Explore the Spellbound Sea with naval combat and ocean travel rules, 3 new classes, 20+ subclasses, 100s of spells, and more!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hello at the tail end of summer! This will be a short and pretty quiet update. TL;DR:
Printing and manufacturing continues! We had a small hitch early in the month because US Customs has decided to require country-of-origin marks on the outside of books instead of just the inside. (This is a new requirement that didn't exist a month ago and doesn't exist in any written law.) But we were early in the print so were able to get it added without fuss.
Since we are getting quite close to ship-time, address lock will be coming up soon. If you haven't confirmed the address in Backerkit is correct, now is a good time to do so.
Summer passing us by does officially mean we've missed the original delivery targets; hopefully that's no surprise to anyone who's been reading any of the updates so far. Our delivery target is still October, with some chance of slippage until November. I'm still pretty happy with 2-3 months late on my first Kickstarter, as these things go.
I pushed the button a couple minutes ago on distribution of the 2024E conversion guide. This is a slim (2 pages) rundown on the recommended changes to make use of Spellbound Sea in a 2024E game.
The ShardVTT module is in beta; it's not at 100% done, but is pretty close. The Roll20 and Foundry modules are on track, no substantive updates to show you on those.
The token pack should be waiting for you in Backerkit if it's in your order. It includes friendly/neutral/enemy tokens for every piece of art that makes sense, as well as the plain token frame pieces so you can build your own.
The digital art book is coming along, albeit slowly; I'm doing this one myself and am not good at InDesign, so it's taking awhile. We'll get there, though!
Happy (end of) July!
I hope your summers are all going well; mine continues to be about making books! This month's TL;DR's:
This month's been a little slow update-wise; basically just a series of back-and-forths over print proofs. We've finished all that and are officially in production. The story of July was basically a bunch of print proofs back and forth, some errors getting caught at the last minute — a few rounds of that. My current estimate, based on starting production now, is that books will be arriving on doorsteps in October. That's an estimate, mind, but that's where we're at. (Basically, we slipped from "early fall" to "mid fall" since it took a couple more rounds of print proofs than anticipated).
You should have received the 1.1 PDF via Backerkit last week. It incorporates a bunch of formatting and styling fixes from the 1.04 release, and adds in corrections to ship hit points and about a dozen spell At-Higher-Levels rules.
The ShardVTT module is in sight of the finish line; it's probably at about 80%, with most of the hard bits already tackled. The Roll20 and Foundry modules are also making good progress but will take longer (they're by the same developer, and also Roll20 modules are Hard).
Our other add-ons are the token pack and the digital art book. I continue to be in the "basically just starting" phase for the art book. The token pack is high priority and coming up soon - Zana just delivered me our token borders! It should be pretty quick to knock out with this done.
I'll probably be sending KS messages to the 50 or so people who still haven't filled out their Backerkit surveys; presumably those emails are not going through.
That's it for this month!
Happy June! Happy Juneteenth, in fact, for everyone in the States.
This month's update is more exciting for me than for you, but it's got some good stuff! The TL;DR's:
I received most of our production samples yesterday! The dice are going through another round, but I now have the book, GM screen, and spell cards in hand. The sample process is going slower than I'd like (and not for any exciting reasons; turns out this stuff just takes time), so unless manufacturing beats my estimates, I think it's pretty unlikely anyone's books will arrive in August; we're looking at early fall now.
Photos below! Standard disclaimers here: these are production samples, produced with digital printing; the quality's a little lower than we expect the final products to be.
I already gave everything a detailed look-through - there are a couple details we'll check with the manufacturer about, and a small list of errata from our side that we'll fix before the print run starts. This also means that it's officially last call for errors before the print run kicks off. We'll distribute the 1.01 of the PDF as soon as we get everything incorporated, and that version is what'll get produced.
Several things to touch on here! First off: whoops. I promised I'd distribute the files a couple months ago, then stuff caught up with me and it slipped off the to-do list. As of this morning, they're uploaded in Backerkit and the distribution button is pressed. In related whoopsies, I forgot to mark the Tinkerer as selected when I configured it in Backerkit, so virtually nobody had chosen it. And in the modeling process, we decided to drop the Wavesiren and replace it with a generic Atxayotl, mostly for technical what's-easier-to-model reasons. Everyone who backed at the Everything level now has access to all 6 STL files. Orders are mostly locked now that the PDF is in 1.0, but if you want to modify your mini selections (either to add one, change a selection you'd previously made, or request a refund because you really just wanted that Wavesiren), email me or file a support request through Backerkit and I'll take care of you.
And in case you want to know what I'm talking about, here are the two new minis I just uploaded!
And here are the four earlier ones, if you passed on the minis before and are wondering what all the fuss is about.
I've kicked off work on the digital art book, though I'm not very far along yet — mostly for boring struggling-with-Adobe reasons. More exciting is work on our VTT modules, which is officially running; the developers and I are doing weekly status checks and they're making good progress. I'll do the token pack a bit before they need to incorporate the tokens into the modules.
As I'm working on wrapping up Spellbound Sea, I've also started work on the next major project. Discord members have already seen previews, but my next class will be a Necromancer. My tentative plan is to produce a PDF-only supplement, following the same contours as Spellbound Sea but about 20% the size. Rather than crowdfunding, it'll follow a "basics for free, goodies paid" model. The best way to following along with that is via Patreon or Discord; I'm developing the free and paid tracks simultaneously, so there's something to see for everybody.
That's it for this month! I'll be back next month with more updates - probably we'll be in the middle of proper production by that point, but we'll have to see.