COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Advance

The Covid pandemic has caused severe economic disruption which impacted businesses across the United States including those involved in publishing the tabletop roleplaying industry. Particularly hard hit are those of us who make a lot of our sales from conventions. I am personally am out a significant amount of money as result of Garycon being cancelled and North Texas Con being held on a restrictive basis. But my plight isn't hard as others impacted by Covid-19.

During the early days of the pandemic, Congress passed a bill that made the entire United State eligible for disaster relief. This includes small businesses. You can read for yourself the various options the small business administration has for disaster relief here.

One of the things offered is the ability to apply for a emergency grant and a loan. When I saw this being made available in March I immediately applied. Then I didn't hear anything for a long time until the middle of April. The Small Business Administration approved my grant and sent me a $1,000. Which was slightly more than I was asking for. As near as I could tell the SBA simply looked at how many people were involved and multiplied it by $1,000. In my case that was one. The SBA will approve grants of up to $10,000.

Keep in mind these are grants not loans that have to be paid back. It not free money either. You have to have filed taxes either as a corporation or using a Schedule C profit or loss from business attached to your personal income tax form.

Now I didn't write about this because shortly after I received the money the SBA closed the application process for all business other than agricultural. Apparently the flood of applications was so great they they fear the program would run out of money without fulfilling the ones they had.

The good news they reopened the program for all small businesses.
If your publishing or game business was impacted you can apply here.

The process doesn't end with the grant. Eventually they will send you a loan offer. Again appears to be based on the number of people involved. However this is a loan that has to be paid back over 30 years at 3% interest. So keep that in mind if you get into this part of the process.

Hope this help and stay safe. I wasn't expecting much and was pleasantly surprised to have received the grant. I feel this will help many of us who have lost sales as a result of the pandemic.

Update
Matrox in the comments points out an aspect of the process that I forgotten about.

Anyone else out there who this might help, the process is very easy, the only quirk is you need your total gross receipts and cost of goods sold from 2-1-2019 through 1-31-2020. If you gather that info ahead of time and have your EIN/SSN handy you should be all set.

Note that you can get most of your gross receipts and cost of good sold from your corporate tax return or your Schedule C. You will have to figure it out for the month of January 2020.

Black Lives Matter Charity Drive

The job isn't done. Borrowing from the words of Martin Luther King used in his last speech, we have crested the mountain and descended part way down the slope but we as a nation and society still have not reached the promised land for black americans or ourselves.

Now is the time to complete the journey as one nation to fulfill the promise of our Declaration of Independence. That all are created equal. That everyone's unalienable rights are not denied. That all enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Onebookshelf has reached out to myself and other publishers about a charity drive to support various organization dedicated to civil rights. Three charities were offered, Black Lives Matter, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the National Police Accountability Project.

I have opted to contribute the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Maps as part of the charity bundle for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  Keep in mind the Wilderlands map comes not only with the map PDFs but the PDF for the guidebook as well. The charity drive also features individual products made by African American authors on DriveThruRPG. This is the link for the entire charity drive if you are interested in contributing to one of the other bundles or authors involved.

This only a small effort given the larger events happening. However the mighty river is born of numerous small streams. If each of us contribute what we can when we can, we will all reach the promised land together.

Black Lives Matter.

Adventure Record Sheet for Champions & Hero System

I always been a fan of the Hero System and Champions. While I moved on to other system for fantasy roleplaying it is still my goto RPG for super hero campaigns. I am starting up a campaign for some friends who are interested in playing some super heroes. One of the things I used in past campaigns is a form from Champions II from way back in the 80s to track PCs and NPCs in combat.

However it has issues where that it doesn't have many lines for characters and splits the information for a character into different sections. I used to use the one in Fantasy Hero but it small. So I made a new one.

Download it here

Hero System Adventure Record Sheet