Once you step beyond the world of Dungeons and Dragons there are roughly one hundred squillion indie tabletop RPGs out there, but only a few ways to shop for them. If you enjoy the work of a particular design studio you can follow their webpage; a few brick and mortar retailers do a good job curating a selection of the indie TTRPGs that make it to print; and if you want to plumb the deep backlist of digital-only publications, your options up until now have been Itch.io or DriveThruRPG. They’re now joined by RPG Trader, which promises “a marketplace built for indie RPG chaos in the best way”.
RPG Trader opened its virtual doors on June 9, and it already lists products from 467 creators. This really is an indie marketplace: of the 2,200+ products on the store, 1,200 are complete games rather than modules or other supplements, and almost 500 use bespoke rules systems rather than someone else’s rules. Titles are available as digital downloads, or as print-on-demand books fulfilled via the global PoD service LuLu.
I’m a long-time user of DriveThruRPG, with a library going back to weird little DnD classes for fourth edition, items you can no longer buy because the original publishers aren’t in business any more. I have no idea if RPG Trader’s back-end is built to provide library management on that scale for that duration. But the discoverability tools in RPG Trader do look better suited to the needs of indie RPG fans than those in DriveThruRPG.
There are obvious filters like price, game system, and type of product, but then everything is tagged with additional data that’s very specific to indie RPGs. Tags in the ‘Playstyles’ filter let you narrow down to a particular campaign length (like one-shot, campaign, or open-ended), play activity (hex crawl, heist, narrative focused), or games that change the role of the GM (GM-less, rotating-GM, solo).
The tags in the ‘Audiences & Content’ filter cover everything from the amount of prep the game takes, to the age and RPG experience level of the participants. There’s an expected filter by genre, but beyond that there’s a ‘Tones’ filter, which reads like a Spotify station – if you’re in the mood for a gritty RPG, or slapstick, or a game that somehow combines the two, you can filter what’s available in RPG Trader using this filter.
The platform belongs to Ten Acre Games, a TTRPG studio that has produced several books and supplements for a variety of different indie games including Cairn and Mausritter. Ten Acre Games describes RPG Trader as being creator-focused. The platform takes a 20% cut of sales revenue, compared to the 30%-35% cut on DriveThruRPG; and the platform’s AI content policy states that it is “exclusively for handcrafted TTRPG content”, and thus “content that includes AI-generated text or images, even in part, is not allowed”.
Have you picked anything up from RPG Trader yet? If you had a good or bad experience, why not let the Wargamer Discord community know?
Source: Wargamer
