**This post is rated R.**

Do you like table top RPGs? Do you know what table top RPGs are?

If the first thing that came to mind is Dungeons & Dragons well… yes. They are kind of the table top RPG (TTRPG to the playah’s out there) but they are actually just one of many. There are tons and tons of these kind of games.

And for the most part they are game where you take on a character (role-playing) and play through a game as that character. Some folks go full hog and really lean into the role-playing aspects. For others, that character is really not much different than choosing between the boot or the top hat in Monopoly and just a necessary element to engage with the game.

The games generally involve some goals. And the TTRPG world is much, much larger than just dragons and elves and fairies. You can pretty much find a game where you are pretending to be anyone or do anything.

There’s a very popular vampire RPG. And if you start to delve into the world of these games, it pretty much never ends.

Until May 2022, I knew pretty much nothing of this world.

Then I met my boyfriend and he is, there are no two ways about it, a total, total dork (and also very, very cute). His favorite past times in the world are Dungeons & Dragons and escape rooms.

After we had been together for a while, his birthday rolled around and I wondered if there was like a 2 player version of Dungeons & Dragons. And then I also wondered, is there like a spicy one?

It turns out, there is. The Book of Erotic Fantasy. Which if you’re not a D&D player, or maybe even if you are, is a little overwhelming both content wise and how on earth do you even play this wise?

And then I thought, how hard could this be to make?

…famous last words, #amiright?

Also, I live a pretty healthy side hustle life, right? So I thought if there is a gap in the market here, maybe I can create this little side hustle to help patch the hole in the boat that is my income these days.

So I reached out to a friend who writes romance novels for a living and she laughed and said she had also thought many times about how that item doesn’t exist because she and her husband are avid RPGers.

And her husband is also a good friend from college and so the three of us formed the weirdest little company together back in July 2022 – The Bold and the Brazen.

Our goal was to have a functional prototype ready to go for Christmas 2022. LOL. That didn’t happen.

How hard could it be was an understatement.

L.J. and Capricos wrote most of the storylines by September 2022 and all three of us would meet weekly to discuss the game mechanics – whether they even made sense.

And you would think that for a spicy RPG the conversations would be wild but in reality they were 80% gaming mechanics, editing writing, and graphic design. 15% exceptionally bizarre conversations like how to get people to beta test this, report on the elements we actually want to hear about and ideally not report on the elements of their gameplay that we don’t want to hear about. And 5% blatantly blunt talk about the spicy aspects and hilarious puns.

I taught myself how to do the layout in Pages and then Pages couldn’t do what we really wanted it to be doing, so I taught myself Adobe InDesign which has been both one of the coolest and most frustrating skills I’ve gained over the last year. I also never knew how passionate I was about fonts and what I feel are the correct proportions of white space on a page but apparently I am.

We were finally able to launch an IndieGoGo for the game that was scheduled to end on Valentine’s Day – with all supporters sent a PDF version of the game that they could download before the end of the day.

It did not go well. We raised about $400.

Or maybe that is well? But the plan had been about $10,000 to hire proper artists and create a physical version of the game.

For now, we’ve decided to list it on itch.io – a game site that has a lot of RPGs and we’ve sold a few copies. We’ve also spent most of the IndieGoGo money on advertising.

We have a wild dream (that I’m manifesting here) that HBO or some television network will find our little game with it’s crazy story plots and be like – this would be a great TV series – and buy us out.

But the more realistic dream is just to get better at marketing and spread the word some more. We’re also working on converting the current version for sale into a version that can be sold on Amazon through their print on demand portal.

I never fully appreciated what a pain in the butt is to reformat things for all these different ways of publication until I became the person responsible for doing it. I am also a little artistically frustrated because I feel very strongly it should be a tangible item you can hold in your hands and I very much prefer the game be split into 4 books rather than all as one large book so you just use the section you need at any given time.

But someday I think my dream will come true.

In the meantime, if you and your partner like RPGs (and the game was actually designed with the idea that one partner really loves them and the other is willing to give it a go – the rules are very simple), check us out here and please leave a PG-13 style review of the game if you do!

So overall, not my most lucrative side hustle. And probably the second most amount of work next to this blog, but we’re not giving up on it yet. We also have ideas for several expansion stories to keep us busy for quite a while.

Have you ever built a game before? What did you find was the most difficult part?