Grinning Rat Publications (Nate)
CREATOR
6 months ago
Project Update: Update 16: Biweekly Progress Update
Dungeoneers,
Since our last update, quite a number of big changes have happened! Some very exciting, some very annoying, all necessary. So, let's get into it!
Pledge Manager & Survey: 100% Complete
- There's a small handful (less than 10) people who still need to fill out the survey. I've sent reminders to do so this morning, so please check your email if you haven't gotten your files!
- The cutoff for filling out the survey will be Monday, July 1 - exactly four weeks from today. If you don't fill out the survey by then, it's unlikely you'll be in the initial shipping wave. This may increase your shipping costs, so please try to fill out the survey before then or reach out to me if you haven't already filled it out!
Dungeoneering: Catalysts Book Progress: 100% Complete
- The book is finished! PDF is uploaded to BackerKit and it is a part of your digital downloads, if included in your tier and your survey is filled out.
- The books are here! And they look great!
The Great Spellcheck Survey: 100% Complete
- The Great Spellcheck Survey for Dungeoneering: Catalysts is closed! Thankfully, no errors reported!
The Starlit Spire: ??% Complete (read below)
I had the opportunity to run two sessions of the Starlit Spire over the past week / weekend with two different groups. Players created characters using the Dungeoneering system (in one party was a Warrior, Troubadour, Alchemist, and Berserker - another party was a Magician, Knight, Necromancer, and Sorcerer) and we started in two different locations (the Surface and the Archives). Each session was about 3 hours long, both parties made significant progress through multiple levels, and by the end of both sessions I had the worst thought I could imagine: this isn't very fun.
I find it important that I'm completely transparent with you, dungeoneers, as you ultimately are paying for this product. It should be as good as it can be, for the price point its listed as. Right now, I don't feel like it's that. Let me explain:
I find it important that I'm completely transparent with you, dungeoneers, as you ultimately are paying for this product. It should be as good as it can be, for the price point its listed as. Right now, I don't feel like it's that. Let me explain:
- While I was running it I kept coming across situations I wanted to improve, or situations I didn't feel would punch hard enough.
- The reasoning for the factions to be where they were didn't seem strong enough in play and were overall confusing between the two human groups (the Aethern and the Starborn).
- We had a handful of Stone Memories found as well as a Corruption, which were cool but in a way that made everyone else at the table feel like they were waiting to find their own Stone Memories or Corruptions, rather than get involved in faction shenanigans.
- The rooms were interesting and I wrote exciting encounters for them, but everything felt very static - it didn't seem like the players overall had a big say as to what or how things were happening in the Starlit Spire at all.
- The big reason the Starlit Spire exists felt like it had little sway over the area, despite it being the origin of more than half the factions being here in the first place.
- The overall design of the book left a lot to be desired for me. I tried to mirror the style in Nine Tombs, but this is a very different adventure than that. The end result is a book that feels difficult to read and, more importantly, actually parse.
So, I sat with what I had for a few days trying to figure out what I should do: polish up a few egregious problems and send out a mediocre adventure or push the adventure deadline back a while to account for what I wanted to do: rewrite major portions of the adventure.
I opted for the latter. Like I said, your money paid for this - you should get your money's worth. That being said, the new proposed timeline is as follows for fulfillment and delivery of everything:
- Starlit Spire PDF: September 2024
- Starlit Spire Print Production: October 2024
- Physical Fulfillment: October 2024-December 2024
Thankfully, you'll notice that the physical fulfillment timeline is ultimately unchanged. Because of the vendor planning earlier in the campaign, I'm able to get the zines to me and GamesQuest a week or two after sending the files rather than several weeks or months later. If I'm able to get everything printed in October, that leaves two months for fulfillment which should be plenty of time in my experience.
Ultimately, I think this is the right choice for the adventure and for the project as a whole. Longtime backers will remember that I've released some sub-par product in the past (the original digital-only Nine Tombs of Athal-Kar from 2021, before its total rewrite in 2022) and I absolutely hated it being out in the public sphere. I'm not some kind of wunderkind when it comes to writing modules, but I know a bad one when I see one - I do not want to be in that pile.
Anyway, this is very long-winded and I appreciate your patience as I move out the deadline for getting the PDF for Starlit Spire. It's the last piece of this puzzle, so once its complete everything should move very quickly after that. I'll announce more news as it comes in over the next few weeks / months. Thank you for understanding!
Physical Fulfillment: 50% Complete (+10% from last update)
- Dungeoneering: Catalysts books are here (see pictures in the Catalysts section of the update)!
That's it for me - look for the next update towards the middle of June.
- Nate
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