Last Full Week at Work, Charging Cards, and the New Year!
Hail and well met fellow Wanderers!
Just a quick one this week: As we explained last week this will be our last full week of work until the new year so we just wanted to ho...
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Aston
13 days ago
Faerie Playtest Survey 03: Oath of Mortals & College of Hysteria
Hail and well met fellow Wanderers!
Nothing groundbreaking in terms of information this week, just here to drop in a couple of reminders and this weeks Playtest ...
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Aston
20 days ago
Something Wicked this way comes: Playtest 04 | The Witch
Hail and well met Wanderers,
Your patience has been rewarded for this week I come bearing the gift of a complete and playable Wi...
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The Dragons Vault
26 days ago
Witch playtest releases next Monday!
Hail and well met Wanderers,
As Aston mentioned, we have had a rather overwhelming week this week with illness and some very hectic life events...
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Aston
27 days ago
Update coming tomorrow!
Hey Gang!
Just a quick message here to let you know that the update & Witch Class playtest will be coming tomorrow evening, Between Conor moving house this week and me being off sick for the last week or so things are a little bit chaotic here at the minute, but we'll be on t...
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Aston
about 1 month ago
Playtest Survey 02, Something Wicked this way comes, and Survey Updates!
Hail Wanderers!
First of all just a small check-in on a couple of notes: Thank you so much to the Duke backers that already filled out their su...
Our campaign for Faerie is over, twas a battle well fought and a victory well earned! Thank you all for raising your banner amongst our own, and making this our most successful project to date! If you’re reading this and didn’t have chance to back, our pre-order store is now open too, and will remain so until we lock orders for manufacture and fulfilment next year.
Now onto the final business for this week, including a round up of loose ends and a key dates roadmap of what you can expect from us and when!
Willow’s Fate
If you’ve not already, go check out our final update on Willow to learn her fate, and find out what awesome rewards you have all unlocked as a result of your choices and rolls! The final roll was done live on stream, and thanks to my sleep deprivation and the efforts of your fellow backers, something pretty wild happened…
Post-Campaign Survey
Expect to receive your post campaign surveys in one weeks time, August 30th. Once they’ve been sent out you will have until September 30th to complete them. If your surveys are not complete by the deadline we cannot guarantee you will receive your rewards, so please do make sure to get them filled in when they arrive.
Playtest Content
Our first playtest survey will also be released on August 30th, to collect your feedback on the preview PDF content such as the Fetch Rogue and Witch class (we will release the full class soon, and collect more thorough feedback later once all features and spells have been made available). We will also be releasing our first official playtest document on August 30th. Which will contain the Witch Knight Fighter subclass, the Circle of Blight Druid subclass, spells & more! We will release a survey the following month for you to post your feedback, alongside the next playtest document. This will continue monthly until we finalise the book ready for fulfilment!
Update & Streaming Schedule
You can expect to hear from us here on Backerkit fortnightly (every 2 weeks) with an official update that will detail progress on the book, the art, and the various rewards! As for streaming, I don’t yet know when we will be hopping on again, but rest assured it will happen and you will be notified plenty in advance. Last nights stream was a tonne of fun, we designed two new monsters and even rolled Willows final roll live! If you missed it, the VoD is available on YouTube HERE.
Fulfilment Timeline
We are penned for a June 2025 fulfilment date, digital goods will likely go out some time prior but this is the deadline we have for everything so expect notifications about receiving rewards no later than May 2025. Returning backers from Tempest can expect your exclusive “Guide to the Wyldsea” expansion to be with you sometime in the next couple months, and any purchases of the Tempest PDF or Dragons Vault Digital Collection will be sent out in a similar timescale once we’ve finished all of our backend work for Faerie.
That’s all of the important dates going forward! If there’s any amendments, changes or delays we will be sure to make you aware as far in advance as possible.
And as a final note, I’d like to say a personal thank you to every single one of you who joined us on this campaign. Because of you me and Aston get to work our dream jobs, I can’t emphasise enough how grateful we are! And if you are returning from Tempest, a special thank you for sticking with us as we continue to grow and develop! Aston will be handling surveys and content for the next week or so while I take a short holiday after working pretty relentlessly the last couple of months, I’ll still be active in our discord if you have any questions or want to talk about Faerie!
Just a quick one this week: As we explained last week this will be our last full week of work until the new year so we just wanted to hop on for one last sign off and also give you a heads up about what we've got upcoming!
First up, our next playtest will drop on the 30th of December, containing Playtest 05: REDACTED (no spoilers yet!), that update is prewritten and scheduled so we won't actually be online to reply to comments or emails until the following week!
Also just in an attempt to remind you guys again so y'all still have plenty of notice: We will be charging cards in January! We'll let you know the exact date in our first update back. This means that this is the Absolute last chance to make any changes to addons and your survey! If you've already locked in and want to add anything on just drop me an email before we charge and I can unlock it for you!
Finally as the last proper chance I'll have to chat with you for a few weeks I just wanted to say thank you all. Honestly me and Conor only get to do this job as long as you guys support us, and truly we're so incredibly lucky that you guys choose to trust us with your money and even your free time! The Dragons Vault started as a couple of friends in a Discord call deciding to make their home game into a product to share with the world, and now the fact we get to share that joy with so many people all across the world is legitimately mind blowing. Thank you, so much.
Have a wonderful Festive season for those of you who celebrate and we'll see you in the new year! Aston
Nothing groundbreaking in terms of information this week, just here to drop in a couple of reminders and this weeks Playtest survey! We also have some information on communication and updates across the festive period for y'all just so you know where we're at!
Faerie Playtest Survey 03: Oath of Mortals & College of Hysteria
First of all, here you will find the feedback survey to the Oath of Mortals & College of Hysteria subclasses we released last month. We're definitely starting to get into some novel mechanics here between these two subclasses and the Witch released last week so your feedback is incredibly important! It's one of our great joys to learn certain rules of mechanical design so we can also then work out how to break them in just the right way. Because of this our subclasses may not always follow more general rules of design and precedent set by official material, what is important to us is more of the feel of the subclass. Is it broken? Underpowered? Does it give just the right vibe for what we want to evoke? These are all important questions that we need your help to find the answers to!
In the new year as we get closer to finalizing some of our mechanical designs I'll hop on and do a bit of a round up of previous feedback surveys and explain if we took any action because of them, we want you to know that we do listen to you!
Upcoming updates!
So next week is myself and Conors last full week of work before taking some time off until the new year, while outside of our normal schedule we'll hop on just to give y'all a final reminder in case you have any burning questions or queries before we hop off! After that we have an update locked and loaded for the 30th just to lead into the new year! After that our regular schedule picks up on the 6th of January with our biweekly updates! Obviously feel free to send any queries or questions you have over our time off but just be aware that you might not get a reply until the new year!
Ongoing distribution
By now most of you that purchased both the Vault Digital Collection and the Tempest PDF's through Backerkit have access to them, but just incase you don't: You cannot access digital downloads until your Backerkit Bill is 0 (Including shipping & Taxes), this means that you need to contact me at [email protected] to pay your remaining balance manually before we charge cards if you want immediate access!
Also we're still getting a couple of emails about the free d20 incentive on digital only backers, so please ensure that you have checked your backerkit survey and that any information required is on there! If you want me to remove the d20 (we understand that the shipping can be prohibitively expensive for some digital only backers) or input your address manually to get an accurate estimate of shipping rates just chuck me an email and I'd be happy to help!
That's about it for us this week guys! But just to give a quick shoutout, there's been some super useful and fun conversations going on in the discord about our Witch class. We're always happy to hear what you guys think about our work so if you wanna get involved in the discussion and haven't already hop on over there!
Have an amazing week gang, we'll be back next week for our final sign off before the new year! Aston
Your patience has been rewarded for this week I come bearing the gift of a complete and playable Witch class alongside all three Subclasses! (available from the dropbox link in the backer only section at the bottom of this update!) There is also an update for our Vault Digital Collection backers at the end of the update for those of you waiting on that!
Will you fight alongside your Blinkdog familiar as the Coven of the Hunt? Curse and corrupt your foes as the Coven of the Hex? Or perhaps you crave a simple life of herbalism and support as the Coven of the Wort? This 11 page PDF comes with the complete class table and features for the Witch, all three fully playable subclasses, 17 sigils to twist and warp your spellcasting (including 3 subclass exclusives per subclass!) alongside the spell list we provided a couple of playtests ago!
So the Witch is done right?
Almost! There are a couple of placeholders throughout the PDF, most notably in two of the Witch Coven spell lists there are certain homebrew spells you will notice are in Bold. These are homebrew spells that are currently still cooking and not quite finished enough to hand over to you guys to immediately break yet! We were going to replace them with placeholder SRD spells but that spell list can be quite limited in terms of what we are allowed to reprint for you guys but feel free to replace them with any spells of appropriate level and vibe for the subclass (as an extremely rough guide for each of the covens we recommend defensive/support spells for Coven of the Hunt to keep your familiar companion alive longer, and any particularly planty/druidic spells in place of Lone Oak for the Coven of the Wort!)
To reflect this, the spell list attached at the bottom of the PDF is very much a placeholder comprised mostly of SRD spells with the few teaser spells we've released so far chucked in, much like I said in the previous update feel free to add in any spells you think have a particularly Witchy vibe with the knowledge that plenty more custom spells will make it into the list before final publication!
Finally, the custom familiar statblocks aren't included in the playtest but there are examples of SRD creatures that make a perfect Witches' familiar!
Where's my digital collection?
Coming over the next couple of hours! I will be progressively updating the digital downloads over the next couple of days as we collect the raw files to distribute to you guys, but tonight digital collection customers will have access to: Tempest: A Seafarer's Sourcebook - Our previously released and newly updated sourcebook full of piratey goodness! Escape from Dimshore - An introductory adventure in the world of Tempest (and a retelling of the first adventure ever played in Tempests home game!) The Curse of Cortez - A small lair/encounter boss fight with the dreaded Captain Cortez with fun and novel mechanics! Still to come are the Tempest token and map packs alongside your discount codes for physical Tempest books, we are currently battling with DriveThruRPG to try and get the new and errata'd version of Tempest uploaded for print but we will know by next weeks update whether this is possible or not!
Again just a small reminder that both digital collection and Tempest PDF customers will not be able to access downloads unless there is a 0 balance on your backerkit survey (this includes shipping/taxes)! If you want access before we charge the cards in the new year feel free to chuck me a support email and we can get you paid up and sailing the several seas!
That's mostly it from me this week, but first I wanted to say thank you all for your immense patience. I know a few of you have been waiting on support requests on the help email for a little while now but I was unfortunately out of office sick last week. Please rest assured that I will be working my way through those emails this week and getting everything ship shape!
As always, have a wonderful week and I'll see you all very soon! Aston
As Aston mentioned, we have had a rather overwhelming week this week with illness and some very hectic life events. As a result we have decided to push the Witch playtest back one week, just until we can give it a final bit of spit and polish!
Nothing too dramatic, but we want to make sure we are being as communicative as possible with releases.
In the meantime I hope everyone is enjoying the change in seasons, whatever hemisphere you are in!
I’ll return next Monday with the Witch and Witch subclasses, and perhaps even some early looks at artwork…
