Upcoming Event - Next Monday (Dec. 8) #beersandboardgames at the Royal Oak

So I'm pretty stoked about our next event. Our friends at Cardboard Kingdom have invited us to run Dungeon World in the Royal Oak pub (188 Bank Street location, Ottawa). They get started around 7PM. You can find more info on the event here of on the Cardboard Kingdom website. We'll have enough decks, character sheets, dice, and crayons to field six tables. In fact we even have the option of a whole table en français (conversation not the characters, sorry). I'll have a quick start tutorial for GMs which I'll run through while the players set up their characters. Tables will have up to 5 players and 1 GM. If you want to try out GMing this is your opportunity. We will set you up. We'll also have several GMs who can help out where needed. All this and we have a cool new pick-up scenario for you to run: Terror in the Swamp!

All of our custom starter scenarios will be available digitally through our Kickstarter campaign. But why wait, come on out and play with us. You know you want to!

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Video!!!

This is the video, remember you are seeing it here first! :-)

This was from one of our earlier attempts.

Next project is to update all the artwork on the kickstarter page. Getting closer!

Art Update

Just a few pieces of art for the project. You might be interested to see where the ideas come from, and what a basic idea sketch looks like. Enjoy!

By the way - if you are a fantasy artist, give us a shout.
We would like to talk to you about using your pieces for our cards.

This is how they all begin. Sharpie on 3x4 index card

Second stage. Inked sketch, scanned and cleaned up

The barbed devil

Blink dogs. Ink sketch

Basic sharpie sketch of a horde of Kobolds

Inked trio of Salamanders

Basic sketch of a Sigben (sp?), a sort of rat-like vampire thrall

Second iteration of the Treant. Still not happy with it

Basic sketch of a Xorn. I like this one

This is the way we're going - acrylic on 80 lb index card

Sample card with pen and ink art - meh

It's not so bad with monochromatic critters like blink dogs

More or less final art for the Treant card

This is the quality of art we would like to see from artists.
Mixed media by Cat Hennessey

New Art

Richard is doing the lion's share of the art for our project. He's actually painting the images then putting them on the computer with the miracle of photography. He starts with sketches in the style we plan to use initially - but our first stretch goal gives us enough to cover the art budget for full colour art for the base deck. At that point full colour art will be the order of the day.

Here are some choice sketches.

Latest Decks Look Great!

We picked up the latest cards this week, I have been cutting the corners (craft tool) for ease of shuffling. I'll have some pictures up soon. All the cards that have art have original art (although some of it is not final art). We have the four utility decks, in fact the useful item and trap decks are quite large - after playtesting we'll leave in only the ones that people really enjoyed. 

If you want to see the cards and you are local - both Richard and I will be at the Geek Market this coming Saturday. Richard will be photographing the cos-players. I'll be talking with artists and showing off our cards. Heck, we might even recruit you to playtest for us! 

Utility Decks

Today we are printing up the most recent iteration of our decks. Included are four utility decks. We've found that the useful item and trap decks are incredibly handy. In fact if you've been at any of our events you might have gone home with a useful item deck. We've gone to great lengths to keep them fiction first and therefore system agnostic. But there is no doubt that they come directly from our play of Dungeon World, but having played many, many different systems I know they will end up on the table there as well.

Our utility decks are simple to use. Pull two cards, using the top from one (usually white) and the bottom from the other (color coded - blue = items, silver = weapons, red = traps, purple = enchantment). So you end up with a Key tied with a golden ribbon or a poisoned potion (trap) of ignobility. Each part has some fiction to get your creative juices flowing. Our two new decks have less refined text - getting them into play will help shape that a bit, and they will not have art yet. Cards where art makes sense will be fully illustrated. This is how they break down:

Useful Items

This set of cards gives you 20 mundane items (we currently have over 30 in our playtest deck and more we'd like to add, more on that later). Additionally there are 20 descriptors that can be combined with the items to give you a huge variety of item possibilities.

Traps

This set of cards gives you 20 different traps. On the bottom of each card is a descriptor to make the trap unique.





Weapons

A third deck of cards gives you 20 different weapons, melee and ranged, and pairs them with descriptors to make each weapon special and memorable to your players. No more troves of longswords - you will be a believer in the power of variety! These cards are new so the descriptions are basic and just waiting for fiction to be added.




Enchantments

Our final new utility deck is a bit different than our other decks. An enchantment is a descriptor that can be added to any item or weapon card. Heck, you could add it to a monster or a trap just as easily as well. Our initial deck has 10 cards, each with two different descriptors. That's 20 seed for building unique magic items!



More...

As the campaign unfolds we fully expect to add more and more utility cards to our decks. We have printed up a pile of blank cards to use as inspiration hits to create new utility cards and get them into play testing as soon as possible.

Additionally we are toying with fiction seeds for failures, boons, and curses. Boons and curses might end up as an addition to the enchantment deck - this is still a work in progress.

Budget Man!

One of the big risks in any campaign is having an adequate budget. There are lots of details and they can add up. We recently had some samples sent from our potential manufacturer and the shipping from China was $150! Unexpected. But it gives us a sense of how much it will cost to get proofs before the cards go to print. I've identified five categories of expenses:

• Art & Design - that is everything from the art we commission to the labour to to layouts in photoshop. 
• Production - what it costs to have the cards printed.
• Import - what it costs to get the printed cards into our hands.
• Fulfillment - what it costs to get the printed cards into your hands.
• Promotion - incidental expenses getting the word out about the campaign

For our initial print run I based the numbers on 500 each of the base (160 card) deck as well as two (60) card decks to account for the utility decks and the additional encounters we want to create. The breakdown looks like this:

Our real goal is a run of 1000 each of the same three decks (and actually an additional deck but at that point the cost difference is negligible). The breakdown looks like this:

Notice that fulfillment goes up but most everything else comes down. That reflects more individual pledges being fulfilled from our end.

I also did one more workup, that is for just a PDF deck. There is some production costs involved but no import required. That breakdown looks like this:

It isn't easy to see from the chart, but the pdf deck is about 1/3rd of the cost of a deck, which is why we can afford to throw in the pdf decks with every physical deck purchase.

Once we have the numbers hammered out we can get back to the fun stuff.

Trap Cards

Like our other utility cards, the top (white) half of the card describes a trap an the bottom (red for traps) is an additional feature that can be added to the trap drawn. Each will have a bit of fiction. However, none of the trap cards are illustrated so far, that will be a later stretch goal to have  then all illustrated. But for sure a few of them will get illustrated along the way. Compare with our illustrated useful item cards.

More Colour Art

Broken World

I just stumbled across this. I love the inventive things people are doing with Dungeon World. If you are wondering why he doesn't just play Apocalypse World read his FAQ.

Getting ready for some Dungeon World tonight

New artwork has arrived from Richard. I'll have to post some soon. I've also finished a redesign of the whole deck so we will put some of the new cards up soon. We are quite happy with the new design and they add the monster names on a side so that the cards can be sorted into the custom boxes nicely. We are about to do another printing of all the monster cards and the two complete utility decks. Probably in a week or so we'll post some pictures of the cards in action even.

On another note - I actually handed in my PhD dissertation yesterday! Frees up a good chunk of time for us. I'm back to teaching this semester but all courses I've taught before so I should have ample time to get our campaign up and running. We also had some ideas about packaging the decks up and we are waiting some pricing information for that. We keep running the numbers because if there is one thing we don't want to mess up it is the funding.

I'll keep you posted. Tonight we play Dungeon World. A few new gamers coming to my table as well, should be fun. What are you doing tonight?

A Little Thing Called Holidays....

Hey all. Just checking in. Both Richard and I have been off on family vacations - he's still away. So things have slowed down to a crawl. I'm looking into alternative fulfillment options trying to make sure we are set up best for a successful delivery cycle. The big concern we have is timely delivery of pdfs. The pdfs will go out before the printed cards and we are looking at a few different files. If you've done this before we'd love to hear your thoughts on what worked and what didn't work well.

In terms of my current work load, I'm knee deep in redoing all the cards still. I had to stop work on that and actually work on a little project I'm almost done - a PhD thesis. I just got back great news from my director, the majority of it is good to go, just some changes with the last chapter and it is a wrap. But I'll try not to let that get in the way of the kickstarter. ;-)

Once the cards are redone we'll see what cards actually still need art. I think a good 1/3rd have final ready art - and that is including a bunch of cards we want to add on as stretch goals! Richard and I are going to be camping (with our families) weekend after this - I'm hoping we'll steal away a bit of time to finalize details either before or after our trip.

First Prototype of THE BOX!

So I showed up at our usual gaming night to find this waiting. It is the first prototype of our box. The artisan whipped this up using scrap pine. We discovered a few problems he'll address in the next prototype - but meanwhile I went home with a pretty sweet home for my encounter cards. The actual box will not be as deep, I have almost three full sets, two utility decks, and my dice in there.

The final product will be amazing! Like the cards.

Dungeon World wins the BGG Best of the RPGs Tournament

Yeah this happened.

Design Update

We've been working on the card design and layout a bit more recently. One of the challenges with the art is making it fit on the cards where the cards have quite a variance in the amount of text they need to accommodate. On the left are the beta cards we've been using in our current prototype decks. On the right is the layout for the same card in the new style. What do you think?




The original cards attempted to imitate the Dungeon World book as closely as possible. I did not want to lose that when we rejigged the cards. However, with the new boxes the cards will be stored on their sides so having the name of the monster duplicated there makes indexing them a breeze. The other addition is a source designation at the bottom left of the card. In this case it says Dungeon World Core.

Here are a few more of the updated cards:

Oh, I did catch and fix the Canadian spelling of armour on the Apocalypse Dragon card. It is now back to Armor so as not to confuse anyone. These images might change again, and if we have our way they will be in full colour (or color for the non-Canucks).

On Set filming the Intro Video

The backdrop was moved from Richard's house to my own. We shot hours of video and hope to have a nice 10 minute promo piece for the site. I'll do some tutorial videos soon as well. Those will just have one actor so they should be much easier to put together.

A Couple Things and check this out....

Just so you know what's happening - I'm frantically finishing the last of my edits for my doctoral thesis. I've gotten my feedback and am able to submit this monster. So I've been a wee bit occupied. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on the campaign.

Tonight we are going to re-shoot our video footage. We will have 4 cameras rolling and a friend of mine, Robert Sykes, is going to come help us get the footage we need. Maybe we are being perfectionists, but I feel that the video is very important.

Speaking of Robert - he is one of the local artisans (and fellow gamers) we've tagged to help us with a very special stretch goal. Our other artisan friend, Etienne Moreau, has spec'd out and designed a wicked awesome custom box for the encounter decks! These boxes will hold a set of everything and have room for some expansion. We are also thinking of a dice/pencil insert so the GM will be able to throw everything in a fancy box. Also the top will open to form a stand for holding cards. It will be beautiful and functional. The style he's proposed is campaign furniture (see image of chest similar to the design he's proposed). He'll be building a prototype before we launch. If we get enough demand we'll have both artisans working on this project (perhaps have two different designs even).

OK one more thing. There is a campaign you should check out. Non-player Character Cards. We love these card projects. I think this would make a great compliment to our Encounter Decks because who doesn't want a more flavour rich gaming experience? Check them out.

Hoping that Third Time is the Charm

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been running numbers, we had a design idea and I want to make sure the numbers jive before we go with it. We've also done two attempts at the video, Richard edited them up, and we need to reshoot it all again. The initial video is so crucial. We have some footage to use for talking about different features of our cards, but we really need a better introduction.

I'll update soon.

Video is Hard - Making Cards is Easy (in comparison)

We redid our video tonight. Well the first part of it. Our first attempt was good, but even edited down we had 19 minutes of material, some of which needed to be broken into short tutorials on features of our decks. I'll post some out-takes when we've gotten a chance to put that together. The other problem with our first attempt was Richard's sunburn. He looked like a lobster. He's still a bit red, but not near as bad.

In our new video we focus on what we need funding for and what you get for funding our project.

Why we need funding:

• great art costs money, and we want great art on these cards.
• production and shipping are our biggest expenses. By having pre-paid pre-orders (essentially what Kickstarter gives us) we can deal with a printer who specializes in card printing and use the savings to add more cards and more perks!
• playtesting costs money. We've printed several iterations of our cards now, and distributed them at our own expense. We need to do this to make sure our product is awesome.

What you can get from funding this project:

• for $1 you get on the mailing list so that you can follow our project and show your support. This option also gets you in for certain add-ons later.
• for $10 you get everything we produce (cards and adventure seeds) in PDF. We call it the no-BS PDF plan. 
• and we'll have early bird buy-ins for great deals on the card decks - in lots of combinations so you get exactly the cards you want. 
• we'll also have shirts (I'm going to put up some images of the shirts we have planned - very cool).
• we'll have opportunities for you to help playtest our decks as well as create your own cards by working with our design teams
• we are hoping to hit the stretch goals that let us go ahead with developing an app version of our decks for your mobile devices.
• and finally we'll have opportunities to get some custom art from great local artists.

There are really lots of great options we want to put out there.

Each of these options adds a bit of complexity to the project. But we think it is worth it, and that is why we are not rushing to Kickstart the project until we have all the details worked out.

It's going to be awesome!

Final Video Shoot

Spent the evening shooting video for our campaign. Both Richard and I have had a tonne of work and life stuff lately, so this has been a long time coming. I'm hoping he'll have the editing done in a week or so. We decided that August is probably the best time to run our campaign. We'll be back from vacations and all that good stuff. We want to make sure we carve out the whole campaign time because we have a tonne of stretch goals we want to add.

Soon as I get some images from the video I'll post them for you to see.

One other really fun thing we have been working on is designing a t-shirt for the campaign. We are probably going to have two designs - both with the monster coming right off the card! The mock ups looked awesome and we'll try to put up the designs when we have them close to final. So much to do, but this campaign is going to be awesome!

Mailing List

We are getting closer!

One of the things that makes a kickstarter campaign exciting is being able to offer some really kick-ass early adopter deals. I'll post some of the details here soon. But you will want to make sure that when we launch you know right away. 

So here is what you should do. 

We've set up encountercards @ gmail.com as a dedicated email addy for the cards. Simply send us an email saying you want to know when we launch and as soon as the campaign goes live we'll fire an email right back at you. This list will be used once, and only once, to inform you that we've gone live. In fact I'll delete the list right after (sending the email as a blind carbon copy to each of you) it is sent. After that your support of the campaign and this blog will be your points of contact to see how things are progressing - with no pestering from us. 

Next post will include several of our support levels to give you a good sense of what kind of savings we hope to pass on to you via kickstarter. Note that we are likely using a print-on-demand as a way to make these cards available after the campaign - that means the price will probably double when our stock is depleted. Print-on-demand means we don't have tonnes of stock in our basements, you can still get beautiful cards, but it comes at a premium. 

BTW I just showed off the cards to folks in St. Catherines and friends from Cambridge (ON) and the response was enthusiastic! We can't wait to get these cards in your hands improving your gaming experience. 

Soon.

CanGames and the Card Backs

CanGames was so much fun. I'm preparing for an academic conference this coming weekend, so it was a great break from the running around I'm doing right now. I ran two full games of Dungeon World using a starter (seed) scenario I wrote for the convention. We also had the latest base Encounter Deck and Useful Item Deck - printed on almost the final thickness (quality) of card stock, new backs and rounded edges (thankfully the final cards will have this done by machine instead of me using my wife's scrap booking tools!). Boy do they look sharp.

The players that came out seemed to really enjoy themselves. It was a good mix of serious and hilarious. Thank you all who came and made some memorable moments. Lily the bard in her Daisy Dukes using the power of interpretive dance still makes me chuckle. And Augustine the Paladin - you were so noble, even when the skeletal dragon had you in its mouth! Spoony the Thief, your "guys, I think I've become a vampire!" was priceless. So many great moments. We are hoping to run a few more sessions around town and all the places our summer travels take us this year.

This is the latest card back (left) we are using. It will probably get tweaked, but the cards looked a lot more professional than our original card back (which was something I threw together quickly anyway). My absolute favourite card right now is the zombie card (right). When we get funding our priority will be to make sure the art on the cards rocks!

Speaking of which, we were hoping to launch, but the reality is we are waiting on a few details (one is we're getting a developer friend to price out creating an Encounter Deck app!) so that we can make sure that we don't lose our shirts but give you the best deal we can as funding partners in this project. It is also slower because we are being very careful as to what capital we lay out before we have funding secured. We are passionate about making something that will actually enhance your gaming experience.

When I'm back, week after next, I will set up an opt-in email list which we promise will be used only once - to send you a notification when the Kickstarter goes live. We are going to have some amazing early supporter deals. You will not want to miss those.

Frank

More than a Little Excited!

So Richard handed me the latest cards. They include all the custom art to date and a full set of revamped Item Cards! They look really good. The paper is 100lb, which is closer to the 140lb paper the actual cards will be on. He also made a great promo card for us to give out at CanGames. I'm including a sneak peak. If you show up for our games you will get a Basic Moves sheet (on really nice card stock), a character sheet, and because I have a couple full sets of item cards - we'll dice off at the end for someone to take the latest beta item card deck home! I can do this because they only contain art we've created (unlike most of the beta monster cards). The Item Cards are system agnostic, will work with any fantasy RPG. I think you are going to like them.

Next week I'll set up an opt in email list here at the blog - it will be for a one time future mailing. That mailing will simply be to announce the launched kickstarter so you can get there for the limited early backer levels. We have some nice ones planned.

Enjoy the promo card, come see us at CanGames to get one, complete with the latest card back.

Art from Cat Hennessey and CanGames Weekend

One of the things Richard has been working on is making sure that we have enough artistic support for when you support us into making all kinds of great expansions to the encounter decks! We've purchased some amazing art from local artist (and cosplayer!) Cat Hennessey. Here is a sample.

We are also working hard to get ourselves ready for CanGames this coming weekend. So excited to show off the cards in our custom scenario. We'll have the latest printed and ready for use this week. If you are in the Ottawa area, why not come and see us there. In addition to running games on Saturday and Sunday, Richard and I will be on hand all Sunday to answer questions and show off the latest cards. Come see us!

Because we want to do this right, we are delaying the launch until June. We wanted to launch our campaign this week, but we still have a few ducks to line up. But things are coming together. Hopefully we'll have a new improved card back to show you soon too.