We're in the final hours of the Downcrawl 2E crowdfunding campaign!! We've just hit $75K which is incredible... let's see how much more we can get the word out about this game in these last few hours!
It's actually fairly tricky to self-promote your own crowdfunding campaign these days. RPG sites don't want to cover them, many places only want to talk about shipping games rather than preorders, and even most TTRPG communities require posts about your own games to go to a "self-promo" channel which everyone has universally muted. Despite the fact that there've been dozens of discussions about the first edition of Downcrawl on the r/rpg Subreddit over the years, for instance, my attempt to post about it there was predictably smacked down:
All this is a slightly complainy way of saying: I'd really appreciate anything you could do to spread the word about Downcrawl 2E today to your followers and communities and friends. You can download a bunch of hi-res images here for easy sharing, and here are some posts on social media you can reshare as well:
I'll repeat my mantra from my first update: Word of mouth is the ultimate currency in our oversaturated media landscape, so thanks in advance for any recommendations you make. 🙏 ❤️
What's been happening on the game otherwise? This week I've been working on finalizing the Encounter Deck, one of the add-ons which helps with generating random encounters during journeys. As opposed to some other systems, while Downcrawl encounters can certainly be dangerous, they're often framed more as interesting side quests than just a list of random monsters you might fight.
The four kinds of Encounter (plus Fungal Foraging, sort of another kind of encounter) each have different instructions for how to draw other cards to "assemble" a final situation. I did a bunch of experimentation with layouts earlier this fall to find a way to position all of these "pieces" together in a way that helped your eye align them, no matter which configuration the cards were in. This took a lot of rejiggering since each card can appear in multiple configurations with other cards.
This week I've been going back to these mockups (which are the early ones you saw on the campaign page and in the Encounter Deck video there) and layering in the final artwork. The deck cards are created in InDesign, which has a helpful feature that lets you import one InDesign document into another; so I created a file showing cards laid out in all the major combinations which will auto-update as the card design and art is tweaked, so I can see how edges and lines were looking:
You can see how this helps me check that, for instance, the artwork on the Fungal Forgaging area aligns with a second card to produce a compound fungus name ("emerald funnels"):
Note: the "Side Effect" is upside down because you draw that later and separately... in general the text orientation is always trying to help guide your eye to what's relevant for a particular draw.
I'm really happy with how the Encounter Cards are working together and looking with this final art in place. I ordered another proof yesterday and will share pictures once I see them in action. (The Encounter Deck is included at the "Complete" pledge tier or as an add-on to any order.)
That's all for now! After the dust settles from the final campaign day, I'll probably share an update some time next week with my current thinking on timelines for production, shipping and fulfillment. A reminder that shipping is not included as part of your pledge, and will be charged separately shortly before your items ship, which allows me to keep the cost to you as close to the actual rates as possible. (You can review the "Shipping" section of the campaign page for my best estimates currently about what the shipping charge will be for your pledge and region.)
Thanks for being a fan of Downcrawl, and never stop exploring,
