In a social media gaming group I moderate, one of the questions I see over and over again from aspiring designers is, “What kind of game should I make? What are people looking for right now? What genre is hot? What system should I design for?” I understand the question, because I asked it myself once. And someone gave me some advice that has stuck with me ever since: follow your heart, and the market will find you. Just make the thing that interests you. Make the weird game you wish somebody else would make. Make the adventure you would actually want to run. There is no crystal ball that will tell you what the RPG market will want by the time you finish the project, and if you do what everyone else is doing, you're probably just making a slightly worse version of something that already exists. Your enthusiasm and authenticity is the one of the few things you have that someone else doesn’t.
Now, if you want to make money doing this, by all means, go for it. But go into it with your eyes open. The RPG business is precarious, and the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen suggests that the overwhelming majority of people who design games do not make a living from it. One guy who has published 20 games, some of which you’ve heard of, makes about $10,000 a year. Nothing to sneeze at, but not enough to live on. Even “full-time” RPG creators may be combining design with freelance work, Patreon, convention income, teaching, another business, or a spouse’s income. I can’t find enough reliable data to put a percentage on the number, but the people who actually make games and discuss it on various forums are consistent in saying that making a living exclusively from tabletop RPG design is the exception, not the rule. That’s not meant to discourage you. It’s meant to liberate you. You don’t have to build the next D&D. You don’t have to convince investors that your game will capture X percent of the market. You can make something small, strange, personal and affordable, and if fifty people love it, you've made something that didn't exist before. I did that, and while I don’t make enough to live on, I earn $80 to $250 bucks a month. That's not nothing, and I did absolutely no market research (or marketing, for that matter).
And please don’t use AI to make it. It’s getting harder to tell whether people are using AI to write, but it's still easy to tell when people are using it for art. AI can be a powerful tool for a starting point in research, and a fun toy for goofing around, but for publication, it’s the easy way out--the refuge of someone who, deep down, thinks they aren't talented enough, or who is a little lazy, and who wants the appearance of having made something without actually learning how or bothering to make it. I speak from experience here. I can actually draw fairly well, and even I was tempted to use AI art for a few products just to get it done quickly, because I was lazy and I wanted a result right now. I did this with my games BEAT and Top Men and I paid the price with some bad reviews. I pulled them from the market and I’m working on original art for them now. It was a good lesson: even if you don’t have an ethical problem with it, the community will likely crucify you. If you can’t draw, that’s fine. Neither can a lot of RPG designers. If you need art, public-domain material is your friend. Find old illustrations, engravings, photographs and decorative elements that you can legally use, then transform, collage, crop, recolor and recombine them into something that is actually yours. This isn't some kind of cheat: Johan Nohr's MÖRK BORG explicitly credits “a couple of Public Domain images” alongside his own graphic design and artwork, and his design for Into the Odd has even more. It’s also OK to copy the poses in pictures from old magazines--sports magazines, body building magazines, martial arts magazines, car magazines, and the icky ones aimed at “soldiers of fortune.” Lots of artists use real-life models, and that’s no different. And if you feel your art is too amateurish, remember the wonderfully crude illustrations in the earliest D&D books. The right audience doesn’t necessarily need polished corporate artwork. Sometimes they’d rather see evidence that an actual human being made the thing.
As for layout and design, some people who do the writing and art themselves, but use AI for layout. This is, arguably, more appropriate. But it’s not that hard to learn some basic graphic design, and cost is not a factor. You can use GIMP, which is a free Photoshop-like program. Scribus is a free desktop-publishing program roughly like InDesign. You can learn typography and composition. It’s not like learning trigonometry. Any reasonably diligent person can use these programs. I worked in the newspaper business for 20 years, so I had a head start, but it’s not unlearnable. Even just a few hours with a tutorial should set you up for a lifetime.
And remember, you don’t have to compete with the big boys. You probably can’t. You don’t need a warehouse full of books, a distributor, a printing contract, a marketing department or ten thousand dollars in startup funds, or physically attractive paid influencers to pimp your game. You can make a PDF and put it on DriveThruRPG or itch.io. They exist to support independent publishers uploading and selling their own PDFs and print-on-demand books, without the traditional publishing infrastructure. If you eventually need money for a print run or professional art, Kickstarter is there--but crowdfunding brings its own headaches, obligations and risks, so don’t assume it’s free money. And you don’t need it to make money. I never have. Just start small. Make the thing you want to make. Use inexpensive or free tools. Learn as you go. Yes, the indie RPG market sometimes looks like it’s been buried under an avalanche of well-intentioned but uninspiring products or AI-generated stuff, but that’s actually an opportunity for you to shine. Genuine human effort is obvious, and its imperfections make it authentic and special. You don't need to be the biggest game on the shelf. You just need to make something that somebody sees and thinks, “This was made by somebody who really cares about this.” That’s a market worth finding. You may not make much money, but I’ve made a little bit, and better yet, I’ve shared what’s in my heart with a niche group of like-minded people, got some recognition and creative validation, and made a few friends along the way. That’s better than money.
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