Well, as I’ve said before, and I’ll say again before the end: Thank You! The support you’ve shown so far has allowed me to proceed with great confidence. It’s nice to be able to err on the side of “more!” whenever there’s a choice.

Funding Progress

I’m a bit of an analytical guy in my personal and professional life. So here’s what I can say.

From an absolute perspective, we’re four days into the campaign and have raised just over $7,800, an amazing 260% funding level.

Looking at my three prior Kickstarters and that of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, one can see some pretty clear trends.

• There are three funding zones. Day 1-2, Day Last and Next to last, and The Giant Ocean of Pain in between
• The Day 1-2 pace tends to set trends. If one sets the average funding rate per day at 100% for Day 1-2, the last two days tends to be about 60-70% of that level (per day), and the entire middle runs at 13-16%
• The Hall of Judgement campaign is 25 days long, with four fridays in it

Our funding rate for Day 1-2 was just over $3,000 per day. This suggests a finishing rate of $1,500-2000 per day, and a daily rate of roughly 1/8 to 1/6 of the initial total, or $375-500. That suggests an amazing $16-20,000 for the entire campaign.

That’s awesome, but it’s not the most important number.

Four Hundred Seventy Five

This is. What is this? It’s roughly the point in terms of total number of backers where it would be foolish of me to not do a full-on offset print run of at least 1,000 copies. That’s the minimum order with the company I’m working with on Dragon Heresy, and given the price and quality difference for a sewn offset softcover (both cheaper and nicer), is the tipping point where there’s really no decision to make.

Sewn offset softcover?

Yes. Get your copy of Adventurers or Exploits. Hold it up sideways. You’ll see this:

Each group of pages is a “signature,” made by printing a bunch of sheets and then folding them up, and binding them in the black glue near the spine.

Now open Adventurers to pp. 54-55. I’ll wait. Got it? If you look inside where the pages meet, say, roughly to the left of “Choose 15 for a tendency,” on p. 55 on the bottom left, you’ll see an obvious hole or puncture, maybe even thread.

The signatures are sewn together to keep pages from falling out.

This is a very high quality softcover book. I’d like to make Hall of Judgment the same way, but it’s going to take more help to do it.

Nose, Meet Grindstone

A amazing as this last week has been for me to watch, it’s time to get busy. What have I done?

I’ve taken the entire final version of Lost Hall of Tyr and re-exported it as a text file. I’ve cut that up into the new outline (which hews to what I promised in the main campaign itself). I’m spending the majority of the weekend writing, revising, and expanding the text. I have no real upper limit on what I intend here: the book will be as long as it needs to be.

Fantastic (Dungeon) Grappling

I’ve completed a really good revision of the grappling subchapter, and this one took and incorporated the entire grappling section from Exploits to eliminate questions on “which rules apply?” It runs four pages, including art.

Here are two pages from the middle of the layout. This is the third and fourth page of the section.

This will continue to be tested in actual play in blindtests (that means that I’m not around to correct or nudge folks; it gives a clearer view of what’s left uncertain or unclear). I’ve got some great folks on it, and you’ll see playtest reports in the coming weeks.

Maps and More Maps

Glynn Seal, author of The Midderlands and The Midderlands Expanded, did my main map for Nordlond and the adventure material (previewed in the main campaign page). The KS smashed the goals so quickly that I was able to, with full confidence, order four more.

You’ll get a zoom-in of the area around the Hall, a complete micro-location with map and potentially life-threatening things to do, plus two more dungeons to explore.

As I said: this is going to be bigger and better than Lost Hall.

Isfjall

Sean did such a good job making Caverntown a living, breathing place to visit that I felt I owed it to DFRPG fans to do the same thing. And with the release of Pyramid #3/116: Locations, there’s yet another template/method for presenting interesting places to go and get killed.

Sorry: go and kill things and take their stuff. Ignore the glint in the GM’s eye and just keep telling yourself that’s the plan, Mr. Jenkins.

Pre-Gens and GameHole Con

What templates will be in the book as pregenerated characters?

• Barbarian (but how can you tell ’em from the Nordlonders?)
• Bard (Skald)
• Cleric
• Holy Warrior
• Knight
• Scout
• Wizard
• Wrestler

All will be 250 points, hew to the DFRPG core rules or Pyramid articles, and be inherently approachable to beginners and fun for experienced hands. I’m working on layouts for characters and monsters now, and will post pictures as I make progress. And we’ve already got two takers for the fan-contributed Pre-Gens, and I hear a spear-wielding swashbuckler is in the works.

GameHole Con

I will be at GameHole Con from Nov 8-11th, and have booked a room. The most excellent Men in Black are working with me to secure at least one 4-hour game session, probably in the Dorkstock area.

One session is confirmed, and I’ll post that reward level this coming TUESDAY at 10am. You will need to secure your own badges, transportation, hotels, etc. I will provide the game, and a hardcopy of every book I’ve made from Gaming Ballistic including Hall of Judgment. Even if we go full offset, with 14 weeks lead time, I should have hardcopies by then to hand out.

No matter what, I hope to see you there!

Go Tell The Spartans, Passerby

That’s it for the update today! That being said, a brief story: late the other day, with us hanging out comfortably north of $7000 funds raised, a fairly frequent poster and contributor to some of the forums I frequent was surprised to learn that there was a Kickstarter running.

So: please share the link and spread the word! The usual and unusual RPG forums. Reddit. Facebook. G+. Twitter. Other places I don’t know about. We’ve got the SJG Forums pretty well covered, both in the DFRPG subforum and the GURPS subforum.

But a small a community as we think we are . . . we’re not so well tied together that we can assume everyone that would like to hear about this has already! Want to help? Share!