This post has been a long time coming and involves some rehashing of old news and bits of drama. But more than anything, this is a positive post about where Coyote & Crow Games started, where it is heading and what we’ll be unveiling in the months and years to come. If you want to skip the history and get to the news & announcements you can just jump down to that section.
When I launched the Kickstarter for Coyote & Crow in March of 2021, I hoped to make the money back I’d invested and to secure enough money for my print run of the book. I honestly thought I’d be printing a few hundred books and donating a couple of dozen. Of course, things got a little…bigger.
About half way into the campaign, and we were passing half a million dollars, I began to consider whether or not I could stay at my day job. This was a tough call for me as I’d been with PSI for five years, I had a good, secure salary, a role I liked, health benefits, and a good reputation with the game publishers I worked with. But putting together a larger, more expansive book, dealing with all of the stretch goals? It was more than I could deal with while also working fifty hours a week.
Additionally, I had a number of industry friends advise me that taking the money from the Kickstarter, completing my rewards, and then walking away from the situation clean and clear was the best route to take – for my sanity and my heart. But I began to understand that the success of the roleplaying game pointed to a greater need. If the impetus for launching Coyote & Crow was my feeling that the game industry needed a better example of Indigenous representation behind the scenes as well as more positive portrayals of Native Americans, then didn’t I have a rare opportunity to not just throw out an example and walk away, but instead, open a door, hold it open for others and use Coyote & Crow as a way to truly blaze a new trail?
But as you can see in my last post, just because Coyote & Crow raised over $1 million, didn’t make me a millionaire. That little nest egg had a lot of heavy lifting to do. While I have a bit of experience in a wide range of skills, I wouldn’t really call myself more than an “adequate” at business. So right away I began looking for attorneys, tax experts, web developers and others to help me go beyond just creating the Kickstarter rewards and actually start forming a company.
Of course, the first question I had to ask myself creatively was, “What next?” So while I worked on assembling the business side of things and the Kickstarter rewards and all of the stretch goals, I also started planning on things like our custom dice, the story guide screen, merchandise and more. And I began thinking about what I needed to do to attend conventions once I had something to sell.
Simultaneously, I also knew that I was going to need help. I just couldn’t wear all of the hats and even if I had the time, I don’t have all of the skills or the bandwidth to learn everything on the fly. This brings me to some of my hardest lessons and ones that are at the core of what my big changes are about. It was time for me to start hiring some help.
Here’s where I made some mistakes. I try not to be too hard on myself because unlike a traditional game publisher who can model themselves after any number of other different game publishers out there, I had given myself the added challenge of trying to create an ethical, environmentally friendly company that focused on philanthropy, bringing fresh Native creatives into the hobby and putting out content that specifically gave an accurate and positive portrayal of Native Americans. This meant that I had to hire Native American folks where possible. It also meant not always doing the cheap way or the easy or established way.
To be specific about my mistake, what I did was, I envisioned a normal board game company as I knew it – how they operated, their staff, their work flow, all of it. Then I tried to take that model and heap all of my ideas on top of it, all of those added challenges I mentioned. I basically set myself up to fail. Boardgames and RPGs aren’t a high margin operation on the best of days. There aren’t many millionaires coming out of the gaming world.
Sure enough, I’ve lost thousands upon thousands of dollars and worse months and months of time. Without question, every single project has fallen behind my internal schedules and has gone way over my initial budgets. And while I can point fingers at the long list of folks who have taken initial payment from me for something only to miss deadlines, delay projects and eventually disappear with my money without ever delivering or who have even stolen inventory, the reality is, I’m the captain of this ship. I’m responsible for Coyote & Crow Games. And if I had to give myself a grade for how I’ve been running the company? I’d probably give myself a C-.
My doors are still open though. Things are still happening. In fact, the thrust of this post is that so much is happening that I can barely manage, or more accurately, I can no longer continue on the way I have been.
So, here we go.
News & Announcements
I had already been thinking big picture about how I could change things and still keep the company afloat and get my rent paid. But this year’s trip to Gen Con, last minute as it was, led to some fantastic meetings and conversations with incredible game industry folks like Ami Baio, Helaina Cappel, Geoff Englestein, James Lowder, and others. And while their advice and thoughts were varied, they all gave me some fantastic perspective that worked to bring my whole situation into focus.
Below, I’m going to actually talk about some announcements and partnerships that are coming. Some I’m going to tease, and certainly each thing in this list will get it’s own full announcement down the line.
But more importantly, all of these announcements and partnerships are moving the company toward a specific direction. One I hope let’s Coyote & Crow go its own way, rather than trying to make a traditional board game company model do all of the work that I need it to do.
Our New Structure And Goals
First up, I’m currently working on creating a major and lasting partnership with another publisher. The goal is that partner will take on some of the larger, more complex parts of Coyote & Crow – layouts, printing and manufacturing, crowdfunding, conventions, and more. The hope is that with these things moved to my daily margins, I can concentrate on the creative end of things more and give you all more than one new title per year. Even if that specific partnership doesn’t work out, I’ll be changing how my warehousing, fulfillment, and webstore are being handled within the year with the same goals in mind.
Second, going forward, Coyote & Crow Games, as a company, will only be producing things that exist within the Coyote & Crow universe. These may be RPG supplements, board games and other media outside of games, like comics and novels. Like it or not, Coyote & Crow Games has become synonymous with the fictional world I built for the RPG, meaning games like Wolves or others I’m working on that can exist outside of that world won’t get the attention they deserve because of Coyote & Crow’s shadow.
So what about games like Adela, the bead crafting game I’m working on? Where do they go? Well, games that don’t sit in the actual Coyote & Crow universe, like Adela, I’ll be pitching those to other game companies. Ones that have a better production pipeline and a wider audience but similar goals of diversity and sustainability. This will help games like Adela reach a wider audience – both more Natives and more non-Native folks who need to see what good Native representation looks like.
Next up is something that’s long overdue. I’m starting a division of Coyote & Crow Games that will be a consulting firm for Indigenous representation in games. We’ll have a number of Natives, myself included, that can act as design consultants, sensitivity readers and more. What’s more important though is that we’ll do the legwork of making sure publishers have specific, accurate, and helpful information for including Native elements in their game. I want people to know that if a game says “Coyote & Crow Consulting” in the credits, that they can be sure what they’re seeing is done right.
I’ve also recognized a need to work cooperatively with other Native publishers and entrepreneurs when it comes to conventions. With costs rising, staffing issues, and other specific needs or hurdles, it makes sense that we don’t try to go things solo every time. So I’m speaking with a number of folks about how we might tackle that and do something different for everyone’s benefit. That won’t be a Coyote & Crow Games initiative, but something I hope becomes it’s own flourishing entity.
I’m also working on licensing out Coyote & Crow to some other publishing partners for various C&C related things that they can produce better than I can. We already have great relationships with folks like Roll20, DriveThruRPG, and Hero Forge, and Qworkshop, but I think we’re ready for more. We’ve got a few that we’ll be announcing very soon. Here’s everything on the horizon. Again, we’ll have specific full announcements for each of these as they solidify.
Partnerships
- Co-Publisher Partnership: Announcement Coming Very Soon – working on details
- Publisher Licensing Partnership #1: Deal signed, working on announcement date
- Publisher Licensing Partnership #2: Working on project details, no announcement date estimate yet
- Merchandise Partnership: We’re going to have new shirts soon! We may be able to drop this announcement with links any day now.
Announcements
- New Project #1: Early October 2024. We’ll unveil our new crowdfunding effort, which will hopefully be launching in November of this year. 11/1 if I can manage it. This is something that has developed quickly and suddenly, but I’m really excited about.
- Coyote & Crow Consulting: Early 2025.
- 11/1 Announcement – Surprise for Native American Heritage Month
- Native Creative Collective: We might have news about this in time for PAX Unplugged, but it may have to wait until early 2025.
- Primacy: The Coyote & Crow Card Game is coming. We’re well into development, graphics, testing and more. However, because of New Project #1, we’ll be pushing back the crowdfunding for it to early 2025.
- Coyote & Crow RPG Major Secret Project: Announcement in 2025
- Connor’s Secret Project with another publisher: Announcement coming very soon
Siyo folks!
So many updates for you. First off, if you haven’t heard by now, Coyote and Crow is Live On Kickstarter MARCH 2nd! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/connoralexander/coyote-and-crow/ Please sign up there for notifications and/or for our newsletter HERE.
We’re also going to have a separate post that will detail all of the places you can read or hear more about the game through other sources (podcasts, interviews, etc). We’ll update that post with new links as they become available.
(more…) Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, first nations, gaming, indigneous, native, native american, role playing, rpg, tabletop, ttrpgSiyo folks!
Our Kickstarter video is now live on YouTube. You can check it here:
Hope it gets you as excited as it has us!
Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, games, gaming, indigenous, indigenous futurism, kickstarter, native, native american, roleplaying game, rpg, tabletop, ttrpg
So much exciting news. Let’s jump right in to the updates!
(more…) Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, coyote and crow, indian, indigenous, indigenous futurism, native, native american, NDN, role playing, rpg, tabletop, ttrpg
So much happening that it’s hard to keep up. But before we get to the happy stuff, I have a confession to make because I’m trying to be as transparent with our creation process as possible.
I’m scared shitless, my friends.
(more…) Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, coyote and crow, first nation, game, indian, indigenous, native, role playing, rpg, ttrpgOsiyo!
Apologies for the lack of updates lately, but I’m happy to report that it’s been because we’ve been really busy on our end. Let’s jump into all of the good news!
- After some chats with various folks including team members, industry colleagues and a very unscientific Twitter poll, we’re going to stop trying to squeeze our Kickstarter in before the end of the year. Instead we’ll likely be looking at the early part of the first half of 2021. It will be here before we know it!
- We’ve got a great new graphic designer on board and I’m really anxious to be able to show you all some of the things he’s working on.
- Our cover art will hopefully be completed shortly!
- We’re currently working on another round of edits and development after we did a blind test of a group of our alpha testers taking the materials and making a character on their own. We learned a lot from that!
- The materials continue to get both more refined and voluminous. We’re currently estimating the book at about 250 pages!
- We got mentioned along side Rebecca Roanhorse’s new book, Dark Sun on Tor’s website! You can read the article HERE.
- We’ve made some hefty changes to help streamline some of the mechanics.
- Lastly, our GoFundMe (which is still up and available) hit it’s goal of more than $2000! Thank you all for your generosity. It will mean we get many more pieces of Indigenous art into our final product.
That’s it for now, but we’ll have more soon. Take care. Vote Trump out. Be safe. Be kind. Wado.
Blog || Tags: connor alexander, coyote and crow, dark sun, first nation, indigenous, indigenous futurism, native, native american, rebecca roanhorse, rpg, ttrpg
Over the last couple of years, I’ve received a number of variations of the following question: “What about real world tribe X in Coyote and Crow? What happened to them?” I’ve decided now is a great time to tackle this question and address some important issues. Buckle up!
(more…) Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, coyote, coyote and crow, crow, first nation, game, indigenous, indigenous futurism, native american, role playing, rpg, tabletop, ttrpg
I’ve been doing so much work on the timeline, facts and rules for Coyote and Crow that it recently came to my attention that I’ve been sort of secretive about what the world looks and feels like. So, let’s do this! (* One important note: C&C is still in development. Everything I talk about here is not final and may change between now and the final game.)
Osiyo! As I write this, my mind is really not very focused on Coyote and Crow development. It’s on my fellow Natives and my Black brothers and sisters who are out fighting for their very survival. I’m doing my best to keep momentum going though, as I feel like we need hopeful, positive portrayals of people of color in games, now more than ever. But it ain’t easy.
Here’s where we’re at:
(more…) Coyote And Crow News || Tags: connor alexander, coyote, coyote and crow, crow, fantasy, first nation, game, gaming, hope punk, indigenous, native american, role playing, rpg, scifi, solar punk, tabletop, ttrpg