Where do we stand halfway through the campaign? We passed 500 backers…and there’s a lot more lurking below the surface, waiting to bite that tasty, tasty lure. You know you wanna.

Dark Lord’s Doom – Laid Out!

First is a bit of progress. Dark Lord’s Doom is ready for final read-through and playtest. I converted all the things (I think…that’s what the final read-through is for!), and all the art is in place, and it fits nicely into the page allotments. I had to tweak it out a few times, but eventually I got it where it needed to be.

Glynn Seal (of Monkeyblood Design and Publishing) is on tap to help me get all the maps updated to the proper format and size scale (5′ squares). I think he was talking about a day or two turn-around.

So that’s half the books done, two more to go. I’m hoping to rip through those in the next eight days, leaving the final few days for something else, and tweaking based on play reports.

Halfway to the End!

The campaign passed its halfway point … well, sometime today. As I see it, we’re doing very well. Some of this is apparent to backers, but some isn’t.

Where We Stand

• We hit 500 backers today. That puts us in the middle of the pack for total backers looking at my prior campaigns (below), but considering we’re only halfway, that’s not a bad place to be.
• We have an astonishing 1,191 followers, which is more than 200 people higher than my previous record (my prior campaign) for The Fantasy Trip, and 400 more than my Nordlondr Bestiary, which is the record for most-backed of all my campaigns to date.

• One thing I can see but you can’t is the number of those 1,191 followers who haven’t backed yet. I mean, it needs to be more than half, of course. But thus far, we have over 1,000 people following the campaign who have not yet backed it. This has interesting implications for the last two days…if I can determine what those people are waiting for!

• The daily funding track on BackerTracker shows remarkably robust performance since the initial first six days. We’re averaging something like 17 new backers and roughly $760 per day, which means that we can probably expect to pick up another 150-170 people before the 48-hour race begins. That will put the campaign in striking distance of “most-backed Gaming Ballistic campaign” ever even before that crucial last 48 hours.

Finally, that brings us to conversion. The best campaign I’ve ever run had 52% followers to backer ratio. If we hit that right now, we’d add another 470 people, putting the campaign within spitting distance of that magical 1,000-backer level. Magical? Seems that way to me.

But “best-ever conversion” aside…if we wind up at 660 folks when the 48-hour bell sounds (160 new backers over the next 10 days, which is a bit less than average for what we’ve been doing), then to hit that 1,000 backer mark, we’d need about a third of follower-not-backed to come on board. That’s…entirely reasonable.

So, let’s see…oh, new stuff!

Quick Reference Cards!

Glynn and I have a history of working productively together, and we’ve come up with a concept to put all of the monsters, PCs, and NPCs in these four books into a set of quick-reference cards. These will be both digital and printed on 3.5 x 5″ card stock (if you’ve seen some of my Decks of Destiny cards…it’s the same card die). They’ll look something like this, based on some preliminary work Glynn and I have done. These particular cards are a combination of actual characters and art and some placeholder text for spacing.

These are the PC versions. The layout is so that if you use stands similar to those used for cardboard miniatures, the GM or player can see the stats, while everyone else sees the art on the back. The monster cards will have a different layout. BOTH cards are likely moving to icon-based markers for attacks, equipment, saving throws, and a few others. Different colors on the edges for different card families, since color coding can be useful. Work in progress!

One thing I’ll look to do is make all the fonts and text sizes as large as possible. There’s a lot of blank space on some of these cards that can be used to improve readability.

I’ll keep folks up to date on this…but once I have it finalized, you can probably expect me to toss down the project’s only stretch goal…if we cross that magical backer threshold, everyone will get digital versions of these cards, depending on which adventures you pick out. Get all four? Cards for each. Get one? Cards for that one.

Please Share!

The best way to help the project succeed is to talk about it. Forums, twitter, discord, reddit…you talking about the project is almost always more effective than me talking about it. Even so: sharing or retweeting one of my posts on r/osr or the OSE facebook group or my @GMingBallistic account on twitter really does help…and the referral stats prove it.

That’s it for tonight…we’ve got another 12 days in the campaign, so buckle up. I get the feeling the last few days are going to be pretty exciting!