Conlin from Infinite Citadel here.

I wanted to post a little write up about what Infinite Citadel is, what we're trying to do with it, and what we've got going on right now. This is the first post in what I'm hoping will be a continued series on Building the Citadel. We'll use it to share what we've learned on this wild journey and help the next crew.

What is Infinite Citadel?

Infinite Citadel is a lot of things - it's a TTRPG company, an aspiration of a better kind of work, and a place for us to try something new.

On that first point, at the simplest level IC is a company that makes and publishes systems, settings, and other tools for tabletop roleplaying games. We're independent from the bigger publishers and we're focused on maintaining the feeling of being an indie group.

That brings us to the next point - Infinite Citadel is an aspiration to build a system by which our members and friends can work together on the various projects we all want to work on. In more concrete terms that means we're a bit of a blend between a worker coop and artist coop. We share resources, tools, knowledge and funds to help get our games created, launched, marketed, and sold.

What are we doing differently?

Finally, that brings us to trying something new. The TTRPG industry is an interesting space. Wizards of the Coast has somewhere around 1000 employees. The next largest are companies like Paizo and Kobold Press, whose employee counts are in the 10s. One more step down and you are in the realm of single developers and very small publishing companies.

Not all WoTC employees work on D&D, but they have the resources of a company that is much larger than any other in the space.

With Infinite Citadel, we're trying to build something with the reach of a "larger" company like Paizo, Darrington Press, and Kobold Press, but with a focus on worker ownership and cooperative labor.

To that end, we're in the process of building out our operating agreements and all the necessary legal stuff we need to start a co-op. Right now, we operate as a member-owned LLC with all three of our member-owners having an equal stake in the company.

We're still learning a lot of this stuff and we're very new to it all. Luckily, we're looking at joining the USFWC, who have some amazing resources for building cooperative businesses. We're going to keep sharing everything we discover as we learn. That's not just part of being transparent with & for ourselves, but continuing to help others in the TTRPG space that want to do similar stuff.

What are we up to now?

That brings us up to date, mostly. We're operating as a member-owned LLC, working on getting the actual co-op documents together, and figuring out what it looks like for us to operate a transparent TTRPG business.

We're also not waiting to have everything "perfect" before we start building. We just pre-launched Mörk Sol on Kickstarter, and it's already the biggest TTRPG project we've ever taken on, representing the culmination of all our learning for the past few years. We're unbelievably excited about the project and we can't wait to share it with everyone.

Mörk Sol is pre-launching on Kickstarter!

Follow the project now!

We're also going to be at GenCon, running games and meeting as many people as we can! We still have some room open in a couple games, if you are going to be there and want to play with us!

If you're a TTRPG creator and you'll be at GenCon, hit us up! You can find us on Bluesky - shoot us a DM, we'd love to meet up!

What's next?

We've got a new website on the way with a web store, we're shipping out Temperamental Upgrades very soon, and we've got about 1 billion game ideas that we're super excited to share with the world. We're actively looking at how we can continue to bring on new people to the co-op and how we can offer great resources for folks that subscribe (which you can always do here!).

Additionally, we're figuring out how to give back - whether that means providing resources or money, we want to help bring new designers into the industry and help platform marginalized creators. We're planning to make mutual aid a big part of how we calculate our profit share at the end of the year.

We're also going to keep sharing these status updates and all the great things we learn along the way. We really hope you are as excited as we are for what we've got coming up and we can't wait to show you what's coming.