Shipping update / locking addresses
12 months ago – Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 08:37:28 AM

Books are shipping in mid-May

Hi everyone, belated update coming at you! Thank you for your patience and support of the game, and of our little team. We really appreciate you so much.

Okay, TL;DR: books arrive on May 15 (as of the last estimate from the shipping company), and we’ll try to ship them literally that day or the next. Everything else is in hand other than cards, which we may have to ship separately :/

Thus, we can offer two options: wait until June to receive everything in one shipment, or receive two different shipments, starting as early as May. I think the ethical thing is to assume that most/all backers will want the books and other merch ASAP, hence two shipments. That said, please contact me (Wythe) by DM if you would prefer only one shipment, in June.

Okay, now for some details:

What’s up with the books?

We have no control over the books or cards at this point; we can only cross our fingers that they arrive in good condition on May 15 (and that our neighbors aren’t too mad at us for monopolizing the elevator all day when they arrive). That said, our printer is confident they’ll arrive on that date or quite soon after, so we should finally be shippingthem soon.

We’ll start by shipping domestic orders (everything minus cards). Why? Because they are the vast majority, and we have very limited room in our apartment to store so many books. That said, we’ll try to ship everything within one or two days.

Why are the books arriving about a month late? The printer—who is generally great—misprinted The Rain Thieves, so we had to wait for them to be reprinted, in full.These things happen, but of course the delay was highly frustrating. While we haggled about timing, there simply wasn’t any way to speed up the process. The entire shipment had to wait on the new books.

That all said, both books look fantastic! All of the merch looks and feels great. We think you'll be more than satisfied with the quality.

What’s up with the cards?

The cards look great, but they are definitely going to take longer to print than we had been led to believe. Again, unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about this. At this point, we should get him in mid-June, which is way later than we had planned on.

In the future, we're simply going to build out a much more capacious timeline, giving ourselves more time at every step, and adding one month onto all estimates from vendors.

Much more soon

Thank you for your patience. More news soon, including our newest project—Qadida by Ian Derk, a full espionage-themed setting and series of ventures for Stillfleet, featuring new classes and advanced powers!

In upcoming updates, I'll also share more mini-ventures with backers. Many thanks to all of our backers (and our lovely patrons) for helping us create these playable scenarios and offer more ways to dive into the game.

Finally, we are also developing a fantasy game built on the same underlying Grit System that powers Stillfleet. If you're interested in playtesting it, join us on Discord and ping me and our lead artist/fantastical creator, Ethan Gould!

Book-printing / merch-making (big update)
about 1 year ago – Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 09:52:57 PM

Book printing

Happy belated Lunar New Year! We have a few updates and some book pictures for you. TL;DR: books are being printed but will take some time to get to us; merch is coming along more rapidly.

Slightly longer update: the books are with the publisher. We have moved past the dummy, ozalid, and color proofing stages for both books (see below for more on these). The printers have committed the final copyedits, which will be mirrored in revised PDFs. Stay tuned! Major thanks to everyone who has caught and reported one or more of the increasing elusive typos in the books.

With the completion of those fixes, actual-physical printing has started, and thus the process has flown entirely out of our hands. Cross your fingers/paws/fronds/etc.!

Dummies – Completely blank books, for confirming the paper and cover choices and locking in book weights for shipping.

Ozalids – Full books printed in color but on cheap paper, for confirming the correct placement of every spread.

Color proofs – A selection of individual pages (in our case, 20 per book) printed exactly how they will appear in the final books, for confirming the color profiles of key representative art.

As you can see, fortunately for us first-timers, the professional book-printing process is complex and has various measures built in to guarantee that the end products are excellent.

Unfortunately, this complex print timeline has dragged a bit with the holidays (in both the U.S. and China), so we are now looking at getting the books in NYC in late April, which means that US backers are likely to get them in early May, and folks outside the US, later in May.

Fortunately, we are not expecting any further delays. I am told to remind everyone that TTRPG Kickstarters routinely blow their estimates by over a year, so I should not beat myself up over a two-month delay.

That said, please accept my apologies for the delays. We want to make sure you get high-quality books with all the planned bells and whistles as soon as possible. Thank you very much for your patience. Hopefully the hundreds of pages of beautifully designed and illustrated PDFs are giving y’all something to enjoy with your gaming groups in the meantime!

As ever, everyone is welcome to join us on Discord and play some games! We continue to offer fairly regular intro games. Major thanks to our GM-mods, Ben, Jedd, and Jesse!

Merch   

At the same time that we’ve actually-final-for-real-finalized the books, we have been busy moving all merch items from the design stage to full-on production. Many thanks to Sunaree Paiwong for her continued design leadership here.  

Cards – We have text for all cards (and many alts) and are now developing final designs as well as some new archaetech art. Of course, encounters will draw upon the amazing work of Ethan Gould and others! Stay tuned for sneak peeks of cards as we get a bit further ahead with them.

Shirts – We have priced out both shirts with three vendors and made final calls! They’re being printed now. We found a great local shirt vendor who we'll use going forward. Sneak peeks to come.

Pins – We have been working with our pin vendor to finalize these, and they’re now being produced! Heads-up: in proofing these, we learned that the hard enamel process smooshes down too much on thin lines, making them too big and rendering illegible the spaces between—that is, altering our game’s logo and diegetic alter-company logo! What’s more, the rich black color in our logos is not possible in hard enamel. Thus, since we can’t preserve the designs in hard enamel, we’re going with soft enamel and black dye. This costs the same, so there’s no need to do anything. The pins will still look excellent—which is what matters most to us, in the end. They’ll just have a slight texture, as opposed to being flat. Of course feel free to reach out to me with questions.

Dice – The amazing Mardikas is making these dice by hand right now. They even feature the Stillfleet logo now! In addition to those sold on BackerKit, we have a very limited number of version-one porcelain dice sets (d6 to d12) to sell at conventions this year. That said, we hope to work with Mardikas again in 2023. With two more books in the works, all we can say now is—if you like dice, let us know!

Note, we pre-sold a set containing only four dice: one d6, one d8, one d10 and one d12. We didn't know at that time if a d20 and a d30 would even be possible to make in porcelain. For future sets, we'll sell all of the dice (maybe even a d4?).

(Further note, some of y’all have asked for non-Euclidean and/or eldritch dice: while we fully support innovation in the crafting of resources for indie TTRPGs, we have no plan to summon an Escheresque dicemaker ourselves, at least not in 2023.)  

Art prints – Ethan is ordering proofs of these now, and then we’ll print the run for you. We’ll order just a few extra to sell this year, but ultimately this is a limited run, printed under the supervision of the artist himself!  

The future

In addition to the books and merch we announced in 2022, we’re continuing to pursue a number of other existing and new projects. I’ll share major news when I can. For now, just a few quick teases…

Mini-ventures – We're about to publish MV number 4! We're already moving MV number 5, by a guest writer, into layout. And we are going to keep the mini-venture magic going in 2023, bringing the Grit System rules into fantasy settings… (Do y'all like fantasy games, too?)

Recruitr / Interviewr – If you haven't, check out our random character creator by the talented Aaron H.! He's currently working on a non-random version, which patrons will get to access early and in full.

New license soon / SRD to come – We definitely want to keep our license updated and supply an SRD with the Grit System rules. The latter is taking longer than we'd planned, but it will happen.

VTT platforms – We're looking into them. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to everyone who has supported the game. Happy playing!

Final digital book files—headed your way!
over 1 year ago – Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 10:34:17 PM

Dear backers, first of all—happy solstice/winter holidays/and impending new year! We hope you are warm (or, if in the Southern Hemisphere, cool) and enjoying some quality time with family and friends.

In line with various traditions of giving gifts around this time of year, we are also proud to announce that—after some minor delays due to personal matters—we have finally shipped the print files for the Stillfleet Core Rulebook and The Rain Thieves off to our publisher! We will have an update regarding printing and shipping times for you soon. Realistically, physical books are coming a month late, and for this we apologize.

Throughout this process, we have learned quite a lot about last-mile issues that arise when bookmaking, including just how hard it is to catch all typos in a 352-page book (plus another, 100-page book), even with multiple editors. In any event, thank you for your patience. We really hope you enjoy these books, and that we are able to bring to life a few more in 2023.

Of course, the fact that we’re sending off final print files means that we are also shipping PDFs to you, via BackerKit!

Finally, we are also closing our BackerKit pre-order store and adding the PDFs of the books to our stores on Itch.io and DTRPG. If you know anyone who missed the Kickstarter campaign and BackerKit store but wants to pick up the books, they will be able to purchase PDFs at retail prices.

We’ll also create some community copies, and we’ll add more community copies over time as we sell more books. (In general, if you want to play the game but have any questions about access/getting started, just DM Wythe here or on Discord!)

Thanks to everyone who has backed and otherwise supported the game for your patience. We hope to play with you soon!

And of course, to round things out, enjoy some random images from the CRB:

We're finally charging cards on BackerKit + dummy books!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Dec 07, 2022 at 02:42:41 PM

Hi all, very short update: we are so close. We are going to charge any uncharged cards and start the official printing process.

In fact, we have already received dummies from the printer. These are unprinted (blank) versions that show us what our books will feel like, how large they'll be, and how much they'll weigh. The matte (Commonwealth: matt) covers and interiors feel just lovely! The books lay flat without cracking their spines. We're completely pleased and just can't wait to submit the final interiors, patterned ends, and covers and start the not-blank proofing process.

In the meantime, we are going to charge cards over on BackerKit. If you have any questions, please DM me. We'll re-confirm addresses when books and merch are ready to ship to you.

FYI, at this point, we are a couple of weeks late in the printing process. This is purely a product of last-mile editing, design, and illustration. 99% of the work is done, and we are committed to getting PDFs to you soon—very soon! But the print versions will arrive at least 2 weeks later than originally anticipated. I'll update everyone as we submit final files and confirm the digital fulfillment process, then finalize all merch, then start shipping...

More on everything soon (including another mini-venture). Thank you!

Reminder: surveys are closing!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 05:53:11 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.