Crowdfunding The Dose Makes The Poison

A retrospective on my first crowdfunding project, The Dose Makes The Poison, a Bioshock inspired module for Mothership RPG, announced as part of Mothership Month 2024.

Before we get into the nitty gritty, here's a couple of ways you can get your hands on the discussed module should you be interested in picking up a copy:

• You'll be able to grab a copy of as an add-on to my newest project for Mothership, Trapped on Schrödinger's Moon, which comes to Backerkit very soon. A follow on that teaser page would be much appreciated:

• The Dose Makes The Poison and Timed Release are now available physically on the Tuesday Knight Games store in the USA. Dose is available from Iglootree in the UK and on the usual digital platforms now too if you prefer pdf (Itch, DrivethruRPG, RPG Trader).
• Also, sign up to my new mailing list, if you like. This is an effort to control my own list rather than be beholden to the likes of Substack and the likes.

Okay, let's talk The Dose Makes The Poison. I'm going to go into detail about a few topics here, including being very open about income and expenses to give as clear a picture as possible. If you are thinking about crowdfunding hopefully you'll find something of interest in the below.

I'll cover:

• The crowdfunding campaign
• Money in
• Costs
• The finished products
• Learnings for next time

I'm assuming that that you know what crowdfunding is, and also what Mothership Month is. This probably won't make sense if you don't.

This isn't a 'how to' guide, more of a 'what I did', but feel free to drop me a message if you've got any questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

The crowdfunding campaign

Back in August 2024 I had started developing a module for Mothership, with an aim to publishing a pdf to Itch and maybe print a few physical copies. I was working with someone called Norgad (more on him in a bit) who I'd met on the Mothership Discord. They were sorting out both art and layout.

Mothership Month sounded cool: a new release Tuesday Knight Games (TKG) supported by multiple 3rd party creator projects. Although it's become pretty common over he past few years, the whole 'Month' group crowdfunding concept was brand new and exciting back in innocent little 2024.

Despite not knowing much about anything, I sent a draft doc of what became The Dose Makes The Poison over to TKG and it was accepted. Result.

To get my campaign page set up on Backerkit, I took advice from various blogs (like this one), and, if I'm more honest, straight up copied parts of other pages that looked good (I think I used The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo as my main starting point). I also asked people directly for help on the Mothership Discord (thanks especially to Marco at Spicy Tuna for advice at this time).

Norgad did cool page graphics:

Since I have a pal who is a top class animator, I roped him in to create a teaser video:

Before launch I pulled together a press release and sent it to few places like Rascal News. Getting a press release together is relatively easy and since I was starting at zero audience I wanted all the promo I could get.

To boost the campaign as it ran I had planned a few stretch goals: expanded page count from 16 to 24, a suite of supporting audio files and a few other upgrades on the zine itself. There was also an iron on patch for physical backers who pledged in the first 48 hours.

The campaign launched really well, and hit all the planned stretch goals within the first 48 hours, taking the funding total up to around £7K at the end of that period.

Anecdotally, aside from the hype that was following MM24 and the marketing ads that TKG were running, I think Dose did well in this initial period because of a few of things:

• The concept was easy to understand in a sentence: 'Bioshock - in space!' The elevator pitch is important.
• Norgad's eye catching artwork looked quite different to a lot of Mothership modules.
• The video made me seem more legit (than I was/am).

If you are planning your own project, I think applying all three of the things written in bold above will really give your campaign a leg up.

Once the 48 hour hype spell died down, sales flatlined completely for most of the middle 3 weeks of the campaign.

I was assured this was normal (sales usually split as roughly 50% in the first 48hrs, 25% during the middle bit and %25 at the last 48hrs), but if I'm honest, this made me feel anxious and oddly depressed. Despite the zine doing so well, I felt panicked that I was only making one or two new backers a day, and some folks even - dear god - cancelled. It was as if my personal validation was linked to the project, a bit like someone who was addicted to 'likes' on social media. Very strange.

To keep interest during the quiet days I ran polls on Backerkit providing more detail on the module contents, and for Black Friday announced that I'd added Timed Release, a free pamphlet module in to the bundle too. This pamphlet idea was a little more than a scribbled draft at the time, and we'll talk about that again in the learnings for next time section (spoiler: I learned something for next time).

In the end, the thing that brought in more backers was the final 48 hours, as many people had told me it would.

The campaign eventually finished with 1000 backers, taking £13,464.

After the campaign was finished, I discovered another thing: the 'crowdfunding blues' is real. I felt fatigued after the campaign was done, and suddenly an overwhelming pressure to deliver something good to all the people that had backed. The thought of getting back in the saddle was fairly daunting for a while.

The money bit

The below figures are accurate enough I think; they might be slightly skewed by a few things here and there but I don't have the time to dig that deeply here.

At the end of the campaign I had:

800 physical backers

130 digital only

70 £1 tier to follow along for the pledge manager (I think there's a lot of these as backers were using them to extend the 'backer train' at the end of the wider campaign)

This came to a money tally of:

£13,464

Pre orders also took in a bit, £469, and for shipping I ended up charging £7633.

So, grand total, gross, topline was:

£21,566

How much did it cost?

My total manufacturing costs broke down to roughly £6K, including printing (I printed 1600 so I would have stock to sell), art and design by Norgad and editing from DG Chapman.

Contractors (Art and design, editing) £2900
1600 Zine print run (inc £100 postage) £1700
600 print run pamphlet £300
Patches £560
Posters, bookmark and stickers £300
Writing: free (that was me)

Additionally, Stripe and Backerkit combined take just under 10% or so, and I handled postage mostly myself via Royal Mail but had Peregrine Coast Press send packages to the EU because of VAT collection rules:

Stripe and Backerkit £2000
Postage costs £5600
Refunds and replacement copies: £100

Total costs £13,460

Net Profit: £8,106

I mean, I can't really complain about that can I? That's why I put it in H2 size font.

For a first project that's a really amazing total. Now, how many hours did I spend on the project? Probably enough to divide that amount into minimum wage, but there was a lot of learning being done at the same time, as I was clueless about all of this before I started, and had to learn a lot as I went.

How'd it turn out?

Here's everything that was in my top tier bundle, photographed on my iPhone BC:

The complete bundle had the zine, an A4 card art print and 'I was volunteered!' sticker. There was an early bird iron on patch for backers in the first 48 hours, and a bookmark that was added when all projects hit their funding goals.

The zine, art print and bookmark I had printed at Mixam UK and all look really good quality. Some of the zines printed had pages that were 1-2mm out of alignment which was slightly disappointing, but 'within industry margins', apparently.

I love the 'waiting room ad' art print, it's probably my single favourite bit of the project.

The iron on patches I got from Made By Cooper here in the UK, and they were excellent quality, easily a match for any I've gotten from other Mothership projects. Patch printing is expensive in the UK though, so that's something to bear in mind if you're giving these away for free with a project - these cost £560 for 500, although cheaper options might be available.

The stickers I had printed at Print.Work and, while they're good quality they're probably the weakest part of the package I think - although they're authentic as far as a 'name tag' sticker goes I think I'd choose a less 'functional' design and print material next time and go for something with a bit more impactful rather than being so 'in-world'. No shade on Print.Work though, the other item they printed for me was top class (see below).

Norgad did an excellent job with both the artwork and design of the zine. I owe a huge amount to him in general when it comes to the project, and also how well it did.

It's probably unquantifiable to measure, but between me reaching out to work on this and the launch of Mothership Month '24, Norgad happened to drop his own first module, Dead Weight, which was a certified banger - don't think I'd be exaggerating to say it's been the break out success module of the past couple of years for Mothership. I think that gave quite a bit of credibility to my project by proxy. I was a lucky bastard with my timings, basically. Cheers Norg 👋

I worked with DG Chapman on editing. He helped me greatly with development and again, since his name is recognisable from Mothership stalwarts like The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and Another Bug Hunt, I think it lent more credibility to the project from the start.

Shout out to Chris Airiau who proofread the thing and talked me off a ledge about it when coming into the home straight.

The zine has a bunch of audio files to accompany the game, and a full 'TV ad' for the drug company's Hope's Serum. These were a lot of fun to produce and meant I got to dust off my studio gear and buy some new studio monitors and claim them as a business expense.

Here's an example of one of the audio files, SPOILERS for the module if you listen:

A4 Malastr Gallery Note

0:00

/44.064

1×

Halfway through the project I decided there wasn't enough scope-creep (ho ho), so gave away a new pamphlet module to all digital backers and a print option add on for physical backers.

Timed Release was a fun concept that I thought I could pull off, but in the end turned out to be the thing that dragged the project into delay, as it took me an age - and a lot of self doubt and second guessing - to get something I thought was any good and fitted on a pamphlet (which is harder than you think).

Still, it's the first content I've designed myself all the way through to printing - styled like a brochure found in a doctors waiting room - and I think that's something to be proud of, even if I did get addicted to tweaking Creative Commons icons in Illustrator rather than attempting to deliver the project on time. The printing for this was done at Print.Work and was excellent quality, and I'll definitely be looking to use them again in the future.

Learnings for next time

Below are some things I've learned. I wouldn't feel confident enough to offer this as 'advice', but the below might help you if you're going to organise a crowdfunder at any point. It's worth bearing in mind I'm my own worst enemy and some of these pitfalls could be avoided just by delivering your work, y'know, on time... anyway:

The crowdfunding cycle is weird: rather than building up to a launch day, you build up to the funding launch day for your project. Once that's over, you fall into a post-campaign malaise for a month, squirrel off to your basement for a further 6 months to write the thing, spend another three months dicking about with print proofs, CMYK conversions and other random stuff and before you know it a year has passed, you're only just getting your zine into peoples hands and everyone's forgotten what got them interested in the first place.

This really kills momentum, and there's a strange limbo feeling when your zine is finally out but no one is talking about like they were back when it was funding (back when it didn't even exist!). Indeed, I think seasoned backers - those who back lots of crowdfunders - know projects are often delayed, so purposefully 'forget' about projects until they deliver, so they don't get frustrated.

Next time I'll try and arrange for some blog write ups and reviews to land around the time backers receive their copies to bring the module front of mind again.

Writers: writing is much easier before you've funded than after: Before crowdfunding, writing and ideas is easy; your brain a blunderbuss of sci-fi horror buckshot. Once you have taken peoples money, however, that final 20% of script left suddenly becomes a huge ordeal, and in addition you now have 40 other unrelated tasks to sort too.

I've encountered the above twice now, first with Dose and also with Drink from The Hippocrene, the module I'm finishing at the moment. My advice here is to have all the writing done before crowdfunding. It frees you up to run the production and make sure everything else is on schedule rather than delay everyone while you finish your bits. You do not engage the same part of your brain for writing as you do working the Royal Mail Click and Drop website, and switching between those sides of the brain becomes a real pain in the arse.

For my new project Trapped on Schrödinger's Moon (crowdfunding soon, OMG did I not mention this?! remember to sign up) we're almost ready for a second playtest and to go into editing, this time all before the campaign launches. I'm hoping to turn the whole process around in 3 months.

I know this won't always be possible - paying for project development is a big part of funding for a lot of projects - but the less time between you crowdfunding and getting the zine into peoples hands, the more excited they'll be to play it, and the more rich, famous and successful you'll become.

Scope creep is real: If you funder is doing well it can be really excited to add new stretch goals and additional bits on in order to keep things exciting and keep people interested, especially during the middle months of the campaign when sales drop away. Just remember, you need to deliver these things, ideally within the original timeline you've given backers. My big regret of the Dose campaign was adding in the Timed Release pamphlet, as it became a psychological blocker for me for what felt like months for no really good reason. It kind of ruined Christmas for me. Go easy on your stretch goals and make them easy to implement.

It gets lonely out there on your own: I've never been good at a) asking for help or b) presenting work to people before I think it's 'finished.' Both these things have bit me on the arse in producing The Dose Makes The Poison and the module I'm finishing off at the moment, Drink From The Hippocrene.

I've spent strange weeks where I've felt nothing has moved forward and everything is shit, only to have a 10 minute call with my editor to talk things through and everything falls into place. It's a tale as old as time, really: get over yourself. Swallow your pride and present first draft work if it means you'll get good feedback. No one cares as much as you do.

A quick final thought

I've not much to add here - for a first ever project this went far beyond what I could ever have expected, and then some.

One thing I would say is that if Mothership Month hadn't come along, there's a good chance that in 2026 I would still be lurking on the Discord server, quietly posting 'coming soon' messages while looking at draft 96 of The Dose Makes The Poison, waiting for 'the right time' to publish.

MM24 forced me to commit to something, publish it and learn from it, and I can honestly say it's been the best thing to happen to me creatively in about 20 years.

Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that. Just go and make the thing.

Cheers,
Andrew