Oh Captain, My Captain! breaks down the door to traditional publishing

For The Queen, Alex Roberts’ cult card-based game about a queen’s retinue, changed the creative landscape of tabletop game design. Its affordable price and short-form, single-session, self-teaching gameplay is a perfect design for introducing newcomers to TTRPGs, while creating the foundation for countless other games. Now, its descendants may have a similarly altering effect on the financial reality of the industry.

On September 24, Simon & Schuster’s Adams Media released Oh Captain, My Captain! a Descended From The Queen RPG by James D’Amato. This marks the first time in recent memory that an imprint of the Big 5 (the largest entities in book publishing, which include S&S, Penguin Random House, Hatchette Livre, HarperCollins, and Macmillan) has produced a standalone tabletop roleplaying game. If Oh Captain is deemed a financial success by the standards of traditional publishers, “there is going to be a call from my publisher… for other game designers to come in and do their own projects,” said D’Amato in an interview with Rascal. “Maybe within the Descended from the Queen format, maybe if this does well, it bolsters their confidence in other designs.” 

D’Amato—known for his work founding the One Shot anthology podcast and its subsequent AP production network—believes that tabletop “is an industry propped up by people who want to express themselves. There's something beautiful about that.” He also believes that there’s an important distinction, “once you get to a position where you have financial and corporate success. How people are taking care of each other within the industry and treating this professionally becomes a much more important question.”

If Oh Captain is deemed a financial success by the standards of traditional publishers, “there is going to be a call from my publisher… for other game designers to come in and do their own projects."

Over the last few years, D’Amato has found success publishing supplementary RPG texts through Adams Media. He said that his first book, The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide, has sold over 65,000 copies since its publication in 2018. The sales of that initial title allowed him to gain a sense of trust with the Adams editorial team, and led to subsequent RPG accessories like the Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Guide. “Simon & Schuster is fairly confident at this point that they can profit from gaming accessories,” said D’Amato. The jump to a standalone game, however, “is always kind of a sticking point.” 

Their hesitancy stems from The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, D’Amato’s initial attempt to bring proper RPGs into the fold at Adams Media. According to D’Amato, the anthology of 40+ microgames only sold 12,000 copies. Note the only in that sentence. By TTRPG industry standards, that would be an overwhelming success. By the standards of traditional publishing? A complete and utter failure.

“That gives you a sense of the greater problem we're talking about here: the sense of scale in our industry,” said D’Amato. “An accessory book in the RPG field is far and away outselling everything but probably D&D and maybe Pathfinder in terms of sheer volume of units, which is weird. People play these games, but it's so much easier to sell an accessory product around [them].” For comparison, he evoked the publicly available sales numbers of Evil Hat, the original publisher of For The Queen. “If I was under Evil Hat with numbers like that, the Micro-RPG book would have been one of the best-selling products that they ever produced.”