Compendium Kickstarting on May 1
Added 2019-04-04 18:20:50 +0000 UTCAs you know, I've been working on a compendium of adventures for.. a good long while now. With your support, I've been redoing all of the old adventures to bring them up to spec for a book. That work is coming to an end.
On May 1, I will throw open the gates at the end of the Sun Temple, revealing the long stair downwards. Every backer of the Kickstarter campaign will represent a doughty warrior of Grinvolt in an assault on the dradkin fortress below.
Every time the campaign reaches a milestone, I will reveal a new portion of the dradkin fortress map, representing the progress of the assault. I will also unlock a randomly chosen stretch goal, representing the strange secrets of the lightless realm below.
I'm keeping the campaign deliberately lean; too many worthy projects have died because of stretch goals. Even so, I have some very cool things lined up to unlock: a bestiary, system stats, a special extra adventure, gazetteer pages, and a few more.
Please help me make this the best campaign possible. I'm including a preview link for the Kickstarter, so you can check it out early. If you have time, I'd appreciate your feedback on the campaign's clarity, tiers, stretch goals, risk, and value. If you have comments or questions, you can write them here or on the Kickstarter preview page.
Again, thank you for your generous support - I couldn't have made it here without you. To get the book out as quickly as I can, there will be a gap in the monthly two pagers (nor will pledges be taken), but I plan to be back at the writing anvil as soon as I can!
Comments
Eden, thanks for your feedback, that's a great point. I suspect I'll need to address this in the campaign FAQ (for which I have to wait until the KS is live). In situations like this, the reality is muddier and doesn't sound as great as a sound bite, but there will be others who are puzzled, just as you are. The process of assembling the book has been enormously labour intensive; inkjet vs. printed margins are different! Since the adventures are laid out within an inch of their lives, this necessitated rewrites to make the text fit. All of the stylings from old adventures were updated, and a bunch of them were rebuilt from portrait to landscape. I've standardized my use of notable details and forward references as styles, etc. etc. These changes, in turn, necessitate re-editing (which I don't do myself). Now, almost all of that is in the rearview mirror - the costs for the animation, cover art, all those hours are already spent. (Not the copy editing, that's starting now.) I /could/ just plop the book up on DTRPG.. the problem is that it wouldn't sell nearly as well. Kevin Crawford's estimate is that his Kickstarters move approximately 2 years' worth of follow-on sales. Kickstarters (as he put it) are essentially canned marketing campaigns that buyers understand, and the reverberating word of mouth can be extraordinarily helpful. If I just put the book up on DTRPG, it would be substantially less likely to make the effort pay off. My die-hard fans would go, "Neat!" and buy it, and then the long trickle of tiny sales would start. Kickstarter gives me a much bigger bang for my marketing hour/dollar. Having said that, there's still a bunch of work to do. The adventures add up to 99 pages, and between possible stretch goals and things like the table of contents, index, and so on, the book will weigh in somewhere between 140 and 165 pages. There's more art to buy as well, and so on. For what it's worth, here's the link to the KS preview page itself: <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trilemma/286623283?ref=790394&token=ed6aaebf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trilemma/286623283?ref=790394&token=ed6aaebf</a> I don't think the answers I've given you are all spelled out there, so (as I said) I'm sure I'll be pounding this all into the FAQ the second it launches. Thanks for taking a look at this, Eden, it's helpful to understand how people see things.
Michael Prescott
2019-04-29 00:11:55 +0000 UTCJust read your blog post and watched the videos. <a href="https://blog.trilemma.com/2019/04/kickstarter-videos-marketing.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://blog.trilemma.com/2019/04/kickstarter-videos-marketing.html</a> I've been following your posts for a while and love your work. I'm very excited to see you put this in book form. I do have some quick feedback on your video and the call to action. I think the call to action may be a bit watered down because a) you've done all the creation work (art, writing, layout) already and b) you're using POD. Is the call to action that you need our help to make the book (which is what the video currently says)? Or, is it that you need our help to make this book the best that it can possibly be (i.e. support the development of expanded content)? I think the distinction may not matter to many, but it is something that jumped out at me. If the book is done and being produced via POD, why not just release it now? On the other hand, if the KS is for, or includes the possibility of an offset print run, then the production costs themselves become basis of the call to action.
GardenGM
2019-04-28 23:46:56 +0000 UTCCertainly looking forward to this!
Cze and Peku
2019-04-08 00:40:22 +0000 UTC
