Surveys away!
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Jul 22, 2023 at 04:45:07 PM
All of you should have the campaign survey in your inboxes by now. and some of you have already filled it out! As usual, I don't like to wait for 14 days after the campaign ends, as Backerkit suggests; Kickstarter has already collected the pledges (and dropped those it could not collect), so why wait?
Especially since Severed Heads and Broken Blades is just about ready for the printer, and because we want to have copies in hand by Labor Day, we're only going to keep the Backerkit store open until August 5. The only thing left at this point — and I find this rather amusing, for some reason — is to replace the pro forma open license text. As you probably know by now, we live in a new era — the OGL is dead, long live open licensing. Since Paizo released the final version of the ORC License a few weeks ago and WotC placed D&D 5E under Creative Commons, the OGL-based text that we used to use is obsolete. Now I actually have to write something new, and I will attend to that shortly. An exciting way to spend Saturday night, for sure.
Am I being devious? I don't care.
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 09:56:01 AM
Maybe it's because I played Call of Cthulhu over the weekend and my character was secretly relieved that the party had to sacrifice a woman he had hit with his car to the Eldritch horror. No surviving witnesses. right?
But I thought I'd point out that DriveThru RPG's X-mas in July sale started yesterday, and PDFs of everything in our catalogue are marked down by 25%. If you don't see the red slash through the regular price, don't worry — the discounts show up on the item page. This is about the same discount that you'll get through the Backerkit store for this campaign when it opens this weekend, so if you'd rather buy through DTRPG than add on to your pledge, that's fine with me. The advantage to Ramen Sandwich Press is that you'd help us along toward a best-seller badge, and if you like what you get, you can leave a review or a star rating on DTRPG and that should help encourage others to buy during our long dry spells between Kickstarter campaigns.
The only disadvantage is that the Kickstarter Limited Editions of Places by the Way and Found by the Way, back when we did such things, won't be available through DTRPG whereas they will be available through Backerkit. But if such things don't concern you, then buying the location modules through DTRPG will work just fine.
Ding Ding Ding!
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Jul 15, 2023 at 04:48:42 PM
Yes, that's the closing bell. Thank you to everyone who backed this campaign. We'll have Severed Heads and Broken Blades ready for the printer very soon, and everything is on track to have the print copies shipped out by the end of next month. As I mentioned earlier, our goal is to have the book ready in time for Gateway Con in Los Angeles, and that overrides whatever grace we might get from Kickstarter backers if we ran behind schedule a bit.
In the meantime, Kickstarter is collecting your pledges even now. Please make sure your credit card information on file is in order; I haven't checked yet, but it's always a little alarming when the first charge attempt doesn't go through.
Then, in about a week or so, I will have Backerkit send out the surveys to collect your shipping information (if needed; anyone who just wants PDFs can skip the survey). You'll also have access to the Backerkit store for this campaign, where we will throw open our entire catalogue at a discount from our normal price. The only exceptions will be PDFs of the first 10 modules from our Places by the Way and Found by the Way series; the versions that we sell through Backerkit are crowdfunding-exclusive versions that include a little bit of extra content.
However, truth be told: I think DriveThru RPG's Xmas in July sale starts next week, and you can find PDFs of all our titles there at a similar discount (if not better). Just search using Ramen Sandwich Press as the publisher, or follow the linkage from our website. If you prefer to use DTRPG to dip your toes into the deep waters of our catalogue instead of using Backerkit, feel free to do so; I only ask that if you like what you get, please leave a favorable review or star rating, as we really could use more positive buzz there.
Thanks again, and I'll be in touch soon!
The home stretch is nigh
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Jul 08, 2023 at 10:41:22 AM
One week left, so I wanted to post a quick update as we get closer to the closing bell. Thank you again to all of you who have pledged, and now that we're funded I hope that Kickstarter will work us more thoroughly into their targeted recommendations and set us up for a strong finish.
There's nothing dramatic to report about progress on Severed Heads and Broken Blades, although I was shocked and embarrassed by how many errors remained in the manuscript that I handed over for layout. There were some egregious cut-and-paste errors between passages that use the same or similar phrasing, but mostly it's a matter of changing a word here and there. For instance, I decided that attacks should "deal" damage, but as I wrote it was all too easy to slip and write "does damage." Is there any functional difference between the two? No. But when it comes to writing rules, I think it best to be consistent to a tee. It's all too easy for someone reading closely to wonder, "What, is there supposed to be a difference between 'deals' and 'does'?" No. No, there isn't, and it's on me if you have to ask that question. I just hope I caught all of the slippages.
Finally, I'd like to note a curious pattern to the backing so far. In all of our past campaigns, the lowest-price rewards are by far the most popular. This never surprises me. I understand wanting to spend as little as possible, and I understand being so comfortable with PDFs that you feel that you can do without a print copy. I also understand that, if you're not familiar with our books, you might want to minimize your risk by spending less; if you don't like the book, at least you only blew a few bucks on a PDF. This time, however (at least so far), slightly more backers are down for a hardcover copy + PDF (highest tier) than PDF only (lowest tier). I'm not at all displeased by this — hey, if we can somehow get to 100 hardcover copies, we get a price break from our printer — but it is a break from the usual pattern.
It got me thinking a bit about backer psychology: I started out assuming that Kickstarter exclusives and the like were the most important thing, but after the campaign for Places by the Way/Found by the Way #10 I started to wonder if price (or value-for-money, if you prefer) was more important. Our campaigns since then have sort of borne that out. This time, I decided to offer hardcover as a premium option to generate more revenue but assumed that only a few would go for it. If you're going to spend $25 on a short book in small format, you're thinking like a patron rather than a consumer and sometimes I wonder how many people who think like that are left on Kickstarter. But here we are. Perhaps we should put more effort into creating premium options like that in our future campaigns.
Well, whether you think like a consumer or a patron, I salute you! Thanks again for your support, and let's hope for a gangbusters last week to round out this campaign.
Funded on the 4th of July
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 10:47:14 AM
Well, not really. We funded on the morning of the 3rd of July, but it took a day for it to settle in that we had hit the benchmark. Thank you to everyone who has helped us get there!
There is little to report about the production process because it's just a matter of tidying up a couple of details. Time permitting this holiday afternoon, I will give the layout one last proofreading pass and make a final decision on the epigraphs. Then, that will be that; once those changes are implemented we'll be on schedule to go to press at the top of next month.
Choosing the epigraphs has been far and away the strangest part of putting this book together (although this is somewhat by intention). The older you get, the more tricks your memory plays on you and it's wise to double-check everything. So on the one hand, I have been deep-diving into the exact phrasing of Ned Flanders' verbal tics. I would swear that I once had a .wav clip of him saying, "Oopsie doodley!" But the closest that Google gets me to that is YouTube clips of that episode where he remembers spilling ink on his beatnik father's poems and saying, "Whoopsie doodles." Fumbles.
On the other hand, choosing a good quotation for critical hits has come down to deciding which translation of Homer I want to use, which is kind of like deciding whether I want a Neapolitan sandwich or mint chocolate chip scooped into a bowl. They're both good, I just have to pick one and refuse to second-guess it. I will pluck something from Book V of The Iliad, which is essentially a catalogue of vivid descriptions of death in battle. The historian Gwynne Dyer once wrote that Homer had no illusions about the nature of close combat; the way I prefer to look at it; whoever wrote that part of The Iliad knew how to put the 'critical' in critical hits.
