The Arabian Nights meets A Fistful of Dollars in our latest location module for D&D 5E and Pathfinder! It's not too late to pre-order a copy of the Kickstarter Limited Edition, plus copies of all of our other location modules. Plus, don't miss out on Tome of the Utility Drawer, a collection of magic and exceptional mundane items, and more!
The Paladin Queen's Forest is live as of now. Have at it, and thanks again for your support!
Good news: Somewhat to my surprise, Kickstarter didn't bother to screen the campaign for The Paladin Queen's Forest and I can launch anytime. They withheld that liberty from Oasis of the Elementals for some reason, so I submitted for review today on the assumption that they would clear it, say, Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest.
I'm going to wait until Tuesday anyway. I probably won't have enough time to do all of the launch-related publicity on Monday. In the meantime, here is a preview and I think Kickstarter will let you follow it so that they'll notify you as soon as I actually launch. I'll also bug you again here, in this space.
In sync with the new campaign launch, Harold Buchanan will post an episode of his excellent gaming podcast, Harold on Games, that he recorded with yours truly late last year. Harold graciously allowed me to preview it, and it turned out quite well. At the time, I felt pretty incoherent and figured he'd be lucky to get 20 minutes of usable material out of it. But he's a skilled interviewer and conversationalist, and in retrospect I can see that he knew exactly when to stop me and when to let me ramble, when to press for clarification and when to change direction. He made me look good, which is no small task. I'll post a link when it's up, or you can keep an eye on Soundcloud.
By now, all of you should have your rewards for this campaign. As far as I know, I took care of the last bit of outstanding business a few weeks ago. So if you don't have your rewards or add-ons from this campaign in hand, please let me know. I'm proceeding on the assumption that we're all settled up.
As was once my old habit, I spent Valentine's Day and the following weekend at Orccon in Los Angeles in the dealers room. This time, however, I was selling my own stuff, as my old friends from The Weekend Warrior Game Company were kind enough to let me share table space with them. I sold more books than I'd expected, and it was great fun meeting and chatting up folks who had no idea Ramen Sandwich Press even existed. This was probably my key takeaway from the convention: As much fun as it is to work Kickstarter, and as much as I still need crowdfunding to get each module off the ground, I have just begun to scratch the surface of the market for what I'm doing. I need to get out of the house more often — too many people I will never reach by digital means alone.
That being said, I am now on to Places by the Way/Found by the Way #9, working title, The Paladin Queen's Forest. Does anyone besides me remember:
“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.”
Yes, I’m old enough to remember ADVENT, and those words haunt me to this day. As I stumble through middle age, I still have recurring nightmares about trying to navigate my way through a building or landscape that ought to be familiar to me, but I keep getting lost. There’s probably a lot more that feeds into this than the trauma of dealing with the worst part of a computer game, but it’s alarming how the two overlap.
This is a roundabout way of saying that it was probably inevitable that I would write a module about getting lost in the forest. It’s just sketched out right now, (I’ll be ready to go back to Kickstarter to pre-sell it very soon) but that’s pretty much what happens in it. Your party enters a large, dense forest that is a royal hunting preserve, probably on the pretext that they’re searching for a lad who snuck in and never came back out. They find out that the preserve is not guarded by rangers who hunt poachers, but by magical devices that disorient you so that you’ll kick back out and never want to go back, or you’ll wander around until you die of thirst, hunger or exposure, take your pick.
The Paladin Queen’s Forest will be a bit of a departure from its predecessors in that there will only be a handful or so fixed locations; instead, it will rely heavily on a substantial random encounters table to suggest what happens to your party as it tries to find its bearings in the forest. Eventually, it will have something that feels like a proper conclusion, as the party will have the chance to find their missing person alive and well, perhaps even saving it from a dangerous monster lurking in the heart of the forest. At the very least, the Paladin Queen herself makes her entrance at the end to set things to aright, like Richard the Lionheart in the Robin Hood story.
I also plan to keep this module compact, according to my original plan for Places by the Way. As much as I am fond of Oasis of the Elementals, both in terms of how it turned out and how much fun it was to write it, it feels overstuffed and it was too much work. It topped out at over 15,000 words; with The Paladin Queen’s Forest, I’m shooting for something more like 11,000 words — more in line with my original projection of 10,000 words or so for a module.
Stay tuned to this channel; I'll give you as much warning as I can once I have the next Kickstarter campaign ready to launch. Still not sure what the Easter Egg is going to be. It's either coming from the Brothers Grimm or an Asian folktale — that really narrows it down to the point of being a spoiler, doesn't it? But it will add an extra location that won't be in the Standard Edition.
As expected, most of the print reward copies arrived yesterday via UPS. They would have arrived on Wednesday, except for the holiday — but I can't begrudge anyone taking New Year's Day off, since I myself spent the morning watching the Rose Parade from the top floor of an office building overlooking Colorado Boulevard. Much more engaging than sitting in front of the TV in my pjs wondering why I got up so early.
A few shipments went out with today's mail, and maybe another 10 or so will go out with tomorrow's mail. And so on and so on, until all the print rewards have been shipped. I figured out how to upload tracking numbers to Backerkit, so I assume that they'll email shipping confirmation as I feed them the info.
I say that "most" of the print rewards are in hand because we're still waiting on the print copies of Tome of the Utility Drawer. I can't say offhand when they'll arrive because we haven't gotten a shipping confirmation notice from our printer. We'll look into it — and I'll bet we get it right as we're about to ask them what's going on.
Those of you who ordered PDF rewards and/or add-ons should receive them shortly, if you have not by now. Last night (late last night, for some of you) I instructed Backerkit to distribute them. The process seems to have worked, with the possible exception of the Pathfinder 2E conversion notes for Found by the Way 1-7. I may have set things up wrong, letting my mind wander as hand and mouse did things on their own, but it looks like 8 backers ordered copies but none were sent out. So as soon as post this, I'm just going to email the PDF manually, leave nothing to chance.
I had hoped that I would have the print rewards in hand at this point so that I could sign and ship them by the end of the year. However, our printer warned of delays during the holidays due to extra workload and, well... the holidays. So the print copies are being printed, but I don't expect to have them in hand until after New Year's. I swear, Ebenezer Scrooge gets such a bad rap for his views on the holiday season. Anyway, the latest news, then, is that the PDF rewards are ready and their electrons are buzzing about, but we'll have to wait just a little longer for the print copies.
While we're waiting, my next task is to start overhauling the Ramen Sandwich website, which is, frankly, such an embarrassment that I don't even bother updating it anymore. We've decided to pay actual money for a site that looks less amateurish and has e-commerce capability to give a boost to Ramen Sandwich Tees and Ramen Sandwich Press alike. Once that's done, it's on to module #9, for which I have jotted down a couple of ideas.
As always, work remains to be done that I intended to finish several weeks ago. I suppose I can blame the billboard that went up just outside Ramen Sandwich Press HQ right after Thanksgiving advertising the "REPTILE SUPER SHOW" at the Anaheim Convention Center next weekend. I know it's just a consumer expo for people who keep pet snakes and such, but the giant image of a lizard outside my window is disturbing enough to chip away at my state of mind. Oh well. Time to close the blinds, I guess.