Quite possibly, the most fun thing we can think of doing, all made possible by you, our Kickstarter backers. Christophe and I are in awe. Still. Again. Living the dream! The dream guys, the dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam!
Some housekeeping first!
Housekeeping
Backer Survey
The backer survey will be sent more towards our ship date. We will be collecting alternate digital distribution email addresses (if any) and physical addresses for shipping. We treat your personal data very seriously, and one of the higher-order rules for security and privacy is not to store data you don’t need. We don’t need anything right now, so we’re not collecting it. Please standby.
Upgrading Your Reward
Just send us email. We will tag you in the Kickstarter system as wanting to upgrade and around the time we are sending out surveys, we will send you an invoice for the difference. Please note this invoice will be from PayPal (which does accept credit cards without a PayPal account). We don’t have our own merchant system and won’t until we deliver Curse of the Lost Memories.
Progress Update
Where We At
The question of the day: where we at?
I would say we are on time. We might be delivering things on June 30th, but hey, it’s June, right?
We’ve gotten several public and private messages saying to take our time to deliver quality goods. We appreciate that commentary. We also don’t want to drag this project into summer because we need time to do business planning and execution. As a (current) two-man band with a bunch of helpful folks, we spent a considerable amount of time on the Kickstarter at the expense of business development. We know how to design, write and publish books. This needs to be a repeatable process, and to do that we need solid thinking on all aspects of the RPG business.
For example, a storefront. We need a place to go for people to buy our products outside of Amazon and other places such as DriveThru RPG. We have plans. Those plans need to meet reality. However, that reality takes a back seat to Curse of the Lost Memories delivery. We want this product to be the best RPG module money can buy.
Another example is fulfillment. We will need to spend less time stuffing things into boxes and more time designing and writing.
And to be blunt, we aspire to go beyond what RPG publishing does today. As a DM, I want to click on a button and get a high-quality hardcover, the PDF, the physical battle mats, a map portfolio I can print player maps from, and pre-painted 30mm-scale miniatures used in the encounters. Can Griffon Lore Games do that? The business-minded side of GLG says, man, that sounds like a lot of work.
But we sure would love to figure it out.
Does anyone else want that one-click All-The-Things experience? Leave a comment please.
Kingdom of Lothmar Guide
In the order of transparency, completing this guide in June as a physical book the way we want it to be is looking mighty iffy. We had as much interest in this book as we did Curse of the Lost Memories. This book will also serve as the blueprint to the rest of the campaign-centric material. We don’t want some simple PDF tack-on, we want the full meal deal. There are a lot of reasons to make this book stand out, so that is what we are shooting for.
So, we’re committed to giving backers a guide, but it looks like you’re going to get several different versions before the final product. And be aware that if you change your physical address between the time you get your first book and the printed campaign guide, you’ll need to make us aware of your new address.
Risks
Our singular risk is still the length of time it takes to play-test everything up to our standards and incorporate feedback. We have money, solid book publishing infrastructure and a motivated team. Luckily, modern layout software supports a high degree of dynamic text changes. Making an encounter three pages instead of two isn’t going to set us back a week. But we are hyper-aware of all the modules we ourselves played with encounters that seemed dramatically—off. That is not going to be an attribute of our RPG offerings, especially given our encounters will be difficult out of the gate.
Cover Art
Dudes. Spectacular doesn’t quite cover it. We’ll do a cover-art reveal when we have the finished goods back from Oliver, but wow. We asked Oliver to give us a cover that is a nightmare dream of the fantastic, and he’s gone above and beyond.
Stay tuned for this and more sneak-peeks!
Pathfinder 2E
So, that’s a thing.
Christophe and I saw this coming, we just didn’t know when. Well, August 2019 is going to be the release, with August 2018 as the play-test start, and we’re going to be into the 3rd book in the Chronicles of the Celestial Chains adventure path sometime next year.
Let’s be totally upfront: Pathfinder 2E is a very good thing for the RPG industry and Paizo in particular. I’ve seen some grumping about the need for it (as in, not needed), but the both from a creative and business ends, Paizo needed to rev their rule-set. D&D 5E is a fresh take on old concepts. And without a lot of marketing, Wizards is selling it faster than they can print it. There is more than enough demand for fresh ideas and good refinements for Fantasy RPGs, Pathfinder included.
What does that mean for Griffon Lore Games and our backers?
We’re committed to a conversion PDF for all our Pathfinder 1E works. Unless most of our Pathfinder backers want us to switch over mid-campaign, Chronicles of the Celestial Chains AP is a Pathfinder 1E product. If our backers want us to switch over, we will, but we don’t see that desire right now.
Then again if you would have told me that Wizards, after D&D 4E sliding into oblivion, would produce an update so popular they sold out of their entire inventory, I would have doubted that would happen, too.
That’s it. Expect more updates as we approach June!
