Major Progress: First complete layout pass
almost 6 years ago
– Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 10:56:19 PM
A lot of movement on the Kickstarter! We passed $12,000 and that puts us on track to more-or-less equal Dragon Heresy unless we see something, as Mr. Furious would say, "either very good or very bad."
Layout: Block and Tackle
I've been working really hard to pull things together, and the efforts are paying off. In quick-point format:
- Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch, GURPS Line Editor and author of the DFRPG, will be contributing the Foreword to Hall of Judgment! I made the offer to SJG, Steve pronounced it virtuous (his word!), and I'm very excited to have that going in there.
- John Adamus, editor extraordinaire, turned around my manuscript in twelve hours, and caught enough detailed points that it was clear he got both content and copy. If you're in the market for an editor: hire this man.
- I've got the first full layout pour of the document in place. So there's a page for just about everything that needs to go there. Title page, Kickstarter Backer credits, Table of Contents, Crazy Norse Words pronunciation glossary, Town, Journey, Dungeons, the Hall itself, Grappling, Pre-gens, Bestiary, and a bit of modified backstory for those that care.
- The PDF as-is, no maps, no art, no orphan text fixes, is 116 pages. So my delivery target for a print book will be 128 interior pages; likely the PDF will be 131 or 132 for spacing and facing for the cover.
- The maps are still being worked, but there's lots of time for that. Each is a page in size, so they're easy to plan for in layout. No delays expected there.
- The pre-gens are coming along nicely. The eight promised with the book are done. I think I have 2-3 of the backer-submitted ones in hand already, if not fully laid out.
- The monsters are also coming along; perhaps half done. The core 16 that originally came with Lost Hall of Tyr are finished, and the 14-15 more that are added with Hall of Judgment are next on the list.
- Fantastic Dungeon Grappling got another small revision and is looking solid.
I've got 22 days left until the deadline set by "we plan to release the product in August" promise I made in the April 1 announcement, and the PDF will be ready by then.
Printing
That leaves us with the print question. At this point, we've got 275 (ish) print backers. That's more than enough to get us out of POD, but not enough to drive to a full offset print run.
Wild and crazy things can happen, and I hope they do. What does this mean? It means unless we see a wild uptick, I'll be using a short-run printer in the UK to deliver 140gsm interior pages (that's about 93# paper; typical DriveThru is 70#/105gsm).
Because the printing is in the UK and the fulfillment partner I'll be using is also in the UK, I expect to be working hard on the shipping side of things. I'll probably know more in two weeks on that score.
Ask Me Anything
I'm working on a "final week Ask Me Anything" session, probably a few hours long, sometime this week. Not sure what that will look like, but I want to do it and take questions about the process, the adventure, and anything gaming-related. Or viking related.
Campaign Close Process
That brings us to the finishing touches.
The campaign closes July 14, which is Saturday. I would deeply appreciate re-shares on social media, and talking about the project in general. The better we do, the more likely SJG is to want to do this again.
When the campaign closes, I'll ready and fire up the Backerkit phase, which will have a short survey to get your pledges allocated to product. For those not getting add-ons, is all you'll do with the "survey" is:
-
Validate you're getting the product you want
- Pay for shipping
- Select any add-ons you'd like
- Answer a few questions about the product, and what you'd like to see next
It is pretty important to be prompt on this one, and the survey period will be short: Probably 7-10 working days.
Note that Backerkit does not set the pace for digital reward delivery. As long as the funds settle and there's no weirdness with payment (this happens every campaign; it's depressingly normal) you'll get your PDF on August 1.
So that's it! This is the home stretch, and while there's still work to be done, that work is pretty well defined at this point.
Grab your axe and shield, board your longship and let's finish strong. Glory awaits.
Character and Monster Templates taking shape
almost 6 years ago
– Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 07:25:16 PM
I've been working on the writing, which is now in the "I have something for everything" stage, and now turning to editing and converting from Fifth Edition/Dragon Heresy to the DFRPG/Powered by GURPS stats and difficulties. That starts, well, now.
The other big thing I did was structure the creature and pre-gen templates in InDesign. This was (and will continue to be) laborious, but there's nothing to be done about that.
In any case, here's a preview. Starting with one of the Pre-Gen characters that will appear in the book, using the Wrestler template from Pyramid #3/111
And a sample monster, with bonus stock art from the always excellent Dean Spencer
Things may indeed shift around, but I kinda like 'em both.
Wow. 10K. Amazing. Oh, and Print/Ship Commentary
almost 6 years ago
– Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 06:49:22 PM
We hit $10,000!
I mean, the trajectory and usual Kickstarter behavior (where your last two days are about 60% of the first two days) suggested this anyway, but still, seeing it is astounding. We also surpassed the total number of backers for Dragon Heresy, my full 288-page RPG, which was 328 during the campaign itself, plus a few pre-orders. We're at 334 as I write this, which means no matter what, we've passed both.
The next "can we get there" milestone is to pass Dragon Heresy in terms of funds raised, which is a higher challenge. Our first two days were astounding: $6566 raised! Then we kept up at a $440 per day rate for the next 6 days, and since then, the pledge rate has leveled to $200 per day. The final two days can be up to 70% of the first two . . . or they can be "just another day."
That means that at the low end, the next 13 days of the campaign could bring in another $2,500 and 85 people . . . which is awesome no matter what. Or they could bring in another $7,300. Who knows! The key will be getting the word out, and that depends on you more than me.
In any case, the campaign has already been very successful, and each day makes it more so.
Printing and Shipping
I had a question come up on the SJG Forums, and I thought I'd open the kimono a bit more about where we are, and where we might go.
I have four vendors I use for printing. DriveThruRPG, Publisher's Graphics, a UK company that does short-run, high-quality digital print (Call it Company C), and a Hong Kong company that only deals in 1000+ quantities (call them Company D).
DriveThru and PubGraphics both have online quote generators open to all. DriveThru uses Lightning Source for printing, which has a UK branch; this means "not the USA" uses Royal Mail for shipping, which is much less expensive to y'all. A full 30% of backers to this project fall into that category (double the usual!) so this is a real consideration; the lowest cost to get a package out of the US to London by USPS is about $25. Royal Mail does that for $5-6.
But printing! The basic factor here is the quality and cost per book. I find PubGraphics quality superior to DriveThru. The paper is a bit better, the binding MUCH better, and the color more vivid. They're also roughly 2/3 the price per book, but charge a setup fee. In short, somewhere between "I order 8" and "I order 32," it's cheaper to order from PubGraphics even including the ridiculous shipping cost to get it out of the USA.
But I will be ordering a minimum of 200 books, because you guys are great.
Let's hit the other extreme. I can't order fewer than 1,000 books from Company D. So that's a dollar amount threshold, full stop. That, however, means that I will have something like 700 books sitting in my house. If I can sell them? FANTASTIC. That's extra revenue, and the cost per book easily supports a distribution model. That's an additional $7,000 in revenue (with associated licensing fees to SJGames!) over time, though not front-loaded like the Kickstarter.
In the middle, between 345 orders and about 720 orders, we have Company C. Their stuff is going to arrive with much thicker paper (140gsm vs 105gsm; 93# paper vs 70# for us Americans) and still be perfect bound like DriveThru and PubGraphics. Originating in the UK means that the costs for international shipping are lower, though I will need to find a good partner to split off 30% of the orders and get them to international folks.
So where are we for printing? We're just at the cusp of kicking over into the wide territory where Company C wins the cost/quality battle. If I wind up ordering about 50% more books than actual print backers, then once we hit 230 print backers, we upgrade to the thicker paper. At 475-480 print backers, we get the sewn binding.
I'm working now to find a good partner for this in the UK. If you know of one (a game store that also fulfills international orders at a reasonable cost, perhaps), please let me know.
Progress
Writing continues, as does map creation. I just did a quick layout trial, and the current text - with no maps or art of any sort - runs over 75 pages. Add on the "Thegn of Your Own" backers, five full-page maps, six half-page encounter maps and we're at 88 pages with zero artwork. Given I like to put something every spread or two, if we budget a quarter-page of art every four pages you're dealing with another five or six pages of art.
And there's a lot of dungeon and wilderness encounters and lions, tigers, and bears, oh my yet to do. (No tigers, actually. But lions and bears play prominent roles, so there is that). "Town" itself is 18 pages long, which makes for a nice, robust starting place with lots of things to do, and good embedded culture and entry points for adventurers to explore.
So we're definitely trending to the 96 pages or more endpoint, which is fun for a book that started at 64.
Today is a "write all day" budget, so by day's end, hopefully I'll have most of the prose done. That would mean the big job is converting to Powered by GURPS numbers and stats. That's a challenge, but it's a direct one.
So I'm going to get to it. In the meantime, a bit of "yay, team!" on social media would not go amiss.
Thanks!
