Inkwell Ideas 2017 Round-Up

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Thanks to you, in 2017 Inkwell Ideas had a great year of new products to help you make your games better!

Our biggest achievement was getting Worldographer (Hexographer 2.0) to version 1.0.  There were a number of technical challenges, but I’m very happy with the end result.  The UI is greatly improved, the multiple map levels works well, the new graphics set looks great, etc. We’re still finding bugs and adding features (we’ve put out updates every 2 weeks or so) but that’s expected.  Plus, you (users) are passing on so many suggestions that we expect to keep updating with new features for a long while.

Toward the end of the year we did a new Kickstarter for 5e Magic Item cards, which successfully funded and had several stretch goals hit. These are on track to release to PDF in February and printed versions a few weeks later.

We expanded our 5e Creature Decks with the new “Deck of Beasts: Low-Level Creatures” which made trading card versions the Challenge Rating 0 to 2 creatures from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts. Another deck will release within the next couple of weeks that has the creatures from CR 3 to 5.  Expect more 5e Creatures from us in the coming year.

We released new system neutral NPC Decks & Sidequest Decks. The NPCs Decks did well, but the Sidequest Decks have been a favorite with many of you. Expect more of these from us this year as well.

We had a lot of success at conventions. GenCon is the largest convention we attend, but also the most expensive. Our local 1d4Con was a lot of fun and very worthwhile. North Texas RPG Con was likewise a lot of fun, worthwhile, and great for networking.  We checked out PAX Unplugged, but didn’t exhibit.  It looks promising, but is disappointing they made 2018’s con Thanksgiving weekend. Our first convention of 2018 will be Gary Con.

Our biggest failing continues to be self-promotion.  Spending so much time trying to make great stuff leaves less time to talk about it. This blog didn’t get nearly as many posts last year as it should have, for example.  We did start a Youtube channel to show overviews and new features in our software which is going well, but needs to keep up with weekly updates.  We need to be on Twitter more.  Our newsletter got somewhat more regular, but we need to keep that up.  This website needs a bit of an overhaul to remove some out of date info and highlight what’s new.

So that’s a quick 2017 recap and a look ahead for 2018.  We’ll check in again in a year and hope we’ve done as well (or better) than we did in 2017!