State of the Rascal, podcast edition

You might have seen our recent article laying out the potentially dire financial straits facing the website. In this special episode of the podcast, Chase and Thomas tackle the reasons why and what you, dear listeners, can do to support us through this (hopefully) brief economic blip. It's a conversational and transparent discussion about finances, failed projects, experimentation, and dreams. We also answer some reader questions, one of which prompts a long tangent about reviewing tabletop RPGs.

Want to snag a Rascal subscription for 33% off an annual membership? You can also find our Tip Jar at the bottom of the article.

Find Rascal Radio Hour on Apple, Spotify (for now), and all the other various podcatchers. Leaving a five-star review helps new listeners find our show and website. Since we eschew traditional advertising, any reviews and word-of-mouth are genuinely a massive help.

Here's an excerpt:

Chase: We are trying to run the business such that we have runway. If something happens, we're not just immediately shitting the bed for next month. But we also want to give people the security to make life decisions. Not will I have a job next year? And the reality, when we crunched the numbers, was that we're now in a position where, if things continue as they are, Rascal may not be able to support our people at this time next year. Maybe even sooner.

I've always said that Rascal is only worth doing if it can like support the folks who make it happen. If we get to the point where we're having to work two other jobs to make this work, that's asking people to give up too much of their energy and too much of their time.

Thomas: And that is a young person's gig as well, right? This idea that you can just infinitely juggle things and burn yourself at both ends, that kind of thing. Even if we could, there is a very clear expiry date where, after a while, you are like, actually, I can't do this sort of work anymore. I just need to be able to work a limited number of hours and then I need to rest.

Chase: Yeah, that's also not a workable model long term. It's the sort of thing that you do because you hope not to do after six months, maybe a year. But we're past that two year mark. Rascal is heading towards its third birthday next year, and we cannot afford to work as though we're all 21 anymore. We've got to take this seriously.

Thomas: Yeah, the tenor in the room is changing a bit. When it was the Rascal crew by themselves and the line was going up, we didn't think about it. In the sense of you don't worry about it because you just focus on the work. But when the line goes down, it's like there's another person in the room all the time. It's like an I Think You Should Leave sketch, right? Tim Robinson is playing some real awkward guy that you want to get out of the party. Except in this case, he's the US economy. And every time we meet and talk about anything, there's just a guy there making it awkward for everybody to function. It stresses everybody out in a way that I think made the work harder to do. It stressed out personal relationships. We were all putting more pressure on each other.

When the line is going down, you feel like you should be doing more. And you look around at everybody do more, do more, do more as if you can dig yourself out of this with sheer effort. That was not really the case. That's also something we figured out at some point: we couldn't just increase quantity.

Chase: Again, that's the mentality of a 21-year-old who's like, I'll just stay up until midnight writing a few more blogs because that'll that'll get us through. I want sustainability, and I want that for everyone else here too. You're right about the other person in the room because for so much of Rascal's entire existence, the line has slowly, gradually been going up. We were always "not there yet", but that "yet" was really holding on to a lot of my hopes and dreams. This February was the point where that conversation stopped happening in my own mind. I stopped saying "we're not there yet." And I started wondering, when are we going to get back there? Are we ever going to get back there?

I'm not trying to set that up as some sort of big tragedy. A lot of businesses have to talk like this, but it did change the framing of every single one of our business discussions, decisions, and considerations in a way that the last six months has not been fun. And it has meant a real reduction in what we're able to do, what we can do, and how we want to cover the industry. We got to the point where maybe we just make an earnest ask of folks to get us over the financial hump. Here are our plans for the future; here are some of the things we'd love to do. Help us achieve them, give us the money to make it work. It'd be a long-term investment. It's not something you're going to see us accomplish next week or next month or even a couple of months from now. But it does mean that Rascal will be around in 2027. It'll be around in 2028. We can put down the roots that we need to flourish over the next five years or (fingers crossed) a decade.

Thomas: Yeah, and this is not something that we, at any point, thought was given. When I joined, you were not sure about the future. There was an undecidedness of this project, the fact that it was always something that either could survive or could exist. What kind of clarified it this year was that there was some general sense that we've been around two years; we're just going to be around. Internally, we need to be clear that it's not actually a given. Externally, we need to remind everybody else that it's not a given. We all need to be like, no, actually, this is a nice thing. This is a good site.