Intermission: A General Note On The Whole Tariff Thing
Hi folks, Maz here.
As you’re probably aware, the US has announced new tariffs on almost every country in the world, including the ones where we make our games, and the ones...
16
0
4
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
about 2 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 8: Something in the Air
Is it spring? Hope? Or smoke from the chimneys of the ever-toiling word factories? Things are definitely happening, that's what matters.
TIMELINE
After I wrote the February...
8
0
1
Rowan, Rook and Decard
3 months ago
Intermission: Would You Like Some Hollows NOW?
Hello again!
First! Look what Sam's done with the map of the Isles!
My favourite parts are the broken bridge and, if you look closely enough, the dilapidated train lines....
11
0
6
Rowan, Rook and Decard
3 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 7: Prognostication and Midwinter
Apologies, Islanders - I managed to miss January's update. It would have been a brief one anyway, I admit. So is this month's update - a lot is happening behind the scenes, t...
10
0
3
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
5 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 6: Storms and New Eras
Hello backers!
This is the final update of 2024, and headline: everything’s going roughly to plan.
TIMELINES
Last month I said there was potentia...
10
0
1
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
6 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 5: Presidents, Kings, and other Wretchedness
Hello backers!
This month’s update is rich with new material, but also we’ve got to talk about politics a bit. We’ll do that first and get it out of the way....
As you’re probably aware, the US has announced new tariffs on almost every country in the world, including the ones where we make our games, and the ones where we could make our games in future. What this means is that for every item imported into the US, there will be an additional tax levied at the ports, based on where it was manufactured. For some countries that’ll be an extra 10% of their manufacturing cost; for others it’s up to 50%. Those are taxes paid to the US government, and they have a big impact on importers like us (and almost every other importer in the games business).
As I write this, it is super unclear what the impact will be for us, and for Hollows in particular. We are still waiting for clarity about what the actual rate will be for various territories once multiple tariff levels are combined, and for clarity about deeply wonky things like which HTS codes precisely are exempt and whether the implementation of those exemptions will be in line with the order as it’s written. We might be waiting for that for a while; the details of the legislation and how it’s intended to work in practice are not clear right now, not just to us but also to the experts we rely on to help us navigate global freight in calmer times.
In the meantime: work continues. We’re writing, editing (I now have strong opinions about the definition of the word "would"), playtesting and making art, as well as checking the headlines. We don’t think these tariffs are going to prevent anyone from getting their games; we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to build resilience against this scenario, and we’re hopeful that - relatively speaking - we’re in a better position to weather this than we’d feared.
But: that “relatively speaking” is doing a lot of work. Assuming that what we believe to be true about these tariffs remains true - and pending the massive impact this will have on global shipping, freight and US ports - we may have to raise shipping costs higher than we’d hoped, and there may be other knock-on effects too.
It’s too early to say exactly what we will do in response to these events. We expect the situation to evolve in the coming days and weeks; we’re monitoring it and we have contingency plans. If you’ve got specific questions, you’re welcome to ask them here, come to our Discord where we’re discussing this in more detail, or email [email protected]. We want to be very transparent and open about this; we regularly talk about how our business and the broader industry works in our Discord, and it’s been an active topic today. You’re welcome to join in.
A deeper dive If you’re still unsure of how these tariffs might impact the games industry, Meredith Placko, CEO of Turbo Dork Paints and Steve Jackson Games, wrote a helpful and live explainer:
A company makes a product in, let's say, China. It costs them $3.05 to manufacture (not counting tooling fees, color process, freight). Say that company wants an 8-to-1 ratio (because they're thinking scale, and if they sell in distribution, that can take upwards of 65%-72% off MSRP). Now that product is priced, to consumers, at $25.00 (rounding up for easy maths).
Alrighty. $25.00 for the item. That's a reasonable price for a decorative bowl found at Target, a card game with some tokens, a baseball cap.
However, to make that product in China, we have to add 20% to the cost, because of tariffs. That now means it costs the company (not counting tooling, color process, freight) $3.66 to manufacture. And to get that same 8-1 ratio, the item will now sell for $29.99 (because taking that one penny off $30 makes it seem "cheaper".).
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Today, if Trump announces 20% on ALL incoming imports, on top of the current 20% already lobbed on Chinese goods, and that 25% extra if the country of origin is buying gas from Venezuela.... the company who makes that item for $3.05 needs to add an additional 65% on the cost, making the base price for said item $5.03, and the new cost to consumer is $40.26.
A product you would have bought for $25.00 now costs you $40.00…
For cost comparison, and using a semi-recent real world example. I quoted a product in both China and the USA. In China, the price for the item was $1.26. In the United States, it was $7.42 per unit (and that was with a reasonable MOQ). Even with the 65% increase, it was *still cheaper* to produce overseas. This wont always be the case, but most of the time... it is. And companies will *still* raise the prices to the consumers to cover their costs.
And everything else Given everything else that’s happened and is still happening in the USA, in the last three months, these tariffs are just a part of a very concerning and frightening picture. Some of us are in the USA; some of us are now trying to work out if we’re still safe to cross the border to come to Gen Con; others have already recognised that we’re not. If you are living in this, right now, we are sending you strength and hope for the future, and we recognise that TTRPGs are really quite unlikely to be the most important of your concerns at this time.
Thanks for all your support; sorry about all this; no pasarán.
Is it spring? Hope? Or smoke from the chimneys of the ever-toiling word factories? Things are definitely happening, that's what matters.
TIMELINE
After I wrote the February update – days after, I think – we decided to squeeze in some more playtesting. The good news is that, after some initial stumbling blocks (a few bits of missing or conflicting information, now fixed) that’s going well.
We haven’t started getting feedback yet, so whether the timeline remains good or we have to pump the brakes and rewrite a couple of subsystems remains to be seen. Watch this space.
MANUSCRIPT
Still in editing! So far, so good – Editor Supreme Maz has tightened up some writing, streamlined some sections for clarity, and called us on a few common sense issues (“You cannot call two distinct and separate categories of people ‘Allies’. Stop.”). We’ve also sent the manuscript to our sensitivity consultant, who has not yet emailed us a massive bill for future therapy, so I think that’s going well too.
ART PROGRESS
Sam’s drawn almost everything he could possibly draw for us, barring a few chapter header illustrations and the slipcase for the special edition and component kit pack. The most recent treasures are his pictures of Hollows’ sample Entities – imagined as carved wooden tokens from a Hunter’s personal collection, used to plan and prepare for the battles ahead – and another version of the Isles map, also from a Hunter’s gear.
The Isles | Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
The Learned Beast and The River Witch | Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
COMPONENT KIT
We are, I think, a couple of weeks away from seeing samples of the component kit. This will be our second prototype, and hopefully the final one. More to say next month, hopefully.
First! Look what Sam's done with the map of the Isles!
Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
My favourite parts are the broken bridge and, if you look closely enough, the dilapidated train lines. How the mighty empire has fallen.
As I may have mentioned before, we're creeping ever closer to release, with all that entails - editing, layout design and refinement, and so on. We at RRD have never been the types to do things the easy way. We take the road less-travelled. March to the beat of our own drum. Run a final playtest mere months before release.
(Producer Chant is fine about this, it doesn't mess up the spreadsheet at all and everything is great.)
Jokes aside, there's quite a bit of material in Hollows that only comes into play when you start running longer-term games. Players get to develop the Refuge, their Hunters' interdimensional pub/guest house; Hunters die, gain Corruption, and gain new boons and banes in the process; GMs develop storylines that run across multiple Hollows. The Refuge and Corruption are some of the most iterated upon parts of Hollows and, while we've had a good time with them, we'd like to open them up to wider feedback while there's still (just about) time to tweak them if we need to.
So, if you would like to be the first to see these unreleased chapters of Hollows, for the low, low price of giving us some feedback, please sign up using the form linked below. We'll send out a packet of rules and other content in the first week of March, and try to squeeze in a couple of months of testing while we're laying out the rest of the book, getting sensitivity reading done, etc.
Apologies, Islanders - I managed to miss January's update. It would have been a brief one anyway, I admit. So is this month's update - a lot is happening behind the scenes, to be unveiled over the next couple of months.
TIMELINE
Remarkably, things are looking... OK? Good, even? No news is good news, under this heading.
THE BOOK
Hollows is still in editing - and that's normal. There's a lot of book, ergo there's a lot of editing. This very afternoon, I've had a delightful meeting with Mina (McJanda; art director and layout maven) about page design, paper weights, and ribbon - so we've done a lot of good groundwork ahead of starting layout.
WRETCHED DOMAINS
Last update, writing was nearly complete; now it is complete. It's nice when a plan comes together. Art is still trickling in, but that's almost complete too. Behold, for example, Letty Wilson's stunningly unpleasant sketches for Chris Taylor's fairytale Hollow.
Art by Letty Wilson
That lupine thing is called The Worst Wolf. It's the manifestation of every wolf in every story. Every child's nightmare, now bound in service to a teacher whose personal hell is the power of children's imagination.
That brings us to the end of a short but gruesome update. More soon.
This is the final update of 2024, and headline: everything’s going roughly to plan.
TIMELINES
Last month I said there was potential for the project timelines to slip. There still is, but at the moment estimates are holding up: we should start shipping books out in Q3 of next year. Now, I think it will be later in Q3 than I would have ideally liked, but still Q3. Watch this space.
THE BOOK
We’re still not 100% finished but the outstanding bits are:
Revising the Steel City and Morningmire scenarios you might remember from the original playtest, to match the new updated rules and some setting developments
GM advice on how to beat up your players’ Hunters and make them enjoy it
The small but important bits of front matter like “what is a roleplaying game?” and “what is this roleplaying game?”
I hope you’ll agree that isn’t much, in the greater scheme of things.
Our own Maz Hamilton is going to start the first editing pass in the next week or two. This is both exciting and terrifying. Maz is one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with, and what they do to the manuscript will make it several times better (and it’s already bloody good), but it’s also going to ask some difficult questions and force Grant and Chris to answer them, because that’s what a good edit does. We’re fine, though. I mean, I’m smoking a lot, but that’s OK, right?
WRETCHED DOMAINS
We have eight complete Hollows, and the author is working on the ninth one in our virtual office co-working space as I type. This collection's looking good, folks. And the art! Oh my goodness, the art! This month, I’ll send you off with these absolutely revolting works by Morgan Robles, for Sasha Sienna and Helen Gould’s Hollow. This was formerly called The Lord of the Dockyard and is currently Break! Break! Break! – the story of a mutineer who Hollowed when his uprising failed and he proved powerless against the navy that crushed his spirit.
Bleak, right? And Morgan’s art brings it to life perfectly.
Art by Morgan Robles
That’s it for this month, for 2024, and damn nearly for the writing stage of this game.
I hope your year ends peacefully and the new one starts strong.
