Playtesting Packet #1: Crafting Alpha Draft & Survey!
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 02:57:49 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

The Chosen MANY Poll! Updates, Art, Streams and More!
about 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:02:46 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Surveys are sent, Updates, Art and the Schedule!
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 01:54:17 AM

Hi Folks-

Surveys & More!

All surveys for the Pledge Manager should be out. You have quite awhile to fill them out (all the way till May, when I will close it and start to charge cards to give things time to process), but if you have not gotten one, please reach out to me (well, check your spam filter, make sure its not there, and then reach out to me :D ). If for some reason you want me to lock and charge your order earlier, I can do that, but I do have to do that manually so I'd only recommend this in cases where you have special circumstances with your card where waiting for it to be charged would be inconvenient (I know some folks don't regularly use credit cards had to set up a temporary one for this project and the like so I've run a few of their orders early at their request).

For folks as the Bundle +1 (the $200 tier) you should have also gotten an additional email to talk about your custom upgrade this morning. Please let me know if you have gotten it.

As for the Chosen One poll I've decided to run that after the first playtest packet (see schedule section for when that will be!), as I want folks to be more informed about their options, so you'll have the playtest/draft version of the options you'll be voting (and more info there regarding that poll and increased page count!)

Art Previews!

As I always like sharing the art coming out, I figured I'd toss out another sampler of that!

The 200k Bonus Stretch Goal?

Yup, you folks smashed that. I should know better than to put a stretch goal in front of you folks! I'm already working on the bonus section there of special crafting magic and utility rituals to bring day to day fantasy life to... well, life!

The Schedule

So, here is the rough outline of my schedule. Folks go easy on me here if these dates move around - some people are telling me that publishing a schedule like this is shooting myself in the foot, but I'd rather set the dates and let you know if they have to move:

• Playtest Packet 1 [End of March]
• Chosen One poll [Mid March]
• Playtest Packet 2/Draft Compendium [End of April]
• PDF Version [June]
• VTT Versions [June]
• Digital Rewards [June]
• Books [August]
• Digital Crafting Tool [August]

This represents my plan and schedule, but there's a lot of moving pieces. So far I think I am on schedule; I've gotten a lot of art in, got a lot of updates in, and have a lot of playtesting underway. Smaller updates are going out on the patreon, but all backers will get the updates listed there. Playtest Packet 1 should have the subclasses for the default classes, another update (small update) for the two classes, a big update for the crafting system, and a partially complete bestiary (no art yet), but will not be laid out into a Compendium at that point (it'll be a list of links). There will be a feedback survey for it as well. Playtest Packet 2 will have the same stuff + the stretch goal content, more complete bestiary, and the custom upgrade quests, and is currently planned to come out in Compendium format, though still a pretty rough draft.

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and its easy to get ahold of me, here, Discord, or patreon. If I've missed anything question or comment, feel free to resend it - it may be easy to get ahold of me, but sometimes my inboxes get a little overwhelmed.

All the best,

-Kibbles

...and Promotions?

This has nothing to do with the project, but as you folks may have noticed, at the end of updates here I like to give other Kickstarters a boost if I can, this time I'm going to point out one called Adventures Await. It's a collection of a bunch of one-shot adventures.

•  Why I'm Linking to it: I have no association to this one, but I've talked the chap running it I know he has put a ton of work into getting things ready for it, and you can preview a ton of his work for free on his website. This isn't a paid promotion or anything, and I'd recommend looking into seeing if it is for you, but if you've ever wanted a collection of one-shots, this is probably worth looking into.

I just like to share these as I get a chance on updates I'm already sending out, as getting the word out was a vital part of my Kickstarter, so I like to do what I can in that regard for other folks.

Have a good one!

All surveys should be going out now! 200k Stretch Goal?
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 12:22:28 AM

Hey Folks,

Surveys

As I hit the button to post this, I'll be sending out the rest of the surveys! Everything looks like it went well with the smoke test surveys (5% of the total) but if you have any question, feel free to contact me.

These are what feed into the Pledge Manager and should allow you to customize your order or otherwise make selections for add ons. These should allow you to complete a late pledge if payment through Kickstarter failed for some reason. This should be where you can update your address if you've moved.

200k Stretch Goal?

So, first of all, I want to say this is a little informal. Unofficial I guess. This idea came from two places:

• First, an idea came to me the other day, and I thought "damn, that would have been a good stretch goal for the book"... unfortunately it was several weeks after the Kickstarter had finished.
• Second, I've noticed that with pre-orders + add ons we are getting very close to 200k, and that 200k is a neat round number.

Essentially, Backerkit tracks how much has been added to the funding total, and so far with preorders and add ons, that's raised another $4,286, which puts the project firmly in striking distance of 200k!

Now, this is just sort of a fun little confluence of ideas. I'm thrilled with the funding total already, and don't want folks to toss in add ons or tips or w/e more than they want to, I just thought it would be a cool chance to include one last idea that I thought would be neat.

So... what is this neat last idea...? Crafting Magic. Utility spells. A spell that makes your campfire burn as hot as forge for a few hours, a spell that animates your cookware to turn a single cook into a kitchen, a spell that speeds of the processing of hides into leather. These primarily ritual based magics wouldn't be intended for combat use and would have some special rules around how they are learned, but are things that would simply be cool to have for many fantasy settings; they'd include a few magic items that could cast them (meaning they wouldn't be relegated to spell casters), some additional rules around, about 2 pages of new spells.

This is an idea I know can do and fit into the book, so there's no big risk to adding it, just a fun little idea I think would be a good fit, and help expand the crafting system as part of a fantasy world, made to supplemental the proficiency with tools, augmenting and enhancing it, rather than replacing it.

Schedule

Lot of folks have asked about the schedule, so I figured I'd give an overview of the expected schedule from here on out:

• 2/4/2021 : Kickstarter Campaign Ends
• 3/2/2021 : Pledge Manager Survey Sent [We are Here]
• Estimated Late March : First Playtest Packet (this will be content, but not with fancy layout, formatting or editing yet; this is intended for playtesting, but not necessarily editing or polish); these are mostly because I want to let folks that want to see stuff and be involved get their hands (and eyes) on it. I have a lot of playtesting lined up for these, but feel like including the Kickstarter audience just makes sense from all perspectives; more feedback, more involvement, and getting to play with stuff earlier (I would treat content in these stages like you'd treat UA content).
• Estimated April : Playtest Packet
• Estimated May : Final Playtest Packet (this will be where editing and polish feedback is useful; this will probably be the copy that has some layout, formatting, and editing).
• Estimated June : PDF goes out (with layout, formatting and editing).
• Estimated June/July : VTT versions will start making their way out. These will run in parallel to the final version of the PDF.
• Estimated June : Other digital rewards go out (Tokens, Art Packs, Custom Character Sheets, etc).
• Estimated May/July : Kibbles' Guide to Kibbles' Content. This will be a bit piecemeal through the whole campaign. In part, the streams I've already been doing on Twitch are sort of part of this, but the comprehensive written part will be around that timeline; looser time frame on this, as this is mostly just dependent on me and where it makes sense for me to be focusing on this.
• Estimated August : The books should start arriving to folks. This is probably the hardest to project date with international shipping being what it is, and a lot of pallets that'll have to get around the world to places.
• Estimated August(?) : The Digital Toolset for crafting goes live.  This could be much earlier, I just don't want to make any promises yet that it'll be earlier, as it's going to be a bit of a parallel development in the later half of the development cycle.

This is a big project and this is my first time with a book like this; while I have some expert advice from a few folks, the schedule is moderately ambitious and there are a lot of moving pieces. I don't currently see any reason any of these dates will slip, but I'm just offering my best guess and what the schedule currently looks like in terms of what will be possible at the rate the artists are working on things, the rate I'm able to process playtesting feedback and polish content, the rate things get playtested, etc.

There are a lot more dates and deadlines, but I wanted to keep this comprehensible, so I'm posting the ones more backer facing here.

For folks are interested, I'll probably write a fairly long 2-part "post mortem" of sorts; part 1 will be after the PDF ships, and part 2 will be after the books arrive (you can probably guess what they will focus on! :D) the intention of those will be to help folks that want to run a Kickstarter like this (or just find it interesting to know what the process was, where and how money got spent, that sort of thing).

Anyway, surveys should be sent, let's see if we can get to 200k after all (and I won't be even a tiny bit disappointed if we don't... perhaps I'll still post the crafting magic as a PDF online somewhere or something :D)

Alright folks, that's a long post.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to working on this campaign to send you folks the best book I possibly can. This has been truly amazing, and I'll be in touch with you frequently, but if you ever want to get ahold of me or be on the cutting edge of the updates, there's always Discord or Patreon. Anyone can tell you its easy to get ahold of me there (or Reddit) if you have any questions, and that I post and share stuff frequently for those that want to follow along with the latest (so far we've seen 2 fighter subclasses, 2 rogue subclasses, and have 2 warlock subclasses coming soon... suspicious they've been coming in twos... :D )

All the best,

-Kibbles

Surveys have started going out!
about 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 09:23:53 AM

Hey Folks,

Survey

The first wave of surveys will be going out... now! This is called the smoke test, and goes out to 5% of backers. If everything goes well there, the next wave of surveys will go out shortly after.

Excited to get this out to folks! If you have any questions about the process, feel free to reach out, I'm happy to make sure things are working as expected or answer any questions.

Some of you will be getting your survey right after this, and the rest of you will be getting it as soon as those are complete and the system looks like its working.

Shipping

Shipping will vary from below estimate in some places to higher-than-I'd-like in a few places; as this is regional friendly shipping, it essentially has a shipping partner in each region that tells me what their rates are (and I have Nord Games helping with this step; many thinks to them once more).

To even get to these prices, I'm subsiding a fair bit of shipping out of pocket. Unfortunately shipping is just not in a great place world wide. That said, hopefully none of the shipping prices will be a shock, as I believe they are all still inside the estimated ranges. Of course, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Summary

Thank you all! I'm excited to get this next step, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions about addons or the like.

I will tentatively hope to send out the first playtest packet to folks by the end of this month; this will be a good bit rougher in formatting, but will have a lot of content as things have been coming along pretty well there.

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Shout Out

Now this doesn't have anything to do with the project directly, but if your looking for more 5e stuff on Kickstarter (and there's a ton of great stuff) I wanted to offer a little shout to this project:

Mag of Holding for 5e (ending soon)

• Why I'm linking it: I'll be contributing one page of content (a system called Camp Actions for improving your long rests) for it (they requested something and I sent it along).  I don't actually know too much about the project overall, but that the creator seems like a great chap and you can get into the project for a very low price of admission if you're just looking for a PDF and it offers a very fast turn around time. I'd recommend flipping through and see if it's something you find interesting.

I'll probably be pointing out a few other projects as they go live from folks I know or have talked to about their Kickstarters; I'll explain why I'm linking to them, but it's just a recommendation to take a look and see if it's for you. My Kickstarter got off the ground because a ton of awesome folks told a ton all of you awesome folks about it, so it seems like the least I can do when I have a chance :)