Today I received in the mail, by 2nd Day Air, the proof hardcopy of Dungeon Grappling. This means that we are solidly on schedule, since the things that must be corrected are fairly easy to do. That means that we’re one step closer from going from pre-orders to full retail sales.

The Ugly

There’s no ugly. If there were, there’d be delays. There won’t be.

The Bad

There are a few places that the title text encroaches on the border. Such as the following two pages:

 

This is trivially easy to fix – we’ll just nudge the title up into the middle of the border a bit. This will look better even for the short titles.

There are a few textual elements I want to change. I want to sub in the mathematical multiplication symbol × instead of the letter x when I have a multiplier. I think it looks better.

There might be a tweak I make to the index.

And then there are the errata that y’all identified. Those need to be validated as fixed.

The Good

This is a great-looking book on a few levels.

I selected matte paper and cover, and I think it makes the book easier to read under any sort of light. No glare.

I’m still in love both the cover and my 5e compatibility logo.

 

The colors look very good, and the color palette that Nathan and I iterated to works quite well.

No bleed issues, and the book is put together well.

 

The Next Steps

This is the home stretch. Nathan and I will work over the next day or three to finish this.

I made all of the errata corrections on the blog post last night . . . all but two. Changing “PFRPG” to “The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game” was never going to work layout-wise, and I tried it, and confirmed that it breaks the layout. One of the rules of the compatibility licence is that you either use the entire name, or you can use the non-trademarked/non-product-identify PFRPG, but you can’t just say “Pathfinder,” nor can you say “The Pathfinder RPG,” both of which might have fit. So we won’t be doing that one.

There was another conditional/weasel-word phrasing that I wanted to replace, and expected to be able to do so, but again . . . broke layout. So it stays.

Everything else on the list got changed.

Left to do

• Change multiplication symbols from xN to ×N
• Do a full spell-check just to see if I made any errors in anywhere
• Nudge the running titles up so they don’t encroach on the border; might nudge the page numbers down a tetch as well
• There are some “what level of the hierarchy is this?” errors (or maybe it’s only one) in the Table of Contents, and that needs to be fixed
• There are some missing hyperlinks in the ToC, and we’ll check both the ToC and Index. Those are the only places you’ll find hyperlinks, though. We’re trying to not bloat the file size. Bookmarks are present and correct.
• We’ll then re-export the PDF, re-create a new Print-on-Demand file to the same specs as the last one, and export an ePUB document.

The ePub and PDF will be distributed as soon as I have them. The new PODX file will be sent to DriveThruRPG, where they’ll do the same color correction they did last time (since it worked), and then I’ll re-upload that file (the cover is perfect).

Once it’s accepted for print, I’ll start fulfilling orders. If things go well, I will do that this weekend. It will probably take about a week to spit out the copies, and another 1-3 weeks to send by media mail, especially to the USA.

So at this time, I can, with reasonable confidence, estimate that the process of closing out the Kickstarter and delivering all promised rewards will be well underway by the end of February, which is pleasingly ahead of the “end of April” date I had originally communicated.

The Art of Dungeon Grappling

One of the comments that was made in Eric Diaz’s review of Dungeon Grappling was that the art was so good (in his opinion, he wished it were bigger).

Yeah, me too. So I laid out just the art in landscape format, using a lot of the same background and detail techniques we used to make the main book.

The product will be offered on my website to start, and the trick here is that nearly all the money – probably 85% of it – will go either to the artists themselves or as a donation to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. I will need to take a slice to pay transaction fees and as a bit of a boost to overhead for my company, but I’m thinking I’ll be taking 35% and dividing it up to give bonuses to the production team (who did such a fantastic job), and 50% to charity. There will be several price points for the same product to allow more and more to go to St Jude’s.

 

 Thank You!

So here we are, at the end of all things . . . well, the end of this thing, anyway. I’m looking forward to getting the books you all funded into your hands, and I want to thank you again for trusting me with your money, and having faith that I will deliver something useful.

I still would like to ask for your help:

• When you get your rewards, please review the product somewhere, anywhere. Link it back to me so I can advertise a bit. Grappling is disused in games because it’s always been so cumbersome and annoying. I think these rules go a long way to fixing that, and I’d like folks to understand that.
• Please consider following me at Gaming Ballistic, and spreading word of what I hope will continue to be an exciting and expanding product line.
• Support the Dragon Heresy Kickstarter when it comes around . . . and convince your friends to do so as well. I strongly suspect I’ll need on the order of 1,000 to 2,000 backers to make it happen. But if I do make it happen, it will be gorgeous, it will be hardcover, Smyth-sewn, and full color. And a few other surprises.

The next update will be when I can announce that shipping has commenced.

Pre-Order Dungeon Grappling on Backerkit!