Product, writing and marketing
Using my shop to learn
At the Looting Llama I sell PDF character sheets for tabletop roleplaying and war games. I get to decide on the design, the pricing, the marketing and the support. Because of this, it is a perfect place for me to practise new ideas and methods for product development and business approaches.
01 · Why it exists
No longer selling hours
My earlier companies were hour-factories. We built fantastic things for our clients, but our own growth was limited by our work hours. This made me curious about products that generated revenue passively. Digital assets were a perfect fit, and I already had a need in my own role-playing games; and thus the Looting Llama was born.
This shop is a playground for me to explore strategies or disciplines that I normally never had space to learn about. Somewhere where a mistake was fairly safe. It is an experiment, and it was never really set up to make money. That said, around 14,500 sales later I now have a monthly recurring profit.
02 · Character sheets
Teaching as you play
In role-playing games, building a character can be complicated, but is often the part players look forward to most. Players use online character builders to make setup easier, but many of these have a subscriptions and rely on internet during play (which can be shaky).
Having devices at the table tends to pull players out of the story. That's why many prefer pen and paper. However, official character sheets are designed for advanced players that don't need references anymore - and are thus too hard to use for starting players.
My form-fillable PDF sheets teach you the game as you fill it in. The original sheets are redesigned to place the game options available to a new player front and centre. The logic is coded into the PDF, so that the person using it needs no internet connection, can print it, and owns the file.
03 · Starfinder adventure
Story: warping between realities
You are travellers carrying a package to a corporate contact when your ship starts glitching. Each room warps into a mix of the original room and a place matching one of the published Starfinder worlds.
Behind this collapse is a ball of radiation and cables that is syphoning power off of the faster-than-light engine. It is not malicious, just hungry.
Each region teaches about a different type of roleplaying game. The android planet of Aballon covers combat and movement. The cloud world of Bretheda introduces social exploration. The undead world of Eox is an escape room. The jungle world of Castrovel is a dungeon crawl. The desert mine of Akiton is about surviving waves of enemies. And the final encounter explores floating untethered in faster-than-light space.
Specification
Detail
What it delivered
Game systems
Research into the most played, open licence games, narrowed the focus to Pathfinder 2e, Starfinder 2e, and Nimble 5e. Trench Crusade and Rangers of Shadow Deep are personal interests.
Largest market
Learn the game
These games are known for being the first replacement away from Dungeons & Dragons. But learning games is hard, especially with rules heavy ones like these.
Clear user need
Lead generator
The sheets are given out for free on my Gumroad store, acting as a lead generator for a mailing list segmented by the game. They will be future customers of starter adventures that I will sell online.
Targeted mailing list
