World's Oldest Profession... Is The Third Time The Charm?

For those who haven't been paying attention to every TTRPG supplement I put out, this weekend saw something of a milestone for me. The supplement World's Oldest Profession: 100 Rumors To Hear In A Brothel went live, and it is the third installment in this particular series (behind the previous two supplements A Baker's Dozen of Brothels and 100 Courtesans and Concubines respectively). I don't usually work on series like this, but the runaway success of the first two supplements meant that I had to go back to the well for a third installment.

However, some things have changed since those first two splats dropped. There's some additional challenges I'm facing now, and there's some potential storm clouds on the horizon. So if you're one of the many folks out there who has grabbed one (or all) of these supplements, and were hoping this train would keep rolling a little while longer, this update is going to be important for you.

And grab a copy of the latest, if you haven't yet!

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What Happened Before (And Why There's A Struggle Now)

When the first two supplements from this series dropped, they were met with a rather surprising amount of audience demand. Both of the original supplements went Silver by the end of the first weekend (100+ copies sold), and both of them wound up at Electrum status when all was said and done. Not only that, but both of them spent a rather long time in the top slot of the #1 Bestseller Under $5 on the TTRPG front page.

So what's happened with this latest release?

Well, it went Copper by the end of its first weekend (50+ sales), and though it's made it to the top sellers chart, it's been sitting pretty around slot #5 for the past day or so. There's been a definite slow-down in demand, and the reaction doesn't seem as large as it was for the previous two.

We're going to dig into this a bit.

Now, a lot of this can be chalked up to the changes I mentioned a little while ago in Drive Thru RPG's New Site Isn't Great For Smaller Publishers (Now With Numbers!), but I'll touch on some of the bigger points here. In short, the new site (which was rolled out between the second supplement and the brand new one) has a terrible algorithm that makes organic discovery nearly impossible for people browsing the site. So the only ways people are finding new releases from publishers is if they're on that publisher's newsletter, if they catch them on social media, or if they happen to see a particular product on the top sellers section.

Given that social media of all stripes has been strangling creators' signals, and that getting sales off of FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc., is like wrangling a unicorn, the fact that this installment has done this well is a testament to just how popular the series (if I'm calling it that) has been so far!

With that said, if you're someone who wants to see more installments of this series, then please get a copy of World's Oldest Profession: 100 Rumors To Hear In A Brothel. And if you're one of the folks who has already done that, please leave a rating, a review, and share the link either on your own social media pages, or share the link to this blog instead. I say this because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter the negative forces the market throws up in my way; numbers talk, excuses walk. If the numbers see a sharp decline, then it will be tougher to justify expanding this particular series of supplements.

This is true not just for the fantasy versions that are already on the market. In keeping with my strategy as a creator, I had been hoping to make sci-fi versions of these three supplements as well, kicking off Galaxy's Oldest Profession. Because whether you're spending your loot from a dragon hoard, or you're suddenly flush with credits after a big corpo job, we all know the kinds of "distractions" that mercenaries, enforcers, and so-called adventurers seek out once they've upgraded their gear and find they have a little scratch left in their accounts.

The OTHER Issue Looming On The Horizon

A lot of my readers might not have dug through the Project 2025 papers, or have been paying a lot of attention to the news lately, but there has been a major push to reclassify a lot of things as pornography, and to make possession or purchase of that kind of pornography illegal. We've already seen this with romance novels that were sold on Amazon and which have been taken down, as well as in state laws restricting access to particular kinds of content.

And while none of the World's Oldest Profession supplements have anything explicit in them (the worst they have is some PG, tongue-in-cheek innuendo), that hasn't stopped other books from getting banned from libraries, or becoming the subject of controversy all over America.

Trying to avoid this guy as best I can.

Because of this, even if I can get a few hundred folks to answer the call and help boost this series, there is every chance that the political winds might decide to remove anything deemed "adult content" from any markets, including the ones offered by DTRPG. So even if I manage to get these supplements expanded, and I get a sci fi version of them up to get a second version of them going, it's possible that something will happen in the next handful of years that will force them to be deleted from the site entirely.

Which is why I'd recommend everyone who likes these supplements download copies and backups of them to be sure you don't lose them in the event they do wind up caught in a purge.

And if you're someone who wants to see this series keep going (short-term or long-term), then please help me get the word out about the supplements that are available, and leave a comment down below telling me which future installments you'd most like to see! Fantasy, sci-fi, or even other genres we haven't thought about branching out into just yet, all input is welcome!

In addition to the supplements themselves, I wanted to remind folks that the silly little introuctory stories inside them get made into audio dramas. The two that are out actually tell a fun little two-part tale set in the underground brothel known as The Pit, staffed largely by tieflings, and a handful of aasimar. The first tale talks about the party cleric sneaking off to have a bit of fun...

And the second story, of course, is what happens when the rest of the party shows up, having tracked him to the brothel. They think he's joined a cult and made a bargain with dark powers, of course, which leads to some rather... awkward interactions.

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