January Update: Home Stretch!
about 1 year ago
– Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 02:08:02 PM
Happy New Year to everyone!
Apologies for missing a December update; I was sick most of the month, and between that and the holidays, I just dropped the ball. TL;DR working on the pre-final draft, progress on the add-ons, and the finished book is in sight!
Pre-Final Draft
The original goal was to get draft 3 done in the first week of December; once it was already delayed by a week, the layout designer and I made the decision to scrap that as a milestone. It was going to be an intermediate draft, not content-complete, and would have cost about a week of my time and a few days of the designer's time dedicated to it. So instead we're moving straight to the pre-final draft, which will be content-complete aside from any last error corrections. I should have that ready for you on next month's update!
In terms of writing progress: all the classes, subclasses, species, and items are done. Feats and backgrounds are done. Spells are done. Seafaring rules are done. I have a little more playtest feedback to pull in on some of those, but not much.
The last two major big sections are the mini-settings and the monsters. I'm about halfway through on the monsters, and have started on the mini-settings.
Collaborations
The final collaboration of the book is nearly done! This is KibblesTasty's crafting appendix for the 45(!) magic items appearing in the book.
Maps
One of the neater things I haven't mentioned to folks much is that all our mini-settings will come with maps! This will help DMs run adventures there right out of the box (though you can, of course, ignore the maps if you have your own ideas). The maps are by the very talented Matt Francella, and he finished those up in late December.
Other Stuff
Since this month's is a relatively short update, I thought it'd be nice to include a few smaller mentions on our other bits and bobs.
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Art! My goodness there's a lot of art in this book. We've illustrated all the section splash pages, a bunch of items, some backgrounds, and a lot of interstitials (little stuff that'll sit in empty corners).
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VTT Modules! The first-crack developer for the Foundry module has unfortunately dropped off the project (no hard feelings, just didn't work out). Not a big deal; I've always had two backup plans in place for the Foundry module.
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Physical Add-ons! Žana is wrapping up the art for the GM screen (it's amazing). Bora's finished the dice and is finishing up the spell cards; once she's done there, I've got a pipeline set up to get the text ready on them.
November Update: Draft 3 Progress, Soundtrack, and Assorted Bits & Bobs
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Nov 23, 2024 at 03:33:04 PM
Happy Thanksgiving, Americans! Happy November, everybody else!
It's been a bit of a slow month on the writing front, but some exciting progress on our other pieces. TL;DR I'm chugging away on draft 3, the soundtrack got finished, there's an Actual Play you can listen to for the book, and misc. stuff continues to advance.
Draft 3
My original target to wrap the content for draft 3 was next Wednesday; I'm still making progress but am not going to hit that. This month has included some major progress on the Seafarer's Manual (pretty much complete, pending more test feedback), as well as some more subclass and magic item work. November turned out to be a very hard month for creative work; both because everything and also due to some health issues. (Nothing major; in fact, it's side effects from finally getting help addressing some long-standing health stuff. Still ate up some working time, though.) Anyway, the goal was to get you draft 3 by early December; that's a little up in the air now. No impact on our overall timeline, because I built in some flex time in case of issues like this. Next month's update will have more detail.
Soundtrack
This one's real exciting, though! Our collaboration with Music D20 wrapped, producing an epic 5-song EP to accompany your adventures. We've got one track for each mini-setting in the book, as well as the Spellbound Sea itself. From the chilling dread of the Sailors' Graveyard to the raucous tavern music of a bustling port to the majesty of Storm's Eye Citadel, we've got you covered. You can find it on Backerkit. It's free to anyone who backed at PDF or above, i.e. virtually everybody.
Actual Play
Our friends at 5 GMs in a Trenchcoat are running a 4-episode miniseries based on Songs of the Spellbound Sea! It's a colonialist struggle involving a brutal trading company, some peaceful Atxayotls, and a lovably disfunctional group of PCs. Check it out! Episode 1 went live yesterday and the rest should go live over the next few weeks.
Other Stuff
Since this month's is a relatively short update, I thought it'd be nice to include a few smaller mentions on our other bits and bobs.
- Art continues apace - we've actually brought on a new artist as of this month. Almost all the class & subclass art is done at this point, so we're moving out of the "illustrate ideas individually" phase and into the "find where more illustrations would fit naturally into the book" phase.
- Maps! Did I mention we have a cartographer on the team? Most of the mini-settings will get their own regional maps, to help you make use of them in your game worlds; Matt the cartographer is mostly done with most of them.
- VTT Modules! Work's started on the foundry module but is going very slow so far. Roll20 and Shard modules will wait until the core book's done, so I'm not anticipating those getting started until the new year.
- GM Screen & Spell Cards! We're hard at work on the art and graphic design for these.
- .STL Files! Last update had a big mention here (upping the file count from 3 to 6). We finished test prints and a round of revisions on the 4 that are already done; now we're working on the next 2, and setting up another round of test prints on the first 4 to validate our fixes.
October Update: Draft 2, and an update on .STL files!
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 02:57:25 PM
Draft 2!
I just pushed the button to distribute Draft 2 of Songs of the Spellbound Sea — by the time this publishes, it should be in your inbox! It is over twice the size of Draft 1, at 231 pages. The biggest piece of that is the spells (61 pages of them), but also 10 more subclasses, 1 more species, the seafaring rules, 3 appendices, 30 magic items, feats, equipment, and balance revisions for much of the existing content. You can find a detailed changelog here. (In the campaign, I promised a book at least 200 pages long; I think we'll likely land closer to 300 than 200!)
Notably absent: the mini-settings are going to come last (since those don't have to go in a playtesting queue). 1-2 species are still absent. I still have a handful of subclasses to write, and at least two more sections for the seafaring rules. Still working on more magic items, on backgrounds, on monsters, and on more feats.
Notably unpolished: art is not blended, links are not linked, and there are still a bunch of placeholder blocks where art will go. (There's a lot more art than last draft had, though). A bunch of styling is not in place and won't be until page numbers are finalized, because that stuff's a pain to move around. As with draft 1, we haven't put special effort into optimizing for browsers - it's recommended you view the draft with Acrobat, Foxit, or another PDF reader.
Feedback
Everything in this draft has had a professional edit pass, so it's at the point where reader feedback on the text is appropriate and justified. You can use this form to note text errors. Don't worry about style & art stuff, just text.
.STLs!
Four of our .STL files have been finished! Wait, what? Four? The campaign only mentioned three...
We've decided to expand the STL collection up to six files. Everything-tier (and above) backers will receive all six. All other backers will see the new options added if you go into edit or add .STL files to your order. Backerkit surveys and storefront are updated to account for this change - you can grab your survey link from your email if you want to go back and change your selection.
The four files we've got done are just waiting on a test print and quality-control pass, and then I'll mark them available via Backerkit.
Songs of the Spellbound Sea, v0.1!
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Sep 02, 2024 at 02:33:23 PM
Hello wonderful people!
A couple minutes ago I pushed the button to distribute the first WIP draft of Songs of the Spellbound Sea - it should be in all your inboxes by now! This is a hugely exciting milestone, but also represents an early step in this process.
What it contains:
- The Classes (Troubadour, Swashbuckler, Bloodrager)
- Not including our Spellbound Sea exclusive subclasses yet
- The Subclasses (most but not all)
- The Species
- All but Drowned and Crabkin (and I'm debating whether to add a secret eighth species)
What it notably does not contain:
- All the spells (you can reference those here, for now)
- All the other stuff
- Seafaring rules
- Subs and species written after early-mid August (The Drowned lineage, Hexbound Swashbuckler, and Order of Exploration Wizard)
Artwork is not necessarily in final locations and does not have final blending/layering. Some style elements (notably monster statblocks) are not yet developed.
What this draft does do is give you all a mostly-convenient PDF to find all the core content, for easy reading, referencing, and playtesting. It gives me a way to see everything compiled in one layout, to spot issues where our graphic design needs tightening up or I need to commission more interstitial art. And it gives us a canonical WIP text, so issue reports can reference specific page numbers and headers, rather than being indexed to dozens of individual GMBinder or GDoc files.
A note on spells: This draft doesn't contain any of the book's final spells. I anticipate we'll probably put out another draft relatively quickly, since attaching the spell corpus will be a big boost to the document's usability. In the final text, every spell used (that's not in the SRD) will be included. That includes basically all of Spells That Don't Suck (marked with SDS in the text) and a number of spells by KibblesTasty (marked with K). All those spells are used and reproduced with permission.
Backer's Choice Poll, Final Stretch!
over 1 year ago
– Sun, Sep 01, 2024 at 10:23:27 AM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
