Time for Playtesting!
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 01:00:57 PM

Playtesting!

Hey folks, we're back! Finally on the mend from covid, and we are ready to hurl ourselves into playtesting. That means subclasses, spells, species, teamwork maneuvers, and wagon rules!

Check out this form to begin! https://forms.gle/LiWRNzVJysZQEtMZ8

If you want to take part in playtesting, we'd love to get you on the Discord! https://discord.gg/VRh2nkSpQM

This public round of playtesting will go until March 15th, so hop in and hang out with us!

See you on the road, Delvers! 

Progress Report, World Events, and General Update
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 01:00:55 PM

Hi everyone! First, we should talk briefly about world events.

Crises Overseas

Along with most of you, we have been following the news in Ukraine with ongoing horror. Putin's invasion continues to feel like an unreal event, but there is no denying the real effect it is having on those near and dear to us at Heartleaf. 

More than one of our artists was living in Kyiv specifically, and maintaining contact has proven incredibly difficult. Many of our artists are also in Russia, where sanctions and SWIFT cutoffs make paying them increasingly difficult, all while the floor drops out from the ruble and prices of goods skyrockets. Some of them even face jail time for joining the protests in their own country. We have made personal pledges to those artists working with us to do everything in our power to help them stay afloat, but there is much that a community can do that we alone cannot.

On March 1st, the Ukrainian division of the Red Cross put out a plea for hundreds of millions of dollars of medical supplies. To that end, we are encouraging our backers to make a donation here:

 Make a donation to the Ukraine Red Cross here. 

 We Need a Bit More Time

Might as well say it clearly, painful as it is for us to do so. Delays in production have stemmed from several places, starting with our entire home team - all three of us - getting sick around the new year. With that said, we are still handily aiming to have the project shipped well before year's end.

It hurts to admit a delay, but we want this book and everything that comes with it to be the best it can be, and rushing it out the door isn't the way. We've got a lot more plans for the Beast World in the future, but that all starts with the Delver's Guide. Heartleaf Games has no plans to put forward any other projects until this one is done.

Production

So let's talk about where we're at!

Plushies and metal dice are done. Thousands of plushies (nearly 300 boxes of them!) and countless dice are sitting in our manufacturer's warehouse, waiting to be sent over with the books. The Beast World Dice Set, with its lil animal heads, has faced a delay - the first batch of production deformed while it was setting thanks to a temperature issue in their storage - but is on track to be finished.

The Deck of Delvers now has over 80 artists working on it, bringing in awesome talent from every corner of the community and all around the world. I cannot wait to show it off, and while I can't show you any cards with characters belonging to backers (they're a surprise for the backers!), I can show one of the handful of cards with a character from us to give an idea of the level of quality we're seeing!

Rules for the Meandering Tales card game are complete and production of the individual cards is well under way, with both it and the Deck of Delvers getting printed on huge tarot-sized cards: 70mm x 120mm. Big enough that everyone at your table will be able to see them!

The first round of play testing on our Main Event Fighter, Frostburn Eclipse Sorcerer, and Carrion Master Ranger - plus dozens of spells, magic items, species, and Homeland features - went great, and the amount of feedback and enthusiasm we received has been overwhelming. We're still sorting through it!

Writing has been focused entirely in the mechanics for The Delver's Guide for the last month or so, primarily in bringing you the best 5e wagon experience ever. Split into several different weight grades, 6 wagon models, and over a hundred attachments, these traveling homes and miniature fortresses for Delver crews will grow with the strength of the party. Invest in your crew's wagon, and it will be an invaluable tool for taking on the most dangerous foes in your games. Play testing on the wagons (and more subclasses, with the next pack of material including our barbarian, druid, and paladin subclasses) is still ongoing. Here's a lil preview of the work that's been pouring into these wagons...

And that's all for now! We want to continue keeping you all in the loop as Heartleaf Games continues to strive towards the finish line. If you've got any questions at all, please feel free to email us at [email protected] or hop on our Discord to chat with us directly! https://discord.gg/VRh2nkSpQM

Long Live Love,

-Lexi Fox

Editor & Layout Artist

Okay, my turn too.

HI everyone! Cullen here. I wanted to add a personal note as well.

The stuff in Ukraine has been very distracting for me. As Lexi mentioned, many of our artists are in Russia and Ukraine, and we've been doing our best to be helpful to our people there while still grinding away at this beautiful project. I hope that you'll find something to give to them; we've been donating all that we can, too.

Things with the Delver's Guide are going well! I am working my very hardest to make up for the lost time from being sick in January, and we are slowly but surely working through the other delays as well. The past few months have thrown us some manufacturing curve balls, and obviously becoming unable to pay many of our staff, or even speak to others, has been a pretty awful sort of challenge. That said, we are hammering away at what is left and the book is good. Great, even.

I'm keeping my head up. I'm so grateful to have all of you here, and to feel the energy and excitement surrounding the book. The progress is looking so good, and the more we get into a finished state, the more confident I am that this could really be something special. Just wait a little while longer, and I promise the delay will be worth it. I'm not letting go of the thing until I'm sure it's the best it can be. I can't wait to hear the stories you tell with it.

Thanks again for being patient with us. Long live love. And peace, come really damn soon please.

Cullen

PS: I want to hear from you! If you're not already in our Discord server and have questions for us, or just want to chat, we are always listening for you. The place is really jumping! I'm going to be scheduling a new round of play testing in the next few days, so come on in if you want to see what the wagon mechanics look like in particular!

 Our Discord Server 

And please, as Lexi said, consider a donation to the Ukrainian Red Cross.

Make a donation to the Ukraine Red Cross here. 

This is really happening.
over 4 years ago – Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 08:16:35 PM

We are funded, plus some extra.

Here we are at the end of the campaign. To start with, something a little personal.

The reality of all this is crashing over me like a wave, giving me a clearer glimpse of what the future might hold than I had, even at 11:00 AM this morning. Until this moment, it has all been a kind of ephemeral thing- an abstract collection of bar graphs and counters and projections. And now it is real. You have validated my existence in this silly world in a way I can't begin to describe.

You have changed my life for the better. Thank you, with every word I know with which to say it. Thank you.

Now, we move forward together!

I'm going to take a few days to decompress and get my head bolted back on. From here, we begin work on the book in earnest. I will be posting regular updates on the progress of the book, along with snippets of lore and game information. There will be streams of the game, plus other ways to shake the box before you get the chance to open it.

Those of you inclined toward game design yourselves (or just too impatient to wait) are probably wondering about playtesting! We are going to be getting feedback on a lot of content on Discord, with formalized teams who can poke and prod at the individual moving parts of this thing. The exact structure will be coming in the next few weeks. If you want to be a part of that conversation, join our server here:

https://discord.gg/aSAzhdwp

If your character is going to be in the book:

Hang in there! In the next week or so, I am going to compose a guide for how to submit your character. There are well over 100 of you who will be submitting characters, so I need to streamline the conversation a bit to make it easier to give you a good fit into the world. There will be cooperation and a back-and-forth conversation with each and every one of you, I promise. You haven't missed anything- keep an eye out for my emails and also for an update here on the page.

Bats and Kobolds.

We came up about 10% short of our goal for bats and kobolds before the end of the campaign. However, we have several promotions coming down the line that are going to push that number higher. I know for a fact that there are many people who were unable to pledge because of credit card issues or paychecks incoming or what have you. Therefore, we're going to give it until Halloween to report that final number. So spooky winged folks and goofy lizard kids shouldn't despair! There's still time. <3

Once again, thank you. We're going to build something truly remarkable, and we're going to do it together. Long live love, delvers.

Your humble chief for as long as you'll have me,

Cullen McGuire

Pre-Orders, Pledge Manager, and more!
over 4 years ago – Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 07:58:37 PM

Hey everyone!

Pre-orders are now up

I wanted to let you know that pre-orders are now up, and we are counting up to bats and kobolds once again. You can reach the pre-order page from the Kickstarter, or you can follow this link directly:  

https://thedelversguide.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/364469 

If you're already a backer and want to add more stuff onto your pledge, hold on just a little while longer. The Pledge Manager only opens up once we've handed over Backerkit's fee, which we can't do until the Kickstarter funds drop. That will be in about two weeks. If you mistakenly preorder something completely new, it's alright—we can merge your orders together when all is said and done.  

However, if you missed your chance to pledge altogether, this is the opportunity! By the way... there might be some previously unavailable stuff on that preorder store page... I heard a rumor.  

Some notes about pledges with selections, commissions, and character cards.

Keep an eye on your email. I will be sending an email when Pledge Manager opens up, which will let you choose stuff that requires choosing (such as which plush you want if you're getting one of the two characters, or which poster you want, etc.)   You can make changes to that until about February 2022, so don't worry if you can't decide for now. In particular, those getting posters may want to wait until they can see all the final pieces.  If your character is part of the project, either because of a commission tier or character card, stay tuned. Next week I'm going to be sending those folks an email with the first step of that process. There are a lot of people whose characters need to get into the book and cards, so I'm going to be streamlining the process with some Google Forms. Don't worry! If there's something in particular you want that might be an exception, there will be a way to talk to me directly about it too.  

Thank you, Furry Nexus!

I wanted to talk a little about one of the servers who helped us out a ton during the campaign. There will be another one of these announcements in a bit, but for today I want to give a shout-out to Jammy , who is the administrator of The Furry Nexus. It's a really big furry Discord server (I mean really big) and they helped us out a whole ton. Thank you Jammy! You can join The Furry Nexus here, if you're one of the few furries on planet Earth not aleady in it:  

https://discord.gg/ypCX7wMNBt To thank Jammy and The Furry Nexus for their bark during the campaign, we're using their Minecraft server for the official Littfeld server! I might pop in during downtime and try and make a wagon caravan. >_>

You can find that server and other Minecraft info in our server as well in the Minecraft channel, so come hang out in the Beast World discord with us here: 

https://discord.gg/beastworld 

And that's all I got for now! Unless I forgot something which I really hope I didn't.  

I probably didn't.  

Yeah, I think we're good.  

More updates soon, about playtesting and pledge managing. Also, maybe some pics of our new office space???? 

Long Live Love, 

Cullen

helo evryone, this is red kobold. last too days for plejing! new strech gole for 500,000 gp is kobolds! last gole!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Oct 03, 2021 at 01:48:00 PM

dear delvers,

helo, this is red kobold. cullen got up to do snacks and nap. i am puting an update out.

cullen says if we could get 500,000 gold circles, he will put red kobold and friends in delver's guyed. he told silver kobold this is the last strech gole. 

kobolds ar strong and good friends for delvers. we never take gold circles that isn't ours, except for one time. and also the other time.

thank you for reading my update. i hope you enjoyed reading it so much that i enjoyed typing it.

eat pray love,

-red kobold

(Last stretch goal. $500,000. Beast World Kobolds.)