As I write this, the campaign has been active for exactly three weeks, and we have 12 days to go.

Daily Illuminator!

Today the Norðlond Sagas was featured on Steve Jackson Games’ Daily Illuminator. If you get a moment, re-sharing or commenting on the post – especially in venues off the forums – will help bring some needed attention and (hopefully) velocity to the campaign.

Map of Norðlond

Things have not been idle since I last posted an update. Glynn Seal has completed the map of Norðlond that is available as an add-on, and it unifies the various adventure locations geographically. The team had a good time naming the various larger towns and cities. I’m looking forward to using this particular map in books and as a stand-alone.

With that in mind, I’ve done a bit of digging on the map options, and wanted to pass this information on.

The heavy, 14-point map, UV-laminated for limited use with dry-erase markers is basically printed on business card stock. I’m going to ship these directly from my house, so that I can pack them in a rigid mailer and two plies of double-wall cardboard to keep it safe. Shipping in the USA is likely to be about $10 (it can’t go by media mail, and the packaging to keep it safe is expensive); rest-of-world is likely quite a bit more.

For those who want portability, for the same price of $15 I can offer a 100# paper map, 16×20″, which can be rolled up in a tube mailer. This is just a glossy poster format, no lamination or coating. There’s no price difference there, just paper stock. As always, shipping is a pass-through, I have no control over it, etc.

For international customers, the 12×18″ maps available through DriveThruRPG will be your best bet to have a larger map but still have shipping be affordable.

Editing

I have started in to editing pieces of Rosgarth, and to a lesser extent Forest’s End and Hand of Asgard. The work is coming in a chapter at a time, and I’m going over it and making adjustments to keep the world coherent, as well as acting as editor and keeping in mind flow, art, and all the things that go into making a set of books. This part of the “publisher” job is time consuming but also a great deal of fun, helping folks achieve their vision.

Funding

Right now, we’re hovering at around $20,000 and we’ve been, well, pretty flat – the last 11 days have been tough. Roughly $600 in cancelled pledges, and some of that is related to Kickstarter itself. I hope that these folks come back to us during the Backerkit phase, which avoids that interaction.

The good news is there are nearly 400 folks who are following the campaign but not yet pledged: that means that between actual and “latent” interest, there’s as much as $43K out there. We certainly won’t pull a Pokemon and catch it all, but there’s more than enough to surpass the $29K stretch goal, and all non-shipping funds collected in both Kickstarter and Backerkit will count towards that goal. I want more pages in the book(s) as much as y’all do. The authors, of course, will want more room for more material in their books! (Plus, they get paid more as the backer count increases; my version of profit sharing. Their per-word rate goes up with backer count).

So while things have been quiet for the last week or so, there’s still nearly two full weeks in the campaign, we’ve long since funded, and there’s lots of potential to hit the big goals for offset print as well as longer books.

Gaming Ballistic on the Web

In case you’re looking for me, you can always find me here:

• Main Website and Blog
  
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• MeWe Group
  
• Gaming Ballistic on Discord

Just for Fun: Yrth?

Earlier today, someone pinged me on Discord and noted that they just bought Hall of Judgment, and while they really loved it, their current campaign is on Yrth, and so how would Nordlond fit?

My first suggestion was to plunk the continent on which Norðlond can be found elsewhere, simply not on the continent of Ytarria. The explicit “the Gods of the setting are real, walk the earth, and the creation ‘myth’ isn’t a myth at all” would have to be altered to fit the setting. I talk about variations on the cosmology of the setting in a blog post: Monotheism and Competing Divinities in Norðlond.

The other possibility is, well, those Nomad Lands are pretty far north. What is more, Ytarria is very big. I found this map online, which is the publicly available Ytarria map plus the continental USA and Alaska, added by Eric B Smith.

For those of you that know me, I’ve been living in Minnesota since about 2000. Norðlond is very deliberately sized to my home state, maybe a bit bigger, and the location of major cities in the setting might kinda sorta happen to correspond to county seats in Minnesota. But if Nordlond is roughly 90-100K square miles (it is), that means it can fit into the Nomad Lands about four times over. If your campaign isn’t already much involved there, you could probably drop Nordlond and a good part of the Dragongrounds into the Nomad Lands without even blinking.

Make of that what you will!