A Bestiary Approaches for Nordlond and the DFRPG

You’ve probably seen the cover floating around for a long time.

You may have seen the mockup.

Hmmm. A big hardcover. Wouldn’t THAT be nice?

Well, as of just a few moments ago, I submitted an initial Kickstarter page for review. I’m still a few weeks away from pushing “go,” but I’m actually inching up pretty close to having the first basic installment of the bestiary ready to look at layout.

The first version of this would be a 48-page softcover. Probably have about 60 creatures, including “for a giant X, increase ST to 22 and add Odious Personal Habit (Eats Delvers).” But the major creatures are all meant to have full stat blocks and art, like these from some of my other books. Format will be similar, graphic design will change. Not quite sure how yet.

The trick here is that each one is aimed at having some nice art. Ideally custom art. I need to look at that really hard, because some of these monsters are truly unique, others might be approximated reasonably well with high quality stock art from That Other Game. The fire-breathing Wyvern, for example, from Forest’s End is stock art.

So I need to look very carefully about what the project goals are. But if I got custom art for every piece, we’d end up with a 240-page hardback, but would need $75,000 to do it.

In any case…hopefully Real Soon Now Kickstarter will approve the campaign format, which means I’ll have a box saying “Click here to be notified when the campaign launches.”

And I’d really appreciate it if you did.

I can say that my intent is to have the basic PDF pledge be $20. As we unlock stretch goals that add pages … that $20 PDF pledge grows in page count.

I can’t do that with the hard-copies, though. So the price of the hardcopy book will be an add-on to the PDF basic pledge, and the more stretch goals we unlock, the more pages, and the price of the final book goes up accordingly. As I get more information – quotes from printers, chatting with my artists, a better idea of what the art costs would be for stock art vs custom commission – I’ll be updating the final goals in the background.

Until then…I intend to launch this sometime in November.

Oh, and a lot of the creatures will seem pretty familiar. One of my hopes is that if we can get the full book, folks will be able to run D&D adventures with this book, and maybe Monsters 1 and Monsters 2 from SJGames, just looking up in a “alternate name index” that a particular monster from the SRD is now called the Ismargfaetlur, or Ice Centipede, with stats on page whatever.