DarkSpace was mostly a two-man job of hundreds of late night hours to publish a 60 page document. That’s still less than $0.25 per page of work. While larger corporate publishers are able to publish their PDFs at a lower cost because of their expected sale volume, we are not able to do so and be compensated for what we feel is a fair price for our work.

If that price is cost-prohibitive, we understand. We hope that you will subscribe to the newsletter to recieve updates about the full version and hope that when it launches you will find that more in line with your expectations.

Fair question. The Quickstart Rules do include AI art because they are intended to be low production value to get the rules out for people to try out and provide a few pieces of art to convey the variety of characters that you can make with the rules.

I (Than) am an artist as well and know the struggle it is to get paid a fair share for your work especially in the face of generative AI art. Rather than underpaying someone or asking them to do work “for the exposure”, I made the choice to selectively use 9 pieces of AI art that I made with Midjourney, including our amazing front cover.

Our hope is that people will support us enough that we can pay actual artists a fair price when the final book is crowdfunded and released.

Until then, we offer an art-free version here if you want just the rules:
https://www.dmingtheworld.com/dming-the-world-shop/p/darkspace-rpg-no-art-version

Great question! Most sci-fi RPGs have very specific genres. DarkSpace is designed to be a rules-lite framework that you could put any type of space genre on top of whether it's survival space horror, epic space opera, or pulpy space western.

We're not necessarily trying to replace any of those games. They're fantastic games. If you're happy with them then stick with them. We're just utilizing the excellent Shadowdark system to make sci-fi adventures for the folks who love the system.

Ultimately, yes we want to crowdfund the full release. We would like to be able to release it in both digital and physical format with all of the bells and whistles that come with a successful crowdfund campaign. But we have to write the rest of it first.

We believe that a crowdfunded RPG book should be basically ready to go to the printer before the campaign is launched for two reasons.

First, it’s the nature of the beast that large print jobs get delayed. Being ready to go means you minimize the delay.

Second, and more importantly, it’s part of the social contract with the backers. They’ve given you an investment, return that to them as quickly as possible.

We plan to include a lot more for DarkSpace GMs - generation tables, denizens, upgrades, an in-game gambling game, actual art by actual artists.

There’s lots more to come! Sign up for the newsletter to get updates on the progress!

Yes please! We state in the licensing section that we grant permission for third-party content creation in adherence with the Shadowdark Third-Party Content license.
That means you need to follow the Arcane Library’s rules first but we ask that you honor those restrictions with our book as well.

If you do publish third-party content reach out and let us know. We’d love to see it and help promote it.