished. Hopefully, I can draw some inspiration from this and push my game/adventure writing a little harder and a little further in 2025.
I love your candle slime. I posted a PWYW collection of magical candles for old-school D&D a while ago, and I kind of want to write up a slime candle now. :)