Only a Company Can Make an RPG
- Malin Freeborn
- July 31, 2025
The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the various articles on ‘indie RPGs’ which are in fact made by corporations. But even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits page at the start. Any one-person-show (something with no credits beyond its singular author) wouldn’t have an editor; and any book without an editor desperately needs one.
Only a company can make an RPG. These books have the word-count of a thesis, and have to skip between technical explanations and purple prose, sometimes many times per page. That’s why most have a dozen different editors who start work only after a team of writers have settled down and mostly stopped typing. I’ve never seen IT people credited in a book, but they must be there - any company with a bunch of ‘IP’, and Adobe Licences needs a bunch of engineers to support everyone else.
So if the indie RPG scene wants to stop the word ‘indie’ being used as a synonym for ‘shit’, we need to form companies in some minimal sense of coöperating with each other. Almost every advantage the large corporations have over the indie scene comes simply from numbers. They have more editors and artists, the artists and editors have more time to work on the book. They have time to polish their words, while the indie creators have day-jobs. They have fancy specialists for the index and specialists for the layout, while the indie creators just try to be everyone and do everything.
Can You Count, Suckers?
Itch.io currently shows 4,000 Fantasy TTRPG works .
4-fucking-000
Imagine the amount of work required. Imagine only 10% of this creative force focussed onto a single project. Even 1% of this total work equals the work of 40 different RPG works; some full adventure modules, others are one-page ideas with some diagrams, but each one represents a lot of work.
And if people could work together, economies of scale would emerge, as they always do. People could share skills more directly, and even a dozen eyes on the same book would help immensely with the editing quality.