This last week was all about getting ready for the transition to Backerkit. There’s a lot that goes on “below the waterline” to make this happen. It’s a lot like synchronized swimming: it only looks calm and graceful if you don’t look at the legs.

So, what went on?

• A lot of art direction. A lot. Something between 70 and 80 new illustrations, most of which are already underway.
• A lot of conversations on fulfillment, culminating with the decision to partner with Nord Games and ShipQuest UK to provide international and domestic fulfillment for ALL of my product, not just the hardcover books. Anything on offer will be made available to anyone. This was greatly facilitated by ShipQuest’s decision to become a formal VAT agent for the UK/EU, which is 90% of the reason I was loathe to offer anything BUT the book.
• That doesn’t mean shipping will be cheap, easy, or happy-happy-joy-joy. It won’t. But this puts the decision in the backers’ hands, where I think it belongs.
• Even more conversations with the card deck vendor, talking about boxes.
• A decision on which printer I’m using, final book page count, and number of copies.
• We are now assembling the shipping matrix and hopefully will have that all settled early next week. Followed very quickly by the survey itself.

Now it’s monsters, monsters, monsters. I actually hope to get a chunk of about 50 of them into my Patrons’ hands for review as soon as this weekend.

Gaming Ballistic Patreon

To help with ongoing funding of art and speed eventual time to delivery, Gaming Ballistic started a Patreon in January 2021. Here’s the weekly update on Patreon status.

• Membership status: 59 patrons and $483 per month.
• Special Content: Nothing in the last week, though a lot of discussion, pre-viz on artwork, and whatnot happened on the Patreon Discord.

Some shifting. Lost a patron, but picked up two more, one of whom (if you’ve been tracking the dollar total) really went all-in on support.

Gaming Ballistic in Media

I’ll leave this section here for one more week.

Shadow of the GM: Discussing the GURPS Bestiary with Douglas Cole. Why a bestiary? Why now? How portable? A really good chat.

Nerdarchy: TTRPG Monsters with Gaming Ballistic.

Talking Crit with Erik Tenkar and Bad Mike. This has a primarily OSR/D&D audience, but they have always dug my works, they recognize that I’m one of the better planners for Kickstarters, and they value my insight and commentary after running over a dozen projects successfully.

SJGames Live with Hunter Shelburne. This discussion was pretty focused on the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Lots of previews and screen shares.

Where can you find out more about the project, or make comments?

• The Kickstarter page, of course. Lots of updates. Some of the more interesting ones:
  • Update 9: “So…what’s really in the book?” A list of most of the creatures in the 128-page version.
  • Monsters of the Day appear in various updates. Gremlin, Edderkop, Fjallatroll and Baenadyrid, Rock Lizard, Totally not an Invisible Stalker, Horses.
  • The VTT Pack was added to all pledges of $100 or more
  • A new Pledge Level for the Starter Pack PDFs AND the QR PDF and VTT pack was added at $70. If you are new to Nordlond but have the boxed set (or want to get it), this is the pledge you want if you’re a digital kind of person.
• Gaming Ballistic’s Blog
• The GB Discord channel
• Threads in the SJGames Forums, including the DFRPG and GURPS forums
• Reddit has threads on r/GURPS and r/RPG. That second one was started by a fan, so it is a better place for people to comment than those started by the publisher.
• Reddit actually has several threads going on, all of which are worthy of dropping a note into to keep them current
  • The Nordlond Bestiary Campaign Ends Dec 7 has been very active, with lots of positive comments and a self-proclaimed art critic.
  • Nordlond Bestiary – Baenadyrid in Action is a post by Exxar, the Chaotic GM, testing out the “Mantis Demon” vs one or more 62-point knights using Delvers to Grow. It’s a few combats, from 1-1 to 3-1 in favor of the monsters, showing that, as intended, they’re a speed bump, but a capable one.
  • Monster of the Day posts from Nordlond Bestiary: Collected. Instead of trolling updates, this thread has them all in one place.
  • The Nordlond Bestiary and Enemies Book project is now Live! The post that started it all.
• Same deal with this thread on RPG.net, and another on ENWorld, which have already gathered some commentary. Posting to these has generated a non-trivial number of pledges, so contributing to the discussion is valuable.

Currently Manufacturing/Fulfilling/Shipping

Projects where hardcopies and PDFs are going out or scheduled to do so.

• Nothing new this period. GB is current with fulfillment and shipping.

Crowdfunding and Product Launches

The Bestiary Kickstarter is in the “head down and working” phase. Good news is my awesome art team has mostly said they shall turn around my latest set of commissions by something like mid-January. That’s really excellent and sets the stage for some product acceleration (though not a ton).

Monsters. Monsters monsters monsters. So many monsters. They go into a spreadsheet, then I use that to help with layout, and then I tweak and arrange the bits. Helps cut down on errors.

The Backerkit stuff is the most important next step, combined with a post-launch campaign to hopefully take a book with known content, size, and scope and see if we can push the numbers a bit higher. I’ve picked a printer, settled on final page count, print quantity, and now we’re working the logistics and shipping numbers to get the lowest cost (which will still be not awesome) considerations for pledges. For add-ons, it gets a bit odd, but some conversations with the fulfillment partner resulted in me just making a few decisions that should hopefully work out in the end (short version: the card decks as opposed to books are tricky, but since the ONLY non-book product on offer is the card decks…there’s not much point in stressing over it).

Product Announcements

The full Product Catalog is still out there.

I need to modify it to include the Bestiary, and I didn’t get to that this week. It won’t really take long. I’ll do that this weekend.

In Development

Writing and content creation for announced projects. Some of this may be cryptic.

• Inns and Taverns, by Marshall LaPira. Systemless. Revised tavern submitted on Nov 11, returned with comments in early November.
• Two Warring Houses, by Douglas Cole. Systemless. Outline stage and writing, but on hold as the Bestiary gets launched.
• Nordlondr Bestiary, by Douglas Cole. Dungeon Fantasy RPG. See above, workin’ hard.

Friction

Bits of news and items that put a monkey in the wrench.

• A late start due to a blizzard and a stay-at-home day due to misbehavior by bad actors on social media meant I did not get as much computer time as I wanted.
• Insomnia sucks, and getting to sleep at 2am does not help my productivity.
• I did not get nearly as far with monster data entry this week as I hoped, but I got pretty far on the logistics
• Late-year Kickstarters are rough on taxes. I’m accelerating buying needful things for the project to see what I can shift into fiscal/calendar 2021.

Fair Winds

Information about things that move GB forward.

• The discussions with Nord and ShipQuest were really productive, and I’ll be working with them on fulfillment. The ability to use SQ as a VAT agent is huge. That doesn’t mean all is cheap and easy: It won’t be. But it will be possible without dumping thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into per-country registration or setting up as an internet One Stop Shop under the new rules.
• Very pleased with the progress on art. That’s going faster than I’d planned.
• Printer has the paper in stock for what I’m doing; given folks are waiting four to six months for paper on some books, this is rather good news. It, of course, could change at the drop of the hat. I am likely to pre-pay to set that stock aside, which is fine.