Nightmare Fuel is Coming in October...more monsters!
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 09:22:28 PM
In October, three new bestiary volumes launch for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG on Backerkit Crowdfunding! Gaming Ballistic is pleased to announce the Nightmare Fuel crowdfunding campaign!
Why Did it Have to Be Snakes?
Always a classic. From the powerful spawn of the World Serpent Jörmungandr to the mythical hydra. The flying coatl and the (totally not a) medusa. These legendary creatures come in all sorts of sizes, ready to crush, envenom, and petrify delvers. Or swallow them whole.
Now we know why it had to be snakes! How could it be anything else?
Really Big Bugs
What's more terrifyingly awesome than a swarm of insects? A plague of giant, man-eating insects. From giant ants to ant-men. Scorpions both swarmed and super-sized. And spiders, of course. From ancient near-gods (who are absolutely not spawns of Ungoliant) to baby acid spiders. Does it sting, bite, enweb, or just look creepy?
This book is a straight-up catalog of crawling horror – at least 32 different insects, arthropods, and near-human (-ish? -oid?) creatures, ready to play.
Feed Me, Seymour!
Sometimes, it's the scenery that's out to kill you. From awakened trees, and a shrubbery that brings you where it wants, to things that are definitely not ents. From literature and legend, a host of vegetative monstrosities populate this short volume.
Sixteen different flavors of plant monster. Sing it with me: Delvers sure look like plant food to me!
The Books
These three volumes are targeted as follows:
- Serpents of Legend. 40 pages.
- The Bugstiary. 36 pages.
- Garden of Evil. 20 pages.
There will be a limited number of pledges that include hardcover versions of the original Nordlondr Bestiary. The campaign launches on October 13. Follow the campaign to see how it's progressing, hear about stretch goals as they're revealed, and spread the word!
Nordlond and More
In addition to the Bestiary, Gaming Ballistic also offers the Delvers to Grow character generation quick-start, five ready-to-run adventures, and rules supplements. Check them out on the Gaming Ballistic Shopify Store, or pick them up during the campaign!
Please Follow the Campaign
If more (and more, and more...) full-color monster books are of interest, please sign up to be notified at the landing page. The campaign is scheduled to launch in mid-October, and should last through early November.
Let me know when the nightmare begins!
Shipping Over-runs (By Request, I swear)
almost 2 years ago
– Sat, Jul 09, 2022 at 06:41:16 PM
So, I want to preface this that I'm doing this by request from some of you.
The domestic shipping bill came in, and it was nearly $2,500 more than I was expecting. I got some data from my fulfillment partners, and mapped it out.
I did a bit of Solver work, because of course I did, and it seems like for pledge levels from $65 to $125, the typical overage was about $6. Only a few dollars per package, but you can see that the two most common pledge levels (Bestiary only and Bestiary plus cards) accounted for the lion's share of the delta. The rest is, in fact, pretty ignorable, especially on the Nordlond to Go and I Want it All levels. Those were all spendy enough that eating $10-13 in shipping was part of the plan.
I remember trying to account for the "flat fees" for box and handling as we set up the shipping rates, so the delta is probably a combination of "per item pick fees" (though this is zero on the book-only stuff) and what seems to be a roughly 50% (!!) increase in the actual postage rate from when I entered the values to when it was actually shipped.
I'm sure everyone here shares my painful memories of the delays in getting the books here, and delays in arrival led to increases in postage, it seems.
Several folks have messaged me on Facebook or Discord and asked if they can make a donation or cover the shipping increases somehow. For those that wish to, here's a PayPal.me link. I'm not asking for it...but I will accept it.
Backerkit now has a method in place to charge shipping nearly at the last moment before product goes out. I'm chatting with them (a lot) to see if they can do this even better in the future, but painful, horrible shipping is in the cards for a while. Phil Reed, CEO of SJGames, noted in a reply to me on Facebook that his shipping cost per game to get boxes overseas cost more than the game itself.
So I'm ... less depressed? ... about being so egregiously far over the estimates in the future. But it's hard to say. All in all, it cost me $9,000 to print the books and cards for this project, and over $11,000 to move them around the planet to backers. That seems typical for the day, but wow, that's some brutal resource allocation.
Last Call: Download files, contact me if your books aren't here yet
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 11:10:47 PM
Well, I think we're done here.
I'm sending this out now, but THIS FRIDAY I will close down the Backerkit.
If you haven't received your stuff from this project by now, contact me on my Discord or by email, and we'll see what we can do.
Thanks to all who made this project so successful, and I look forward to returning to this concept in the future. Already I've got two small bestiary-style projects in the works by new authors, and I'm definitely interested in another large-scale project like this one in the future.
Resent Tracking information for Stragglers
almost 2 years ago
– Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 05:21:49 PM
Don't worry...we're not sending duplicate books.
I had been receiving a reasonable number of requests for "where's my book" combined with "oh, mine showed up out of the blue!"
This indicated to me that tracking information got lost along the way, so I asked Flying Cloud to re-send it. So even I got an email saying that 144 Bestiary copies were now on their way to me.
So, if you have your stuff already, awesome. Ignore the info.
But if you don't, now you have the wherewithal to find out where it is.
Back from Vacation, Books Arriving!
almost 2 years ago
– Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 05:35:20 PM
I came home from vacation to find 142 copies of the Bestiary neatly piled in my foyer, thanks to some friends. I also see continued updates on FB, Twitter, and other forums that the Bestiaries are arriving.
I do have tracking numbers for every domestic order. That being said, I would give it until, say, the end of June before worrying that your order has been waylaid or lost. After that point, if folks want to contact me via email at gamingballisticllc at gmail dot com I will happily look up your tracking number and let you know where your books are.
Thus far, they seem to have been arriving in good health, so that's good news.
