Had to step out but going to take a look now.
*edit* Also love the shield etherfushion. This archetype is going to be amazing
I think I've earned the $40 I get to pocket from this one, Alex, just from page count alone, mind you. :P
Just because I get annoyed when the link isn't on the freaking page I'm looking at…
Oh, and congratulations. I look forward to see this grow and grow. Just wish there was something here for me.
Don't get me wrong, I like your work Bradley, but none of these are grabbing me. Maybe if the ethermancer was simply called a Warlock I'd be more excited. I don't even think I have the ethermancer, so its hard for me to judge…and I have no idea what a true namer is.
Besides, I'm not a caster fanboy, so really, what am I complaining about.
It's called Strange Magic...
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Here's the rub - they don't act like casters.
Ethermancers are skirmishers who fire blasts of energy instead of arrows.
Ethermagi summon magic swords, supercharge them, and crush the opposition.
Truenamers just machine gun weak spell effects until it's time to rest with more recitations remaining than the Mystic Theurge started with.
Maestros and Cantors are all about bardic performance cranked up to 11 with tinker customization besides.
If you like the dirty tricks of magic without the Vancian hogwash of spell slots, then this is your book.
Alright, we're funded! Here's a bit of a challenge for everyone, a "Flash Stretch Goal", if you will. Though $2,000 is enough to barely push this book out the door, $3,000 makes things much, much easier from my point of view.
If we can hit $3,000 by 6 PM Eastern Standard Time on September 7th, I'll upgrade the $3,000 archetype to a pile of sorcerer bloodlines, cleric domains, and oracle mysteries that grant truenamer recitations (the high level ones with inflections included) as bonus spells, thus tying into the fact that the First Language contains all things. A few of these are already developed, though balance tweaks are necessary.
If this goal is not met, what little I have already made will find its way into Strange Magic anyway. If this goal is met, well, I've got the incentive to build some very cool oracle mysteries.
Just figured that would be of interest to potential backers on the fence!
(Oh, and looks like we might see a Metronomicon as a backer add-on to a backer add-on... which would be kind of awesome...)
Aye. Hoping he goes maestro with his idea. While the other classes use archetypes as discrete options, the maestro is getting very... webby, allowing the player to stack up to three archetypes at once in order to customize even the very core mechanics of the class. I'd love to see a few discrete options archetypes that are still compatible with one or two of the core mechanic transformers.
Personally I love having lots of options and the capability to stack them. Makes for very modular and customizable characters. Though a headache to test all the options and look for gaps and things that might be unintended.
We're good with that so far, Alex. The maestro's archetypes look like the following presently.
Arranger - Get rid of refrains or channel energy. Add melodies to opuses. Opuses are now a point pool rather than each being 1/day.
Songweaver - Change the intro/melody/outro nature of scores to the following: scores are melodies only, verses are mini-scores you can swap every round you maintain and contain a melody, and bridges are an outro only and can only be used after several rounds of uninterrupted conducting.
Virtuoso - Get rid of magic. Pick up bardic performance (except the 20th level song)
These can all stack on a maestro (but not on a cantor --- yet), thus giving us a magic-less maestro who uses a totally different score system and adds melodies to his opuses. Given the new wave of opuses that act like the 1812 Overture (ie they don't shut down normal scores because they're weaker than average), it's possible to take the Extra Opus feat a few times and make your character do nothing but triple perform until the fight's over.
Of course, because I find this to be the absolute coolest bit of crunch in the entire book, you can pretty much guarantee that an inordinate amount of stretch goal material will be focused on adding more archetypes right here, so long as we get that money raised.
An early backer just backed out. We've got one earlybird slot open.
Stretch goal off the port bow!
Thanks to your generous contributions, the art budget of Strange Magic just went up by 1 piece. For those keeping track, that's 20 base + 10 backer + 1 stretch, for a total of 31 pieces of art, unless cover art ends up being over budget.
Let's keep plugging away, everyone. I'd love to have an excuse to throw a new archetype or two into this book before everything's over.
A bunch of links have been posted for backers to see some of the new archetypes and material. Know that didn't get updated here so everyone should take a look. It's really fantastic!
That and you can now grab the Antipodist pdf as part of the kickstarter for a mere $5 and it is -awesome-!
I just posted that a minute ago in a new thread .-.
That's the general feel of it, Caedwyr, though I simply didn't get enough money to justify adding the 50 pages of shadowmagic and shadowmagic/shadowdancer/monk/assassin to the hardcover proper. The three systems in the main book itself can be summed up as:
- Make your own compositions bard
- Advanced warlock with space theme
- Truenaming that isn't borked
Tell you what, $1 lets you look at a lot of what's being made right now. Come on in, check out the Google Drive, and if it looks to be moving toward something you like, bump yourself up to $25 and join the party! If you don't like it, take your $1 and go home. I won't obsess over it.
I don't think it is simple as shuffling around stretch goals. Adding a whole other chapter to the book increases the cost to produce after all. The prestige book is separate and lower down on the goals because it is a separate book and wouldn't impact the Strange Magic book's cost in a significant way.
I'm just kind of thinking out loud here, but I wonder what would happen* if the stretch goals got shuffled around a bit to put the Antipodist at a stretch goal level where it could feasibly be put into the book, and the Prestige book (with Antipodist goodies) unlocked later... Perhaps that might generate more interest and help draw in more persons who are sitting on the fence, or something along those lines.
As I said, just thinking out loud; I honestly have no idea how possible/reasonable/feasible such an undertaking would be.
*fwiw, one of my favorite Marvel Comics series was the old, "What If??"
If I could get absolutely every $25+ backer to put an extra $7-$8 in, I'd put the edgewalker, the antipodist, and some archetypes in Strange Magic, mate. As is, there are some individuals who have backed and moved on, so it's hard to get ahold of them or get them invested in additional content, and it's an extra 20,000 words (25,000 with archetypes) or so of development and I need to pay my bills. And Thilo. $5 of every book will be going to Thilo for awhile to pay him off. Besides, since I'm going to have to charge $25-$30 for the PDF once it releases, it's honestly best not to exacerbate the fact that I'm a boutique publisher compared to the Kobolds, Frog God, or the Dreamers, by adding another subsystem and forcing the price even higher. I'm a bit more expensive by necessity, and I have no interest in fighting them on their turf, but I also can't go astronomical or I'll find it hard to get new converts. Having a reputation for printing unique, functional insanity only goes so far.
Besides, I'd sooner fight like a dog at hitting The Eccentric Prestige, or even drop that stretch goal a little if the pre-orders will push me over the top. I've got four first-time designers in the wings hoping I'll be able to pay them lump sum for the designs we've worked on, and I'd like to be able to afford ART to give these people the first showing they deserve. There is some exceptionally cool stuff there, but it's going to take a small miracle to pull an additional $1,500 to make it work. Personally, I'd be making more money at $3,000 raised than $4,000 raised. Our projections look great for Interjection Games as a company - this is a great first showing and I'm quite motivated to try to get a quarterly Kickstarter cadence going because it attracted $1,000 in new blood to the company with the first attempt alone. Even so, I'd rather take less money by hitting $4,000 and getting Conan, Alex, Garrett, and Mike published.
Will these prestige classes be available eventually if we don't get $4,000? Yes, but they will not be together because having them separate lets me nickel and dime to give them more money per unit moved, and it won't have a couple hundred budgeted for art. Odds are I'll barely break even for my time however this goes, though, so it's all the same to the company. But for moral and ethical reasons, that stretch goal will NOT move up. I've got me an obligation to some people, and I will not move the goal posts on them for any reason, except to make it easier.
So, forget about the whole shadow magic in Strange Magic. This has much more behind it. Do you want to bring fossils back to life and use them as animal companions? Do you want to play a gunslinging witch? Do you want your soul to grapple the BBEG's soul and prevent both of you from taking a raise? Do you want to play Squirrel Girl? Get me closer to $4,000, and I'll open that stretch goal early if I have enough people at the $25 level willing to pick it up.
I expect to release the PDF in late February. One artist in particular may push this to early March, but the odds of that are low. Endzeitgeist is editing, but we tend to miss similar things, so I'm going to release the PDF for a few weeks before sending it to the printer, giving people a chance to hit me upside the head and tell me I done goofed. Give it a few weeks for the printer to get everything situated, and then the print version will be ready.
Expected release dates:
PDF - February
Book - April
Expect me to lay out and release the three sections as separate PDFs as quickly as development permits, without art if need be. All $25+ backers will get these for free to help whet their appetite for the main course with all the fancy art and unique layout templates. Lower backers get what they paid for.
Development order
1- Ethermagic
2- Musical Composition
3- Truename Magic
Also expect one 30-page PDF per month while I'm working on this. Something has to pay the bills while it's gestating. If you've got an idea in mind, let me know. I'd be happy to develop a cool class idea on the side this Christmas season.
September - Antipodist
October - Sanguine Disciple
November - ?
Decembet - ?
Expecting to have a new Kickstarter rolling in late January to replace the project that gets spat out the door in February.
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Alright, and that's closing time! I'll be trying to push The Antipodist one last time in the end survey, but, unless people come in with adjustments at the very end, we came in just below the $3,000 mark, so that means no recording artist for the maestro, but we did secure more art, so that's good.
In any case, this is an absolutely fantastic freshman Kickstarter for Interjection Games and I hope that the end product will benefit your home games as much as I'm thinking the legitimacy of a hardcover book will help me and make it so cranking these out on a regular basis is doable.
Thank you for throwing your money at this idea; you've given a dream its jump start. It's time to get busy!
We'll find a way to make The Eccentric Prestige happen, Mike, though it's not going to have the budget behind it that I wanted. Let's shoot for November - after the horrible losses I took getting this off the ground, I need to release a base class or two for myself to get the PDF sales started back up.
Thanks to afterhours addons via PayPal, Strange Magic has just blown the doors off of the $3,000 mark. The final book will contain three more archetypes and one more prestige class than advertised. Names and descriptions to be added to the Kickstarter proper once we're good and ready :)
If you like, make it utterly, stupidly broken, then try to get it pushed in as a greater manifestation or opus.
Clockwork Multiverse...
Here we go!
Did you want to sink your abilities into another 1,000 words for that most insane of greater manifestations? I'm open to it! It did lose its place as "longest IG spell/ability" when a certain fishing pole came along. :)