Four programmed adventures written for Old-School Essentials. Play them Choose-Your-Own style, or with a referee.
Seeing that the $85 starter pledge level is one of the most popular, I contacted Exalted Funeral to see if they'd allocate me another 50.
They said yes.
So I've boosted the US hub allocation maximum from 50 to 100.
Just for the case of being explicit.
To change your pledge, you'll first click on the "Manage My Pledge" button that comes up at the top of your screen when you go into the PC website, or at the bottom of your screen with the Kickstarter application.
(PC Version, using the SJGames Pyramid Scheme 2022 as a demo)
Hopefully that helps folks!
This campaign has just surpassed every other prior campaign of mine for total number of followers.
One hidden thing: there are more than 820 followers who have not (yet!) backed the campaign. So things could get really interesting near the end. Hopefully sooner.
Looking over time?
A pretty clear trend (especially if you selectively edit out the Portuguese experiment) that both backer counts and follower counts are going in good directions.
As I said...not meaningful for THIS campaign until the numbers are all in ... but I'm a bit of a data geek, so it was interesting to look.
Wait, what? It's DAY 3 and already I'm talking about the end of the project?
Yeah. Making the stuff is, in a way, the easiest part of the project. I just completed a similar one, and wanted to give an idea of past shipping charges, as well as the process I use to try and keep it under control.
Books vs Stuff. At this moment, there's no difference because the campaign doesn't (yet) have any "stuff," like, say...quick reference cards for monsters.
Manufacturing. The way I do it is the USA, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand books get printed and shipped from the USA. The UK/EU/Rest of World books get printed in the UK and shipped from GamesQuest. This keeps things reasonably contained and predictable. Manufacturing times for books of this nature can be wildly unpredictable...but for my prior project ran about two weeks from "go" to "received." That ain't bad.
These are shipped by media mail in almost all cases. The shipping charge for the four books in the prior campaign wound up being $8. This covers some time to pack it, the box itself, and postage. The hardcover book will push weight up: I'm estimating $10 for that.
On the off chance that there's a "stuff" add-on that may or may not appear later, shipping that via USPS or UPS would be about the same cost and be about $15. There was, on the average, about a $6 "plus-up" going from USPS Media Mail to regular mail/parcel service at equivalent weight when you add "stuff" that means you can't use Media Mail anymore.
Starter kit (just under 4 lbs, all books) to Canada is $50 by the time I try and cover duties pre-paid. The solos-only without the core rulebook is likely $25-30. I always send USPS because all the courier services slap "handling and brokerage" fees on the end-user that I've seen range from $25-70, and hold the package hostage until you pay. No thank you, Evil.
This one's a little weird. I have a many-time backer in Australia with a freight-forwarding service. I sent six orders to him for the last campaign, and it wound up being something like $16 all-in for Australia, and $20 for New Zealand. That was for 1-2 books the size of the solos...even so, the rates I was seeing from USPS and even Royal Mail were in the $50 per package range. Ironic that doing it this way will make it cheaper than Canada by far.
Shipping cost for three books inside the UK was about $12/£10 by untracked Royal Mail.
Four books to Poland was about $23 including $3.50 in VAT. Was $19 for the same order to Ireland.
Buckle up, and grit your teeth. It's going to hurt. A lot of the "way out there" orders were $50 in shipping.
GamesQuest won't deliver at all to Russia these days, and will fight me about delivering to Brazil (but the last package I had shipped there arrived just fine, and it was a big hardcover Bestiary. Was spendy tho.)
This is the obligatory disclaimer. The world is a turvey-topsy place these days, and who knows what might happen.
Last thing: I'll be using Backerkit again to charge shipping in TWO WAVES. First wave will be "confirm your pledge, do a short survey, do any add-ons, and then enter in address and credit card info. This wave does NOT permit PayPal. Don't blame me, I don't much care for that either.
Second wave is "pay for shipping." That's done on the same payment method as the first wave...OR you can wait and do PayPal here. So if you really like paying with Paypal, just wait until we're at the collect for shipping phase. Last time, that was maybe a few week shift, so it shouldn't be that bad.
Last time there was a hiccup within Backerkit where if you had a zero balance but ALSO had physical goods you weren't asked for payment info for shipping. A few folks missed the later emails/updates and were reverted to digital orders (and refunded the majority of their balance) because I didn't have either an address, payment information, or both.
So please be aware of the two-phase thing, when that time comes.
OK...enough of that. Time for me to get to work!
As I have mentioned, I'm maybe 20% done with the work on the four adventures. One of them, Till Death Do Us Part, is essentially done. Rob Conley of Bat in the Attack even wrote a very short review.
Beyond that, Enzo in the comments posted a question that I wanted to respond to more broadly, because it was a great question:
In short: there's maps. Glynn Seal (MonkeyBlood Design and Publishing) and I have a longstanding productive relationship and I have used him pretty much on every project after my first couple. He also does fantastic game work in addition to cartography: go buy his stuff.
Nonetheless: here are two screenshots of maps from Till Death Do Us Part. If you want to see other of his work as it will appear in the three other solos...huh. I have some preview PDFs ready to go, but not uploaded yet. Give me a day, and I'll post the.
(For the record, Rob identified a few THAC0 errors in the statblocks; they'll be fixed)
In the meantime, my Dungeon Fantasy RPG previews can be seen here. That's color work, but gives a feel for what I do.