Greetings Horizoners,
I’m sitting here constantly refreshing a Kickstarter page in disbelief, because I’m constantly blown away by how much support we’ve had for Outliers, Samantha Leigh’s absurdist solo journaling TTRPG of weird research and eldritch bureaucracy. To paraphrase a colleague: if only I had a word for something that numerically isn’t like a previously set trend.
In case you haven’t seen it, Outliers is a Wretched & Alone solo game where you play a research assistant trying to keep your job and keep a research study afloat in a human participant study where many of the participants appear not to be human, and there are some really weird and unexplainable goings-on. If you can keep them at bay, and if the dreaded IRB don’t shut you down, then hopefully you’ll get enough funding for another study. But if not… you’ll be back at the employment office, or worse, maybe you’ll be stuck in the study forever.
To me, Outliers asks a fundamental question of our time: what are we willing to put up with in order to keep our jobs? Shitty clients, toxic colleagues, domineering bosses, endless bureaucracy, and dangerous workplaces, maybe. But Leigh’s vision of a project beset by terrible luck, eldritch interference, and endemic failure of oversight is one we can all laugh at - it’s absurd, it’s silly, and it’s funny, overall. In short, it takes a serious subject, and gives it the Welcome to Night Vale or Gravity Falls treatment, to humanise it for us.
Outliers was already one of our more successful games, hitting that perfect storm of indie darling creator and capturing the zeitgeist. Add to that an Award from 2023, and that ol’ time-ghost had served us well, and when CoOp member Falco suggested we tried something new with crowdfunding games, I knew we just had to try it.
Before we’d even launched I knew we were onto something pretty good, when we got in excess of 500 project followers. There’s no sensible way to rely on project followers, but at that scale I knew that if we had 30% of them convert to being backers, we’d probably get fully funded. I was pleasantly proven wrong.
Day One saw us raising not just our funding goal (within six hours), but an extra £1,000 on top of that. The stretch goals I’d wanted to announce passed me by whilst I was stuck in my day job; by the time I got home, I had to hastily re-evaluate things. A nice problem to have. By the end of Day Two, we’d smashed past those as well.
To recap for those that haven’t seen the project, that means that:
The softcover is upgraded to have front and rear frosted covers, with 160gsm paper instead of 120gsm - it’ll look and feel absolutely stellar, like the beautiful thesis transcript you had to have printed at uni
All softcover pledges come with a free sticker sheet and an individual, Kickstarter-exclusive sticker, at no additional cost
We’ll be creating print-at-home (or in the lab, if you like) round sticker templates for making tokens, character standees for bizarre rituals, lab money to replace the tumbling block tower if you like, and some kind of play aid to track your state of play
And the pledges keep coming. We’re at a point now where we’ve achieved the following:
We can print 2.5x the number of books that have been ordered, meaning we can have a lot in stockpile to sell to retailers, on consignment, or at conventions
The team get a whopping 60% bonus, meaning that our writing rate is at about $0.16 per word (well above the industry standard)
The per unit rate of books sold has come down enough that we can divert over £500 to the CoOp War Chest, meaning we can do exciting things like print runs for other zines in the future without dipping into personal cash reserves
We’re now saving surplus revenue to split between the creators to spend as they will (hopefully kicking it forward a bit)
More than that, though, the Outliers Kickstarter campaign has given two amazing extra gifts. Firstly, it’s a template for us to crowdfund campaigns in the future: we have a working example of what to do when we get to the end of a creative project and we want to launch it, and get our creators paid equitably. We’ve done the maths needed, we’ve built up a base understanding of how to market what we’ve made, and we’re confident that we can get people paid for their work. That’s what we’re about.
Secondly, it’s restored my faith in crowdfunding after a pretty disastrous previous attempt (naming no names). Crowdfunding is a leveller - it lets us, a relatively small outfit of even smaller names, compete with the big guns in the industry. And we’re never gonna make something like Avatar: Legends or one of the highly successful franchised games like Alien or Dune, but, we’re gonna make cool, weird, queer, leftist, punk AF shit for you to consume, and it’s gonna be fun, and you’re gonna love it. Having access to crowdfunding, and really getting it, means we can be up there on the same pages, on the same lists, as the big hitters, and we look all the more f***ing badass for it.
If you want to be part of the Outliers campaign, and make its creators a bit more dough to pass around, and help the coop, and restore my faith in humanity, then you can. You’ve got until February 29th 11:59pm GMT to back it. At just £12 for a softcover copy, it’s an absolute steal, so if you can chip in a bit extra for a community copy, all the better. Thank you so much.
Project Updates
Normally I’d do project updates here, but nobody would give me one, so I’ll just list what’s on our plate to whet your appetites:
A Thousand Burning Stars zine series, season 2, headed by Nynphaiel:
The Endless Library (from Season 1), print edition coming soon
Kobolds: Work Until You Die, digital edition “imminent”
In the Court of the Invisible King, Sic Itur, Bare Your Soul, Elementarium, Scene, Famous Last Words, and TRACS, all in development, and coming hopefully Q2-Q4 2024
We Dig Giant Robots by Kamala Kara Arroyo, Arroyo’s ode to Megas XLR and other giant freakin’ robot anime series. This is being finalised and we’re very excited to share it with you. We’re hoping to bring this to crowdfunding in Q2 2024.
Ludd & Bone, a game of skeletons and Luddism about how we all long to smash new technology to keep it out of the hands of the oppressors, and built from the Resistance Toolkit (Spire, Heart), is being “actively thought about” and is not just a fantasy heartbreaker, Marx swears.
Gungamesh, a Bronze Age romp, is in active development but not a lot of information is being shared with us. We’re looking forward to showing you more of this, later this year.
Sundo: We, Once Mortal is another one in active thought mode, but we’ll try and keep you checked up on this one, because it’s a very exciting project from extremely cool creators.
Far Horizons Guide to Death will return, because we want the games to come back, but we need more time to prep for a bigger Kickstarter. We’ve learnt lessons in bucketloads, and we’ll get you something on this Soon™.
That’s all there is, there ain’t no more, unless I see that bear once more. Remember: make cool games. wage class war.
Marx //
F.H.C.