Before anything else, before the world, before the first adventure, before the logo, decide what you're building. Not the creative vision. The business shape.

Are you building a label around a single setting, with everything you publish existing within that world? Are you building a label that publishes adventures compatible with existing systems, designed to be dropped into any GM's campaign? Are you eventually building toward a full game system of your own, with early publications as a proof of concept? Are you primarily a creative outlet that happens to generate some revenue, or are you building toward this being a real income source?

These are different businesses with different priorities. A setting-based label needs worldbuilding depth before its first product. A drop-in-adventure label needs broad compatibility and doesn't need deep lore. A label aiming for sustainable income needs to think about production costs, pricing, and audience-building from day one, unlike a passion-project label.

Chaotic Chronicles is a setting-based label. Everything traces back to Equarium, the rifts, the planes, the pantheon, the history. That decision shaped everything that came after: the legal framework needed (original creatures rather than borrowed ones), the content roadmap (lore-first, adventure-second), and the audience (people drawn to a specific world, not just looking for the next module).

Know your shape before you start building.​

This is the part new publishers skip and regret skipping. If you're publishing content compatible with an existing system, D&D 5e being the obvious example, you need to understand the licensing landscape before you write anything you intend to sell.

For 5e specifically, the relevant framework as of 2023 is the SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. This license lets you use, modify, and publish content from the System Reference Document as long as you attribute Wizards of the Coast correctly. It's more stable and more legally tested than the older OGL framework, and it's irrevocable, WotC can't pull it back retroactively.

What it doesn't cover is Product Identity. Specific named settings (Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Ravenloft), specific named characters, and specific creatures (Beholder, Mind Flayer, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, Slaad, Yuan-ti, and others) are off-limits regardless of license. You can use the underlying concepts, psionic horrors, planar warriors, chaos creatures, but you have to build your own versions.

Build a reference document for your team before anyone writes a word. What's in the SRD and fair game. What's Product Identity and needs an original replacement. What attribution language goes on your copyright page. This document will save you legal headaches and creative confusion for the life of the label.​

The biggest myth about starting a TTRPG label is that you need to start from zero. You don't. If you've been running games for years, you have material. Homebrew creatures. House rules that work. A setting your table has been building collaboratively for a decade without realizing it was a setting.

The founding of Chaotic Chronicles followed exactly this pattern. Equarium had been a private creative project for over a decade before it became a publishing label. The cosmology existed. The history existed. The world had been developing in the background of someone's life the whole time. What changed wasn't the material's existence, it was the decision to make it tangible.

Take inventory of what you already have. You're probably closer to a first product than you think.​

Start small. A one-shot. A short adventure. A single creature compendium. Something achievable in a defined timeframe that lets you go through the entire production pipeline once, writing, editing, art, layout, publishing, before you commit to something larger.

The first thing you publish reveals your actual pipeline, where the bottlenecks are, who on your team is strongest at what, and what your audience responds to. All of that information is worth more before your big launch than after it.

Starting a label is a real undertaking. It's also one of the most rewarding creative projects available to people who care about this hobby. Explore what Chaotic Chronicles has built so far, and what got us here, at chaoticchronicles.com.​