I've updated the Interloper PDF files using a lot of your great feedback and sent the final draft out to all campaign and late backers emails via Backerkit. (Linked again here in update for those who can access it. )
The files are also accepted at the printers and out contact at Jostens let us know that print copies will be coming off the presses and shipping out to Space Penguin Ink by 4/29, possibly earlier. After they arrive we'll start shipping all of these books to your doors.
It's been a long time shepherding Interloper to completion and I want to thank you again for helping to make it possible.
Also I wanted to let you know about our new RPG adventure book launching April 21st-- Citadel of the Sun Kings.
It's an excellent sandbox desert adventure for Old School Essentials by Micheal A. Curtis with cover art and additional illustrations by Logan Stahl. And the final manuscript is already 100% complete!
Beyond the walled town of Najad lies the Red Wastes: a wild region of blazing sun and shifting sands, scattered with ruins of empires long turned to dust. Within these sun-scorched lands, whispers speak of a golden citadel rising from the dunes: the last redoubt of the Sun-Kings, a place of treasure and terror, guarded by the remnants of elder powers.
• Najad: A caravan town brimming with intrigue, shifting loyalties, and dangerous opportunity. • The Red Wastes: A wild expanse of mythical strangeness filled with ancient beasts, lost shrines, petrified forests, and hallowed tombs. • Six Dungeons: A flooded cistern inhabited by unlikely residents, a desert ruin filled with traps and snakes, the forgotten sanctum of an oracle, the cyclopean domain of the Iron Behemoth, and the mighty Citadel of the Sun-Kings itself. • Realm Below Night: A sunless underworld of forgotten horrors that allows for fast travel across the desert, assuming you survive the journey. • Discover: 18 new magic items and 13 new monsters. • Flexible Design: Play it as a full campaign or plunder the treasures of the Wastes for your own setting.
I'm super excited to make this post. I just turned in the final main manuscript to Greenspore, and they are working on one final pass of dev edits and then copy and line edits. We'll be holding our editorial committee meeting near the end of April, and the full committee will be as follows:
Violet Ballard (myself)
Greenspore (editor of the book)
Christian Sorrell (MeatCastle Gameware, they did very early dev editing on the project)
Christopher Airiau (a good friend and great designer and editor)
We'll be having a meeting of the minds to look over the completed manuscript at a very high level. We're going to figure out what still needs work before we put in the effort of layout. This team will also meet again once we have completed layout to look at the final book to ensure we are ready to go to print.
Alongside completing the main manuscript, I have also completed the manuscript for the solo prequel adventure, now titled The Halcyon, that will be printed on the sleeve for the vinyl containing music by Anthers and art by Zach Hazard Vaupen. I'm attaching a link to the PDF of this manuscript for backers only that you can play through now. It is an even further stripped down version of the solo gamebook Mothership engine that I developed for Cassette X. This is an emotional, narrative pair of adventures there is not a huge focus on mechanics. We're moving to layout for the vinyl shortly once we finish a few other back projects, so we should be ordering them for manufacturing in May or June.
We’ve got two big progress milestones for this update.
Patch and Tattoo Samples
Our printer mailed us production samples of our two patches and temporary tattoos, and they look great!
We’ll likely remove the small pink stars from the skull design for a cleaner look, as they aren’t very readable in the embroidery, and there’s a color error with the skull’s eye we’ll try to get cleared up. But there shouldn’t be any other changes to these.
The Charon’s Ferry tattoos are big. There’s a lot of fine detail in the artwork that comes out nicely at this size, and we didn’t want to lose that by shrinking it down. So if applying it to the back of your hand, you’ll want to place it a bit higher toward your wrist and away from your knuckles to help keep your skin from pulling it apart more.
Awaiting Digital Proof
We had some additional delays due to a couple of mislabeled templates we were given to rework our margins. That said, the design files have been approved and are being used to make the digital proof right now.
Once we review and approve the digital proof, our printer will make a physical pre-production copy and mail it to us for a final review. When we approve that, we’ll be put into the full production queue.
We should have more of a timeline at that point. We appreciate you all waiting patiently for fulfillment!
Somehow, 10% of you still haven’t filled out your surveys! If that includes you, do that ASAP at http://devils-due.backerkit.com/ or the link BackerKit emailed you. We’ll let you know when we’re getting ready to lock shipping addresses, so if you’re concerned that you might be moving soon or something, don’t worry about that yet.
First and foremost, we have a Backerkit preview of the adventure ready for you! Keep an eye on your Inbox with instructions on how to download it from Backerkit. You should see that come through in the next 24-48 hours.
Please keep in mind, this is a preview; I'm still waiting on a couple more art pieces and some final editing notes but I wanted to get this in your hands for release as soon as possible. The final / v1.0 release will also have corrected cross references and hyperlinking.
Please take some time with it and let me know what you think in the comments. You can also use this form for typos or any other feedback you wish to provide.
Patch Feedback
Additionally, we have a vote coming that I want to get your opinion on. I've already revealed the 48-Hour Bonus Patch that for the Physical and Physical+ Reward Tiers but I want your opinion on the standard patch that comes with the Physical+ Tier. So please keep your eye out for the upcoming Poll on which patch comes with your reward!
– Lone Archivist
PS. I'm so sorry this release has taken so long but I hope that you all enjoy some psychokinetic shenanigans in PK49 and look forward to your feedback!
Looking for some more outlawry? I've teamed up with Josh Domanski of Liminal Horror to co-write Paramour, a heist-or-hunt involving an old flame on an iceball world. This module lands your crew in the frozen heart of La Bohème, a city you loved when you were young. Will your crew help out Cassandra Cross for old time’s sake, or make a play to claim the bounty on her head for yourselves?
In Paramour, return to Slushtown, a fully developed six district city, snowed in due to terraformation failures. Explore the city you once knew, or launch directly into the heist after your ex-lover. The zine features full color illustrations from Not Enough Scoundrels artist, Lur Noise!
The adventure is written for Orbital Blues, a rules-lite sci-fi game easily converted for a Mothership space trucker campaign, or any sf system. You can check out all six sci-fi offerings during Orbital Blues Month!
Happy Tuesday, my friends! We’ve had a busy month, so I thought I’d get you updated on what’s going down at TKG.
First, it’s been great to have you all share in our excitement for Megadamage! We love reading everyone’s comments about their favorite short stories and the eagerness to soon flip through the physical copies. If you didn’t have the chance to back Megadamage, we plan to have it available to purchase from the TKG store at a later date. Stay tuned!
Our printer also sent us new samples of the Wages of Sin Deluxe Version. Check it out!
So
Awesome
The cloth-covered hardback gives a lo-fi aesthetic that will look rad on the shelf in between campaigns. In the case of Wages of Sin, maybe all that glitters is gold after all.
It looks like the Wages of Sin books are still right on schedule for April. Daniel says they are ready to be picked up from the manufacturer and should freight to the warehouse next month! If you have any questions or problems, please reach out to my old pal Tyler at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!
Pre-Update update: Great news, the PDF is nearly finished. It has nearly *doubled* in size from our original projection. We'll be dropping that imminently, ordering books, and shipping ASAP.
Sorry for the late update! Combination of the short month (which always gets me) and a minor family health scare threw off my schedule.
I'm so close to wrapping up layout on the v0.1 draft for PK49. I should have a Backerkit preview draft ready for your eyes within the next few days.
In the meantime, here are some internal spreads to show you what I've been working on as well as Mykell Pledger's amazing character art.
For those of you that aren't aware, this zine has been heavily inspired by the Acid Graphics (or ACD GFX) art scene and design style. So there are going to be lots of beautiful looking spreads to separate the sections of the module and help with wayfinding. Finding a balance between making it look cool and legible and useful has been a task-and-a-half. But I think it's been worth it.
Also, I've gotten several messages outside of Backerkit saying how excited people are for this release so I hope it lives up to the hype. I just want to say a special thank you for the kind words in those messages.
Thank you as always for your support and everlasting patience as I wrap up this project.
Thanks a bunch for your patience. Here is the finalish PDF for Interloper! Hope you enjoy it, should be enough to get your game started if you're looking to be running the mystery module as soon as possible. It's been a while working on this and I'm happy to share it with you.
Bookmarking is still pending but hyperlinks should work.
EDIT: Late pledge backers can't see the link for some reason, but I've just sent this to everyone's email via Backerkit as well.
If you see any typos over the next week, send an email with the typo and page number to [email protected] and we'll work on fixing them in final, final version and send it to the printers.
We have a brief update about progress, we wanted to post this last week, but we missed the end of the short month of February. We continue to work out our style guide, but our biggest progress has been completing the entire script for Amanda's 7 full-spread graphic novel pages that tell the story of the final two weeks of Brianna Pilgrim's life. I'd never written a graphic novel before, only screenplays, ttrpgs, board games, and academic writing. This made me scared of this task, but it was actually a joy to complete once I discovered the manuscript format used by Dark Horse comics. I'm also so happy that I have such a tremendous artist who I trust to adjust blocking and dialog as she illustrates, I trust Amanda's taste immensely.
We are now on track to have the solo prequel adventure done this month, to give everyone something short and playable. We will also start to share PDFs of each level of the station as we complete them, but we will save the final level of the station (there are seven total) and the back half of the campaign for once the book is finalized. We want y'all to be able to see work while still saving some mystery. We also look forward to getting more eyes on each section as we layout because we can make adjustments as we complete the book.
