Next stop: The Hobgoblin's Fortress
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Sep 09, 2024 at 03:49:21 PM
Our current Kickstarter campaign, which includes Places by the Way #13: The Hobgoblin's Fortress, has entered its last full week and we still have a ways to go. We're only about 2/3 of the way to funding and pledge activity has been effectively stalled since week 1. So I thought I would reach out to as many past backers as I dare to make one last attempt at goosing this thing. If you have any interest left at all in the series, I could sure use your help right now. There's still an awful lot of room left on the bandwagon.
It seems that I last used the updates to this campaign to pitch what was meant to be the first and only campaign for The Hobgoblin's Fortress. You may or may not know that that turned into a bit of a debacle because I did not cope artfully with Kickstarter's new form for launching a new campaign and I mistakenly set all reward tiers to be invisible until the end of the campaign. :0 So I cancelled, corrected and relaunched. The link above takes you to the corrected and relaunched campaign.
I must admit that I'm surprised and disappointed that The Hobgoblin's Fortress isn't doing better at this point. Our location modules have sold quite well on the convention circuit this year, better than at any point in the last couple of years. As I just noted on my Substack blog, Dungeons & Dragons has never been more popular and socially acceptable than it is now. I should hope that our sales (and pre-sales) would be increasing, not declining. I know money is tight these days, but we'll reserve you a PDF copy for less than what a gallon of gasoline costs right now. Is Places by the Way losing its mojo? I hope not. I have no desire to stop writing it. But it's also hard to justify writing these modules if they're just going to meet with indifference.
Soon.
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 01:30:46 AM
Hello, and I hope the tail end of summer finds you doing well. Goodness knows, the season has passed awfully quickly. But that always seems to be the case, and the older I get the harder it seem to be to grab its arm for a moment and just savor its presence.
Anyway, I wanted to let you know that Ramen Sandwich Press will be back on Kickstarter soon, this time with another Places by the Way module: The Hobgoblin's Fortress. I have already discussed it a couple of times in my Substack, here and here. BTW, my Substack is probably the best way to keep up with the latest from Ramen Sandwich Press, and announcements and design diary-type stuff will remain free to everyone even after I put up the paywall. As prior backers, you will probably get a notification from Kickstarter when the campaign goes live, but I'll post it to Substack as well.
Module sales have picked up this year — mostly at conventions, but also online. So we decided to go back to Places by the Way at the cost of bumping some longer-form ideas down the list. We're also going back to how we used to handle Places by the Way and Found by the Way on Kickstarter, on account of the growing popularity of our Pathfinder-native books. We'll run a campaign for a single module concept, and you'll have the chance to choose between the D&D 5E version and the Pathfinder version at the backer survey stage. Or you can get both versions, we won't stop you from buying more!
Kickstarter is reviewing the campaign right now, so we should be able to launch soon. I look forward to hearing from you again!
Now it can be told!
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 09:03:33 PM
In the last update, I mentioned that GMT Games had hired me to work with John Butterfield on his next game, Away Team: Voyages of the Pandora. GMT just added it (actually, I think they added it last week, but I missed the announcement) to their pre-sale list, so if you're interested you can see their actual order page and reserve a copy at a discount. I don't know when the game will actually ship — John estimates 2024, but that's just a guess right now — but GMT won't charge your credit card until they're about a month away from shipping. They use their pre-sale numbers for advance planning and prioritizing which projects move the fastest through the production queue more than anything else, so the more demonstrated interest, the higher priority it gets.
BTW, the flavor text in the listing is not my doing. I volunteered to write flavor fiction to preface the game documentation, but GMT didn't consult me about this. What you'll see in the actual game books will have my characteristic panache, I promise.
To that end, I have added a copy of Hesiod to my Buy Me a Coffee wishlist. Pandora is such a perfect name for an exobiology survey vessel. Hesiod is the OG source of Pandora's legend, so I'd like to reach into it for a suitable epigraph for my flavor text and, really, the game itself. Adding a touch of class wherever I go, don't you know.
For the Canadians among you, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. For the Americans, I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving next week. For everyone else, I hope this finds you well!
The road goes ever on and on... and on and on...
over 3 years ago
– Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 08:41:44 PM
And away they go: The last of the print rewards will go in the mail tomorrow, and I just authorized Backerkit to distribute the PDFs. If you ordered PDF copies of Book of Chance Meetings or Book of Hidden Paths, DTRPG will get in touch with you shortly, if they have not already. If there is a problem with getting your rewards and add-ons, please message me through Kickstarter and we'll get it straightened out; otherwise, this brings the curtain down on another successful campaign. Thank you all for your support! To some of you, I have said this many times over by now, but it never gets any less sincere with repetition.
As for what happens next, all I can promise you is that you will hear from me again at some point. Exactly when you will hear from me, I cannot say. Six years after firing up the ignition on Ramen Sandwich Press and branching out on my own, and my to-do list of ideas and projects just keeps growing. Another way of looking at it: The road ahead not only goes ever on and on, it keeps branching off into directions, all of which I would like to follow at once. It's not disheartening, like a maze of twisty passages, all of them alike, but it is daunting.
The project moving up to the top of Ramen Sandwich Press' list is another book of random encounters. The working title is Chance Meetings: Villages, and I see it as the first of three books diving deep into random encounters in small, medium and large settled areas. In other words: villages, towns and cities. It will include a bunch of NPC templates (something on which the 5E core rules is actually rather thin) as well as tables covering a variety of village types, classified by the village's core economic activity. Yes, I had originally thought that I could fit everything about random encounters into one big book. Then I realized I couldn't, and I broke it into two books, one for wilderness and one for settlements. And now, I reckon I'll need three books to cover settlements and discuss at length who or what might bump into your party as they round a corner.
How long will it take me to write it? Not too long, I hope. It took me a bit less than a year to finish Book of Chance Meetings at a time when I literally had nothing better to do than work on it. But on the other hand the remaining Chance Meetings books will benefit from using essentially the same template as Book of Chance Meetings, so some of the foundational work has already been done.
However, at the same time I will be working on a project for GMT Games, who recently hired me to help legendary game designer John Butterfield flesh out his next project, Away Team: Voyages of the ISS Pandora. You can call it a reboot, revision, update — whatever — of a solitaire game that John designed for SPI many years ago; as I see it, he's revisiting an old idea and wondering, "How would I do this game now, as opposed to what I did then, in a different time and perhaps with a different perspective on things?" Those of you who remember Ambush! can probably figure out why he would want another writer to help him out, and I'm excited to be a part of the project.
So I'll be working on two major projects at the same time for the next little while — and on top of that, my list of things to do once they are finished seems to get longer all the time: I still have a list of Places by the Way locations that I could write. I want to write a series of stories as a sort of companion to Places by the Way. Note-taking and planning continues for the massive city setting book that I want to write as a sort of capstone to my RPG career. I seem to be accumulating promises to help with art and cartography, and I'd like to take up those offers before the skilled folks who made them change their minds, or develop arthritis or go blind, or whatnot. Perhaps influenced at some level by recent events, I have it in mind to write rules supplements on incorporating infectious diseases and warfare into fantasy RPG campaigns. And as if all that wasn't enough, I was reminded over the summer that I still haven't finished the novel that I started writing years ago out of frustration that my contribution to Big Eyes Small Mouth 3E would never be published (and my goodness, that is a story all unto itself).
At this point in my life, I do not fear running out of ideas. I am more concerned about running out of time — and lacking the resources that allow me to remain focused on my work. In that respect, I do appreciate the support and encouragement that I have received from all of you through Kickstarter. Sales outside of Kickstarter help, and I'm just started experimenting with Buy Me a Coffee as a sort of ongoing tip jar. I don't know how well it will work but I figure it's worth a try; with a to-do list like that I've got, I'm going to need a lot of coffee.
Thanks again, and until next time, take care and keep the dice rolling!
The printer delivers
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 07:40:40 AM
As with so much else in life (to say nothing of Kickstarter), it look a little longer than we'd hoped. But the print copies of Tomb Raiders of Orek and Into the Royal Tombs arrived from the printer late yesterday:
If you will remember, I had hoped to have them in hand over a week ago, but our printer confounded us a bit. In addition to the printing delay, the books seem to have shipped from their plant in Pennsylvania instead of the one in Central California, which has always handled our orders in the past. For those of you east of the Mississippi, it feels like your rewards are taking the long way 'round, this time.
Even so, all print rewards will go into the mail early in the coming week; if I hustle, I may even be able to get some out the door this afternoon. At that point, those of you who are due PDF rewards and add-ons will get notices about how and where to download the files.
Thanks again for your support, and I'll post another update to wrap things up once all the rewards have been distributed. Get ready for a long read, as it will look forward much more than it looks back, and the future should be quite busy.
