Castle Ironskull and Crown of Eternity

Yesterday I sent out preliminary PDF copies of Castle Ironskull, a 16-page adventure by David Pulver for The Fantasy Trip. It’s the first of five adventures created for the “Four Perilous Journeys” Kickstarter, which successfully funded at well over target level. This begins roughly a month of proofing, refining, and final adjustment before the files to to the printer and finalizing quantities. That means if you missed the Kickstarter campaign proper . . . it’s not too late! Pre-orders are open on Backerkit.

This morning I “blasted” notification emails for Crown of Eternity. These notes should be in your in-box; if not, check Spam. If not, email me or send me a message through Kickstarter.

Unlike Castle Ironskull, Crown’s counter art is not yet complete. But here’s what’s coming

• 14 salt-wraiths
• 7 wights
• 6 royal wights
• 4 gargoyles
• 3 cactus things
• 3 human henchmen
• 3 tooth snakes
• 2 important NPCs

I’ve seen the preliminary art for the salt wraiths and the royal wights this morning; they’re lovely.

As always, please send any observed mistakes to my email: gamingballisticllc@gmail.com with [Crown of Eternity] in the subject header.

Other Progress

We really are coming to the end. The next big steps are to prepare the actual printed counter sheets, which means choosing a design for the back of each sheet (something y’all helped me with in prior updates), and then moving the color version of each one to the vendor site.

It also means preparing the PDF of the color sheets for those that get it. These two steps are really the same.

It also means putting some labels down on each counter so that you can distinguish them by more than looks. Again: that’s going to happen at the same time as the other two steps.

Since the color counter art is in hand for most of these, the job is tedious but can be done at any time; because physical printing of the books is slower than printing the counters, I can even start this after the final book print files go to Latvia . . . but I probably will try and get a jump on them earlier.

The card decks are the other bit of tedium. These will require some coordination with SJG, but again, a lot of work is done – largely thanks to SJG giving me the files for Decks of Destiny. If someone says (and I saw this on Reddit) “SJG is hard to work with,” let’s just say my experience has been radically different, and better (and I said this on Reddit). It continues to be a true pleasure.

So really, once the final art comes in, it’s a whole bunch of “grunt work” but that’s that. The rest is proofing, tweaking, and getting the very-simple NPC stats transferred over.

Card Decks

Just to be clear: we passed the 250-deck stretch goal for increasing the number of cards in the deck to 63. That means 12 or 13 cards per adventure. The next goal would be at 500 decks, which seems unlikely at this time. Pre-orders in sufficient quantity – which means nice comments need to spread beyond this forum! – would fix that, but it needs to be soon!

In any case, for (say) Crown of Eternity, you would get both important NPCs, one each of the rest (minimum), and duplicated of the salt wraiths and wights. Where I have to choose, items that already appear somewhere else (another deck) or are fairly mundane – like the gargoyle above – will be dropped to ensure a unique monster, especially one that appears in large numbers, has more than one such card.

About those Pre-Orders

This has been a very successful project for me, and is on track to remain so (but it’s not over until I pay for shipping, so . . . ). Pre-order volume, however, has been very light.

You can help me with that. Saying nice things on Social Media, and including the pre-order link, really does make a difference. Now that the adventures are in hand, quick capsule reviews of the good (which can generate sales) and the improvable (which helps me and the authors refine the game for next time) are huge boosters. Coming from not-Gaming-Ballistic they have more weight than me or my authors promoting our own product.

And after all, there were 3,300 backers or so for the original Legacy Edition. That leaves roughly 2,700 people who are right smack in the target market here! Let’s get busy. (Kidding. Sort of. Well, not really.)

All Book Covers

Just to leave you with some pictures, and most of you have seen these before. But . . . here are the final covers for all five adventures.