Meet the Publisher: Davide Quatrini

I first became aware of Davide through the News Roundup; he reached out to me about a Mork Borg bestiary he had released, and I decided to ask him some questions. I must apologize for the length of time between when I sent these questions and now; I dropped the ball on getting this posted. Davide spends most of his time using his Ph.D. engineering degree as a greatclub to beat gremlins out of 'railway vehicles' (yes, the good trains of old). In his spare time he writes random products for random rpgs because, you know, the only good release schedule is "one supplement for the breakfast, one for the tea".

You can find Davide's work here.

Question: You've got a pretty varied catalog of publications. I see everything from Mork Borg to RuneQuest to Pathfinder. I myself find it difficult to write for multiple systems. How do you go about doing it? Do you have an idea for something and then decide what system to use, or have you already decided the system, or is it something else?

Answer. I need to be specific here. My products are not all born the same way. The 'standard' ones are the fruit of inspiration, typically from some piece of Public Domain art. For them, the system is a consequence, and most of the time it comes inside the 'inspiration flow'. The remaining ones are deliberately written for a specific system in order to understand how the players of a particular game react to third party products from minuscule independent creators like me. In this latter case a period of deep study is obviously needed, but I'm so old that I have 30 years of experience in playing ttrpgs and 20 in writing them, so I hardly start from zero :)

Q: What's your favorite system to write for? How about the most challenging? 

A. There is no univocal answer. I like writing monsters for OSR systems for example, because most of them have very flexible rules which make easy translating my ideas into stat blocks. I like writing instead adventures for large systems like D&D or Pathfinder because they have a huge pool of existing resources to draw inspiration from. The most challenging games to write for are the ones with the most complex setting canon, because I always strive to stick to it.

Q: I'm curious, is there a system that you find sells the best, in terms of people interested in it and downloading the product? My gut tells me it would be Pathfinder, but I'm curious as to how you view it as someone who has written for multiple systems.

A. Caveat: my portfolio currently includes around 140 products, and about half of them are at least Copper Bestsellers. I do not know if such population qualifies for statistical relevance, but I hardly think so. That said, if you mean sheer numbers, D&D trumps all: for example, my only Gold Bestseller is a 5E equipment supplement for Eberron. If you instead mean 'community reactivity', Chaosium customers are always eager to see new contents for their games. Pathfinder is very weak from both sides in my tiny experience.

Q: What are you working on now? 

A. I started playing again after a relevant hiatus, therefore I have no 'rushing product' currently. I have an idea to follow in my recent path of 5E Greyhawk products, but only time will tell if it will coalesce into a new item or not :)