Building the World of Song (Part 1)

Splash image with the title "Building the World of Song" and line art map from the Starfall on Tyrian Peak adventure from Midnight Muscadines. — Artwork by Galen Pejeau

Over the last eighteen months my job has been to write the setting for Midnight Muscadines with the extensive help of the talented writer, game designer, and author M. Allen Hall alongside the feedback of many play testers, early readers, fans, and community members.

Midnight Muscadines has received praise for it’s worldbuilding, lore, characters, and interconnected locations, NPCs and events. For a game that could have sunk into a silly and outlandish premise of making magical jams that you eat to cast spells, I’m very proud of that.

As this is one of my favorite topics, strap in, we’re going to go deep.

Point and Click Adventure TTRPGs

Callout box card, reading: "You spot a matte brown-and-cream RV parked by a field of wildflowers. “Copper and Cashmere Travelling Inn” is painted in flowing text across the side panels of the old winnebago overtop the yellow and green pinstripping."

If you talk with me for long enough, I’ll eventually bring up or reference Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey in some way. It is impossible to overstate how important these two pieces of media are for me. Perhaps I’ll deep dive on why in a post one day, but that’s not for today.

The important thing is that while I was reading the Grim Fandango Design Document written by Tim Schafer in late 2025, something clicked:

Point and Click adventure games are solo, interactive choose-your-own-adventure point-crawl roleplaying games.

Batch Writing Descriptions

A green banner with black outline. In the center is the text: "I need to write 10 biomes with: 25 creatures, 15 encounters, and 10 towns per biome, with 15 NPCs per town. That's only... 660 descriptions..."

Over the last four years, I have written hundreds of descriptions for new monsters, ingredients, NPCs, backgrounds, classes, towns, clues, and more. Writing one or two comes pretty easily for me, but writing fifty? One-hundred? It becomes daunting, and I often get hit with writer’s block.

So here’s a trick I picked up to help me write out batches of descriptions and avoid that dreaded creative paralysis that plagues writers everywhere.

2025 Year in Review

I imagine life as a book. A massive tome of all our experiences broken into chapters. Some end abruptly, leaving loose ends and confusion, others have a nice tidy conclusion to them. Many characters span between chapters with us or perhaps a new cast appears.

Regardless of how a chapter closes, a new chapter begins with a major life change: a new job, an important person leaving or entering your life, moving to a new city, committing to a big decision, etc.

2025 didn’t just see a new chapter opening. This year, it feels like I entered ACT II of my life-book.

Jumping into Shipping (US)

We specifically try to keep everything cardboard for recyclability, so no poly mailers, plastic slips, or bubblewrap for us. Every additional piece you add to your shipping is additional cost, so we also keep it simple.

Outer Packaging

Envelopes

For A5 zines we use 7.25 x 11 padded envelope mailers from EcoEnclose. These fit 1-4 zines well depending on thickness of each. Our A5 44pg perfect bound book can be paired easily with two A5 12pg saddle stitch in these.

To get started, you can pick up a smaller 7 x 9 hard sided envelope from Amazon. These worked really well for us for 2 years, but EcoEnclose’s padded envelopes are cheaper and more versatile.

Getting Started Selling Books

This was originally written in 2022, and I try to keep it updated for others creators to reference.

Introduction

In the TTRPG space, especially indies, there's the thought that you need to run crowdfunding to get your games made and make a living. I'm going to make the argument that for a good, sustainable business, you need to use crowdfunding as a marketing and awareness tool, but not rely on it as your primary funding method.

What we've done is a slower, lower risk, lower stress approach. It takes time, but at the end of the day, it's a slow burn of growth and getting your name out there, and building reach and recognition to build up consistent sales.

Write Your Game’s Pitch

This is a first in a series of posts I'm putting together. These are meant to provide tips and a discussion. What you read here might not work for you, and that’s okay. Change it up!

You have a game.

Maybe it's a 1 pager hack of honey heist, a 12 page setting agnostic zine, or a behemoth 250 page hardback epic. But how do you talk about your game? You have 140 characters on Twitter, ad images give you 1080x1080 pixels viewed as a 2" square on a phone screen, and most potential customers and fans will give your words about 10-20 seconds of attention.

You need a pitch! A 1-3 sentence summary of what your game is that hooks that audience! The pitch needs to catch the attention of publishers, distributors or customers and pique their interest for more information. What each audience is looking for is a little different.

Setting up Shopify for Wholesale

This is a bit more technical of a document then my other writeups. I cannot provide you technical support, but if something is confusing or unclear, you can message us on Discord or at hello at pandiongames dot com

These are instructions for configuring your Shopify store to support a gated wholesale portal. To do this, we use:

Templates and collections to create a password protected area
Customer tags to assign permissions to for access
Shopify Bundles App to show wholesale prices while keeping inventories synced.

We decided to use this method because Shopify Wholesale Portal app requires Shopify Plus, which is $2,000/month, and wholesale marketplaces like Faire take too large a cut to make using them sustainable ($10 + 15% on top of your 50-60% wholesale prices).

Setting Up Itchfunding

Note: This was originally written in January 2022 for Zine Month. We worked with several other creators to try to tweak itch.io to work for us as a crowdfunding platform.

Itch is a great website, but it isn’t really built for Crowdfunding like Kickstarter, Gamefound and others. This article is looking at some of the things we did to set up Itchfunding to act similarly to other crowdfunding platforms.

Before we get into it, it is important to understand that Itchfunding excels at the lower-stress long-burn of funding campaigns. There’s no time limit, no deadline. However, I wanted to have a strong ‘release day’ and build hype around the game I’m working on. As such, I want to emulate several KS features.