NEW STRETCH GOAL: The Pocket Guide to the Vermissian
over 6 years ago – Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 09:14:51 PM

We tore past 60 grand, there, didn't we? To that end, we had a bit of a chat this morning and figured that we can squeeze in one more stretch goal. At the £75,000 mark, then, we're proud to announce:

£75,000 - THE POCKET GUIDE TO THE VERMISSIAN

Construction began on the Vermissian around a hundred years ago; human retroengineers, loaded up with technologies unearthed from ancient katakos undercities, promised a grand automated transport network the likes of which the world had never seen. Train lines would pierce the skin of the city and run up and down its length, allowing travel faster than ever before - no more dog-cranked lifts! No more swarms of overworked megacorvids! No more gangs of stair protection racketeers, poking at banisters with their trademark crowbars!

Alas; the project was rife with corruption, and the technology at use was barely understood (as is the human way), and Guild of Laddersmen made serious political inroads to stop construction on "grounds of decency and tradition," and - crucially, some might argue - the engineers pierced the roiling hole in reality at the centre of Spire, and the rot spread throughout the city like a disease.

Now, the Vermissian is a shifting nightmare web of tunnels - some flooded, some crumbling, others permanently on fire, some haunted by the ghosts of trains that never were - and the denizens of Spire do their best to avoid it, or if they have to use it to get somewhere, to do so as quickly as possible.

THE POCKET GUIDE TO THE VERMISSIAN will feature full in-character descriptions of the original pitches for each station made to the aelfir, reflecting what the retroengineers were aiming in all its majestic grandeur - and, also, what each of the stations and sections of track are like now, in whatever ruinous and deadly state they stand. 

Released as an illustrated PDF complete with NPCs, rules for things that might try to rob, kill or eat you (or all three!) and the occasional Extra Ability for characters who spend too long communing with the sentient animus of a long-deceased subway system, The Pocket Guide to the Vermissian will be your go-to guide for this most strange and iconic part of Spire. 

ALSO.

We've been blown away at the support that you've shown for this project, even at such an early stage. It's so exciting to hear about the different sessions that people have played using the Quick Start rules (in ours, our Knight came joint first in a rat-eating contest as part of a distraction), to watch people get excited to explore the world, and to take part in discussions about what's happening with the project.

We're going to do everything we can to build a community with players and readers, because this is a world we want to explore - and if there's a community, and a market for products, then we can justify writing more books. There're so many stories we want to tell in this world; not just in Spire (although we have a rough idea for a full P.I. splatbook down the road) but also in the gnoll cities in the southlands, where they capture demons and use them to power strange mechanical creations; the techno-warriors who live beneath the human capital city of Whitecross, forming gangs to capture millennia-old machinery; and the Home Nations of Ys, last bastion of the dark elf race, torn apart by five centuries of civil war.

Thank you, all, so much. If you've got access to the Discord, we recommend that you come along and say hello - there's already a great community on there, making resources for play including cheat sheets, redesigned character sheets, and even a bespoke stress tracker app! We can't wait to see where this goes from here.

- G

Meet the classes, and: 48 HOURS!
over 6 years ago – Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 03:27:02 PM

Okay so: first up, we wrote a big, in-depth piece on all nine of the core classes in the game. Because it's so long, we've hosted it on our website. If you're interested in the kind of characters you can play, and why we made the choices we did with the advancements and progression, take a look!

MEET THE CLASSES

Also, agh, we've got 48 hours left! We're really excited to see how much we can raise in that time. If you'd like to help out (and you want to see exactly what Deep Apiarists are, along with everything else in the £60,000 stretch goal) then we'd love it if you could share our campaign with folk who might be interested in it. 

We may well do some sort of live hangout as we cruise towards the last 12 hours - we'll see. Not entirely sure how it all works. If you've got any ideas, we're all ears.

Anyway. Exciting!

- Grant

Midwives & money
over 6 years ago – Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 12:06:38 AM

Hello folks. I’m Mary, your producer on the Spire Kickstarter, and business partner to Grant & Chris. My job is mostly to make spreadsheets, look at graphs, and make sure that everything is happening on budget and on time once the funding campaign finishes.

First up:

MIDWIVES!

We've hit £45,000 now, and that means we get to write about midwives. They are arachnid defenders of unborn drow children, spider-like and monstrous, and we're very excited to be able to show them to you.

With a little more than a week left to go, we've had one God tier slot open back up, and we're really hoping we can make it to a community vote on a new district.

... AND MONEY.

This is what I'm here to chat about, as the production person. The three of us have run three Kickstarters now, and this one is structured differently to the last two in a few ways. There are a few reasons for that, and we wanted to talk to our backers about why we’ve made the decisions we’ve made.

For Goblin Quest, we cut every cost possible and set our targets very low, not really knowing what to expect, and we were surprised with a runaway success - you can read a bit about what we learned here. With Unbound, we commissioned art up front, budgeted for properly paying all of our contributors including the authors, but still tried to keep the costs of production as low as possible to make the Kickstarter accessible.

For Spire, we know we have a gorgeous setting, beautiful art and a sumptuous game. We want this game not just to sit on people’s shelves but also to be used, frequently - to be passed around, to be enjoyed visually and read. We want that to happen without the book falling apart, and we want to make that experience as pleasant as it can possibly be. We want Spire to feel luxurious.

So we’ve made some different decisions about build quality this time. Rather than going with a cheap distributed printing company, we’ve picked out a couple of UK printers whose work we’re really impressed by, and we’ve priced up two editions of the book. One will be the hardback edition, with the gorgeous cover you can see at the top of this Kickstarter page; for those who really enjoy printing details, it’ll be 115gsm matt coated paper for the text and 150gsm for the gloss cover, sewn in 32pp sections and case bound. The luxury edition upgrade will have coloured endpapers, a placeholder ribbon, a different cover and a card slipcase - and now that we’re fully funded, we can start commissioning design and new artwork for it.

The high quality we’re aiming for is reflected in the prices of our physical pledges, as well as things like the cost of design and proofreading - Spire is twice as long as Unbound was, at this point, coming in close to 80,000 words. That also pushes up shipping costs, as we’re expecting the books to weigh more. And because we don’t have a publishing or distribution deal at this stage, the cost of getting up and running is factored in to the Kickstarter. Quite genuinely: without you, none of this would be possible.

Printing in one location means we can minimise errors and maximise quality, but it also means we’ll need to distribute from that one location. Unbound taught us some helpful lessons about shipping - to stay on budget, we ended up using container shipping for some batches of books, which caused both delays and damage to some of the books before they reached people’s hands. For Spire, we’ve found a UK distributor we trust who will do picking and packing for us, will make sure the books are properly protected when we send them, and will do international shipping by airmail, minimising the risks of delay and damage - and hopefully guaranteeing that you’ll get your books within a week of us sending them out.

Here’s a rough overview of how we’re breaking down the costs, based on how things looked at the point where we funded.

As you can see, art makes up the smallest component - which is why more art was one of the earliest stretch goals on our list. Game design, design and editing costs don’t increase as we sell more products, the way that fees, printing and fulfilment do, which means that the higher we fund, the more we can afford to commission for stretch goals. We’re really hoping that we will get the chance to add whole new sections to the game, at high levels - and we’ll keep adding pre-orders to our total for the purposes stretch goals until as late in the process as possible. Once the campaign finishes, we’ll be moving to Backerkit for pre-orders, add-ons and fulfilment, and we’ll be keeping updates running here and in the Spire Discord channel as we go.

If you have any questions about the production side of Spire, please let me know - I’m @newsmary in the Discord channel - or comment here and we’ll do our best to answer them!

- Mary

Vote for the new district!
over 6 years ago – Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 11:09:08 PM

Hello!

We're writing a new district, on account of us passing the £50,000 stretch goal - and we want your help. Please answer a couple of questions on this form to tell us what sort of district you'd like.

- G

Sneak peek at the newspaper clippings
over 6 years ago – Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 05:33:32 AM

Tim's sent through a few of the newspaper clippings that we're bundling with the Luxury editions, and we're really happy with them! Here's one, focusing on the hip new trend for moneyed folk to eat raw meat:

 ALSO, we're nearly at 50 grand! That's exciting. I imagine we'll hit it before the weekend is out. With it, we'll detail a brand new district in Spire, and release it as a PDF; once we hit it, we'll put out a vote for you to take part in to choose what sort of district you'd like us to write.

- Grant