I came home from running some errands to find this announcement in my email. This Kickstarter was funded at just over ten times its initial goal, and all of its stretch goals were funded.
Hello, Grimtooth backers! Just wanted to give you a quick status update on one fun part of the project: the DCC/Grimtooth crossover adventure module. Jobe Bittman has finished the manuscript and Doug Kovacs has finished the cover art. Here is a preview of the current cover design! We are still playing with the typesetting so the final font details may change a bit, but I thought you might enjoy seeing Grimtina in action!
If art and typesetting is the only fiddly bits they have, it won’t be long now. Estimated delivery is July, 2015, and unless something totally out of the blue happens, there is no reason to think that this won’t ship on time.
Crayons for a project in the works. I remember when the 64 box came out. Now they have huge boxes. 64 is enough for me. Coincidentally, I graduated from high school with the current president of Crayola. (We are almost related. My great-grand uncle was his grandfather’s step father. Small world.)
Finally, Contact Paper to laminate maps and things. I’ll soon have a posting on that.
Just got this update from Peter Ragan. 20 days just to get the funds, but he’s reliable so his print shop is all ready to go, just waiting on the money. I suppose all those planning a Kickstarter need to factor in 20 days until they get the money. So, barring something unexpected, this will deliver on-time.
#10 Kickstarter Funds Transferred
Posted by Peter Regan
The project funds hit my account this morning (not sure why it takes 4 days to transfer them on top of the 14 days they take to collect the funds) and I’ve just sent a payment to the printers. They’ve already set the print job up, which helps speed things along.
As soon as I get a firm delivery date I’ll add it to the comments here. I’ve got all the packaging supplies in hand ready to go. This week I’ll be printing the sticker sheets and ordering the A3 insert sheets.
I’ve had survey responses from all but three backers, and I’ll chase them up at the weekend.
I wrote about the quadrille desk pad I once had when I shared the map of a town, for a character in my brother’s campaign. I was reminded of this by the Dungeon DeskpadKickstarter. I had been toying with the idea of getting quad ruled desk pads for over a year, and I decided to get them, and to joining the Dungeon Deskpad Kickstarter. Once I get my overseas shipment I will take pictures to compare..
The brand of desk pads I got are the Tops. Each is individually wrapped in plastic. They were the least expensive. They are not all square and not all the same exact size. That’s OK. I plan on using them for mapping out an abandoned ancient city/megadungeon. I can also use a sheet for a single sheet map of the town that is the current home base of the players in my campaign. The rough map I have for the town of Larenda is two quad ruled sheets taped together. I can even get a roll of clear plastic “shelf-paper”, and laminate some of these sheets for a quick and cheap dry erase surface. I usually only use maps and such to show relative position. Even if it is an exercise only for me, it will be fun. The one draw back to paper this size for maps is that it is too big for my scanners. I will have o do better than a quick picture with my cellphone. I’ll have to put my cheap camera on one of my cheap tripods, to get good pictures for online.
After ordering the two sets of Koplow Who Knew Dice that arrived last week, I ran across an article on Imagur about Wiz Dice and their bag of 100+ dice vs. the Chessex Pound’O Dice, and I ordered the Wiz Dice based on that article. I am always needing more d4’s and d8’s in play. The Wiz Dice 100+ pack includes a fancy drawstring bag with complete matched seven dice set. I ended up with 103 dice plus the set in the bag, for 110 new dice. I received 15 of each die, except for the d12 and d20, which I received 14 of each of those. So I ended up with 14 matched sets of seven dice, 15 counting the drawstring bad, and one partial set missing the d12 and d20. I have matched sets of solid colors and then the “gem” style dice of the same color: green, blue, red, yellow, purple, and red. Then a solid black, swirled black, and a white set. I have one complete orange set and the other orange set is incomplete. I don’t think most people get that many matched sets. I think it is cool that I have enough dice for 15 players from one order of dice, not counting how many ever sets I had before.
One idea I had with this package of dice is making multiple dice tables using different colors of the same die. For example, if I need a table for 14 different results of a d20, or 15 results of a d8, I can do it.
Magic missile is resolved quicker with more d4’s. Lots of monsters taking their attack is resolved quicker with more d20’s.
Blue is my favorite color, but in dice, I find black and red to be my preference. For some reason, it is the same way for me with Risk. For some colors, I prefer the gem style over the solid style.
I guess I need to have a post with a picture of all my dice. They are not all in one place at the moment, so I will have to defer that for a bit.
I also realized that having so many d10’s makes it easy to roll a d1,000 or a d10,000, etc. just specify which color is which digit. I know that they make custom d10,000 dice for such a thing, but I have to tone it down a bit. I’ve spent more on dice in the first two months of 2015 than I spent all of last year, and most of the three plus decades before that. That isn’t to say that I won’t buy more die this year, but I don’t have to buy them all in the first quarter.
Greetings backers. Some of you have inquired about the status of the Challenge Coin PDF that we promised as part of this project. The PDF is long overdue, and for that we apologize. We were slammed with business and personal things in the past year. We allowed that to push the PDF to the back burner, but we have not forgotten it. I have collected all of the stories and done most of the layout work. It comes in at 30 pages and is full of challenge coin stories both touching and funny. We’ve formatted it as if all the writers were sitting in a bar swapping stories about challenge coins.
The work that remains is for Howard to write a foreword and to draw the illustrations he promised to include. We intend to have this work done in the next six weeks, or sooner. We’re gathering momentum for our next Kickstarter project and we can’t begin that in good conscience unless we have delivered this first.
Thank you very much for your patience. I know that for some of you this PDF was the primary reason you backed the project. We’re sorry we’ve taken so long to get it to you.
Howard has posted daily comics without fail for well over a decade, and completes everything he says he will. The coins shipped on time, it is only this document that was delayed. I was not worried about it because I got the coins. The PDF was a sort of afterthought, as I recall, but I could be mis-remembering. I look forward to receiving it and seeing the art and reading the backgrounds on challenge coins.
The idea of something like a challenge coin or an insignia for a group is interesting and see it applying to RPGs. In my Wednesday night AD&D game our characters came up with an insignia. I know other groups of players that have done this. Further updates as they are available….
Back in the mid to late 80’s I bought a quad ruled desk pad from an office supply store. That was back when desk pads and pen and paper were still the mainstay of business. I have only one sheet from that desk pad that holds the map to the town for Griswald, the longest running character I have played, who is now, essentially retired from play.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of the pad. I used it for mapping out a Boot Hill area, and such things. I think that pad may have been one of the things I lost in the water leak incident, but I don’t recall.
I have in the last few years tried to find such a pad in stock at an office supply store, but no go. I would have to special order or order online. If you search for quad ruled desk pad you will find them. They run a little under $20 each.
I like using them to map out large cities. I am a visual person and like to be able to see them. In my campaign, there are ten ancient cities of a fallen empire. I have taped together 8.5 x 11 quad ruled graph paper for a rough map of the one closest to the action of the current group of players. Having a bigger single sheet would simplify things and make it easier to fold up and get out of the way.
I also like he idea of using them for a megadungeon. Who doesn’t want to design a megadungeon? I think I started to do so way back in the day, but it is lost material.
This all comes to mind as I ran across Peter Regan’s most recent Kickstarter for a Dungeon Desk Pad, over at Oublette Magazine. It is an interesting idea. I am trying to avoid new Kickstarters for the financial responsibility end of it, but man is this one hard to resist. Personally, I prefer a full-size desk pad of grids, but this idea is interesting. My desk pad pages are 16 inches by 22 inches, slightly smaller than the A2 standard. The Dungeon Desk Pads are 16.53 inches by 11.69 inches, which is the A3 standard. The other issue is that Peter is UK based so overseas shipping adds to costs, etc. So far, I have only backed US-based Kickstarters, mainly because I have not had interest in others that were not based in the US. I know that Peter has a good track record, thus hitting the funding goal, and stretch goals are reasonable and fit with the base project.
I was also intrigued by an article that Peter shared that of Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop [former link: http://unpluggedgames.co.uk/2015/02/13/games-workshop-the-inside-story-part-one/] still has his first dungeon on a desk pad on his desk. You can save this photo and zoom in to be able to read the room descriptions. It would be easy to use this for a quick dungeon for your next session.
Ian Livingstone Deskpad Dungeon
This motivated me to get the rough map of Helmsdale, Griswald’s town, and share it here. The quick story on this town. My brother, Robert,the DM determined that for Griswald to be a half-elf, it made sense for the human to come from a place near the Elven Kingdom. The hillsmen in his campaign are based on the Scottish clans. They live in a series of hills called Carbaen Moor. Griswald is a Fighter/Cleric/Magic-User and we rolled his age. I believe 45 years old, so the backstory is that the hillsmen had a civil war where the Buchanan Clan Kicked the Stewarts out of their territory and became king. They did not maintain control of the Stewart territory so it became infested with Orcs and worse.
Griswald’s father was a duke, and as far as Griswald knew, he was the true heir to the throne. He later learned that the grandson of the king and the grandsons of the dukes higher in precedence had their own band of outlaws called the Red Arrows. They had red fletchings (feathers) on their arrows. Griswald joined up with them, and through creative use of magic and bluff developed a reputation beyond their actual abilities. Tameus, the true king, decided it was time for war. Through lots of favors owed and other factors and army big enough to challenge the Buchanan’s was raised, and while outnumbered by the Buchanans, magic and Elven cavalry defeated them. After reclaiming the kingdom, there was a massive earthquake that devastated most of the kingdom and the old Stewart lands. Since the orc tribes in the Stewart lands bordering the former Buchanan lands were hurt as bad as the humans, Griswald decided to take back his ancestral lands. With the help of a small force of mercenaries and a PC wizard and his own henchmen – two fighters and three magic users, the orcs where driven out.
The town is in a valley of a ring of hills. It has a ditch 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep. The earthquake reduced the walls. Griswald rebuilt a smaller town with an Elven temple, the price of the Elven troops. This works for Griswald as he is a cleric of the Elven moon diety, Isil-nar. There is also the ducal palace and homes for troops and workers and farmers. Outside the walls is an inn, The Merchant’s Delight. The merchants like Griswald, since he does not tax them as heavily as the orcs. He also built a gatehouse at the only way across the ditch.
The two biggest orc tribes were not hurt by the earthquake, and were consolidating their control over the remnants of the orc tribes Griswald had not yet eliminated. These tribes did not like this upstart half elf moving in, so they moved to invade and take him out. Griswald has a crystal ball so he looked for the leaders of the invaders and took Alim, his highest level magic user henchman to teleport to these troops on the march to take them out. While the two most powerful magic users in town, Griswald 10th fighter/10th cleric/11th magic user and Alim, 10th level magic user were gone, the other orc tribe got past the wall across the valley to the south and surrounded the town. Griswald and Alim mangled the rear guard of the larger force and were gone until morning. This was put on hold for 15 years, until we made it work to finish the scenario. Robert wanted to resolve it so the other players would know what happened, as they are ten or more game years past this point in time.
The orcs surrounding the town set up a catapult and started battering the walls. They also attacked the gatehouse with 50 men that were the troops of Logan, a PC who was killed, but the men stayed with Griswald. The gatehouse was cut off from the rest of town and the 30 or so cavalry on hand tried to get through, but were routed and nearly all of them were killed. The archers on the walls of town made long range shots at the orcs around the gatehouse, and nearly exhausted all the available arrows. The gatehouse fell. The high priest of the temple cast insect plague in the area around the catapult to delay the battering. By the next morning the high priest rested and relearned insect plague and cast it again. Somewhere in here, we had a two year delay of getting together to wrap it up, but we finally finished it.
Finally when the time line in town caught up to them, Griswald and Alim read teleport from their travelling spell books and returned to the palace. Griswald and Alim had hardly any spells or scrolls left, but as a fighter with protection from normal missiles, Griswald could mount the walls and fight off the invaders. Finally enough orcs were killed that their morale broke. I don’t know if I ever got a full count of the number of dead orcs, but the image in my mind is of The Battle of Roake’s Drift from the movie Zulu. Thankfully, it was not The Battle of Islandawana.
On this map each square = 40 feet. I found that the width of the squares is the same as the distance between the lines on a standard 3 x 5 index card. Index cards were handy for measuring ranges in the battle. We used a few miniatures, but was mostly scribbles on the map.
Every time an orc was killed we yelled, “Oh no! They got Grignak!” The inspiration for Grignak comes from Galaxy Quest.
First the map of the “north” of my brother’s campaign. This is one half of a TSR hex mapping paper, with the Willingham cover. The other half is the “south”. Only one player has been off this map. It is 10 mile hexes. This is a photocopy. I did the coloring. Robert used the photocopier to enlarge and zoom in in the following images. These are pictures and not scans. You still get a hint of my brother’s artistic talent here.
The Stewart Lands shows the fiefs of the various Stewart Dukes.
The North
Carbaen Moor
Stewart Lands
Griswald’s Hex
Below shows the ring of hills with an opening in the hills to the North West and South. The rectangle in the center is where the town goes.
Detail Griswald’s Lands
The post it note was added to complete the circle for the area of effect of insect plague. That spell is one of the ultimate battlefield spells if you can buy a high priest ten minutes (one turn) to cast it.
This is in pencil on 20+ year old paper with poor lighting.
Helmsdale
Inner Town
Insect Plague
I am curious if there are any other desk pad sized maps of towns, dungeons, space ships, etc. That would be an interesting gallery.
I backed the Grimtooth’s Traps Kickstarter. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. I spend way too much on this stuff. Supposed to be a July, 2015 delivery date. I ordered the hard back, which includes the PDF.
They met the goals for all of their 13 stretch goals.
Of course, more later for the unboxing sometime in July.
I got my Hero Forge backer’s mini on Saturday, that I ordered in December, and wrote about in my Hero Forge Update.
It was well packed and arrived undamaged.
It looks like it has dust on it, but that is an illusion of the texture.
Now I need to get the supplies needed to paint this and my original miniatures from back in the day. Since I am running out of month to finish two RPG related tasks, that will have to wait. No promises on the when, but I will post pictures when I get them done. I will show progress, etc. I will take better quality pictures and dig out my homemade light box when I start the painting process.
Now for pictures of the unpacking. Can you tell it was raining? Actually, this was before the rain and the warm weather melted the snow and ice on my roof and it dripped down on my front steps where the mail carrier left it.
It was wrapped in large bubble, bubble wrap with a layer of the same type of bubble wrap to ensure that it did not bounce around in the box.
Hero Forge is one of the Kickstarters that I backed. they are a victim of their own success and are backed up due to the volume of orders placed in the last few weeks, and rather than a planned two – four weeks until shipping, it is delayed to be four weeks. I received a generic email a couple of days ago, and today I received a personalized email about my specific order.
Here is the informational email I received.
Thank you for shopping with Hero Forge, the internet’s new home for customized, 3D printed tabletop miniatures!
In a response to requests for status updates, we are reaching out to users whose orders have finished processing and have been sent to our manufacturer to be forged. We wanted to let you know that your order 107996 has finished processing and has been sent to our manufacturer to be forged.
While it normally takes up to 4 weeks for your miniature(s) to arrive, we have experienced very heavy order volume during our launch and encountered some delays. This has resulted in some orders taking longer to be fulfilled and may extend delivery times by a up to a matter of weeks. We are working to address these setbacks in order to return to the 2-4 week fulfillment speed that we would normally provide.
*Your Character(s):*
Character: Griswald — Material:ultra_detail_28mm
Note that we have been implementing several updates and tweaks to our models and poses to improve the quality of our 3D printed miniatures. We have included high resolution renders of your figure(s) below which include any updates. We invite you to review and verify they are as expected, though no reply is necessary unless you have any questions, concerns, or comments.
If you have any questions about your order please contact our customer service team support@heroforge.com with your order number, account e-mail address, and the contents of your order confirmation e-mail.
We hope to see you again soon! HeroForge.com
I’m in no hurry, I had beta access for nearly two months and due to my schedule, I did not order until December. Having regular updates to let me know that things are progressing is great, at least I know where things stand, and maybe by the time of MarmaladeDog, I will have a sample to show….
I backed the Inkwell IdeasDungeonMorphs 2: Cities & Villages: Map Generator Dice/Cards and just got my initial shipment. I backed at the $40 level which gets two sets of dice, so I took one set from the original dungeon morphs dice and 3×3 dice tray, which is what arrived today, with a pack of cards and two bonus dice. The base set of five dice come in a cloth drawstring dice bag. The two extra dice are dungeon morphs on 5 sides and a village on one side.
The dice are easily an inch on a side and appear to be very sturdy with a slight “edge” to the ink. The images on the dice are cut into each face and filled with color. If the color were to fade or flake, one can easily re-ink it themselves. The dice curve in slightly on each face. I don’t think it will affect their rolls. If you don’t like a roll, you can always change it to your liking. It’s not like they are milled to Las Vegas casino standards. These are substantial and would make a lot of noise on certain surfaces. Some finished surfaces could potentially be scratched, chipped, or dinged. So the same caveat for rolling any dice on nice furniture applies. 😉
The dice tray has a high enough “wall” around each square to hold them in position while you move it out of the way or for temporary storage. The tray is sturdy and does have some give in it it one uses force. The only way it would break is if it got caught in something very sturdy and a strong force was applied, like between a door and the doorpost.
The shipment with the new dice is planned for I think May, 2015. I was not finding the planned shipping date when reviewing the Kickstarter. I will post another update when those ship.
