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The Delver's Guide to Beast World: a 5e Supplement & Setting

Created by Heartleaf Games

Pre-order store for The Delver's Guide to Beast World

Latest Updates from Our Project:

THE BOOK IS DONE! AAAAA Production Dates, Fulfillment Dates, Moving Forward!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 06:07:25 PM

(i wonder what five As is going to do for inbox filtering i hope this gets to everyone ok, anyway)

We're moving forward!

Hop in, delvers.

It's been a few weeks since we talked. We've been hammering out the last details and wrangling our manufacturer to get what I know we've all been waiting for: dates.

First of all, Here's a picture of the book. 

The final print won't be so... chunky.

For July and August, we've been getting things to this point. Writing, editing, compiling art, laying it out... Content is tested, little bits of fun are added all over. We are just about ready to take a hibernation-like nap. Just a few more weeks.


Here is every step of the process left for us to do, and their dates.


September 14th: Final PDF in for book production.

A couple days before that, we'll get the print proof you see above in the mail. We'll look it over, probably adjust color balance in a few places, and snip the last bits of editing in the final proofread. At this point, we'll have a PDF that looks identical to the final book. At this point, our manufacturing boys will start running off a few thousand of them to send to y'all. <3


September 15th: Shipping Charges Start, Orders Opened Back Up

It'll be time to collect shipping charges soon!  If you've moved since you put your shipping info in, you will have the chance to update your shipping address on this date. You'll have until a couple weeks before we start fulfillment to get things squared away. I'm sure there will be hiccups here and there, but as always, we're here for you every step of the way.


September 21st: Deck of Delvers PDF handed in for production.

I've still got some editing to do with the decks, but I edited the first half of them in two days. I've been buried in book work, but once I'm clear of it, I'll be able to give the decks a haircut and send them off. For these, we've already seen print proofs. And they are... gorgeous.


By the way, now that they're finished, every artist who contributed to Deck of Delvers 1 & 2 (87 in total):

5Suns, Adalfyre, Ais05, Alexander Faolchu, Alice Frainer,

Alphatrick, Anest, AngryGooseberry, Anna Rodman, NargilFlameWolf, 

Ashary, Ashley Meissner, Ashrin, astf, Aurru,

B.Koal, BadCoyote, BeraCerbera, Bleakley, Bluekea,

Botak, BrambleDraws, Brjk_blue, Bruno Yudi, CaelestisHound

captyns, Caraid, Cavalcamondi, Centradragon, crimsonLure

cyanroll, DannoItan, DiDihell, Dom Valencia, Draekos,

Elena Skitalets, Emberwick, Eregbueye, Eruca, Ferima,

FortunataFox, Foxovh, Furlana, Giu Solla, Gluma,

Golden Druid, Hindru, Jade Dry, JEIBON, Jennybear,

Jude Collopy, JuliaTheDragonCat, Katarzyna "Guree" Podermańska, Kiaun, Kuon Heather,

Lethal_Doors, Lingrimm, Little.swamp, MDs, Megan W - "Archery",

Micaylo, MitsuiFox, monday, Nico, NIXSMIS,

Noctalosis, Pandaking757, PB&J, Red-IzaK, Rika,

Saterina, Seyumei, Shamerli, shermugi, Simul,

SleepingWoolf, Stasya Danilova (<3), Tayan54, TheArtManor, Tom Fischbach,

Travis, ValSalia, Yacrical, Yan, YanKatya, YoungJinja, and Zummeng.


September 28th: Pathpost Scout Kit Final PDF handed in for production.

Same as before, got some final editing to do here. I'm very very pleased with the adventures that are coming out of these. This is going to be a huge hit, I can't wait to share some images of the prints.


Now, at this point, it's a wait. We all wait for the books and the posters and the box and the GM screen and the... All of it to run off the presses.


November 11th: Orders Locked, Fulfillment Address List Made, Ducks Rowed.

Here's the cutoff date for shipping charge collection and address changes. This will give us time to put together our big list for Fenris and Direct Link. And then...


November 18th: Books Hit The Dock, Fulfillment Begins 

We're going to LA port personally to make sure things get to where they need to go. I'm going to be driving a big ol' truck with all the stuff to Fenris Publishing's headquarters, and helping out with fulfillment. I'm also gonna sign every copy of the Special Edition.

(Pray for my left wrist.)


At this point, you'll start getting your stuff! We'll hold the final book in our hands! Aaaa!


 What's Next?

Next week, we're going to finalize shipping prices. We're... sweating our shipping rate promise, I can't lie. Inflation has hammered us, and the price of freight has not exactly gone down as I hoped. BUT! I'm gonna foot the bill, and still subsidize the cost. My promise stands: no one pays more than $29 for shipping. I'll have exact figures for you next week, in advance of opening things up. I might even give us an extra week, depending on how things go at the office.


Finally,

Thank you. Thank you for being patient, and staying excited. Thank you for the tremendous support, both financially and in the energy you've given us to get through this. It's taken a bit longer than we anticipated, but we've learned a TON of lessons about how to do this, and I gotta say... We're starting to feel confident about this whole publishing thing. OH man I can't wait for you to see this thing. I feel like we've got something special here.

More to come soon. I have big plans.


Long live love.

Cullen


PS: If you're not on the Discord you're making a mistake, honestly. Hahaha. I know everyone wants you to join their stupid server or whatever, but ours is super active and we're on there all the time. If you want to chat with us, I promise you'll be able to if you join. There's also a ton of content on there that I can't fit in these updates. Join! I love hearing from y'all.


https://discord.gg/hrrXVT3r84

Time, Labor, and Progress
over 1 year ago – Sun, Sep 04, 2022 at 12:27:33 PM

Wagon Wheels, Ever Turning

For this month's update, I want to share my answer to a question we got on the Discord server, which relates to where we're at and what's takin' so long.


First, the explicit question:

“When the Kickstarter was first launched, how far along did you think you were in the book versus after all the stretch goals unlocked throughout the campaign?”


So, I want to answer that question as well as answer the question sitting alongside it. That being: "Why was your estimate wrong? What have you been doing?" I will address both. 

Let's get on the same page about that real quick. Here are the stretch goals, and the overall amount of work, in people-work-hours, they represent.


  • 100k: VTT Support

This is being contracted out after the book releases, and really shouldn't take very long actually. We always wanted to do this, the reason it was a stretch goal was solely because of the extra expense.


  • 150k: 15 more delver cards

Ahahaha. Put a pin in this one, I'll come back to it in a sec.


  • 200k: Extra Delve in Pathpost Kit

Writing and editing this adventure is about a week of work, from blank-doc to send to print. That's Lexi, one artist, and I, so about 120 people-hours. This was a good stretch goal!


  • 250k: Playable Dragons

Let's assume that one new subspecies is a single new "5e race". The dragons are 5 of those, on top of the 25 already to-be-included. However, keep in mind that they don't have their own homeland features. The dragons took about 40 hours, along with another 10 total hours testing, remixing, and talking with playtesters. Not so bad, all told.


  • 300k: Art of the Beast World

I haven't talked much about the art book because it's Lexi's baby, but my heart is overflowing for it. It is unbelievable what she has pulled off. This thing is filled with sketches and unused art, it has descriptions artfully inserted, it has meticulous attention to design and detail. It is, pardon the cursing, a damn masterpiece.

It was also a ton of work. Haha.

Lexi's format makes the art book a compelling read!

Now, some of this work is actually a side benefit. Lexi has been doing the art book in between doing layout for the book proper, and I know she's been learning a ton about InDesign and the craft of laying out a book generally through the process. I reckon the 150-page art book has taken her about 6 weeks of full-time work in aggregate. So, 240 hours. That does not include all the art hours, of course, which has also been an unbelievable blessing. The art in this book is unquestionably on par with a WotC book. I know I am a biased source, but I think it's better.


  • 350k: Exotic Draught Beasts

Okay, here's a little honesty for you. This was a false stretch goal. Hahaha. This was a matter of changing how some features in the wagon rules are flavored and writing a few monster stat blocks. It was all work we had to do anyway. It did let us commission some more Travis art, though! He's been drawing some of the exotic draughts and they're neat as hell.


  • 500k: kobats

Bats and kobolds are another two species included, bringing our total to 32 (unless it isn't, I get this number wrong like all the time and probably will forever, there are so many at this point ahaha). Less work than the dragons, and it made a lot of people super happy. I'm thrilled we got to do this.

Now, I want to go over some of the reasons my estimate was wrong, by several months. I am going to do my best to be absolutely honest and also fair to myself here.


1. Cards are a lot of work. A lot.

Before we started the cards, we had about 20 artists or so total on the project. Now, with the cards, we have over 100. That's 100+ people, many of them non-native English speakers, to wrangle and get accustomed to the visual language of the Beast World. A big part of this task, before we even started writing the cards, was finding those artists.

Lexi, Selius and I spent weeks meticulously going through portfolios on FurAffinity and Twitter, looking for people we thought were technically skilled enough, dependable enough, and whose aesthetic matched the vibe we wanted. Then you have to reach out to all those people, tell them what you're about, get them into a common space, then get WIPs, chase down stragglers, give notes, get final work in the right CMYK, hi-res format, then get paid, in the middle of a war affecting many of them that turned off Paypal. Take all the work of doing that process one time, then multiply it by one hundred and ten.

And that's before you even start writing the cards.

Now, these characters belong to people. You have to gather character information from 85 magnificent people (25 of the cards are ours, to fill in gaps in the species (so there aren't literally 0 armadillos)). Then, you also have to schedule card commissioners and get into a 1-on-1 conversation. Setting up the scheduling took 5 workdays. The actual scheduling discussions are another workday. Then, an hour of chatting and post-chat notetaking and discussion, multiplied by 85.

Then, you have to write the cards. This was one of my big personal mistakes in time estimation. Writing an NPC is easy! I can knock out a couple of balanced attacks and give them an interesting twist, no trouble at all—no. No, you fool wolf, no.

Print proofs—the final cards have rounded corners.

The cards are good. They are not just "guy does a sword attack that does level-appropriate damage, and also gets a trip or area of effect." The cards are freakin' good. They are filled with interesting quirks, new magic items, every one of them has a plot hook, the ones that are stat blocks have unique attacks and actions... And so much of this is thanks to Selius. He has taken the card project with both hands, white knuckles. The speed at which he has become a master of 5e is frankly stunning. He can rattle off exact, WotC-style wording for features with 95% accuracy, just off the top of his head. I can't stress enough how rare and valuable that is. The work he is doing on these cards is incredible and his name will be next to "Writer:" on those deck boxes.

I would be dead without my rat, is what I am saying.

Selius can do about 4 cards in a day's work, and I can edit and revise about 12. So, just for the writing, that's seven work weeks of people-hours.

I hope that September 1st is starting to feel closer than it did before you started reading this. Haha.


2. This became a business under our feet.

We raised a lot of money. More than I could realistically have hoped for. I knew we were going to do well from pre-launch email numbers, but I expected 250k. The money you gave us allowed me to hire Selius, move him from Lincoln, NE, to Buffalo, NY, and get us office space.

As a quick side-tangent...

It also let me pay Stasya a full-time salary. To give you some context about what my quiet Russian darling does around here: I am not great at art planning. It is a weakness of mine; there were a lot of little gaps in the book that needed illustrations. Stasya just... does them. We say "hey this needs an illustration of some kind, can you do something real quick" and she says "ok)" and in 2 days I have industry quality work sitting in my Discord inbox. Stasya has so much work ethic, I sometimes wonder if she is a super-advanced art AI from the future.

But she isn't. She is just an incredible artist who works much more diligently than I could ever hope to.

I would be dead without my bear, is what I'm saying.

Anyway...

Yeah, it became a business. I was able to hire Lexi and Selius and Stasya full-time, I was able to hire Fleeks part-time (as a magnificent and devastating talent in graphic design, she is the reason the SE cover looks so good).

But all this takes time. Moving Selius to Buffalo, finding him an apartment, getting business LLC paperwork set up, finding a business lawyer for contracts, scouting out an office, buying office furniture, on and on and on and on... There are three of us doing this full-time in-person. It is Lexi, and Selius, and Cullen, working our butts off to turn this from "literally nothing" into a glass door in the Brisbane Building in downtown Buffalo that has the Heartleaf Games logo on it. It is surreal every time I see it, still.

The Heartleaf Games office.

I did not foresee that being as hard as it was. That is my fault, and it was silly of me not to budget time for it. I could have, if I'd had more foresight at the time, but we learn and we grow.

On the bright side, 95% of that stuff is done now, and doesn't need to be done in the future. We spent the sunlight growing the roots, and now we can spend it growing the fruits into the future. We are gonna have so much cool stuff for you in the future.

Buuuut, let's talk about the next reason, why the book is taking a long time. Let's get a little personal. Get to know me, and my quirks:


3. I have ADHD. I have never done work at this scale before, ever in my life.

If you had told me, even in January 2021, that I would be working as much as I am right now, and be committing this much diligent attention to a single project, there's no way you could have made me believe it. I have learned to work throughout the course of this process, and it's been a revolving door of brain-tricks and weaving through novelties that get my head in the right space to commit words to a page.

There are days when I sit down to write pages, and nothing happens. If I have the internet, I lose entire days to Twitter, or closing Reddit to open another tab and jab "R-E-D-Enter" into my keyboard to make Reddit pop up again. (Reddit is a brain disease you are giving yourself, it is exploitative, at least Twitter lets you get to know people, please quit Reddit if you can. \tangent) I lose entire days talking with you wonderful folks on Discord about the book, when I should be writing. (To be clear, that is also important to me, and I do not regret a single moment I spent here on the Discord talking with all of you. I'll come back to this in a sec.) If I don't have the internet? On those days, I literally stare at the wall. I look out the window, I start reorganizing my desk, I walk around, I decide it's a good time to call my mom, I... you get the idea.

ADHD is tough, and I have a very severe case. I didn't learn this about myself until 22 months ago. I started taking amphetamine salts in October of 2020. So, I have a little catching up to do when it comes to coping processes and untangling some pretty bad attitudes I have about myself, and work. A lot of the coping mechanisms that are popular on the internet have made me hate myself for a long time, because most of them don't catch the teeth on the gears that make things happen in my brain. There's a lot of pathways missing up there.

So, what has changed that has allowed me to get even this far? It's all of you. It's Lexi and Selius and Stasya and Fleeks, who depend on me for their livelihood. If I falter, they lose this opportunity to seize the means of their production. To own their own labor. That is important to me. It's all the other owners, who own nothing if I don't finish the book.

It's all of you, reading this now. I am tearing up right now, typing this, considering that all of you actually want my work, even if it's just a neat thing you saw and tossed some spare money that week. It's a cliche to say this, but I mean it literally: I wake up every morning thinking about y'all. You have transformed my life and turned me into a person I thought I could never be.

Also, whiteboards. Whiteboards are good for organizing my thoughts. But mostly all of you.


4. Wagon rules. 

This was one of my time-planning mistakes, for sure. I way, way underestimated how hard it is to build a compelling system in 5e from the ground up. I absolutely refuse to leave holes in my wagon rules, whenever possible. Selius, Lexi and I sat in the office for 12 hours a day for 6 weeks, grinding at every possible problem and question and abstract what-if related to wagon rules.

They have to be simple, but also allow for compelling creativity. They have to mesh with the existing 5e rules, but also justify their own existence. They have to be easy to imagine in the theater of the mind, but also complex enough to allow for strategy.

Writing rules, writing good rules, is hard. At the table, I can cover up smudges with narration and "roll a Dexterity check" ( 💭 I guess that makes sense? Please don't think too hard about this solution...) For general rules, I have to anticipate all those problems and pre-solve them in an elegant way. S'hard! Way harder than writing a subclass.

"Dungeons & Wagons" remains our core slogan

That said...

My fastidious self-punishment and cruel refusal to let my first book be anything but the absolute best it can be has paid off. People have played with the wagon rules, for real, at real-ass tables, and told me they made the game better. There were a lot of little bugs they caught too, but I feel confident in saying this with my full throat: the wagon rules are fun. They will make your game better. You will want to include them.


5. All the other little things, and all the other big things. 

I try not to do too much politicizing around on here, but I dunno if y'all have noticed that 2022 has... sucked. I don't even feel qualified to say that I know what a sucky year looks like, compared to some of the other people doing very real work on this project. But it has sucked. That has weighed on all of us, and it has stolen good-brain time from all of us at the office. Some days we just stare at our monitors until one of the three of us notices that everything is just bad. We're trying to be aware of when that happens, so we can spare our good-brains for when the time is right to buckle down and hammer work out.

🍺 This one's for you, Clarence Thomas, and Vladmir Putin, and all the other weird ultra-gods who can just trash our mental health, if not our lives, on a whim. Here's hoping the general strike comes soon.

Now, some of this stuff is out of my control, and some of it is in my control. I have made mistakes through this process. I've been grouchy with playtesters (thank you for being patient with me), I've wasted time I didn't need to, and I've been unkind in moments of stress to my two closest friends Selius and Lexi. I've hyper focused on stuff that doesn't really matter and wasted time on little project things that only needed a few minutes of work (you guys, if you ever want to learn about Google Sheets, I am the dungeons and dragons god of google sheets).

That said, we've created something stunning here. We've brought incredible talent together, learned the skills necessary, and built a rad community in the process. Their work is good, and mine is good. I want you all to know, though, and I really, earnestly mean it, this book is coming very soon, and it's going to be a beautiful thing.

Heartleaf Games hard at work, by Mousecry

Thank you for reading this. Long live love, delvers. For real. I love you all,

Cullen

An Update on Where We're At!
over 1 year ago – Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 08:28:44 PM

"Where is my book, Cullen?"

It's been about a month since our last update. As a few of you have observed, we're a little behind schedule! Let's talk about that and discuss where we are and where we're going. I wrote this as some insight into the process of making a book like this real.


Here is what each of the three full-time staff has spending their days on.


Cullen 🐺

• Putting everything where it needs to be and making sure there's enough of it. I'm taking the big pile of research and notes and prose and meetings with cultural advisors, and gathering it into written headings and chapters. I'm adding some new details here and there, and cutting things that don't matter to the primary "here's the world" message of the book. Selius and Lexi are a huge help to me here, dragging my brain-addled vessel into the office every day and getting me talking and typing.

• Incorporating playtest feedback. We have a lovely crowd of people who have been poking and prodding at my content for the last few months. I have dozens of notes on the species and subclasses and wagon rules. I have post-session reports to read, concerns to address, and criticism to ingest with dignity and maturity during the most pressured moment of my whole life.


Lexi 🦊

• Finishing up layout. Every page has its illustrations in place and there aren't any weird hanging places. This is art, and it's art that Lexi is working tirelessly at right now. She is tearing through each chapter getting stuff together for me to look at, give second opinions on, and then finally sharpen up for the final release.


Selius 🐀

• Putting the polish on 110 delver cards. We are reviewing game content and prose there as well; every one of these cards is its own character. Many of them are basically monster stat blocks and we need to take their temperature to make sure they don't snap the game in half. This is easier than player creation content because an NPC's block exists only with itself, but it's still another set of hours. Let's say each takes an hour! (lol, let's just say) Multiplication ensues... and it's a task, even when it's that easy. We also need to get each write-up in front of the characters' owners, to make sure they're good with how their characters are being portrayed on their card!

   There's also the card art. As of now, ~100/110 of the character pieces are in. Some artists inevitably became unable to meet their commitment, due to the changes going on in the world. However, that's created the task of finding replacement artists as well as asking some artists if they'd like to have a card in each deck. Every day, more come in. Watching it gather up into a series has been so exciting.


🐺 🦊 🐀

• Making sure all of the game content is actually fun. Are these species you actually want to play? Does wagon adventuring work? This is our first venture as professional game designers, and we steadfastly refuse to give you a book that requires you to say "well, it's a small team so there's gonna be some rough edges..." We are very proud of 85% of the game content. That number creeps upward every day. When it is 100%, this step will be complete.


🐺 💬 One of the major tinkering jobs with this is getting dragons to a place where they are keeping my promises about how they'll feel to play, and also still viable in a party of equal-level characters. They should be the leads of the show, but it shouldn't become a one-man show with a cleanup crew, if you catch my meaning. Jackals will be on a very similar wavelength. Anyway...


🐺 🦊 🐀

• Getting art squared away. I cannot describe to you how large the scale of the art management job turned out to be. Lexi and Selius and Cullen are in constant contact with talented artists. We have been waking up every morning to 6+ DMs on Discord with sketches, and finished work, and payment information, and other artist tasks for months. Stasya is sending us the last of the species key art before she does her own poster piece for the book. We have over 40 artists that have turned in work for the book itself, many of whom are still getting their last big works in as well. By the way, this step represents much of how our project was impacted by the situation in Russia and Ukraine.

• Coordinating with writers for the Pathpost Kit. Cullen is personally writing at least 2 of these adventures from the ground up, and we've received some great ideas from writers that we're going to help put together as well.  As a little follow-on to this, there is of course the art for the inside of that book as well. Maps, character sketches, little item art... It's all gotta look sharp.


🐺 🦊 🐀 (& our graphic designer, Fleeks 🐲)

• Graphic design touch-ups, which we're working with Fleeks on. There is still some tightening up to be done with the game box (the dimensions of a box for a product that doesn't exist yet is a surprisingly elusive thing). Then there's the box for the Knucklebones/Meandering Tales games. And the actual cards for the latter game. And the back of the SE cover. And the recipe cards. On it goes!


In the short-term future,

1.  We will send the draft to print for a proof. This ensures that none of the art is color-graded incorrectly and that there aren't any paragraph styles that look weird in real life. This proof will be sent back to us, containing prose and game content that are complete but not finished. The suit is on, the face is shaved, but the teeth aren't brushed, if that analogy makes sense.

2. While we wait for that to come back from our printer, we are doing final edits on the book. This is a last look at the gamestuff to make sure it's 5e style-guide spotless. Capitalization, phrasing, everything will look like a 5e book as best as I can possibly make it so.

3. We've also got a copyeditor to read the book and point out where my wording could use work. Little things that change the order of a sentence 3 times a page, but overall turns the book from "something I wrote" to "something we made and are proud of".

4. We will also be ordering proofs of the rest of the physical stuff.

This includes:

  • the art book
  • the gm screen
  • the pathpost kit and props
  • the game cards and box
  • the overall kit box
  • the recipe stuff
  • the posters
  • the cloth map

Overall, if it's paper or a map, it's getting proofed and sent back to us.

Then…

Once that's done, we give our manufacturing guy and very good friend Nelson Zhao the thumbs-up, and we wait for all the stuff to come on the boat.🚢  He's already holding onto a few thousand sets of dice, a few more thousand sets of different dice, and 10 thousand plush toys or so. During this time, we will start locking orders down and charging cards for shipping. There's shipping boxes to buy!


When the boat comes in, we get the contents of our box sent to the guys at Fenris Publishing and Direct Link (for domestic and international shipping, respectively), and send it to you.


And then we play.


As soon as we have dates for these things, I will be on every platform we speak on to bark about it. For now, I ask you to be patient just a little longer!

We're in our office doing long days to get this stuff done. I want to put it in your hands soon, but I also want to make sure that it's as good as I know it can be.

It's a little embarrassing that my estimated ship date was off. We're new at this, and there was just so much more work hiding in the wings than we anticipated. 

All I ask is that you have faith that we haven't gotten bored and are hiding from you. Our passion for this thing is stronger than ever, and part of the delay is the fact that we refuse to compromise and ship under-edited or art-sparse work. We're gonna ship you something that will impress you!


Long Live Love,

Cullen


PS: What would you like to see some previews of? In the next update, I will put together a really fancy package with some of the content we've been finishing up on. Got a species you'd like to know more about? A homeland? Wanna see pictures of the office? Tell me in the comments below!


Even better, join our Discord server and chat with us directly. We are always on there, because it's how we coordinate with our staff. We'll answer questions or you can just chatter with us about how everything is going! Join here: 

https://discord.gg/hrrXVT3r84

Posters are Finished! And a little check in.
over 1 year ago – Tue, Jul 05, 2022 at 12:19:14 PM

Something fun in the interim.

We coordinated a whole lot of artists and a whole lot more players for our posters, but that stage is completely finished! Here is the final art for all the posters available on the Backerkit pre-order page. This art will be in the book, too!

If you want to pre-order and are already a backer, or have already pre-ordered, you can double-order safely. Before we start the process of squaring everything away for shipping: We will be merging orders with duplicate email addresses! No need to worry about being charged too much for shipping!


We're doin' our best to look out for ya. <3  More news about the book very soon. When you hear from me next, it'll be when we send the draft to print proofs! Hang in there, and thanks again for being patient, delvers.


Long live love.

Cullen


PS: I also put two new posters on the Backerkit store. One is a piece from the book that I couldn't help but do a run of 11x17 prints of, and the other is the cover! I'll show those ones first, and then the rest!


The Storied Histories League, by CyanRoll
The Delver's Guide Cover, by ZeusDex
Down Time, by FoxNRoll
One Night at Holly's, by ZeusDex
Split Six Ways, by KittyDee
The Great Delve, by Travis
The Littfeld Bonfire, by Shamerli
The Louvain Library, by Stasya Danilova
The Very Trapped Room, by Natalie de Corsair

Surveys! Shirts! And a little update about what we're up to lately.
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 01:01:04 PM

The Backerkit surveys are sending soon!

We just sent out our 'smoke test', which is a little test of the survey sent to five percent of all the backers. If all goes well, tomorrow evening they'll go out for everyone!


You'll notice that we're not charging you for shipping yet. This is so that we don't over/undercharge you! Shipping is all over the place right now, so we'll be collecting your shipping fees later. There will be an update about it, don't worry. Your credit card on file will be charged for shipping down the line, and the fee is still capped at $29 for everyone worldwide in the worst-case scenario.


If you paid for the Special Edition upgrade, you will have $20 credit on Backerkit with which to select that upgrade for free. So don't fret! Just go through the survey and tell it you want the fancy cover. You won't be charged any extra in that case.


Let's talk about t-shirts!

So, on our Discord server (You are on the Discord server, right? *cough cough* join here if you're not) there have been a lot of people asking us about Bats and Kobolds, the two species left over from our last stretch goal. We originally gave October 31st as the final deadline for us to hit 500k and get the bats 'n bolds in. People were excited and more than a few of you wanted to have an opportunity to kick in toward that goal, so we decided to create a t-shirt!

Let your yapping/screeching voice be heard

You can only get this t-shirt on our website! Click the shirt to go to the store page and pre-order it until November 15th. Once that date passes, it will be gone from the store forever and I'll put in the order for very close to exactly that many shirts. It'll ship long before your pledge stuff too!


It took us a little longer than we expected to get our Backerkit survey up and running, so we're extending the deadline for kobolds and bats. The double-extra final apocalypse deadline for the last stretch goal is November 15th. This won't be extended again, so here's the final push to get these weirdos included in the book as playable species!


How's the book coming along?

I'm glad you asked, slightly-larger text. In November, Lexi and Selius and I will be headed to a cabin in the middle of the woods in the mountains for four weeks, to plunge ourselves fully into the process of writing the book. It's going to be a four-week sprint after which I am going to have tons of playtest content and all sorts of other cool stuff to share.

I won't be around much during November for this reason, but there are lots of other staff around to answer questions and help get you squared away.



And that's all I've got for this one! I will talk with all of you very soon. Long live love, delvers.


From the Halloween Party's Snack Table,

Cullen McGuire



oh... and one other thing...

We'll see you at Midwest Fur Fest, with ultra-limited edition free printed copies of Leaving Erin, the preview module, in tow.

Talk to you soon. 🐺