Palace Run Remastered

I recently released Palace Run Remastered as an entry into the Disc 2 TTRPG Jam. There are plenty of free “community copies,” and you should feel free to take one!¹

Iconoclasts in a Church, Dirk van Delen (1630), via Wikimedia Commons

As I’m continuing to “recover” old blog posts, I also wanted to reclaim some of the “pages” I used to have. To this end, the symbol in my nav bar now opens to an equivalent index of posts and material related to Palace Run.

Aside

Since Palace Run has been on my mind, I couldn’t help but apply it to this observation by David J. Prokopetz

The principal function of “player characters” as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one’s collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

When I was going through my notes about playtest characters, even though they were nominally identical, they came to be defined by the things they accumulated. This wasn’t intentional, but I think I lucked into pairing my most minimal set of rules with my most extravagant setting, guaranteeing toys and tools in abundance.

Making it Real

The Palace Semi-Infinite is a realm of infinite luxury. And what’s more luxurious than existing?² So to finish the project, I wanted to print it.

I roughly followed the process that Jack Guignol used for Dirge of Urazya, and that Jim Rugg used in this video that Jack had linked to. I have some minor learnings.

• In LibreOffice, if you prefer to work in single pages rather than spreads, it’s easy enough to choose “booklet printing” when printing to PDF, but the option moves around a lot, so it’s worth looking it up.
• I also ended up using Best Value Copy, but do shop around. If you print with bleeds, they support up to ¼” on each side (this information is hard to find). They included a few extra covers, which was nice.
• When Jim Rugg says to get the nicer stapler, he means it. I got one on Amazon that I thought was the same as Jack’s, but it jammed a bunch and the paper stop was loose.
• I really like the way it looks, but I wish I’d spent some time understanding how the colors would change when printed. I wonder if I could have made the figures pop more, or prevented some of the murk on the back cover.
• I love the way the wraparound cover turned out.
• I ordered these cardboard mailers. I always like getting things in them, so we’ll see how they are to use.
• I used a plastic knife for a bone folder. I’ve never used a proper bone folder, but I think this worked out OK.

A stack of assembled zines.

Selling Them

The easiest way to sell them, I figured is on itch.io, where I already have a storefront. Still, I thought I’d reach out to Binary of Binary Star Games, who has been selling physical copies of Apocalypse Frame on itch. He had some pointers:

• The big bold reminder PUT YOUR ADDRESS DOWN, USA ONLY, NOT KIDDING mostly works, although he’s had to follow-up with a few people. It does seem like the place to enter an address is not obvious on the download page.
• USPS media mail all the way. He also recommended Pirateship, but I’ll save that for later, for now. I guess the big feature is that you can import a CSV file of customers from itch and generate mailing labels for them all at once.
• It should be possible to send coupons to anyone who paid for a PDF already, to avoid double-charging them in the event that they also want a print copy.

So I put it up on itch for $3,³ with 500 “community copies.” At time of writing, five people have bought it full price, and 41 community copies have been claimed. (Given the geographic restrictions and monetary commitment, perhaps my initial print run of 50 copies will prove ambitious, but I’m not in a hurry.) And now, you too can order one (but currently if you live in the USA, sorry).

Pricing

Start with facts:

• Mailers are $0.26/unit.
• With shipping, printing costs averaged out to $0.71/unit.
• USPS media mail is $4.13/unit. Call all these costs together $C$.
• Itch takes 10% of each sale. Call this $I$.
• PayPal takes $0.30 + 2.9% of each sale. Call these amounts $P_2$ and $P_1$, respectively.
• PayPal takes $0.49 + 3.49% of each payout. (Payouts are when you request itch to send you the money you’ve earned.) Call these amounts $O_2$ and $O_1$, respectively.

Now make a bunch of assumptions:

• I want to make $5/sale. I dunno, it’s a nice round number, not too big, not too small. Call this amount $E$ for earnings.
• Let’s ignore fixed costs, like the stapler.
• Let’s ignore small and hard-to-calculate costs, like the staples or the return address labels.
• Assume that I’ll request a payout every ten sales. If they all sell out at once, I’ll do better than this. If they sell one or two a month forever I’ll do worse than this.
• Assume a federal tax rate of 30% on the gross revenue. Assume a state tax rate of 5%. Assume we can add these up to 35% and call this number $T$.
• Assume I’m not going to deduct the expenses. I’m neither a business nor an accountant, and I prefer to interact with the US tax system as little as possible.⁴

Let $X$ be the price point.

Putting it all together, we get:

${\displaystyle E=(1-T)((1-\frac{1}{10}{O}_1)[(1-I-P_1)X-P_2]-\frac{1}{10}{O}_2)-C}$

Or, with numbers:⁵

$$\begin{gathered} {\displaystyle 5=0.65(0.99651[0.871X-0.3]-0.049)-5.1 \\ \approx > \\ 5=0.56X-5.33} \end{gathered}$$

Which we can solve for a price point of $X$18.30$ to That’s more than $1/page! If each sale is a payout (worst case), then I’d need a price point of $X$19.40$. Still, I’ll make some amount of profit anywhere more than $10. So call it $15 and hope that’ll cover the error. This was more fun before I did the numbers and now I’m going to pretend I didn’t.

Practical Concerns with itch.io

The itch.io storefront provides many tools to facilitate this rollout, but they all come with some complications. I wanted to give a $3 credit toward the physical edition to people who had already purchased the PDF for $3. And I wanted to email the announcement to people who had taken free community copies already.

The $3 Credit

• You can make a sale and tie it to a “coupon code” URL, which makes it not public. The difficulty is then in distributing this code.
• You can also limit that coupon code to people who have already purchased a certain game.
• I had thought to upload the code an instructions as a text file for people who paid $3 already. You can add files as exclusive to people who paid more than a certain amount, but for some reason that amount cannot be the actual price (i.e. $3 vs. $0).
• But it’s easy to send an email to people who “purchased” a reward, which is to say, spent any amount of money at all.

The Email Update

• You can’t send email updates to people who claim free copies via PWYW pricing, as those copies aren’t linked to their accounts. This is why I opted to use “community copies.”
• It looks like you can send an email to only people who have claimed community copies. You cannot; it does not work. The only option is to email everyone.
• You can only send one email every 24 hours, so this had to happen a day after I’d sent out the coupon codes to the purchasers.

The Future

Maybe I’ll see about setting up on Lulu after this batch. I expect the quality would be more consistent, the reach broader, and the overhead less. But it’s been really satisfying to hunt down tools and materials and make something physical and navigate new systems to get it into the hands of other people.

At the Ball, Frederick Vezin (1925), via Wikimedia Commons.

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1. Sometimes, “community copies” are reserved for those experiencing hardship. Not these ones! But I can only give permission to my own things. Please respect other creators with different policies. And if you have any difficulty at all claiming one, don’t hesitate to let me know.↩︎

2. Is this the ontological argument? Kind of, yeah, I guess.↩︎

3. Thanks to Jay Dragon, for reminding me that below this amount itch & PayPal eat more in fees than you receive. We derive this result independently later.↩︎

4. Don’t get me wrong, I’m tracking my expenses and I’ll try. I’m assuming that I’ll be unsuccessful.↩︎

5. The symbol $\approx >$ may be read “approximately implies,” by any brave enough. I believe it is my own invention.↩︎

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