We’re Almost Funded

As I type this, we have $670 before we fund, with eight days to go. That could legitimately get knocked down by a single Retail pledge and one more person selecting the PDF level.

Right now, the “backers not yet converted” plus “pledged” backers total 580 people, with BiggerCake predicting 450-475 total backers when we finish.

I hope that we can all take to the ether over the next week or so and help push this a bit. I’ll be on a few more shows this week:

• God Dammit Zach today at 7pm Central
• Crit Academy Wednesday at 6pm Central
• Nerdarchy Live at 11am on Thursday

This is an absolutely game-changing book for those who like GURPS and the Dungeon Fantasy genre, but find that the 250-point expectation is a higher-power campaign than you like to play, or find that you and your players get frustrated with character creation. It allows Powered by GURPS to be fast. TFT Fast. OSR fast. 1st level D&D fast. Five to 15 minutes to a playable, robust, interesting character with only a few decisions required. It’s the best on-ramp to GURPS that has ever been written.

If any of y’all happen to be friends with Wil Wheaton . . . he posted on his social media accounts a “shelfie” featuring a big slab of GURPS books and a nostalgic reminiscence. Wouldn’t it be fun to get that sort of notice?

Behind the scenes, there’s been some really good progress.

Delvers to Grow: Clocking in at 40 pages

Kevin gave me his final manuscript for the basic book. I did an editing and formatting pass. Then, as I tend to do, I put it into layout so that I can start art direction. I make a habit of sending my artists the actual spread they’ll be working on, so that if they want to get creative with composition, they know how much room they have.

In any case, the layout works out great at about 40 pages. Given that even with the modular presentation, a book like this can get very “wall of text,” I made an effort to ensure the various blocks have room to breathe.

I’m going to spend time today putting in some art I already have, and then it’s time to commission the new pieces.

Crypt of Krysuvik: Updated Final Draft Today

Peter and Marshall gave me their draft for Krysuvik a day early, and I quickly turned around a few corrections. Mostly pretty minor stuff, and I expect a final version this evening. I’ll do a formatting and editing pass, and then get that into layout as well.

The first thing that will get turned into art are the maps, and then a few key bits of art that need to be pretty specific. These don’t need layout to know what to draw.

For the rest, we’re almost certainly looking at 24 or 28 pages, depending on how things plunk down. But that manuscript is in hand.

Example Books: Character Concepts

The always delightful Ksenia Kozhevnikova knocked it out of the park again, with “sketches” for the 12 characters that shall be detailed in various stages of their development. I say “sketches” because while technically true, her version of “sketch” is orders of magnitude more impressive than, say, my version.

You’ll see more of these guys in a bit…but for now:

Six Years Ago…

This blog post from 2015 shows that I have been thinking on the Delvers to Grow concept for quite a while.

Delvers to Grow on Kickstarter