2025: A Year of Firsts
Three Sails Studios logo
Today is December 15th, 2025. As I write (George, Three Sails Studios Lead), we’re seven weeks and one day away from launching our second project and newest game, Gallows Corner - A Peasants’ Revolt RPG. Next to me, on my desk, sits an heavily annotated hard copy of the Prerelease Guide for City of Espers - A Street-Level Psychics RPG, our first externally-designed publishing project, created and designed by the amazing Nathan Blades.
It’s rainy, grey, and cold here in Manchester, and I’m looking forward and back at the same time, like some modern Janus.
Let’s see how we got here.
Mappa Mundi: First Game, First Crowdfunding Campaign, First Product
January 2025 started intensely. I was getting ready to move house (which wouldn’t end up happening until the end of March, but I didn’t know that at the time), and Joel (artist), Jeremy (developer, editor, co-writer), and I were all frantically working on Mappa Mundi - An Exploration + Ecology RPG, our very first TTRPG project together and our first as a studio.
The Kickstarter campaign was locked in to start on February 4th and everything felt very make or break. If Mappa Mundi did well, we’d be publishing our first game and (hopefully) have enough money to fund the next one, Gallows Corner, which was about to make the jump from my concepting notebook to our shared Google Drive.
I distinctly remember saying to Joel and Jeremy, about a week before we launched, that I had a faint glimmer of hope that Mappa Mundi might raise £50,000 on Kickstarter. We all considered this wildly ambitious and likely a long shot, but then the project — our first — was also wildly ambitious: a fully colour illustrated 220-odd page hardback book, a deck of more than 70 tarot-sized cards, and a lidded illustrated box.
I’ve never been one for reigning in scope.
Mappa Mundi - An Exploration + Ecology RPG
As you can probably tell from the image above, our crowdfunding campaign was a success. Mappa Mundi launched on Kickstarter on February 4th, 2025, and by March 4th had raised just shy of £75,000, which (at the time) equated to just under $100,000. We were all blown away.
Early on in our existence as a studio (September 2023 was when Jeremy joined Joel and I, who had been working together on a miniature wargame, to which Jeremy had contributed), I decided that we’d only launch crowdfunding campaigns when the game being funded was 99% complete, and that we’d finish the game during the campaign and go to print immediately.
This was — and still is — a risky decision. It means taking all the financial risk on up front and hoping that the game and the campaign are successful enough to cover that expenditure. To make it work, Jeremy and I worked for free while I took on two jobs beyond the studio: one to pay my own bills and the other to pay Joel something, even if it wasn’t industry standard.
Reader, it worked.
The Kickstarter outperformed everything we expected but vindicated the approaches we took as a studio. Jeremy and Joel signed off on my ideas and plans (doing our own marketing, putting the risk up front, producing a game the size of Mappa Mundi and bigger than a lot of others out on the market) and we all worked to make it happen.
And on March 5th, 2025, the day after the campaign finished, we went to print.
And that’s it, right? Risks and ambitions sated for now? Not quite. I told our community, our backers, and ourselves that we’d deliver Mappa Mundi in June that year, giving us three and a bit months to print, freight, and deliver.
Reader, you aren’t going to believe this. It worked. Again.
Our printers, the ever amazing MegaPrint, based in Istanbul, did excellent work on Mappa Mundi to an extremely tight deadline. Books, boxes, and cards hit the road from Turkiye to the UK in early May and the rest quickly followed onto a boat to the US the following week. And then our fufilment partners here in the UK not only managed to fulfil more than 600 physical copies all across the world (to all of our backers outside the US) in the first week of June, they managed to send those to our UK backers in May!
Copies arrived with our UK backers in the final week of May, in the run-up to UK Games Expo, bringing us to our next first for 2025…
UK Games Expo: First Convention as Retailers, First ‘Next Game’
We’d done UK Games Expo twice before, in 2023 (with our prototype miniatures wargame) and then again in 2024, that time with nothing but the Mappa Mundi Prerelease Guide, a huge banner featuring Joel’s artwork, and a plan to shout about it all weekend.
This year was different. We had something to sell. And sell we did.
Over the course of the convention, from Friday to Sunday, we sold 115 copies of Mappa Mundi to customers from across the world. We also met a ton of people who had backed the game on Kickstarter and who had received their copies earlier that week; a good number of them had brought their copies with them for us to sign, which was very surreal. Thank you to everyone who stopped by, who bought a copy, and who just came to tell us how happy they were with the game.
We also announced Gallows Corner - A Peasants’ Revolt RPG and showed it off publicly for the first time. I had been working on Gallows Corner, with input from Jeremy and Joel and a select few playtesters, since August 2024 and getting to show it off was wonderful. Even while distracted by the popularity of Mappa Mundi, getting to talk to people about playing as peasants and the working classes and seeing peoples’ eyes light up was amazing.
And now we find ourselves just ten weeks from launch, and ready to follow the same process detailed above again, but this time with a lot more confidence and experience behind us.
The Rest of The Year: First Time Running A Webstore, First Paycheque, First Award, First Time Publishing (well, soon…) an Outside Project
The second half of 2025 has been a blur. After the success of Mappa Mundi’s Kickstarter campaign, I was able to leave one job and reduce my days at the other, as the business was now able to start paying Joel. This felt like a big step. Another big step was starting to pay Jeremy and then starting to pay myself (again, not very much, but symbolic victories are important)!
We launched the Three Sails Studios webstore (where, incidentally, you can buy Mappa Mundi right now!) and sales have been pretty consistent all year (though not October, which was bad). I redesigned the store to fit ‘our brand’ a little more closely in early November, which feels like a step towards our increasing professionalism (more on this below).
We also won our first award, the Dragonmeet 2025 Gold Award for Best RPG, given to Mappa Mundi. We were completely blown away by this, though also very grateful. We put a huge amount of work into the game and are so happy that people are enjoying it overall. The award felt like a great way to end the year and put a little bit of a full stop on 2025.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
The Dragonmeet Award for Best RPG, awarded to Mappa Mundi.
In February 2024 (that’s right, last year), I had the opportunity to playtest an early version of City of Espers by Nathan Blades, someone I had met at my first UK Tabletop Industry Network (UKTIN) Manchester meet-up only two weeks before.
Some context. I had just met a bunch of game designers properly for the first time, people I now consider very close friends, and had told them that we were launching Mappa Mundi (a game that wasn’t even laid out yet — I learned to do that by doing it for the Prerelease Guide, and then doing it all again for the final book) the following February.
When I playtested City of Espers two weeks later, I said to Nathan after the game that if they didn’t find a publisher for it, I wanted to publish it. The fucking brass neck on me, ey?
Well, 11 months later, at the January UKTIN Manchester meet up and just a few weeks before Mappa Mundi was set to launch (that’s right, it’s a call back to the start of the blog), Nathan asked if I was still interested. Of course I was, I said, but I’d have to wait to see how Mappa Mundi did before saying yes. I wanted to make sure we could afford to bring the game to life in the way it so obviously deserved.
Cut to May, just before UK Games Expo, and we both signed the contract. Three Sails would publish City of Espers, taking care of layout, art and art direction, development, editing, marketing, crowdfunding, printing, delivery, and sales. All Nathan needed to do was finish it and deliver the manuscript (which they’re already ahead of schedule on).
So another first: we’re publishing a game that hasn’t come from in house, but we’re all incredibly excited about it and you should be too.
City of Espers - A Street-Level Psychics RPG
Looking Ahead to 2026
This year has been a wild ride. While I had a solid plan, a solid vision, and the necessary recklessness to try and see it through, everything we did this year was new.
We crowdfunded, printed, delivered, and continue to sell our first game. I learned to do layout and art direction (even beyond the comfort blanket that is working with Joel). We announced not one but two new games. We learned to be publishers as well as designers. We all took a huge step forward in terms of our abilities (we think), knowledge (we hope), and confidence.
What does 2026 look like for Three Sails? Well, we’re crowdfunding, printing, and delivering two new games. I’m already hard at work on games we hope to launch in 2027 (definitely two, maybe three, and maybe a return to Mappa Mundi as one of them?), and — the biggest challenge — is taking that next step into ‘professionalism’.
Three Sails is collectively owned, collectively run, and collectively led. ‘Professionalism’ can read like a dirty word at times (none more so for me), but let me explain what I mean by it.
I want Three Sails Studios to become sustainable, to be able to pay all three of us a decent income, if not a good one, and to be able to offer work worth doing at rates worth doing it at to other people out there in the TTRPG space.
We’ve managed to do the latter pretty well already, but over 2026, I’m going to be doing everything I can to help secure the solid foundations we’ve already put down. That includes our convention presence, too, which I’m very excited about.
And who knows. If Gallows Corner goes well enough, I might be able to pay myself just enough to do this exclusively. A boy can dream!
2026: Gallows Corner, City of Espers, and Future Projects
You’ll forgive me for how long this post became. Once I get started, it’s often difficult to stop. That’s a habit I’m hoping to crack with a future game, which we’ll be announcing in May (and one you won’t want to miss).
This coming year is going to keep us busy, but as my old Nan says, the only thing worse than being busy (in this context, at least) is the opposite. Gallows Corner launches in February and will deliver in June. City of Espers launches in September and will hopefully deliver before Christmas. And then there are new games to announce, to work on, to try and fund and try and deliver. I’ll keep you updated every step of the way.
Thanks for reading. Be excellent to each other. A better world is inevitable if you fight for it, in whatever way you can.
In solidarity,
George
Studio Lead, Three Sails Studios
