David Blandy

CREATOR

about 1 month ago

Project Update: The voyage continues

Hey backers!

David & Dan here, with a personal message from Zedeck below, outlining a few changes we have had to make.

Sailing between the Islands of Weirdhope

Islands of Weirdhope is going to be with us soon. We have been working on it non-stop this year to make it bigger and better than anything we have done before, alongside trying to survive in this increasingly mad, rapidly heating world… we hope it will be worth the wait for you. Not long now!

Here's a quick summary of what's changed:

Zedeck's new adventure for Four Fathoms Deep has been forgone so that he could focus on editing the core book, which now has twice as much content than anticipated (his previous adventure, To Put Away A Sword, will be bundled free with every copy as a token of recompense)
The Pirate-overrun Dino Land stretch goal has been replaced with the Blackrock stretch goal (an imprisoned Monster needs help to escape)
The Mecha & Monster illustration stretch goal has been redirected into the fully illustrated bestiary stretch goal, as the 36 creatures will be more useful in play
The GM Screen has changed from a single screen to a bundle of three card-folding-screens

We go into the reasons for each below. We're sorry for these changes, but we hope you'll understand and be as excited as we are for what's coming!

Why we’ve made these decisions

It's been a joy working on the core book. Together, each of us, Dan, David and Zedeck, have brought out and refined so many elements, making it something we're now really proud of. As of today, it's gone to print, and work on finessing the layout for Four Fathoms Deep is in progress.

The production of a creative work is never straightforward. Certain things that made sense during the campaign felt less important as we built the book. The Pirate-overrun Dino Land stretch goal felt less connected to the rest of the world than the trapped monster of Blackrock. Including it means the main book now contains a mini-campaign with Zedeck's fingerprints all over it. We also had a stretch goal for illustrations of multiple Mecha and Monsters, but a fully illustrated bestiary felt more vital to the book's usability at the table, so that's the direction we went. We hope you can see these choices have made the book more useful, and a better work for you overall.

The current word count of the five adventures in Four Fathoms Deep is a mighty 21,664, and each establishes a different aspect of the Weirdhope world:

Leo Hunt has written The Wreck of the Katabasis, a whalefall-crawl through the carcass of a recently deceased leviathan, delving into the mythological Abyss hinted at in the main book.
Chris Air has written Children of Thalassa, a corporate aerostat facility housed in a dormant Titan's body, stressing the weird in Weirdhope.
Alexander Jatscha-Zelt has written Neptun's Heartstone, an adventure landscape in the floating ruins of a fallen sky fortress, where three factions struggle over what to do with the fading levitation crystal within the machinery.
Will Purves (Dodocahedron Games) has written Quick Winds & A Quiet Palette, where rival artists race island to island, risking dangerous crossings to create visionary works in the wilds of the Weirdhope Sea, as an ancient Monster and AI Mecha threaten to combine.
Amanda Lee Franck has written Mobile Resource Extraction Plant, where a rickety mobile resource extraction plant has inadvertently gathered a collection of people, animals, and junk in its interior.

Even without Zedeck's adventure, we hope you'll agree this is quite a compendium. To make up for it, we'll bundle a copy of Zedeck's previous adventure, To Put Away A Sword, with every copy of Four Fathoms Deep, and share the PDF with all backers.

Finally, the plan for our GM screen has changed. Despite exhaustive research, we haven't been able to find a reasonable supplier after our original one fell through, so each backer who ordered a GM Screen will instead receive a set of three card-folding-screens, each with different full-colour art on one side, and a plethora of useful tables and diagrams on the reverse. They're a little thinner than a traditional GM screen, but still beautiful, free-standing, hide your notes from players, and set the scene for play. We hope you'll accept and understand this compromise.

A personal message from Zedeck

I was originally brought onto the Islands of Weirdhope project to write a 4000-word adventure for “Four Fathoms Deep”, its companion adventure anthology. I was also hired to edit the main Islands of Weirdhope manuscript, in both developmental and copyediting capacities.

At the beginning of the project / the crowdfunding campaign, Islands of Weirdhope was envisioned as a 20,000-word text, thereabouts. But, as these things go, the book expanded in its writing.

With all the rules, systems, a titanic amount of random tables, an atlas of evocative images, and a full starter adventure campaign spanning multiple islands and two full dungeons, the final Islands of Weirdhope manuscript clocks in at 40,000++ words (!!!).

This is a special book and David and Daniel have made something full of Essence, deserving of Gaia’s grace.

However, the added bounty isn’t without cost. David and I had to have some serious conversations. Given that:

The core book—at its new, expanded size—was completed before I could begin work on my adventure;
Nothing in it is superfluous enough to excise, and making sure everything is good and polished is a priority;
Editing the book proved to be an exhaustive task, and while I am very detail-fixated this also means I work slow as hell

We’ve come to the decision to forgo my adventure for Four Fathoms Deep. For what it’s worth, I do genuinely believe the Islands of Weirdhope core book has a lot of me in it (the captured kaiju in the starter adventure has my heart, for eg). Hopefully this is enough. Am truly sorry, all.

With all that out of the way, we’re so excited to get this work into your hands. It’s been all-consuming over the last year, but we hope that you can see where all that effort has gone.

Thanks again for all your support,

David, Dan and Zedeck

3

Share

Edit