State of the Rascal: September 2025

Things don’t seem to stop happening anywhere, everywhere. And the same is true for behind-the-scenes at Rascal HQ. Here's a little rundown:

First, the big numbers. We hit 2300 paying subscribers! The two-week History Week discount following our oh-so-tragic loss of the Diana Jones Award netted us around 66 subscribers — some of them returning, some of them new. This is probably the most important statistic. We live and die by the number of people subscribing. In February, at around the one-year mark, we were at around 2100 so that’s 200 people over 6 months. Which isn’t life-changing, but it’s not nothing.

To put this in context, our total revenue is still lower than Defector’s health insurance budget. And as per our colleagues at Aftermath, a good thumb rule is that each one thousand subscribers cover about one full-time staff member. Which brings us to…

The second of our big numbers is 3. We’re now at 3 full-time and 3 part-time staff. Chase, Caelyn, and Thomas remain full-time, but Rowan has now transitioned into a part-time position. She’s stepping back from editorial duties — no writing, no editing, or at least no expectation of either. She’s going to still be our part-time CFO and help us make big decisions, but she’s decided, for now, she needs to spend her time elsewhere. Stay tuned for a future podcast where Rowan will talk more about it. Lin remains part-time as they wrap up a second novel, amongst other adventures. And our third part-time staffer is a new hire: Khee Hoon Chan.

Khee Hoon is a journalist from Singapore who has written at places like The Verge, Polygon, Vice, Dicebreaker, and Edge. They’re award-winning (unlike us!) — their story on Chinese censorship of a horror game won them a New York Video Games Critics Circle award, and they were in The Game Awards’ 2021 Future Class. 

They are coming on as a news writer. They’ve written for Rascal before — it’s a cool story about play-by-mail games, you should read it — and we’re super excited for them to bring their years of journalism experience to the team. A lot of people are looking to us to fill the gap that the end of Polygon and Dicebreaker left in tabletop coverage, and Khee Hoon is a part of our plan to do that. 

The third of our big numbers is… okay, there isn’t really a third number but there’s a bunch of other changes to how this site functions.

We’re all more specialized now. When Rascal first started, we wanted everyone to do everything. It was a very “this is a collective” mindset. While that isn’t necessarily naive, it sort of relies on the fact that our scale of operations is very small and that everyone is on top of their game. Another realization is that everyone isn’t on top of their game. As we’ve progressed, people have fallen into certain roles, like Rowan doing our business and accounting stuff. And with that, they’ve adopted certain kinds of decision-making power because if you do the work, you get to make decisions about how it gets done. 

Right now, this looks like: Caelyn runs the “miniatures beat” — just like someone might cover sports at a newspaper, Caelyn covers miniatures; Thomas handles features — which broadly means the more magazine-style stories as compared to the more newspaper stuff; and Chase runs the desk — which basically means he handles the operations of the site, edits most of the stories, sets the daily agenda, and so on. Some stuff is still considered communal responsibility, but I expect the amount of things that fall in that category to trend downwards as time goes on. 

This system just works better. It lets everyone do what they do best, which boosts both efficiency and satisfaction across the board.

We’re not doing open calls for pitches. Our last open call ended in February. We haven’t opened it since and don’t plan to for the rest of the year, at least. This is partially because we want to focus on more columnists like Brandon and Cameron, which gives us the space to work with somebody over a longer period. It’s also partially a cold, hard budgetary decision. We’re putting most of our money towards salaries right now, and this means our commissioning budget is tiny.

We might have to raise our rates. Getting that revenue up ‘til everyone’s un-precariously full-time is our number one goal, and if new subs don’t happen, then we need to consider raising the cost of our lowest tier to $6 a month. Right now, we’re at $5 a month on the lowest tier, while Aftermath is at $7 and Defector is at $8. So, we feel that it’s a reasonable number. We know this isn’t the best time to raise our rates, but the same economics that affects everybody affects us, too. Ideally, we’d grandfather old subscribers to the original rate while new subscribers would get the new one, and I think this is how Ghost handles it automatically. But we’ve never done this before, and we’ll proceed carefully. Regardless, if this happens, it’ll probably be early 2026.

We need to get back to playing games together. One of the outcomes of having inconsistent staffing over the last months — as people took breaks, sick leave, etc — is that we’re always playing catch up with coverage. There’s more news and new games and investigations than we can handle. Our fortnightly game was collateral damage. This has meant that there hasn’t been regular columns of Lay It On The Table where we all reflect on our games. Those were fun to do and with Khee Hoon back, we’re looking forward to having the time to play games again. And speaking of Lay It On The Table…

We might need to figure out new rewards for the Party Member tier. Right now, the higher tiers of subscription to the site are functionally “if you can spare the cash, please pay us more for the same thing.” It’s really wonderful that people still choose to do that, but ideally, as a business, we should be offering something that makes those higher tiers a little more appealing. Lay It On The Table was one of the perks, but we’ve not been doing it. We don’t really want to gate any of the existing articles behind that higher tier — that feels bad. But we’re also at max capacity so unless we expand, we’re not able to make extra stuff for it. It’s not a unique challenge, but it’s one that we need to figure out. 

In better news, the Rascal Year One zine is doing well. We’re so happy that people like it and have been posting pictures with their copy. Our publisher printed about 500 of these, and after fulfilling pre-orders they sent about 200 into distribution — half to the UK/Europe and half to the US for conventions through Indie Press Revolution. We were hoping that new people would hear about us by seeing these books at cons — that’s part of the reason we commissioned that eye-catching cover from Will Kirkby. We know a bunch got sold at IPR’s booth during GenCon, so hopefully that’s happening. Seems like we should do this again next year too!

That’s it for this update! We’re having a solid year, and we’re doing it despite a bad global situation. We had a flashy year one, and year two was about consolidating things — growing slowly but sustainably, making sure we’re still around for year three. And so far, thanks to your support, we are definitely going to be.