Hell, Inc. The RPG Week One Update: “Well That Escalated Quickly”

It’s hard to describe the first week of this campaign, because it still seems surreal. I’ve run a handful of crowdfunding campaigns now, and they’re usually pretty stressful. Lots of planning, press outreach, and what seems like infinite time spent battling social media algorithms in hopes of informing your followers that you’re doing a thing. This campaign didn’t have a very high goal, so we weren’t concerned about funding, and weren’t even all that surprised when it funded in the first day. But now we’re a week in and the campaign has gotten more backers than any of my previous ones have gotten in their full month.

This might be why?

We’re absolutely delighted with the response, including being featured on the Kickstarter front page (which we weren’t aware of until we started investigating why a random Sunday nearly doubled our backer count). We’re also a bit stunned by it, if we’re being honest – we made this game in our living room because our last game project, the work-in-progress sci-fi RPG FAIL MARINES, got a good response and we got it in our heads to do something for ZineQuest. At no point did we expect that nearly a hundred people would be on board, let alone in the first week. Thank you all very much!

If you haven’t gotten on board yet, you should! With the first stretch goal unlocked, for as little as $5 CAD you can get PDFs of the Employee Handbook (32+ pages with the full rules, weird Hell lore, and a pre-written adventure), the character sheet, and a second pre-written adventure about reality being rewritten by paperwork errors. That’s a lot of stuff! Further stretch goals include The Soup Drawer (a really weird cooking ‘zine that Caitlin has come up with), a fillable form version of the character sheet PDF that you can type directly into, and a graphics package for online virtual tabletops (like Roll20 or Foundry). If you like Hell, Inc. enough to be reading this, you’ll be getting way more than your money’s worth on this RPG.

And finally, we’re running the first ever public play session of Hell, Inc. on Sunday, September 4th, so next update we’ll be including some photos and exploits from that.