Well, this is April in Minnesota, so naturally I woke to find about six inches of snow on the ground. Sigh. This state . . .

We had a great 24 hours, with over 80% of required funds collected. It was an excellent first day!

Podcasts Fall Like Rain

Over the next few days, you’ll probably see podcasts drop: Table Top Babble, Down with DnD, and Hobbs and Friends of the OSR. I’ve got a few more planned, and I could always use a few more suggestions.

What’s Up Next

This week is all about monsters. Right now, the monsters section lays out to 110 pages, which makes 260 pages of as-is layout. Toss in a title page, Kickstarter backer page, one or two pages for a Table of Contents (call it two), and roughly one page of index per 50 pages of book (call it 5-6 pages), and that’s about 10 extra pages. Makes for a single 270-page book, which isn’t bad, though it’s a bit longer than I’d like. If we hit the $10,000 stretch goal, there are about 14,000 words of pre-written content I’d like to add . . . another 23 pages.

There’s a lot of extra white space in the Foes section, though. I’d wanted to try and get each creature type on the top of a page, for easy reference, and to avoid the statblock from (say) one creature on a left-hand column, and a new creature on the right. Potentially confusing.

The counter-argument here is that for all the benefits of this strategy, it’s very space inefficient.

For every layout example we have of this:

You sometimes get some thing like this:

These are about half-empty . . .

…with some that show empty columns, though in this case, I’d rather leave it there and start Humanoids on the next page.

This is not an insurmountable problem, of course, and there’s lots of time. But it’s where I am right now. If you’ve got suggestions, leave ’em in the comments!

Major Milestones

The biggest milestone here is, of course, to fund. That’s a double-tap, though, because if we hit the funding goal, it means that I am guaranteed the funds to pay my editor. He’s already been selected, and he’s committed to timely delivery.

Once that happens, the only major task left for completing the book is indexing, then assembling the book pieces into a final draft, with all the small bits that make it a complete book. Then, of course, the process of layering and hyperlinking and bookmarking the PDF.

The project is far enough along that, presuming we fund, I can more or less promise that each backer will receive a playable copy of the rules (maybe with editing, maybe now) the day the Kickstarter funds settle: sometime mid-May.

From there, you’ll get 4-6 weeks to play the heck out of the game and ask questions and suggest tweaks should they be necessary. The game was playtested pretty well, but you’ll find things. Those will be tweaked by the end of June, and then we’ll get a final PDF and printable PDF going. That will take a few weeks to get proofs, then the bulk order . . .

So, that’s the plan! Thanks for joining early. If you can, throw down some social media boosts where you’re able, and let folks know that Dragon Heresy is happening.

Have a great week!