Burials of Teganshire Indiegogo Campaign: We did it!

Here we are across the finish line!

Thanks everyone! We appreciate your business–Tales of Lothmar is going to be a great line of products.

Those on the fence can still back, as the campaign has moved into InDemand mode.

Fulfillment Timeline

We are going to move quickly to fulfillment. As soon as Indiegogo sends us the cash and emails, we’ll send out the PDFs’ coupon. We do digital fulfillment through our store website at https://griffonloregames.com/.

Print copies are moving along, too. Theoretically (it’s always a bit unsure in the COVID-19 shipping world), we should get the printed proofs today and approve them. We’re still optimistic the printed versions will go out in September, too. 

Our support alias is support@griffonloregames.com.

Best Regards,
Anthony, Christophe, Anna, and Etta

Not too late to get your copy, click on the cover and head on over to Indiegogo.

Fulfillment Registration, Survey, Project Update, THE INTERN

Super Mega Important

Hi Everybody!

Watch your mailbox and updates for the link to the backer survey. But before that, please go to https://www.griffonloregames.com/my-account/ and register with the email you use for Kickstarter! The new (stripped to the basics but retooled for account management and fulfillment) website is where we can apply digital products to your account and you can download them at will.

It’s also the software that we use to ship physical products and change your order.

Once you have registered (with your email that you use for Kickstarter!), please answer the survey when it shows up on Kickstarter or your mailbox. That is how we can match your registration on our website with your Kickstarter rewards.

To Summarize: 

1: Register on https://www.griffonloregames.com/my-account/ with your Kickstarter email

2: When Kickstarter prompts you, answer the survey (including your address)

3: On the backend, we’ll connect the rewards with your account on our website

4. When the PDFs are released you will immediately be able to download them

5. You can change your address anytime on our website up until we print the shipping label and stuff the books in the mail

A Small Digression

Kickstarter is pretty dang cool. A good chuck of our Kickstarter backers came from people browsing and searching. How Kickstarter works for campaigns after it’s over? Not so much cool. This is why there are so many custom and third-party Post-Campaign services. Our new website is geared towards distribution, and, unlike our prior site, if it gets bogged down we can easily scale it. Over time, we’ll snazzy it up, but it’s job right now is customer fulfillment and blog updates.

Project Update

Temple of Dvalin
Temple of Dvalin

Everybody is nailing it. The artwork is great, the maps are great, the adventure is great—and Christophe and I really wanted to ship by the end of the month, but that’s not going to happen. Mainly for two reasons:

1: Interior Design – Third Time is the Charm

Finding our interior designer was a much more difficult process than anticipated and we went through two separate design teams that were not meeting expectations before casting a wide net to find the third. Our new interior designer is now hard at work creating the templates for the book layout team. He’s super professional, a D&D and Pathfinder fan, and already has gone above and beyond to make up for the lost time.

2: More Content Than Planned For

In hindsight, we should have commissioned all of the maps and artwork and kicked off the campaign after they were all in draft mode. It’s super helpful seeing the maps and artwork while adventure writing. We plan to do this for the next module in Chronicles of the Celestial Chains Adventure Path, Beneath a Dreary Wave.

That’s a minor issue as the largest impact to our schedule is Curse of the Lost Memories is going to clock in somewhere between 130 and 150 pages (depending stat block style, font choice and the interior design). We keep reviewing the writing and wondering if we’re just going off and being verbose, putting in content that should be in the Kingdom of Lothmar Guide, being boring and blah, blah, blah. But no, we’re covering the necessary areas in a guided sandbox. While it’s mainly bad that we didn’t judge the page count properly, the content is highly useful.

Because we’ve significantly blown past 100 pages, we’re commissioning more interior artwork to break up any walls of text. As you can see by the examples included in this update, Ryan is nailing it. Our backers have made it clear they bought into the quality vision by driving over almost all of our stretch goals.

So on one hand, the project isn’t going to ship at the end of the month, on the other, it’s dramatically more content in the module that we campaigned on. We’re going to try super-hard to get the PDFs out by the end of July or somewhere close to it.

Larger Book

A larger book has higher printing cost and higher shipping cost. And that’s perfectly OK. We’re not going to bill any backers for this; please consider yourselves initial investors to what is shaping up to be one of the most epic hard fantasy module to hit the shelves.

Intern

We’ll be getting an INTERN soon. She’ll be a huge help and as soon as she arrives, we’ll get her an alias, but for now everyone can think of her as THE INTERN.

We’ll Say it Again

Thanks so much! We’re living a dream and we’re excited to get you this module. We really appreciate everyone’s support and can’t wait to get you guys the finished product.

LOW-LEVEL PCs ARE DELICIOUS

Curse of the Lost Memories Video Update 1

BOOM! We’ve flown past a stretch goal and marching towards another!

In this video update I talk about art styles. The next video update we’ll talk about hard fantasy and Curse of the Lost Memories.

Be sure to back us on Kickstarter if you haven’t already. Back early! Back Often!

Best Regards,
Anthony

DM Friendly Modules

All modules are for DMs (or, in Pathfinder, the Game Master aka GM). And there are good, mediocre and bad modules. But even a bad module can have DM friendly features, although modules that have inherent flaws usually have issues with features that make a DM’s life easier.

Here at Griffon Lore Games (I admit it; I just like typing “Griffon Lore Games”), we think about making the DMs life easier all the time. Mainly because we are DMs ourselves. Here are some of the things we do to make the life easier for the DM to run our adventures:

Prioritized Lore: Lore that directly impacts the PCs has priority over descriptive text that has no consequence to the current adventure but may be beneficial to the DM in other ways (such as modifying their own game world). The Dame with a lore-based secret isn’t as interesting as the Dame with a lore-based secret that motivates her to help or hinder the PCs based on what they do and say.

Prioritized Setting: Related, setting the PCs most likely will be interested in will receive priority with description and narrative (and maps!).

Impactful Encounters: All encounters are impactful and have weight. There are no fluffy-bunny fro-fro encounters of attrition shoved into the module either as filler to get the PCs experience points so they can challenge the Big Bad the module writers are over-enamored with to the exclusion of the journey to get to the big bad, make some narrative point rather than the PCs making the narrative points, pad the page count or other dubious reasons not having anything to do with adventures DMs want to run. You won’t find encounters in our product designed to test if in a series of combats, the PCs can monitor their resources in a game of attrition. Most encounters will leave players with a sense of accomplishment and sense of heroic wonder that will linger with them until the next play session. Every combat encounter has the capability of dropping heroes to the ground, and if the players don’t combined arms, death or TPK.

Dynamic Plot and Villains based on PC Actions: The PCs do things, and it impacts the world in “real-time.” They do more on their day-to-day interactions than change the life of a stable-boy tipped 100 GP. PCs can influence, and be influenced by, the story’s movers and shakers because they themselves are movers and shakers. Good plot and good villains in a living, breathing game are dynamic based on motives. Rather than dedicating pages for lore for the sake of world-building, let the PCs build their own world by dedicating pages in anticipating common adventure party directions and actions and let them build the world. If the players wanted static quest givers with explanation points over their heads, they would play a MMO designed in the early 2000’s.

Book Mechanics: PDFs even for people who buy the print version. Quality hardcover book printed in color on thick paper you can write on. Module text dedicated to describing dynamic monsters and NPCs that could change tactics based on their overall motives and PC actions. Good stat blocks that are easy to read. Clear maps that can be used in a Virtual Table Top (VTT) program by having the map key in the module text rather than on the map. Proper developmental editing from an experienced RPG-savvy editor and comprehensive, not token, play-testing.

Cohesive Adventuring in an Adventure Path: An adventure path should take a character from Level 1 to Level 20 (or several levels beyond) with a distinctive end. Doing that without putting PCs (or, just admit it, your players) on rails is no easy task, but it is possible with hard work and play testing. The adventure should provide a foundation for the next in a manner that seems organic and plausible. Modules that come next should anticipate several major possibilities of the prior adventure and dedicate text to help the DM transition her players into the next part of the game world without negating their prior hard-won efforts.

This is what Christophe and I are dedicated to. This is hard fantasy, baby. The DMs are putting it all out there. They need as much support as they can get.

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Curse of the Lost Memories

We are announcing our new adventure: Curse of the Lost Memories!

Curse of the Lost Memories is the first volume of Chronicles of the Celestial Chains adventure path. It is set in hard fantasy setting, a ruthless environment with successful villains, detailed political setting, and tough consequences for our heroes’ mistakes.

The player characters have memories that are seemingly not their own—visions of the past that don’t feel like visions, some lingering while others vanishing as if hiding from something dark. The external threat coming from the local moors is only part of fight the PCs find themselves in. This isn’t simply a mission for the local Viscount to clean out a moor of monsters. This is a war for their very identities and they must stand together or perish all.

The 100+ page adventure is setting agnostic, but with original locations and written for both Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as well as the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. The module will take characters from level 1 to level 4 and brings them through four narrative acts of a story arc, yielding 12-15 sessions of play.

Curse of the Lost Memories is a uniquely DM-friendly module that encourages role-playing even when players don’t normally do so. The inhabitants of the land the PCs interact with fleshed out with their own motivations for the DM to use or modify, every location mapped carefully to provide a rich background of detail that when the DM starts to wing it, he or she has a solid foundation. The encounters are challenging and impactful, and many will leave players with a sense of accomplishment and sense of heroic wonder that will linger with them until the next play session.

Curse of the Lost Memories and the campaign world it is not an MMO on paper with a formulaic progression. It’s table-top D&D with 100+ pages of pure campaign role-playing goodness that walks the fine line of giving the DM directions to take the adventure to its conclusion and support when the adventure goes off the rails.

WE WILL LAUNCH ON KICKSTARTER SOON!

We want to deliver you a high-quality product with encounter maps, area cartography, pre-generated PCs, interior artwork and well-tested encounters in a bold, engaging style. Offered both as a hardcover and PDFs, Curse of the Lost Memories is the first mega-module in an adventure path taking the player characters from levels 1 to 20.

Please let us know if you have any questions! 🙂

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