Building Worlds One Map at a Time

I'm an artist and medical student, and I use art to help me pay some bills.

I built a free, helpful tool because to help prevent other talented creatives from undercharging, as I really see this a lot online.

It's a calculator with a built in reality check

Input your survival costs and expenses

True billable hours

Get the rate you actually need to charge to hit a 20% (or whatever you choose) profit margin.

It generates the rate, a template negotiation email + final invoice.

Plan to keep this tool free, ad-free, and open to everyone.

🔗 Check your math: fairpaycalc.artres.xyz

If the "Thriving Rate" calculation empowers you to double your quote on your next job, please consider hitting the "Buy me a coffee"button. It keeps the server running and the code flowing <3

I’m making this a separate post because the original is funniest without context, but for real you have no idea how stressful this is. The reason why relates to this post

As independent artists making a living from our art, it isn’t enough to just make good art, especially when that art is a TTRPG. TTRPGs are not a respected artform, not even by the primary consumerbase. It’s so dire that it takes us making a lot of long posts just to convince people that TTRPG game design is real at all, that a TTRPG’s rules can be written a certain way on purpose to have intended results.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy has good game mechanics, on purpose, but having good game mechanics is only actually a selling point to a shockingly small percentage of people who play TTRPGs, so those good game mechanics won’t sell the game, at least not as much as we need to continue operations.

But no matter how good your art is or how respected your artistic medium is, just making good art is not enough to make a living. Because the truth is, art doesn’t make money at all, social media does. The best, most overtly good art in the world only makes as much money as the number of paying customers that you can reach. All the money we make through Eureka is because I’m out here on tumblr busting my ass to get these notes, followers, etc.

Money is tight, we need to finish Eureka, and we need a new release like Silk & Dagger and Death Bed to get multiple major revenue streams and diversify our market reach in order to make more money and, like, pay my bills, but I can’t work on either of those right now, because I have to spend at least one work day a week entirely focused on social media or else no amount of progress on our real projects means anything, because otherwise they won’t sell.

It’s a little bit like being disabled - or rather kind of an extension of being disabled, since if I was more able-bodied I could work a “real” job that has a steady paycheck - my actual survival depends on other people liking me more than anything else, it’s a popularity contest, and not only I’m particularly strong in, as an uncharismatic, abrasive aspie with strong opinions about the very medium art that I work in, in an environment where openly disliking an element of the art that someone else engages with is considered not just a personal, but moral attack.

If you think this actually does make reblogging hot goth elves on tumblr sound pretty stressful, and want me to make enough money to continue to make TTRPGs for a living, there's a bunch that you can do to help even without spending a dime.

Follow us on tumblr and bluesky

Reblogging/retweeting/whatever our posts on these sites, even if you don't have many followers, makes a huge difference and is actually how we get most of our new fans and patreon subscribers.

Talk about us!

Play our games, tell your friends about them, make posts about your adventures or characters from our games, make homebrew stuff, etc. Like with the social media posts, this is the only way the word gets out about who we are and what we do! Without word-of-mouth, we're dead in the water.

Subscribe to our Patreon!

You get monthly rewards such as Eureka updates, adventure modules, short stories, previews of new games, etc. It also gets you into our patron-exclusive discord server!

Buy, or just download, our games on Itch.io

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Eureka Adventure Modules Vol. 1

Eureka: The Fanservice Files

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG

Edge Hedge Arena

Money helps a lot, but even just downloading them for free gives us a boost in the algorithm and gets more eyes on us!

Donate on Ko-fi How this helps is pretty obvious.

Buy our snoop merchandise

Egg Necklace

early 20th century

“A gold chain necklace with clasp. Attached to the necklace are thirty-two miniature eggs. The eggs alternate with small diamonds which are part of the necklace's chain.”

Russia

A few hours later, the villagers watched him riding off in his fireproof suit, his oil and whisky in a cart behind him.

“Do you think he's really going to…”

“Surely not.”

“I mean the oil…”

“At least he's considerate.”

“At least he needs whisky.”

For the rest of the day, the villagers went about their chores in the shadow of the mountain where the dragon made her lair, trying not to think about what might be happening up there. At one point there was a sudden rise of smoke, as if a great fire had been lit. Followed by a draconic roar.

At the end of the day, the knight rode down again. The cart was empty. His suit was blackened. He looked exhausted, and was sheened with sweat.

“Job done,” he said as he got down from his horse.

The villagers stared.

“Poor girl is barely out of her first shed. Poor thing. Never been in heat before, didn't know what to do.”

The villagers kept staring.

“Should be alright now.”

The head man of the village felt like he should probably say something. “Are you… are you alright?”

The knight looked down at his suit. “This? Oh yeah, she sent out a few warning shots. Didn't like me getting too close to her lair.”

“So you…” the head man's sentence was cut off by another roar, and the sound of wings flapping overhead. The villagers ducked as one, the knight simply looked up, grinning.

“Olive oil and whisky, never fails.” He looked around at their confused faces. “See, normally the female is meant to build a fire herself to draw the males to her. She produces an oil from her cheek glands that lets them know she's in heat. Burning olive oil and whisky mixed smells the same— at least to a dragon— so you can use it in a pinch.” He pointed upwards. “That'll be the male.”