Holy CRAP! No, that’s…that reaction is not sufficient. Frankly, no reaction is. How about…“Black gods!” 😀

Hey everyone, Matt Colville here. It’s sort of impossible to summarize the intense emotional rollercoaster we all went on (and are still on!) the last 8 days. We all went to bed on Wednesday the 6th hoping we’d wake up Thursday and know our fate. But no one, no one at MCDM, even the MOST optimistic folks (of whom I am not one!) never in a million years imagined there’d be this many people who believed in this game. Or were at least curious enough to back!

So Thursday and Friday were intense. Overwhelming. I’m still coming to grips with what this all means. We got a lot of cool ideas for the future, folks.

But the reality is, the crowdfunder is a success. The game isn’t done, and it’s gonna take a LOT of work to get there. But this is work we are excited to do. We’re champing at the bit! It’s only been a week but we’ve already had a ton of conversations about the VTT, about Convention Support. Even before we launched, we’d reached out to some of our creative partners and started contracting designers to begin the process of converting monsters from Flee, Mortals! to this new (still untitled!) RPG. 

Everyone at MCDM busted their ass just to get this campaign launched and this was after a year in which we finished and released Where Evil Lives, Flee, Mortals!, The Talent and The Illrigger Revised. A lot of people wondered openly “why crowdfund now? Why December?” Well there were a lot of reasons but the main one was; we couldn’t imagine a time when MCDM would have more heat than now.  Strike while the iron is hot, and December was as hot as it was going to get for us!

I figured I’d take the weekend off and just turn into a potato but by Saturday afternoon I was back at the keyboard, working. Mostly on what we’re about to share with you, but also the first draft of how Languages and Literacy might work, and I had an idea for a new Running the Game video. There’ll be time to rest later! 😀

I think the thing that astonishes me the most about all this, something I didn’t expect, is how incredibly well regulated the community–you folks–are! We knew folks would have TONS of questions, but what I didn’t anticipate was how the community self-organized to ANSWER the questions! 

This, I think, is a happy side-effect of the open development ethos. We’ve been talking about this game in livestreams all year, we’ve been posting the Warts And All dev diaries on our Patreon and the result is, yeah we had a FLOOD of new people (Hi!) with tons of questions, met by our existing patrons and testers happy to answer them! And then THOSE new people start answering the questions of the even NEWER people. The system works! 😀

Anyway none of this is the point, the real reason for this update is we got something to share! 

The preview spreads seem to be a big hit. So we made another one! And you might get another one in a couple weeks. As with all these previews, all of this is temp. The visual design may change, the text will almost certainly change, the abilities will absolutely change, these are just stubbed-in versions of how we currently think this will work.

Our goal with the Heroes book (and, as I think you know by now, we are subject to the Tyranny of the Page Count, aka Page Count von Glauer as the community have taken to calling it) is to include all the Universal Donor ancestries you’d expect in a Fantasy RPG. Elves (two different kinds), Dwarves, Humans, Polder (our version of Halflings). There’s a LOT of classic Fantasy ancestries we’d love to include and only 400 pages in the Heroes book.

But we also want to include a couple of ancestries that are more common in Capital, our Urban Fantasy setting, and the TIMESCAPE, our Space Fantasy setting. We think Revenants and Devils for Capital, and the Memonek and Proteans for the Timescape. No spoilers!

Well, here’s the Revenant preview! Maybe the idea of playing a DEAD hero is too weird for your game! We get it, not every ancestry is appropriate for every table. But it’s super cool! 

full resolution - Revenants

VERY cool art from our own Nick de Spain! Again, all this is temp. The layout is temp, the text is temp. The actual book could look COMPLETELY different. You probably have a lot of questions but right now, this is all we know! As you can see, we’re taking a different approach to presenting these ancestries. Getting away from the National Geographic/David Attenborough approach. Probably there’ll be like…a chart somewhere with stuff like average height and age and stuff, we’ll see. But we think it’s a better use of our time to hook people on these things so they read the write-up and want to play one of these, even if, like the dwarf entry, you already know what a dwarf is. 

Anyway the work continues! We hope you like this! Holy crap this is insane! 😀

As always, if you have any questions about the game you can come by our Discord, there is a ton of very active but surprisingly sane discussion happening there. If you have any questions about your pledge, you can email [email protected], but maybe give folks a little while to respond, we’re about to have a couple of big holidays and folks at MCDM have families to be with. 

EEEEEE!!!