Wednesday, May 30, 2012

$1400 from Hite, + July Adventure Campaign Announcements + Other Announcements!

For the current Hardcover + Adventures campaign, we're $1400 away from Hite with 60 hours left. Yeah, we did $800 in the past day so this is no pie-in-the-sky thinking. I already pulled the Hite goal back from $15,000 to $13,500 to help get this done, so it's up to you guys. You want it or not?

Surely there's still 14 Refs out there that want a shiny set of revised hardcovers for their group? Or 5 that want that Aino art in it?

Monolith and God that Crawls are coming along. Monolith is in layout but has some extra space in it. I polled the comments section over at the crowdfunding page to see what people wanted me to do with it... and a good number said to put more charts etc. in the empty space. Problem with that is there's only one part of the adventure where it would make real sense to do that, right in the middle, which would basically mean the entire layout gets thrown out the window and would need to be started from scratch. Putting charts in the back that relate to something in the middle just seems rather patchwork and putting unrelated content in there is right out - the Monolith is a tight concept and I don't want to kill the atmosphere with unrelated stuff in the book. So the choices are to get some art to fill in the gaps or have a few blank pages at the end.

The Monolith has gotten such a "wha? huh?" reaction from people when I've run it for them I think I'm going to go for the added artwork. It'll help communicate some of the ideas I think, giving strong visuals instead of the previously intended text-only approach. Not to mention making the book look really alien and awesome. Alfrey's hard-friggin-core.

The God that Crawls will hopefully get a final test run through next week (watch for announcements for the Google + game!) and then that's off to editing and layout.

I'm currently making prelim editing notes on two adventures, Zzarchov Kowolski's Scenic Dunnsmouth and The Colony by James Carpio. I won't be daft enough to actually estimate release dates for them, but I can tell you both feature innovative adventure formats. They are not static locations.

(I won't be crowdfunding these because there's no question of doing them or not...)

In July I will be doing a series of 16 crowdfunding campaigns at the same time. It will be for a series of adventures, but with a different lineup than the current campaign, and in a much different format to correct some of the issues people have noted. If you want to just go for one or a few adventures you can. If you want to go for all of them (and get a significant discount), you can. And Gardening Society members will have even bigger discounts available to them. The lineup so far for these adventures:

Dave Brockie (aka Gwar's Oderus Urungus) - handling his own art!
Mike Pohjola with art by Joel Sammallahti
Tavis Allison and Benjamin Armintor with art by Ryan Browning

More names, and more info on what these names will do with their adventures, in the weeks to come.

9 comments:

  1. This is great to hear, James. I love seeing LotFP pick up so much speed in its publishing schedule, and have been buying the books for the art and ideas. I can't wait to get the chance to actually run a few of the adventures.

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  2. Good luck man, hope to see that Hite adventure get funded. Let's go people! My group is already in for a set of the hardcover books.

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  3. Looks good James. I'll be eagerly waiting for updates.

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  4. Fingers crossed on reaching the 17K-mark and cool people on the new list. Really cool.

    In regards to "Monolith/TGTC", I can certainly understand why you would like to include more art, to make it the coolest/weirdest package possible, but...this was aimed at being printed/shipped in April, and is now pushed to August if I'm not much mistaking, all while A LOT of new projects has popped up. That's quite a delay.

    It's really not to sound like a let-down, but I would really like to get the "Monolith/God That Crawls" cracking before a lot more new stuff is launched.

    I can fully understand that having a lot of balls in the air and being a one-man publishing machine is a lot of work... it's just that I'm a tad impatient.

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  5. I hear you, but when it was obvious that the Monolith just wouldn't fit into 32 pages and had to become 48, that created space in the layout (and made the layout process longer to boot). Additional art (which wasn't planned or budgeted for... ah well) was necessary any which way. The question was whether to make them spot pieces (which results in blank pages at the end) or feature pieces. Either way was going to take time...

    It becomes a question of "does this get done as good as it can be or not?"

    I mean, I could just say "Let's just have the end pages blank and use textures to fill the interior spots" and get it to press in two days, but is that really what people are going to be happiest with when they get it?

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  6. BROCKIE writing an adventure?!?!? Hailz, yeah MF, can't wait!!!

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    1. And before anybody asks... Brockie started gaming in the 70s and still has his white box.

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  7. Since you are so close to funding Hite I think it would be wise to reopen the digital faith packages. It's a much better gamble now than it was when the first bunch bought into it.

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  8. I really hope well for Mike's adventure dispite I have been rather shrill towards him on Finnish forums as the guy has a heart for Red Box.

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