Ramen Sandwich Press: Book of Chance Meetings, and more!

Exposing myself: I'm now blogging on Substack
8 months ago – Fri, Sep 01, 2023 at 09:24:14 AM

I hope the end of summer finds all of you well. Personally, I am astounded to realize that it's September already and that the summer season is over; if I wasn't setting up at Gateway Con today, I wouldn't believe it.

I just wanted to pass along a couple of bits of news, the first being that Severed Heads and Broken Blades, our guide to critical hits and fumbles, arrived from the printer this past week. If you missed the Kickstarter, we'll make it available to the public soon enough; in fact we'll have some print copies available at Gateway Con this weekend:

The other bit of news I want to share is that we're moving my blog, "I Think We've Been Playing It Wrong," from our website to Substack, where I hope it will get more attention. I'm going back to my original plan for the blog, which is to post 2-3 times each week about games, the gaming life, and my other nerdy interests. Plus, I will mix in some original work not directly related to RPGs. At the moment, all posts are free and public, but eventually I will put up a paywall. At that point, some posts will remain free and public (quick reacts to gaming news, announcements about Ramen Sandwich Press, previews of works in progress) and some will be paid subscriber exclusives (game reviews, event recaps with photos, deep-dive essays). As past supporters of my work (I am still and always will be grateful to you), I invite you to give it a look and help me out a bit by subscribing. Substack blogs are delivered by email (Substack likes to call them newsletters), but if the frequency becomes annoying I'll try to set up a weekly digest, or you can just mark the emails as spam.

Enjoy the autumn and don't take the time we have for granted. Get in some gaming, have at least a little fun — it all passes so quickly (or at least it does at my age).

Get your severed heads right here!
10 months ago – Sun, Jun 11, 2023 at 01:40:33 PM

Greetings to you all and I hope the beginning of summer finds you well! Just wanted to use the update system to give you a heads-up that we'll be back on Kickstarter very soon — sometime this coming week, as soon as KS approves the project. It's a modest (100 pages in 6x9 format, almost all of them devoted to results tables) system for critical hits and fumbles called Severed Heads and Broken Blades and it will be compatible with D&D 5E and both editions of Pathfinder. It's going to be even more densely packed with tables than Book of Chance Meetings, as the results in Severed Heads and Broken Blades will be more self-explanatory. As a past backer of a Ramen Sandwich Press project, you'll probably get an email from Kickstarter once the campaign launches, but I just wanted to give you some advance notice. See you soon!

The engine is still running, it never stopped
about 2 years ago – Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 03:37:44 PM

Hello, everyone! I hope this finds you well. Ramen Sandwich Press just wrapped up the Kickstarter campaign for Book of Hidden Paths and I capped off the last update to backers with a couple of announcements that I'd like to convey to you as well — as backers of Book of Chance Meetings, you are a much larger group than them, after all.

First: Ramen Sandwich Press has kicked in Tome of the Utility Drawer (PDF) to DriveThru RPG's charity drive supporting Doctors Without Borders' humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. For those of you who aren't familiar with DTRPG's charity format, publishers contribute PDF products, which DTRPG then divides into bundles and sells at a small fraction of list price. Tome of the Utility Drawer is in MegaBundle #3.

Inspired by that, Ramen Sandwich Tees decided to use eBay for Charity to contribute to Doctors Without Borders and the American Red Cross, which is also involved in relief work in Ukraine. Through March 31 (though we may extend that, since it's March 22 already and we're still getting the word out), 10% of all Ramen Sandwich Tees apparel sales through our eBay proxy store Stuff and Nonsense will go to Doctors Without Borders. In addition, 20% of sales of Book of Chance Meetings and Book of Hidden Paths will go to American Red Cross.

Do-gooding aside, we're ready to move forward after sharing with Pathfinder peeps the goodness of random wilderness encounters that you folks have had for months now. We'll be back on Kickstarter later this year — probably over the summer but I hope we can make it earlier than that — with two more Places by the Way modules. We're going to change the format of the campaign, with the goal of broadening our audience by reducing the cost of buying in. More on that later, once we've firmed up the details.

With the convention scene slowly reviving, we're starting to make ourselves visible at gaming cons that we can reach most easily. Ramen Sandwich had a booth at Dice Tower West in Last Vegas earlier this month, and we plan on setting up at South Pacificon in San Diego and Gateway Con in Los Angeles in May (nothing confirmed yet, though). If Polycon 38 comes off this year (their website is mum on that at the moment), we hope to be there, too. We were all ready to go to Polycon in 2020, but then.... well, you know what happened. If you're at any of these events, look for us and stop by and say hello!

Book of Hidden Paths enters the hopper
over 2 years ago – Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 01:12:42 AM

I hope that this finds you all keeping well, and that you have been making good use of Book of Chance Meetings. I just wanted to post a quick PSA that I have been working hard on its Pathfinder counterpart, Book of Hidden Paths, and that I now deem this book ready for Kickstarter. Accordingly, I'll launch the campaign for it on October 18 at or about 3 PM Pacific Time. Here's the link to the campaign preview, which will take you to the actual campaign when the moment arrives.

As much as I enjoy hearing from old friends with each new Kickstarter campaign, I'm not gonna lie to you about this one: If you have no interest in Pathfinder, you won't need Book of Hidden Paths. It's basically the same book as Book of Chance Meetings, but with Pathfinder 2 mechanics and monsters (although there will be a comment on using it with Pathfinder 1). Even if you get a copy just to read it for fun, you won't find anything new except for some of the weirder and more obscure creatures from the Pathfinder Bestiaries. I've even left the chapter introductions and some of the sidebars unchanged.

But if you know people of the Pathfinder persuasion, I'd appreciate you letting them know that this campaign is a thing. The more people who know about it, the more likely it is that we'll get the support we need to keep Ramen Sandwich Press going. I was talking about this very subject with some gamer friends this weekend, catching up with them after a very long time: The main obstacle we've faced is getting our message out — and not only out, but through the haze of other messaging from other creators/publishers so that people know that we exist. I have found that when people actually pay attention to what we're doing, an unusually high percentage of them find it worth supporting. The 380 of you who backed Book of Chance Meetings have already shown yourself people of discernment and good taste, but our problem is not that everyone else has turned us down; our problem is that so few people have had the opportunity to make the same brilliant decision as you did. So we need the exposure. And with that, [/whining].

You might also be interested that most of our "margin of error" hardbound copies of Book of Chance Meetings remain untapped, so we're offering 25 of them as rewards for this campaign. If you want to pick up another copy for whatever reason — as a gift, or because a black dragon used its breath weapon on your original copy, whatever —this is your chance to get it.

With that, thank you again for your support, and the blessings of pumpkin spice and Halloween upon you!

Ordnance delivered, returning to base
over 2 years ago – Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 10:42:07 PM

All of the digital rewards and add-ons were uploaded to Backerkit over the weekend, and the remaining print rewards and add-ons went into the mail on Monday. If any of you have problems with your orders, message me through Kickstarter and we'll deal with it case-by-case. Otherwise, I think we can consider that accounts have been settled for this campaign and move forward. Thank you for your support, and even more thanks to those of you who have already shared kind words for Book of Chance Meetings!

It should go without saying that your support is exciting and encouraging, whether it's kind works or hard cash, and it helps keep Ramen Sandwich Press' motor running. It has been great fun sharing these ideas and inspirations with you; let's keep it going! Next on the list is Book of Hidden Paths, Chance Meetings' Pathfinder-oriented sibling. I'll get back to writing by the end of the week. I don't know how long it will take to write it, but I hope not as long as it took to write Book of Chance Meetings. It should help that Chance Meetings established a structure that I can use as a foundation. On the other hand, Pathfinder 2 now has three solid Bestiary volumes from which I can choose, so it is bound to be a longer book.

And after that? Well, I would like to write random encounter books for cities, towns and villages — that is, I intend to flesh out the material that was supposed to be the second half of Chance Meetings/Hidden Paths before I realized that I was biting off two mouthfuls at once. 

Before that, however, I think I'd like to go back to doing a module or two. When Ramen Sandwich Press was still in the planning stage, I was warned by people who know better than me that adventure modules don't sell as well as rules supplements. I went ahead with Places by the Way because I could turn them out more quickly than a book as long as Book of Chance Meetings. They're great fun to write, and those of you who have supported my work in the past seem to enjoy them. So I'd like to touch home base regularly instead of zooming off in an entirely new direction.

At the moment, I have in mind a pair of linked modules inspired loosely by that village near the Valley of the Kings that housed the artisans who worked on the royal tombs. If you've seen John Romer's documentary series "Ancient Lives," you know the one. IIRC, as the New Kingdom began to collapse, the residents whose ancestors had built the great pharaonic tombs began to loot them. It probably won't be a neo-Egyptian setting, though — maybe more like Forgotten Realms + Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy. We'll see.

Until then: Thank you again, and I hope you all stay safe and well!