The Empress tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck.
This is Shewstone Publishing’s sixth year-end update, marking the end of our ninth year in business. I’ve been choosing a different tarot card each year to sum up our company’s journey. Before you know it, we’ll be running short of major arcana!
The Empress card represents “Fruitfulness, action, initiative, length of days; the unknown, the clandestine; also difficulty, doubt, ignorance.” That about sums up 2025 for us!
A Down Market for TTRPGs
It’s been a tough year here in the United States, due to the actions of the sitting President. People are shaken. There have been some direct impacts on Shewstone’s business, such as the increased price of paper due to import tariffs. Inflation has squeezed people’s budgets and their job security is weakened. There’s simply less spending on entertainment. This is where the “difficulty” and “doubt” from the tarot card come in. (I’ll leave how “ignorance” fits as an exercise for the reader.)
At the same time, the number of people actively playing TTRPGs is higher than before the pandemic. There are brilliant, innovative products on the market if you have the time and energy to seek them out. The hobby overall is thriving, and I maintain we’re in a golden age of creative output from the indie community.
Marketing Remains a Challenge
I’m very happy with the quality of customers and followers we’ve accumulated—you folks are a joy and an inspiration. I’m still working on getting the right quantity of customers.
I believe there are plenty of gamers out there who would love our products’ rich, literate lore and our commitment to thought-out, playable design. It remains a struggle to reach them. The online communities I’ve seen are fragmented. Most active forums have a few hundred members at most. From each community, I can expect to gain a handful of new customers at best.
In 2025 I spent more on paid advertising than I had done before, and got better results than before. The jury is still out whether I can get a reliable return on investment. Niche channels dedicated to independent TTRPGs have been the most effective, by far. If you know of indie TTRPG newsletters or magazines that accept paid advertising, let me know!
For 2026, I’m also interested in interview appearances on podcasts and YouTube channels. I interview well, and there’s mutual benefit when I provide the creator with an interview and they provide me with exposure to their audience.
Kickstarter Union Triumphs!
In October 2025, a Kickstarter employee contacted me by email, asking me to attend their protest in Boston. Workers were on strike over a lack of a fair contract. I took a couple of hours out of my work day and showed up, listening to speakers and joining in their chants and protest songs. It was a good time; the workers were in high spirits. I’m delighted to say that a month later, the union prevailed and management conceded to all their demands. Union Strong!
101 Tales of Magic and Mystery Funded on Kickstarter!
Here’s where the “fruitfulness” and “action” from the Empress tarot card come in: we successfully funded a Magonomia® sourcebook called 101 Tales of Magic and Mystery!
This is a really remarkable TTRPG product. It’s a (large) set of frameworks for RPGs adventures that give you a well thought out plot outline for an adventure, grounded in the history and folklore of Renaissance England—more specifically, in the Enchanted England setting of the Magonomia TTRPG. These are not fully scripted adventures—they’re starter kits for making your own adventure, with a great plot and all the essential details you need to keep it coherent through all the unexpected things TTRPG players do. Think of them as improv notes for the GM. We packed a hundred and one of them into a book, written by a team of six authors.
THANK YOU to the backers who proved that people want this product that we poured two years of blood, sweat, and tears into. This was a “Stone Soup” project that I thought would be quick, fun, and easy. It turned out to be fun. (One out of three!)
This is our third successful crowdfunding project, and our second success on Kickstarter.
If you missed the Kickstarter—I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for general publication, currently on track for June 2026. Kickstarter has finally enabled the much-needed “late pledges” feature but it didn’t work for me. Late pledges don’t work once fulfillment has begun, and I shared the work-in-progress manuscript with backers immediately so they don’t have to wait till June to start enjoying it. We’ll be sure to announce on this blog and in our newsletter when the book is ready for sale!
A Building Year for Drintera®
Our Drintera TTPRG setting project had to be heavily restructured. Coming into 2025, we were publishing it as a monthly magazine but we had very few sales and subscribers. Sales were simply much too slow to continue production on a monthly basis.
I gave up on the monthly magazine model in January 2025. The magazine definitely wasn’t viable in its 2024 form. I’m proud of the achievement of those high quality issues but the continuous effort burned me out and the cost deficits drained Shewstone’s bank account.
It took all of 2025 to recover. Recovering from burnout counts as another level-up for Shewstone. We’re now an eighth-level TTRPG publisher.
Drintera will continue but at a smaller, sustainable scale. For 2026, we’re planning an annual zine that focuses on one continent: Throntru, our North American inspired region. One of the special things about Drintera is that we’ve assembled a diverse, international creative team and encouraged them to represent their own cultures in a fantasy world, using their own unique voices. I’m proud to work with the Native American authors and allies who are building an uncolonized vision of fantasy based on Indigenous culture and folklore.
We’ll be Kickstarting the Throntru zine in Februrary 2026. We have a project plan that will expand the zine into a booklet or even a full-sized book if we can raise enough money to pay for the writing and artwork. It will be a low cost Kickstarter: only $15 for the zine. The more backers support us, the more artwork and writing will be commissioned, so the zine will grow! Follow our Kickstarter today, and spread the word to your friends so we can go viral on launch!
Hero of the Plains by Erebus Art.
All the work of rethinking the Drintera strategy, and planning the actual articles we’ll write for the expandable zine, aligns with both the “action” and “initiative” and the “clandestine” aspects of the Empress tarot card. It was done over the second half of the year, collaboratively with the Indigenous creators who anchor the Throntru design team.
Looking Ahead
Changes are coming in 2026.
I’ve learned the limits of how much work I’m willing to do for this part-time business. We’ll be celebrating our tenth year in business this summer. The books we’ve written have each taken two years or more to write. Even if sales had quickly recovered our costs (they haven’t), that’s an awfully long turn-around time on a project.
The future of Shewstone Publishing is going to feature smaller products that can be produced in months, not years, and at lower cost than a full-length book. Expect products of 20 or 30 pages, not 300. For our valued and loyal fan base, that means cool stuff more often! For the friends we haven’t met yet, it means smaller, more approachable products.
This year, we’ve gained new customers through our Kickstarter and we’re going to do our level best to deliver the best written and best designed TTRPG products they’ve ever seen. We’re looking forward to keeping that commitment for many years to come. Thank you for coming with us on this adventure!
