The Lone Toad - Ribbiting Adventures Issue 3

Interview with Brandon Lee of Ravensrdige Press - Talking Map Making games and successful Kickstarters

Welcome to Ribbiting Adventures Issue 3! Ribbiting Adventures is The Lone Toad’s mid-monthly newsletter that will dive deeper into solo RPGs with creator interviews, in-depth dives into solo RPG games and mechanics, and a look at Solo RPGs of the past.

Earlier this month The Lone Toad talked all about map-making games and why it’s so great to build your world from a blank page. In this Issue of Ribbiting Adventures, we are interviewing Brandon Lee of Ravensridge Press!

I’ve been following the amazing development and crowdfunding campaign for his newest game, Cartograph: Atlas Edition and I was blown away when I played it. I had a fantastic time doing it, so I had to bring Brandon in to talk about the campaign, how his family is involved, and why he decided to improve on the original Cartograph.

Pre-order Cartograph: Atlas Edition today! or Grab it on Itch and play right now (after you read this post and share it with your friends of course)

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Interview with Brandon Lee of Ravensridge Press

Welcome Brandon Lee to The Lone Toad Newsletter. I am excited to interview you and I'm sure the Toad Army will love to hear what you have to say about Solo RPGs and the TTRPG sector. Firstly, let's talk about Cartograph: Atlas Edition. I'd like to give you a huge congrats on a fantastic Kickstarter campaign. What element do you feel most led to the campaign's success?

Thanks so much! And thanks for having me. I've been enjoying the newsletter a lot over the last year! Well, in truth I think the success of the campaign was largely driven by the advertising strategy we took. My wife (the other half of Ravensridge) took charge of creating reels for Instagram and TikTok, and we also paid for ads on the Meta platform.

The unfortunate truth of the industry is that, no matter how good your game is; if nobody sees it, no-one will buy it, so you have to advertise! We started advertising on meta two months before the campaign which gave us time to spread the word. We also reached out to some content creators to spread the word too! That was very helpful.

Seriously pre-order it today All images in this interview are credited to Ravensridge Press.

Now that the campaign has wrapped up and you've had a couple of months to reflect on it, what was the most difficult part of running the campaign?

I think the hardest part has been the admin of it all; sending emails, contacting game stores and content creators, filming ads. It’s funny, releasing a game in this way ends up being like, 15% game design, and then the rest is boring business stuff!

I'd have to give an honourable mention to crafting the custom dice for the deluxe pledge too; my wife and I have been crafting dice non-stop since the end of the campaign, and that has been very hard.  I think the next campaign we run, we'll probably outsource some of the more 'business' tasks to someone else, so we can focus on the part we enjoy the most, which is making games.

Before we go deeper into Cartograph, let's get to know you a bit better. How did you get into RPGs? Was it an older sibling or friends from school? And what was your first-ever RPG?

I started out playing when I was a young teenager. My uncle lived with us at the time, and he was a huge nerd. He first introduced me to the Magic the Gathering Card Game, and then absolutely hooked my friends and me into playing many sessions of AD&D.

I still remember the unceremonious death of 'Griswold Chunkycheeks' - he ran into the treasure room of a dungeon, opened a chest without checking for traps, failed a con save from the poison dart, and died then and there. It was awesome. Since then I've strayed from 5e into more indie games, and COVID gave me quite the excuse to play solo games too, which I've been hooked on ever since!

In Cartograph: Atlas Edition I saw you thanked several family members in the credits, including your wife and parents. Does your family actively help you in achieving your RPG dreams?

Yeah, my family is massively supportive, I'm very lucky. My Wife and I have been running Ravensridge together for over 3 years now, and my dad has helped the whole time by crafting dice boxes and gaming tables.

My mum was a huge creative influence on me too, I remember she and I designed my first board game when I was about eight, and we spent months hand-drawing all the cards, components and game boards. My mum is great. She's done a lot of editing, playtesting and general advice. I grew up with my dad being a musician in metal bands and my mum was a visual artist, so I've been very fortunate to grow up around a creative environment too.

These are some good-looking dice boxes!

Now, back to Cartograph. The Atlas Edition is the second edition of Cartograph. What made you want to go back to Cartograph? Was there something you felt could be improved upon?

Cartograph was always one of those backburner projects where, even after its release, I felt it was 'unfinished'. A friend of ours, AJ from The Winters Tales YouTube channel (check 'em out if you want some great Australian actual play content), started playing the original Cartograph on stream, and that motivated me to attempt to create the final version of the game.

I was never unhappy with the core mechanism of the map-making aspect, but the old version at times felt like it was more of a roll-and-write journaling game, missing those critical roleplaying elements. I've (hopefully) resolved that in the Atlas Edition of the game. Besides that, I just really wanted to expand on the game. I wanted to add in more tables, more items, more everything, as I had a few players of the older edition play enough of it that they started to get repeat content, so I wanted to remedy that too.

Collection of different tables and pages from Cartograph: Atlas Edition

Cartograph is a solo journaling RPG about map making, exploration, world-building, and resource management. You are encouraged to create a character and view this new world through their eyes. What made you go with that form of world-building instead of just solely map drawing?

I originally made Cartograph as part of a game jam, and the first prototype was just a map-making tool really. Then as I started to play more solo games and learn more as a designer, Cartograph morphed into the character-centric view it has today. I think this change was pivotal really in moving Cartograph from a tool to a game. On top of that, I really wanted Cartograph to be able to produce real artefacts you could take to your other roleplaying games, and while the map is a nice obvious artefact, the journal is a great one too.

You can really get lost in your explorations.

Exploring this new land through the eyes of an individual allows for exaggerations, cultural inflections, myths, half-truths, and personalities to be injected into both the map and the journal. The journal is such a great thing for players in a group ttrpg to find too, especially if they'd already found the map. Having the Cartographer as a filter to ingest the new world you create really makes you see what is important and novel about locations as you visit them too.

What do you think the benefit of creating your own world from the ground up is?

Good question! Well, besides it being so much damn fun, I've always found it infinitely easier to play in homebrew worlds over pre-written ones. I've not run many adventures over my life mainly for this reason - learning another world created by someone else to such a degree that I could comfortably play an rpg in it is hard for me, but when I made the world, I've already learnt it in it's creation! It's just a wonderful exercise in creativity, and I've found you become infinitely more invested in the stakes a character may face if you know and care about the world they're in too.’

What will you discover?

The Toad Army would love to know what your plans are for Ravensridge. Can you tease any upcoming games or projects?

OOooh, some sneaky sneaky teasers, ok ok. We've got a couple of projects in the works at the moment, the first is a group or solo TTRPG called Alpha Directive, a game about bioroids searching a bizarre, viscera-punk dying earth wasteland for identity, and the second is an as-of-yet unnamed solo rpg in which the player embodies an incarnation of death, hunting down anomalous individuals who have somehow cheated death.

We're also venturing into board game design, teaming up with the talented Nicholas Robinia from the Bardic Inquiry (their blog is great you should read it), to design an asymmetrical card game in which one player embodies a cult, and the other an investigator.

Here's a picture of the current cover of Alpha Directive:

Going to have to check this one out!

If people want to follow your work, where can they find you?

You can find us on Instagram or TikTok at @TheRavensridgeEmporium

Our website is:

https://theravensridgeemporium.com

And for all our other socials, you can find them on our linktree: https://linktr.ee/theravensridgeemporium

Thank you so much Ravensridge!

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Wow, what an excellent interview! Thank you again Brandon Lee for taking the time to answer my questions!

Want to hear more about map-making games? I did a deep dive into them in the May Edition of the Lone Toad.

My world

This is the world I created using Cartograph: Atlas Edition. The cool things I came up with were:

• It was underground in a world forgotten.

• The water glittered and rain went upward.

• The locals had no mouths but spoke with gestures and facial expressions.

• Terrible beasts lurked in the shadows and wastes. Their goal was to eventually make it to the surface.

I had the idea of turning it into a setting book, but we will see.

Next Month

To celebrate the recent successful kickstarting of Sundered Isles, next month will be all about Ironsworn-like games. In the June Lone Toad I’ll look at what other people have done with the bones of Ironsworn and then in Ribbiting Adventures Issue 4 I’ll dig into the Ironsworn gameplay loop in detail.

Thank you everyone for reading! We’ve recently passed 400 subscribers. I’m constantly blown away by all your support. Continue to like, share and comment! I love hearing what you all think about these posts and if you have suggestions for what to cover in the future, let me know!