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:
Shipping Charges Incoming
over 3 years ago
– Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 06:23:26 AM
Hello everyone!
In just about 24 hours, we'll begin the process of charging for shipping and taxes/VAT, as well as any unpurchased items in carts. Starting at 9 pm EST/6 pm PST tomorrow (November 2nd), if you have a remaining balance (as is the case for the majority of orders), Backerkit will charge the card you have on file. This will be the card you submitted when filling out your pledge survey or used to purchase a pre-order. Orders with a balance of $0 will not be charged.
If you'd like to check your order, you can use the links below. You'll need to log into your Backerkit account to view and edit your information.
If you run into any issues, please contact us and we'll help sort it out. You can email us at [email protected] or speak to us on Discord - reach out to Selius#2564 or join our server with the link below (for the most immediate and convenient responses, messaging Selius directly is the way to go).
The upcoming charge will be via Stripe, with the statement descriptor HEARTLEAF GAMES.
New orders are still possible, and will continue to be available even after tomorrow. So if you haven't ordered anything yet, you still can! If you already have an order and want to add anything, simply send us a message and we'll edit your order.
That's all for now. We'll have another project update out for you all very soon!
Long live love,
-Selius🐀
Proof Photos, Shipping Info, and Charge Dates! We hurtle EVER CLOSER :D
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 10:44:22 PM
Hello Delvers!
We’re here with some news about shipping, print proofs, and other bits. Before we get started, I want to say hi to the Backerkit pre-order folks, because they haven’t been automatically receiving these updates, which we have fixed now, hopefully. You should be getting them in your inbox from now on along with everyone else!
Okay this is a long one. But there’s fun stuff!
In This Update (too long; didn’t read):
Print proofs are here! There are pictures of just about all the stuff.
The 11x17 Storied Histories League poster is getting bigger, but staying the same price.
We’re cutting the price of the GM screen by ten bucks! If you already ordered one as an add-on, we’re giving you a $10 credit on your Backerkit.
Your order on Backerkit is open, if you want to order more add-ons or change your shipping address.
Let’s show off some pictures of all the proofs we’ve been looking over and giving notes on to our print guy.
Awwwwwww ye
There were a few adjustments necessary, but overall things look stellar.
The book!
Don't mind the lorem ipsum on the back, it's just the print proof! >_>
Fleeks’ special edition design is amazing in debossed gold and blue PU leather. The standard hardcover is also stunning.
Deck of Delvers: Champions & Deck of Delvers: Powers
The cards look fantastic as well! Selius poured himself into the writing work for these, and all of them have a lot of love put into them. If you think you’ll need NPCs for your Beast World game (or even just generally) this is a neat resource to have handy. We wrote dozens of unique NPC stat blocks with their own quirks to make them interesting encounters in their own right. Each of them also has their own plot hook at the bottom, if you’re looking for a place to start a story.
The two Decks of Delvers have a new name! We realized that “Deck of Delvers 1” and “Deck of Delvers 2” weren’t quite right. The decks will be called “Champions” and “Powers”. As before, there’s no specific theme to either of them. Species and homeland are spread pretty evenly across both.
The production map will be the whole thing and will have a clean border
We got samples of the cloth map too! The final size of the cloth map is 24” x 34.5” by the way! Bigger than we initially said, but we want to make sure you can read all the little details.
Plushes
The highest quality materials.
We already showed the plushes, but I want to show them again and it’s my email you can’t stop me
The GM Screen
This is the GM screen! Its price as an add-on has been $40 until today. We were able to get a good enough rate on manufacturing that I want to lower the price. This thing is too cool, and I want as many people to be able to get one as possible.
From today, the GM screen’s price is reduced 25% to $30. If you’ve already ordered it as an add-on, either during the campaign or in pre-orders, I’m going to put a $10 credit on your Backerkit account. You can use it to buy something else, or just use it as a discount to your shipping cost. <3 Thanks for buying it at the higher price!
Speaking of changes…
We got proofs of the posters. I was sad that the Storied Histories League poster was only 11”x17”, because there was some cool detail that was hard to make out. So, we ordered it larger!
The SHL poster is now 18” x 24”. The price hasn’t increased! If you needed it to be 11x17 and want a refund, please send us a message and we’ll get you squared away. I figured most people wouldn’t mind getting a larger poster for the same price, though. ∑:)
Okay let’s talk about this art book.
Lexi has been working herself ragged on this art book. It is filled with concept sketches, design work, and unused illustrations that didn’t make it into The Delver’s Guide. It’s a gorgeous book, and it’s only $20. If you didn’t get it as a stretch goal add-on automatically, you should grab it for your coffee table!
Let’s talk about shipping!
Shipping and tax prices have been configured in Backerkit and applied to all orders. We have not charged backer cards automatically yet. I’m going to let Selius explain because he’s a lot better at this than I am.
—
You can edit your shipping and card info using the link below! Just click on The Delver's Guide to Beast World and it should give you an overview of your order, including "Edit Shipping Info" and "Update Credit Card" options. This will only work if you have a Backerkit account, though, so if you don't have an account yet, I highly recommend you make one!
If you need to create a Backerkit account, be sure to use the same email address associated with your pledge/pre-order. That way, it will automatically connect your order to your account. Use the link below, and up in the top right is a "Backer Sign up" button - click that!
I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any troubles with it, and we can get it resolved!
—
Here is an important date!
We will automatically charge cards on file for shipping on November 2nd.
If you want to pay your shipping fee before 11/2, you can click a “Charge Card” button at the link above, and it will get your balance all figured.
By the way, for those who ordered add-ons twice and had two separate orders, we merged them (you should have gotten an email from us). That way you don’t have to pay twice for shipping. If there’s some problem with your order items, please send me a message. We can fix it!
that's wild
I made this for the Discord channel a few months back (the graph is the price to send a shipping container from China). Things have gotten better since then, but we’re looking at about a $10,000 shortfall because of our $29 promise. The cost to ship to Australia is in the three-digit range. It was… incorrect to assume that shipping prices would decrease in advance of the book being sent out.
Which is okay! We planned for it, and we’re ready to eat the cost to get the book to everyone who wants it. The max price for shipping is still $29 for any backer rewards. The price should be automatically represented on your Backerkit profile, along with any sales tax and VAT. The only way you’ll have to pay more for shipping is if:
You ordered more stuff in add-ons/pre-orders than will fit in the Essential Delver’s Kit box. Most of these folks are people who ordered the second Deck of Delvers in addition. For those, we kept the price to 3-5 bucks more. The most we added on for extra weight was about $10 for international shipments that were very large.
You ordered a poster. These ship in a separate parcel (to prevent bending) and also get extra considerations for fulfillment. There’s a flat “Poster Shipping Fee” added to those orders, which doesn’t increase if you ordered more than one. It’ll all come in the same tube!
To very recent pre-order people (in the last month or so):
Thank you! If you paid any shipping fee already, please take a look at your Backerkit profile. You might have a credit, if the shipping price decreased while we were getting the bugs worked.
If you do, you can either use it to buy something else, or just hold onto it. When we go to ship everything out, I will refund all the cards of people who have hanging charges for this purpose. If you want your excess shipping charges refunded sooner, send me a message. We’ll get you squared away either way.
Can I just, like, come get the stuff from the office? Or meet up somewhere?
Yes! You can do local pickup as a shipping option. If you go to your Backerkit order, you can set your address “Country” to “Local Pickup”, and that will let us know you’re going to come get it. We ask you to throw us five bucks to help cover the freight shipping here to the office, but otherwise, that’ll be the maximum. You can grab it from our office here in Buffalo, NY (and get dinner with us if you like!)
Come and say hi to us, and grab your stuff! We’ll have a great big booth there. I want to meet y’all.
So, why did it take so long to get shipping and Backerkit worked out?
As you may have noticed, it’s about one month after I said we’d be sending out this information. We’ve been working with Brandon at Backerkit (Hi, Brandon!) to enable some beta features in their system and facilitate this shipping cap stuff.
If you want to order more stuff on Backerkit, all of your orders are now reopened. What does this mean? You can make changes like:
Shipping address. If your address changed since you completed your survey, follow the link and you can update it.
Credit card on file. We need a card to charge for your shipping and tax stuff, otherwise we can’t send you the stuff!
Add-on choices. If you want to order extras, that’d help us a lot!
Some folks were asking if there was a way they could “volunteer” more money for their shipping costs to help offset the shipping shortfall. I don’t like the idea of others subsidizing my own shoe-eating, but I do want to open the door for anyone who wants to order more stuff to help offset the cost!
I added a few new items to the Backerkit store. All of the new items have 0 weight in the system, so you won’t be charged any shipping for any of them.
They are:
Some stickers! We have one of the Beast World logo, one of the Big Wagon, and a set of three sheets with some very cool emoji of the BW species done by our pal Citreon. If you order them, we’ll put em in your shipment!
A printed version of the three-session preview adventure, Leaving Erin! This is something a bunch of folks have asked us about. It’s about 45 pages long, and I am still proud of it over a year after finishing it.
To edit your add-ons, use this link here: thedelversguide.backerkit.com
Once you access your survey, you'll see an "edit address" or "edit your order" button at the top right. Click on that button!
On the next page, click the "edit addons" link at the bottom left.
As long as you’re logged into your Backerkit account, the follow links should also help you find the place you need to be.
Here are some answers to questions we’ve received on Discord.
Q. What will be available after the pre-orders are sent out?
Almost everything. The only thing we probably won’t restock is the Spice Kit, because it’s a pain to source. So if you want the recipe cards and the spice kit, now’s the time to get them!
Q. How do I update my shipping address/card on file?
November 2nd, unless you click the link above and charge it sooner.
Q. What are you doing after the book ships?
Taking a vacation. Then… more. :) We’ll keep you in the loop.
That’s all I’ve got! Thanks again for being patient with us. We’re barreling toward the end now! We are so excited to get this in your hands. All of us have been working pretty much all-day-every-day for the past year or so. We are extremely proud of this. I think it might be something special.
Long live love.
Cullen
THE BOOK IS DONE! AAAAA Production Dates, Fulfillment Dates, Moving Forward!
over 3 years 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,
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 superactive 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
almost 4 years 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!
almost 4 years 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:
