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And that's the $21,000 stretch goal. The FIFTH Perilous Journey has been funded.
Two of the adventures - they happen to both be David's - are edited, laid out, and have been passed out to Master and Commander level backers for playtesting as it was foretold.
Or something like that.
Anyway, I will bounce back and forth between art direction for the laid-out books, editing and finalizing the text of the other two, and getting the final status of card decks and token sheets.
Speaking of token sheets, I should be getting 10 copies of a prototype sheet of 42 tokens from Ironskull Castle on Thursday. That'll be a good photograph day.
I thought that shipping for token sheets to "not the US" was going to be unknowable . . . but turns out that the token printer I'm using is already outside the US and can ship directly to the UK.
Depending on the quantity, that movement will only add a dollar or so to the shipping bill per sheet. Because these token sheets qualify as games, not books, they're likely subject to a 20% VAT rate. That'll be about $8-10 and adds to any potential shipping cost; I'll have to consult my fulfillment partner to see what he has to say about that.
Overall, getting them from the printer to backers for about 301-400g worth of token sheets (a conservative estimate) looks to run about:
So for a $40-50 order of tokens (stay tuned for why $50 rather than $40; it's not a price increase, it's potentially more stuff), you'd be looking at $10 in VAT and another $7-11 in shipping. Where possible, orders would be grouped.
If I do a deck of NPC/Monster cards, they'll come from the same source. So might-could-maybe combine shipments with tokens, cards, and the adventures and we'd be looking at about $1 per extra 100g of stuff. Ish. Might have to revise later, because international shipping is weird, etc.
Even so: the hardest part in my mind is shipping stuff from within the USA to "not the USA." The ability to drop-ship a partial order direct to the UK is huge.
In the comments section, there's a very good question as to what's included in a pledge. Let me try and break this down a bit, with the caveat that I'm hoping to introduce some new tiers at the end of the weekend that will be "ALL THE THINGS."
The adventures are each similar to each other: they are 16 interior pages long (the PDFs will be four pages longer, to accommodate the front and back cover, plus blank spacer pages to preserve left/right page formatting).
The first page is a title page, with author attribution, table of contents, and legal stuff.
The LAST page is a print-it-yourself list of tokens. It will contain black and white (greyscale, really) versions of the art in the token sheets that are in the add-ons list. There will be 42 tokens per adventure, on 1" squares. There is (currently) a small amount of space between each one (0.125" to be precise).
There are no megahexes provided at this time.
All the maps needed to run the adventure are included within the 14 content pages. Those who have seen the playtest copies of David's adventures see the rough draft maps that I will hire professional artists to recreate in TFT style.
Right now, your $20 pledge gets you four PDF adventures; your $50 pledge gets you the PDFs plus soft-cover, saddle-stitched printed copies of each. Each adventure is a separate product, with its own cover. It will be printed on 130gsm (86.7 lb) interior paper stock, with 255gsm (between 10.5 and 11 point) cover stock.
After listening to feedback on what the backers want, I talked with David Pulver, and we came up with some thing for you. If we hit $21,000 the following 32-page solo adventure will be included in both the $20 PDF and $50 Print+PDF adventure groups. ANY pledge tier that includes the original four 16-page adventures will include this fifth perilous journey at no additional cost.
Vampire Hunter Belladonna
You are Belladonna, the young maid and cook at Castle Ironskull—moonlighting as a vampire slayer!
Years ago, the sinister Lord Adrik Blackbird turned your best friend into a vampire. For their own good, you had to stake them both! Somehow, you succeeded—but while those vampires perished, they had already infected others. The bloodsuckers will spread like a plague through the local countryside—unless you hunt them down!
Play as the lethal maid Belladonna (wielder of silver stakes and deadly poisons), or as your own vampire slaying hero or wizard. Travel through the villages and wilderness near Ironskull Castle, hunting vampires (and possibly other monsters). During your quest, you may uncover disturbing rumors of the rise of a new and terrifying master vampire, and the arcane relic they seek. Can you find it first?
VAMPIRE HUNTER BELLADONNA is a programmed adventure for THE FANTASY TRIP. You won't need a Game Master—instead a system of branching paragraphs directs you from encounter to encounter as you make your own choice. You resolve combat or other encounters using the TFT rules.
In this double-sized 32-page adventure, you will find:
VAMPIRE HUNTER BELLADONNA is an independent adventure, but it has ties to IRONSKULL CASTLE, so you can use both together in a campaign if you wish.
There are two flavors of add-on being worked. I can say right now that megahexes are not on that list this time. The sourcing of the oddly-shaped hex tiles is not nearly as straight-forward for me as the cards and tokens, both of which are available in many form factors in ready-to-print configurators.
The Token Sheets
Each token sheet will have 42 one-inch square color tokens. They will be the exact same tokens (but again, in color) as will appear on the back page of each adventure. The card stock will be 1.6mm thick; if there are enough orders it's possible I can upgrade this to 2.5mm card stock.
Each sheet, ordered separately, is $10. As mentioned in a prior update, the company that I'm ordering these from will drop-ship to the UK, which means that while you may also need to add $2 to cover the VAT, the shipping should be somewhat reasonable, and it's entirely plausible that I can combine books and token sheets into the same outbound package at my UK-based fulfillment partner's site.
There's also been a request for the color sheets to be made available as print-them-yourself PDFs. I find that reasonable: $5 for the PDF if you just want the token sheet digitally.
The Monster/NPC Cards
These are less well defined, as I'm still working the details. I'm trying to affordably target about a $30-40 price point, which could affordably produce 55 cards (if only a few dozen people order them) to as high as 140 or so (if lots of folks do). I suspect that what I'll wind up doing is having a minimum set (say, 55) of cards, and then Backerkit stretch goals where the more folks order them, the more cards you get. A $40 deck would be 55 cards at fewer than 50 orders, 90 cards at 100 orders, 126 cards at 500 orders, and maybe some midpoints.
The cards are planned to be 2.5 x 3.5" and UV-gloss coated, to best support erasable markers.
I'm trying to validate whether I can match the corner radius of the Decks of Destiny cards.
I may need several card types, even: one for spellcasting NPCs/Monsters (larger cards) and one for fighter types.
As you can see . . . there's a lot left to sort out, and I hope to settle it over the next few days.
Extra Copies
As mentioned earlier, extra copies of each adventure will be offered as add-ons.
One of the side-effects of this being my first TFT Kickstarter is learning what you, the buying public, actually want. As part of that, once the details of the adventures, tokens, and cards finalize over the next few days, there will be new pledge tiers in both digital only ("All the Digital Things!") and physical plus digital ("Get the Things. ALL of Them.") that will basically be the equivalent of SJG's usual "I want it all!" level. These tiers will represent something like a 20% (or more) discount over buying all the things separately.
Stay tuned! This is a major revamp of the Kickstarter, and the main campaign page will change accordingly. But I think the overall package more accurately reflects what you want, and I'm happy to learn from your input.
So, I ordered these prototypes on Friday May 24.
I got them today.
That's not bad turn-around, considering they came from China.
I should note very, very firmly that these prototypes were rush jobs. I asked the artist, Juan Ochoa, to do 42 unique images effectively in 48-60 hours. He delivered, and I ordered these to see how it went.
Before I get to the pictures: I know the font - which happens to be the TFT Logo Font - looks terrible. I won't be using it in the final version of the tokens. I'll use a nice sans serif font with a good fill-and-stroke combination for easy reading.
Overall, I'm very pleased. The color is good, the die-cut is right where it needs to be. A few of them (like the monsters in the lower right and left of the above picture) need better contrast against the background.
I ordered 10 copies of these to see if the card-to-card variation was acceptable. It was.
These guys also direct-ship to the UK, which neatly solves my biggest worry: $20-30 shipping on a $10 product. Fortunately, at any reasonable quantity of these things, the international shipment to my UK fulfillment partner is, well, it's never going to be free, but it probably adds about a dollar to the shipping cost overall. Very acceptable. That being said, these are likely subject to a 20% VAT, and I'm very new at dealing with such things - but I'll be learning, and fast!