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Companions of the Firmament – A Pathfinder Roleplaying Game compatible supplement
BOMBS AWAY! It's time to test all of that work that I did with the Crowdfunding Report a couple of months ago by putting out my own Kickstarter.
Companions of the Firmament is a roleplaying game 144+ page book that is compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game by Paizo Publishing. CotF is meant as a supplement for both game masters and players that focuses on creating adventures and characters that involve flying.
Kickstarter Project Page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gic/companions-of-the-firmament-pathfin der-rpg-compati
Campaign Dates: June 16th, 2012 till July 22nd, 2012 at 11:30pm EDT
Thanks and enjoy!
Do you have any pdfs (full pdfs, not little teasers) that you've released for Pathfinder before?
ShadowcatX wrote: Do you have any pdfs (full pdfs, not little teasers) that you've released for Pathfinder before? Aside from the free downloads on the Geek Industrial website, no.
That's in a sense the purpose of this Kickstarter, to deliver a product up to the hobby to show what I can do.
I have several RPG projects that I've been developing that are larger and more ambitious and realized that I need to establish a track record before I could tackle those.
Mok wrote: That's in a sense the purpose of this Kickstarter, to deliver a product up to the hobby to show what I can do.
I have several RPG projects that I've been developing that are larger and more ambitious and realized that I need to establish a track record before I could tackle those.
Please take this as advice from another 3PP and someone who has had two successful & two failed kickstarter projects and only wants you to be a success:
You need to SHOW people WHY they should donate money yo your cause and free products are a great way to do that. I went you your site and check them out and I like them a lot. The only problem is that I never knew about them BEFORE you started this kickstarter help me get interested in your ideas and project and I only learned about them this this post. I think what might of helped you in the long run was to talk about this kickstarter project for at least a moth before you released it for people to donate to. That would have given you time to showcase what you have done and are capable of doing in the future.
Like I said this is just some advice to help you be more successful.
LMPjr007 wrote:
Please take this as advice from another 3PP and someone who has had two successful & two failed kickstarter projects and only wants you to be a success:
You need to SHOW people WHY they should donate money yo your cause and free products are a great way to do that. I went you your site and check them out and I like them a lot. The only problem is that I never knew about them BEFORE you started this kickstarter help me get interested in your ideas and project and I only learned about them this this post. I think what might of helped you in the long run was to talk about this kickstarter project for at least a moth before you released it for people to donate to. That would have given you time to showcase what you have done and are capable of doing in the future.
Like I said this is just some advice to help you be more successful.
Thanks, that is helpful advice. I did originally have plans for more of a pre-launch. Looking back over my notes for the last month it looks like a lot of the attention I was going to give to a pre-launch ended up being devoted to a lot of the business end of things. Getting all of the basic business infrastructure in place and such. I'm glad a lot of those hurdles are over with now because I know as new projects emerge I'll be able to devote more time to the online conversation building up to launch.
I have devoted a lot of time to the "meta" part of the production over the last several months, such as the Crowdfunding Report, and a variety of publishing questions summed up in my Zero to Hero articles. But yeah, the problem is that it's remaining meta, rather than zeroing in on the product itself. That's what I'm aiming for now that the preliminary elements are out of the way.
One encouraging note, the campaign has already passed the 30% mark in less than 24 hours live, so that is encouraging!
Thank you the advice, it's very helpful.
I have no doubt you'll hit your goal. However, you'd do far better if you would, as LMPjr pointed out, let us discover who you are and what your products are like before coming in and jumping on the bandwagon.
ShadowcatX wrote: I have no doubt you'll hit your goal. However, you'd do far better if you would, as LMPjr pointed out, let us discover who you are and what your products are like before coming in and jumping on the bandwagon. I definintely agree.
Originally I had planned for a slow and more organic introduction. That's how the GIC website came about, to collect all sorts of things that I had been working on and being able to easily share them with the gaming community.
Unfortunately life's complicated, schedules change, and in the end moving towards the Kickstarter model more quickly made the most sense for my situation.
A Formal Introduction
My name is Neil Carr and I'm a gamer. I've been a gamer for 31 years, beginning when I picked out the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (with the very cool Erol Otus cover) on my 9th birthday. I've been gaming ever since through all the stages of my life, drinking deep of the complete panoply of what geekdom has to offer. It began with RPGs but quickly moved into boardgames, video games, wargames, miniatures games, PC games, console games, CCGs and of course Sci-fi/fantasy/horror books, movies, TV, and comics.
In RPGs I've more often been a game master than a player, but still have a healthy experience on both sides of the screen. While the early years were dominated by the stew of D&D and AD&D, eventually I broke out into a wide range titles and genres. If you browse through the ratings of RPG items over at RPGgeek I'm familiar with the vast bulk of what is ranked through several pages.
In the mid 90's I started getting involved in the “eurogame” revolution in boardgames. The focus on designing a boardgame experience to achieve very specific play experiences really helped to frame the many years of gamemaster tinkering I had previously been doing. In 2000 I helped bring boardgamegeek.com to life, being one of the original admins that started uploading content and pushing for a more organized and coherent way of getting information about games on the internet.
I'd say I fit the profile of a hard-core gamer. Really the only gaming rite of passage that I haven't done is attend Gen Con. Geek Industrial Complex is actually in part a way to eventually begin attending them.
Education
I'm a teacher by temperament. I have a B.A. in Philosophy, along with a Religious Studies minor from Salisbury University, and then went on to get an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College. Eventually I gained Highly Qualified Teacher Licensure for middle school social studies in Vermont. Teaching and game mastering have quite a lot of areas that overlap with each other and while I can't seem to get staff and faculty to completely understand what the heck is going on in a roleplaying game, I'm really pleased at how my hobby and professional skills synergize with each other.
Roads Less Traveled
My life has generally been following “roads less traveled” but even these less traveled paths still had forks that forced choices. One path I did not take was becoming an artist. I was the doodler in class, drawing all the weird geeky monsters, aliens and adventurers in the margins of my books. I always took and got A's in art class and even did a successful portfolio for advanced placement art in high school. A major turning point could have happened in the early 90s when White Wolf approved my artwork for a Vampire “By Night” book that a friend had submitted and was green lighted for development. Unfortunately my friend's writing partner did not properly follow through with White Wolf and the project stalled and slipped away. If I had been published as an artist in those early college years I might have completely changed the vector of my life from an academic angle to one focused on art and design.
Creative Outlets
Gaming itself has always provided a creative release that constantly bubbles in me, but even that hasn't been enough. GMing, houseruling, miniature painting and terrain modeling have all been outlets for that creative energy, but the design bug settled in during the late 90's and has held a death grip on me for over a dozen years. I've subjected friends to an array of playtest sessions of various boardgame and RPG material over the years, much of which has been fruitful.
Rise of Kickstarter
Another very important dimension to my life is that I need to be working for the common good. Over the last two decades my regular job has involved several different positions within the social services field and now has transitioned into education. Despite being encouraged to jump fully into the world of game development and publishing on several occasions, I've always seen my vocation involving direct community support and development, particularly focusing on at-risk populations.
Because of that I've resisted perusing a full time career in the game market. However, creating a part-time job out of creating for the hobby I love is something that I've always seen myself doing, however the older publishing models were not very friendly to that approach because it either involved going through submission processes with existing publishers, or requiring a small fortune in start up money. Neither of those approaches has ever been appealing to me.
For quite awhile I longingly looked at GMT Game's P500 system as a viable approach. Unfortunately their system was built completely in-house on existing business infrastructure and that was largely beyond an amateur setup. So when Kickstarter emerged in 2008 I took notice. This did something very similar to the P500 system, but was setup so that anyone could dive into the process. Finally the traditional publishing gatekeepers were being side stepped and the market itself would become the gatekeepers. Now I had a practical end goal where I would eventually create some Kickstarters. This prompted much heavier design work and playtesting.
Recent Buildup
From Living Greyhawk and into Pathfinder Society I became known for my GMing skills in the local gamer network. People often consult me on the arcane loopy elements of 3.5 and Pathfinder. Once Pathfinder Society emerged there was a large influx of new gamers eager to try out organized play. One of the things that I was seeing is how challenging the corpus of rules can be to new players. So I started writing up essays aimed at helping bring people up to speed with PFS play. I've distilled these essays down to what you can find in my If You Have The Tools You Have the Talent series of articles on the GIC website.
Likewise, some material support also really helps to organize a lot of game information. People generally are very visually oriented, so expecting them to process everything through text and then translate it onto their character sheets can be a stumbling block. Because of that you'll find different player aid downloads for Pathfinder Society, or even just Pathfinder in general, such as:
Organized Play Character Build Sheet
Mundane Mounts and Work Animals
Good, Cheap, and Essential Item Checklist
Arrow Packs
The Handy Haversack Pack
Discount Adventuring Kits
While I haven't pushed these articles and PDFs in this the Compatible Products Forum, I have linked to specific items from time to time in posts on the Paizo messageboards and other websites. So everything hasn't been hidden until this moment, instead just organically woven into the context of online discussions.
Crowdfunding Report
Having developed several different projects, I began to explore Kickstarter in earnest and wrote up some drafts of funding campaigns and then sent them to friends and gaming colleagues. I got back excellent feedback that really told me that I needed to do more research. I dug deeper and found that while there was plenty of broad information on how to run a Kickstarter in general, there really wasn't much information for how to run an RPG kickstarter campaign.
Coming from an academic background, and being quite aware of how crucial evidenced-based strategies are when dealing with group behavior (such as classrooms filled with students) I decided to do a survey and see what real data could tell me about the world of RPG crowdfunding. With spreadsheet at hand and the willingness to methodically grind through 150 RPG projects, I collected enough data to get a more clear picture of how this slice of the RPG marketplace works.
I posted results in this forum in the thread What a Year and 150 Projects Bring to Light along with other parts of the net and was rather taken aback at the positive response. I did this just to figure out what I needed to know to do a solid job, however after awhile I realized that this would likely be very useful to many other people in the hobby. I'm very much a proponent of crowdsourcing. Heck, I'm building my whole endeavor off of the OGL, so it was only natural to try and spread this information as far as it could go.
Since then it has been hosted on the Page XX newsletter from Pelgrane Press, and is also being translated into Polish for the RPG market in Poland.
I think it's really important that in the coming years anyone in the gaming world has the opportunity to be able to produce their own contribution to the hobby. Not everything is going to be great, many things will be rejected by the marketplace, but the end result will be a much richer diversity of ideas emerging from the player base. There are a lot of really creative people out there that for whatever circumstances in life can't publish through traditional approaches, and so crowdfunding gives them a chance to contribute. The more idea-diversity gets injected into the gaming ecosystem, the better.
One final footnote on the crowdfunding report that I can give is that after I released the report the fine folks over at Fog God Games approached me about the report and asked if there were some other ideas I might have for their Rappan Athuk Kickstarter campaign. They had already blasted through their funding goal and now saw well over a month of time to continue working on the funding campaign. I drafted some suggestions and since that time it looks like some of those suggestions have shaped their stretch goals. I really don't want to overstate my contribution to their record shattering crowdfunding performance. Rappan Athuk alone is worth it's own success. Still, it's exciting to think that I might have helped with it's funding success in some small manner.
Why Should You Support Geek Industrial Complex?
I am a newcomer to the publishing scene, and with the vast amount of third party material that has come out over the last decade it is reasonable to have a bit of skepticism, as plenty of material has been pretty shoddy.
While I do not have a long track record I hope that I've demonstrated several qualities:
- A willingness to give back to the community through articles, downloads and the crowdfunding report.
- A solid command of analytical design methodology in a lot of the content I've distributed freely.
- A solid sense of aesthetics in my art direction as seen on the Kickstarter page.
- A lengthy and diverse gaming background which makes me knowledgeable on the development and spectrum of game design.
- An academic background that supports all of the above qualities.
Hopefully this introduction can help a bit to play catchup with the lack of a slower roll out of information.
Wow! The campaign is about 50 hours live and we're at 94.6% reached for the funding goal! Thank you everyone for your support, I'm humbled at how quickly this has shot up and the outpouring of support!
We're about to cross the threshold to full funding. I want to make that moment extra special by offering up a unique "Take Off" achievement for whoever does cross the threshold and reach $1000 or more. I can tell exactly who does this as Kickstarter spits out an email to me each time a backing comes in, which gives a backing by backing update on the funding tally.
Whoever lifts CotF off the ground by hitting $1000 or more will get, regardless of your backing level, a Reaper miniature painted by me. You can pick from either a Dragon or a Griffon. Here are the two figures to select from:
http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/griffon/latest/65143#detail/65143_w_1
http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/dragon/sku-down/03430#detail/03430_w_ 2
Here are some examples of my painting skills. They are pretty solid and I've been paid before for my painting skills.
If you've already donated, you should be able to up your backing level again, so this applies to anyone who gets us to $1000.
The figure will be painted and ready to ship to you by January 1st 2013, if not sooner.
Lastly, you have to of course keep your funding level. You can't push it up and then downgrade your backing later and still get the painted figure.
Get ready for take off!
Mok wrote:
Whoever lifts CotF off the ground by hitting $1000 or more will get, regardless of your backing level, a Reaper miniature painted by me. You can pick from either a Dragon or a Griffon.
That would be me :) Awesome!
theneofish wrote: Mok wrote:
Whoever lifts CotF off the ground by hitting $1000 or more will get, regardless of your backing level, a Reaper miniature painted by me. You can pick from either a Dragon or a Griffon.
That would be me :) Damn, I only just missed it. :(
theneofish wrote: Mok wrote:
Whoever lifts CotF off the ground by hitting $1000 or more will get, regardless of your backing level, a Reaper miniature painted by me. You can pick from either a Dragon or a Griffon.
That would be me :) Awesome! Indeed... I think, internet handles can be a bit mysterious :)
But yeah, thank you! I'll PM you about details.
We have lift off!
Mok wrote: But yeah, thank you! I'll PM you about details.
We have lift off!
Pure luck - read the post about five hours after it went up, checked out the Kickstarter, realised it was only $20 off the target, and bam! Great looking product, so more than glad to add it to my pledge list. Miniature is a bonus :)
Stretch Your Wings, Lets Go Higher!
With a month left in the Kickstarter of Companions of the Firmament there is a huge vault of sky to continue exploring with stretch goals.
Stretch Goal Vector #1 – Additional Creature Sheets
If we reach $2000, and every $500 after that, an additional Creature Sheet will be created and given to ALL BACKERS in the form of a PDF.
Sheet #1 – Mounts (already available to all backers)
Sheet #2 – Additional Mounts @$2000
Sheet #3 – Large Size Dragons, ALL of them (Chromatic, Metallic, Imperial and Primal) @$2500
Additional creature sheets will emerge if we keep climbing!
For those who enjoy listening to podcasts, Carnagecast with Tyler Dion interviewed me about Companions of the Firmament and Geek Industrial Complex.
You can stream or download here.
We've gained altitude, passing the $2000 mark and unlocking the first stretch goal for the Companions of the Firmament Kickstarter!
As we ascend we are joining up with twenty new creatures high in the heavens in the form of a new creature sheet with artwork done by Justin McElroy. This new sheet will expand upon the existing creature sheet, illustrating even more mounts that you'll be able to print out, cut up and have ready for your gaming table.
This stretch goal is available to ALL BACKERS!
Enjoy!
Death From Above! Flying Monster Sheet Stretch Goals
A new vector of stretch goals are now up for Companions of the Firmament Kickstarter. See update #6 for the details.
Wanted to chime in and tell you that I really appreciate what you're doing for the community and that as soona s finances permit, I'll jump on board! Looks like an awesomely useful project!
Endzeitgeist wrote: Wanted to chime in and tell you that I really appreciate what you're doing for the community and that as soona s finances permit, I'll jump on board! Looks like an awesomely useful project! Thanks Endzeitgeist! Your kind words are already very helpful!
There be dragons! Dragon Creature Sheet stretch goal is reached!
We just climbed to $2500 and find a lot of new company in the skies with a creature sheet devoted exclusively to dragons. All twenty dragons in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (Chromatic, Metallic, Primal and Imperial) will be illustrated to use as large size counters for mounts or adversaries on your tabletop, available as black & white line art, or fully colored.
This brings us to three creature sheets total that will be available as a PDF to all backers:
- The Original Creature Sheet
- Stretch Goal 1: More Mounts
- Stretch Goal 2: Dragons
Keep a look out for more creature sheet stretch goals. I want to put more in there, the hard part is trying to choose what to include. There is so much I want to cram into CotF and getting the right mix for the creature sheets is important.
Feel free to add comments on what you would want to see in future ones and I'll see if those ideas can work with the lineups I'm planning.
Sky Watching: A Bit of Inspiration
Nestled in the central mountains of Vermont is the Warren Airport. Last Saturday it hosted the 2012 Stars and Stripes Airshow, produced by Jim Parker Airshows. I'm so immersed in flying right now with the Kickstarter that it was hard to keep me away. The weather was a fantastic mix of blue sky and fluffy white clouds that made for a perfect backdrop to the show.
Rather than explain the show, I'll just show it! Here is a video I put together, distilling a few moments of what ended up being two inspiring hours of flying.
My only regret is that if I had planned things out better after the show I could have taken to the skies myself with a glider ride. Perhaps later this summer!
Enjoy!
Click here for a preview of the artwork.
Here Be Dragons, Part II! Creature Sheet Artwork is done!
The stretch goal artwork is rolling in now. Creature Sheet #3 is now done, focusing on Dragons with artwork by Justin McElroy.
One approach to flying mounts in the system is to get a monster cohort, however dragons have not been included in this approach. Companions of the Firmament fixes that by laying out having dragon cohorts, detailing all 20 different dragons (chromatic, metallic, primal and imperial) when they are right around the young age of development.
This creature sheet gives you black and white line art or full color tokens that you can print, cut out and then mount on heavy card stock so you can easily represent them on a battlegrid, and effortless show if your character is mounted or not simply by placing your figure on the token.
You can also use them as an inexpensive resource for flying opponents in your campaigns.
Black and white line art is available for those who want to spend less on printing, or would like to color their dragons. Pick on of the twenty, pull out some colored pencils or markers and customize your dragon just the way you like!
Monster Sheet Stretch Goal, We're almost there!
We're just shy of hitting the second stretch goal for the Monster Sheets. It's like the next backing will upgrade the stretch goal so that 100 monster sheets will be prepared for all backers.
Update #10: Wind Beneath My Wings: Custom Artwork Upgrade!
Artwork is an important element to my vision of Companions of the Firmament and so going into this final stage of the campaign the customized artwork reward levels (Pegasus Rider, Griffon Rider, Mystery Rider, Eagle Rider, Champions of the Firmament, and Lords of the Firmament) now have an upgrade to the backing rewards.
Each of the above reward levels will now include the 20" x 24" signed and numbered ART PRINT by the artist Justin McElroy. This is a one time limited print run of the artwork and will look great hanging on the wall, inviting people to spend some time gazing at the art and perhaps finding something new each time.
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And, as promised, I joined! Let's hope we'll get some more of these creature-sheets! Cheers!
Update #11: "There's... too... many... of them..." Creature Sheet Stretch Goal News!
Link
The Creature Sheet #2 Stretch goal artwork has rolled in! The wild and weird are ready now for you to just hop on their back and leap into the air. The artist, Justin McElroy, said he had a lot of fun doing this sheet, but also wished these guys were larger so he could have packed more detail into them. Perhaps some of them will show up in the book and let the detail really explode onto the page.
I'm working on a final Creature Sheet Stretch goal for the final week. Getting the list finalized is the tough job. There are so many cool things that could be illustrated, but getting it to match up with the needs of the book is the challenging part. Stay tuned!
Egg Laying: The Final Week and another Upgrade
We are now officially in the last seven days of the Companions of the Firmament funding campaign. If you know of a fellow Pathfinder player who would be interested in CotF now is the time to get the Kickstarter on their radar.
I also have some happy personal news to report. My wife is pregnant and so just as GIC is nurturing it's first book, my wife and I are also looking forward to our first child.
In light of that, there is another upgrade for the custom artwork reward levels (Pegasus Rider, Griffon Rider, Mystery Rider, Eagle Rider, Champions of the Firmament, and Lords of the Firmament). Each of these reward levels will now also be receiving an art print of the work that they will help in the commissioning. Not only will you have proof in the book, but you'll be able to point to the wall where it will be hanging!
The size of the art print depends on the particular reward level. The art print will be aimed at getting as close to a 1:1 ratio with the original work.
We're in the Pipe, Five-by-Five: Vehicles, Magic Items, Constructs, oh my!
Five days to go till the end of the Companions of the Firmament Kickstarter campaign!
Here is a final stretch goal to add some drama as we come in for a landing. If we get to $3500 then a final creature sheet will be commissioned that will focus on vehicles, magic items and constructs that focus on flying.
As we make our descent, don't forget the Monster Sheet stretch goal which is set at $3250.
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I'm in!
Have been waiting for a book like this since reading Roger E. Moore's article "Riding High" from Dragon #50 (1981).
Feather Fall: On Falling in CotF and an important upcoming date for all of us!
Three days left and we're at $3191.58! Just $58.42 from the next Monster Sheet stretch goal, and $308.42 from the final Creature Sheet stretch goal.
When you make flying a big part of a campaign the issue of falling is going to inevitably come up. If you go by how the system is typically played the answer to the issue of plunging to your death is to have the spell Feather Fall on hand, typically with the Ring of Feather Fall.
That's fine, but I personally found that unsatisfying, both in working on Companions of the Firmament, but also because it simply solves the problem of falling far too easily and without much expense on the part of the characters. Once everyone has one of these rings, the tension from that aspect of play is gone, and that isn't really the best way to add drama to an emerging story.
Because of that I wanted to offer up some other ways of treating falling by looking at the basic rules on and the offering a set of tools to turn the dial on gravity so that it matches with the kind of feel you want from your play. Do you want falling to more of a “bullet time” cinematic moment where others can react and try and save the falling character? Do you want it to be grimly realistic so that the players need to build their strategies and tactics around the effects of gravity? Each table will be able to decide where to dial in this important aspect of the imagined reality.
Lets shift gears a bit and see how imagination and reality are coming together in a spectacular way. On August 6th the Curiosity Rover will reach Mars and attempt its landing. The Curiosity is much larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that have been on Mars for several years. Weighting five times as much as those rovers, the balloon bouncing landing isn't really feasible, and so instead NASA has devised it's own version of the Feather Fall spell with an incredibly elaborate landing sequence that is designed to gently lay the Curiosity on the surface.
Check out the video of what the landing is supposed to look like and cross your fingers on August 6th!
Final Destination: Last 24 hours!
It's the end run now with just 24 hours left of the Companions of the Firmament Kickstarter. Since the last update a pile of people of climbed on board and we've blown past two stretch goals! First we reached 150 Monster Sheets at $3250, and then the final Creature Sheet stretch goal at $3500.
Ahead we still have a stretch goal at $3750 to up the Monster Sheets to 200. We're only $160 away from reaching it so hopefully we'll have enough join us to get there.
This has been one wild month and I really, really appreciate everyone's support. I'm off to bed and hopefully I can dream up a few things during the night to make the last day more interesting.
Aces High: Hitting the Median, New Stretch Goal and the Final Hour
Hitting the Crowdfunding Report Median
When I began research on doing a Kickstarter I found myself collecting data on other RPG crowdfunding projects to help guide me what to do and what not to do with a crowdfunding project. Eventually this lead the crowdfunding report that I released this last spring so that everyone could get some help with this exciting new tool.
I designed this project around that report and those insights have definitely helped this project flourish. When the project first went live I had no idea how all of this would play out, but it ended up quickly reaching funding levels and it seems as if all the broad patterns of the report were falling into place.
As the funding campaign developed further one of the unspoken pet goals is to see the number of backers for Companions of the Firmament hit the report's median or beyond, which is 110 backers. At this moment we only need 14 more backers today to pull it off. So I'm just putting the call out to all of those who've already backed, if you know someone who might be interested in CotF, now's the time to pass on the word!
New Stretch Goal – Springtime Adventure
To help things along towards that median, I've decided to offer up one last stretch goal. This would be an adventure that would use many different elements of CotF to help illustrate their use in play and inject players into a decidedly aerial environment. I'm envisoning this adventure as somewhat like an organized play module (such as from Living Greyhawk or Pathfinder Society) in structure and length, roughly 16-20 pages. It will also have an intro video that I'll produce that the GM can present to players to set the mood and introduce the plot hook for the players.
If we finish with 110 backers or beyond at the end of the campaign then anyone who contributed at the Wingmate ($10) reward level or higher will receive the adventure as a PDF. The video will be posted to Youtube which should make it readily accessible in a variety of ways to show to players.
The aim for delivery on the adventure would be the spring of 2013.
Final Hour
I'll put out one last update at that final hour of the campaign (10:30 EDT) so keep a lookout for it. I want to add some drama to the last few moments of the campaign :)
Magic Hour - Final Achievement Bonus
One hour left for the Companions of the Firmament Kickstarter!
Progress Update
Many people have been joining the host of the firmament over the last several hours, in particular an “angel investor” descended from on high and cast mana upon the project. While the Angel Investor was to me a hail mary pass, it's been answered and I'm still a bit stunned by that. Thank you Brett!
All of that activity has blown us through THREE Flying Monster Sheet stretch goals! Right now we're just $79 away from a fourth one. We're also just four (4) backers away from the final Adventure Stretch Goal.
Magic Hour Achievement Bonus
It was a big deal to me when the original funding goal was being reached. So much energy over the previous months went into that moment and that was just 60 hours after it started. Now another five weeks have passed with yet another wild ride as more support poured in. To make for a dramatic landing I wanted to offer up a similar achievement bonus to the one I offered all the way back in Update #1.
From this point on in the funding campaign, the backer that contributes the most in within this last hour will get a Reaper figure painted by myself. See Update #1 on your choices of which figure to pick from and examples of my painting skills. If you have already backed prior to this moment then you can either contribute more to your existing reward level, or upgrade to a new level. You're previous contribution does not count, so if you were a $50 backer and then upgraded to $100 then $50 is the measured amount for this achievement bonus. I'll be able to figure all of this out from the KS dashboard and how the emails roll in. Tiebreaker will be the last person to pledge between those tied.
If you want to change your amount, just click on the big blue “Manage Your Pledge” button. On the next page make sure the big dollar amount at the top of the page is correct. The dollar amount does not change when you just select a different radio button with the reward levels.
Two caveats:
First, people who cancel their backing and then back again within this hour will not count in this little achievement bonus. We're all gamers here, but no min-maxing/rule-loophole nonsense!
Second is that my wife doesn't qualify for this achievement. She's talked about backing, but has yet to do it. Honey... there's just an hour left!
Happy hunting and see you in the eyrie!
The Eagle Has Landed: Thank You!
Man, what a wild wild ride these last several months have been. I've been humbled over and over again from all the support that Companions of the Firmament has received during this time. Thank you all for the kind words and encouragement along the way.
We hit the 300 Flying Monster Sheet stretch goal AND the Adventure Stretch goal. Thanks everyone for hustling for that effort. It was great to see us get to 111 backers! After all that work with the crowdfunding report, I just though that it would be “statistically poetic” to be able to hit the median from the report.
Who was the winner for Magic Hour Achievement Bonus? That goes to Jez Clement. Congratulations and thank you for the extra backing!
Act one of this endeavor happened years ago with numerous game designs gently being herded along and culminated in the crowdfunding report. Act two has been a wild ride as I pulled together all the resources to make a Kickstarter, and then see it through till this evening. I've been sleeping and breathing this funding campaign for what feels like such a long time that it's hard to grasp that Act three has begun.
Tomorrow I'll be able to lay out the final budget and begin working with artists on filling the rest of this book up with terrific art. For the custom art backers I'll message you and start working on your visions of the art. I'll also make a point to check in with anyone else, such as Jez, to get the little details taken care of.
My white board is filled with to-dos that have been waiting for this moment. I'm going to bed and tomorrow I'll start grinding through those lists, getting the innumerable little details accomplished so that I can erase what's on the board. In a handful of months Companions of the Firmament should be appearing in your hands and/or on your screens.
Thanks all!
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