Fan Club “Blog” #12: Season 2 Update

Alright, here's how it is. You folks eagerly consumed Quinns Quest Season 1. You bought the games I suggested! You pledged your dollars to this very Patreon. You left comments, and almost all of those comments were very nice.

This can only mean one thing: Quinns Quest Season 2 is coming soon.

It's no exaggeration to say that the support of folks like yourself has been absolutely life-changing. Today, I'm going to present myself for something like a full medical check-up. I want to tell you how I'm doing financially, emotionally, and logistically. Tl;dr the answers are basically ✅✅✅, we're all good, but that's not to say there aren't.. complications.

QUINNS HOW ARE YOUR FINANCES? 💰

The finances of Quinns Quest are GOOD!

This might have escaped your attention but I actually don't have YouTube adverts switched on in Quinns Quest videos, because the money you get is so bleak that I'd rather just offer an ad-free experience for anyone who wants to learn about TTRPGs.

This means that Patreon income (and some very scattered bits of freelance, like GMing professionally for Modiphius) is the only income Quinns Quest has. But that's okay! Fully paywalling a bunch of extra content for dedicated fans was always my business model for Quinns Quest, and things are going alright!

Here are my accounts in a nutshell:

• Money comes in from Patreon
  
• A big percentage of it gets put aside for the TAX MAN 👨‍💼 (it's okay, I don't hate paying tax, inside me is the skeleton of a born socialist)
  
• I put money aside for my video editor. She's great! One of the best things about the Patreon doing well is I can now pay her to edit videos so I can focus on (waves hands) everything else
  
• I then pay the real-life, talented friends of mine who do Quinns Quest's art design, its music, and even do passes over my writing
  
• The Patreon money then pays for stuff like cameras, microphones, lights, props, travel, batteries, software, and - I don't know if you all know this - snacks and drinks for the players at my RPG nights! That was a milestone promise I made on Patreon a while back and ever since then my players have been inhaling twiglets and cans of shandy and they're all very happy
  
• I then pay myself, because Quinns Quest is something close to a full-time job
  
• About half of what's left is then spent funding experiments. Basically stuff that's not reviews that I think you guys might enjoy, or that might otherwise gain some traction online. You'll see more of this in 2025
  
• The other half of what's left gets stashed for emergencies, so that if there's some disaster or act of god Quinns Quest doesn't just end until I get my next Patreon payout. I consider this a respectful thing to do for y'all 👍
  

If I can manage to keep growing the number of Quinns Quest patrons in 2025 then my mental health will be... hang on, this really should go under the next header

QUINNS HOW ARE YOUR EMOTIONS? 😭

My emotions are good! Thanks for asking. It's almost bizarre how happy I feel considering I spent the last three months in a cast and then had food poisoning for five straight days over Christmas, but I guess that's the power of "Starting a business and it miraculously going well?"

That said, there are a couple of areas where I'm... keeping an eye on myself, let's say.

The first of which is making sure that - like an Olympic torch - I'm able to carry my love of TTRPGs into 2026 and beyond. I know from experience that the act of transforming what you love to do into what you have to do for work leads to that passion being put under immense pressure. Recently, I've been feeling that a little more keenly.

Remember in my Broke Leg Blog where I talked about how the injury would give me more time to play RPGs? I ended up starting three roleplaying campaigns of three different games that have all been running for the last couple of months, and this has confirmed something for me: One RPG night a week is fantastic, two can be intense, and three is just too many. It's not that I'm not enjoying them, but my GM drive goes from "Let's think how I can make this a session to remember!!" to "Oh jesus okay let's just get through this session in one piece", and that means I experience more stress and less pride before the session, and during it, and after it.

I can confirm that Public Access is an absolute belter of a game, though. Holy crap. We're having so much fun. Below you can see a sneak preview from the vast amount of paperwork in our game:



The other nasty little thought that's been swimming around my conscious mind is... maybe not that real? Or maybe it is?

Basically at the beginning of Season 1 I was an outsider to the TTRPG community, but by the end of 2024 I was... erm, not. Depending on what metrics you care about I'm probably the biggest reviewer covering independent TTRPGs. I sold a lot of books this year, especially when it comes to The Wildsea, Heart and Mothership.

And the thing about being in a position like that in a community where the vast majority of people are making games or content for the love of it, with very little financial reward, is that you sort of become The Man and it becomes more and more fair to criticise you.

So basically, I'm now dealing with creeping paranoia over what I publish. When I uploaded my review of The Wildsea at the beginning of last year, I felt like an excitable fan just sharing a book he thought was cool. One year on, I'm fretting more about the games I'm covering in season 2, I'm second-guessing what I say about them, and I'm stressing about what people are going to say about the things I say.

I don't love that. But that's why it's been so nice that you folks, my Patreon community, have been a source of real positivity throughout the year.

When the pressure all gets a bit much for me, I tell myself that I'm not making reviews for the entire TTRPG community. I'm making it for my patrons. Then everything seems a bit more manageable. 😊

So please, keep the good vibes coming. I don't want to sound needy, but the fact is that your positive energy means just as much as your financial support.

QUINNS HOW ARE YOUR LOGISTICS? 🖇️

Oh god. They're fine. They're okay? 😅

Basically, completing season 1 took a year of my life, during which I also learned that people prefer longer reviews. So season 2 has more episodes and the episodes are longer on average (I teased this over on the Quinns Quest discord but I've written one review so far and it's longer than the longest review in S1).

So, season 2 represents a lot more work.

I thought to myself that this wasn't a problem, because with season 2 I would simply work smarter, not harder. If I batch-write the entire season in a couple of months by finding a really nice workflow where I write every morning, then I batch-film everything in a couple of months where I leave all the cameras and lights permanently set up in my living room, I could be so much more efficient! "Why," I thought to myself, "This way I could be done by June!"

I've been working this way for about a week now, just writing every day, chipping away at the scripts for season 2 and... uh, basically I was dumb and wrong and this isn't going to work.

The wordcount for all of Quinns Quest Season 2, plus all of the Patreon videos, is approximately 75,000 words, which is practically a novel. Now, if this was just a case of writing on a scale that I've never written before in my life, I could maaaybe do it? But the real problem is the more ineffable stuff in my writing process that starts to get claggy and go wrong when I try to write everything all at once.

Basically, the perfect workflow for me is to (a) play a game, (b) write about a game while it's fresh in my brain and my soul, (c) publish the video, (d) receive constructive feedback and good vibes from my audience, and then (e) take that energy to pour it into another video.

Here's how "Writing all of season 2 at once" is going for me so far:

(a) play a game, (b) play a game, (c) play a game, (b) play the second game again, (d) get confused, (e) try and remember how I felt about game (k) that I played 5 months ago, (f) write about game, just absolutely grinding out the script, (g) realise you now have to go straight back into writing ANOTHER script with no feedback or good vibes, and you have to do this whole thing six more times, (h) panic (i) remember you need to write a Patreon post, (j) write the Patreon post you're reading now.

I think the solution is going to be something in between. Maybe writing 2 or 3 videos at a time and filming them together? That sounds like a happy middle ground.

Okay, that's quite enough granular details about Quinns Quest Season 2, and I haven't even talked about the new look you can see in the header image. Ohoho.

Plenty of stupid ideas are coming your way, let me tell you. I can't wait for you to see (and hear...) what me and my team are cooking up.

Speak soon, everyone. Sending love from the UK.

Ohohoho.

xx

Quinns