Hello friends, big milestone in production today: The books are printed and on their way to our fulfillment warehouse.

What this means for you:

We will be locking all orders this Sunday, September 24th. If there is anything you want to add-on (jumpstart folios, an extra copy of the hardcover) please do so as soon as possible.

As mentioned during the campaign, we will assess shipping charges once orders are locked. You will see an additional charge to your card. Please make sure your payment method is current.

Shipping to the US is around $10. For all other countries we ship to, the costs range from $16 to $42 depending what's in your particular order and where it's going.

Finally, please make sure your address is up to date. Our warehouse still has to set up their fulfillment line for this project but once they do, they work through orders very quickly. Help us make sure your game books get to the right location the first time.

All of this can be managed by logging in to (or retrieving) your BackerKit survey at https://girl-by-moonlight.backerkit.com/ You will also receive a reminder email from BackerKit tomorrow when we pull the magic lever to kick this whole process off.

It's been a delightful journey putting this game into the world and we're excited for you to finally hold Girl By Moonlight in your hands.

Our Next Crowdfunding Effort: Deathmatch Island

Deathmatch Island is a fast-paced roleplaying game about a deadly gameshow on a chain of mysterious islands. If you're a fan of Squid Game, Severance, Battle Royale, Control, or messed up Reality TV, you're going to enjoy Deathmatch Island.

Designer Tim Denee puts a striking spin on the PARAGON game engine in this fast, flexible RPG that explores corporate dystopia, paranoia as a tool of control, and competitive survival as entertainment.

Crowdfunding begins on October 17th. Reserve your place on ISLAND ONE now.

Sign up for the Launch notification and get immediate, exclusive access to the Deathmatch Island Staff Orientation Guide.

Sign up here.

Hey friends, it's been quiet for a couple weeks here as we've been working behind the scenes but we're ready to pull the switch on BackerKit from "Crowdfunding Mode" to "Pledge Management Mode." Here's what you can expect in the next couple days:

That covers the basics of moving into Pledge Management mode. In a few months, as we get closer to having things finalized and ready for delivery, we will lock orders and charge cards, and update your Digital Rewards page with links to PDFs, Roll20 redemption codes, etc. Shipping on physical goods will be charged later. 

We're making steady progress and the project is on track. Here's a few snapshots of the preliminary proofs we got from the printer:

And just a reminder that the stretch goals for the Zine By Moonlight will be produced and delivered separately. They will not be in the book, they will not be delivered when the final PDF drops, they will be delivered as they are completed. We are not holding up production of the core game to gather all the contributions from our 40 different stretch goal contributors. We also want to give them time to turn in something great!

And finally... A Note About Add-ons
The short version is: If you pledged for a digital-only tier, you can only add digital items to your pledge.  If you pledged for a physical tier (like Hardcover + PDF) you can add any reward to your pledge. Mostly this is due to the fact that we don't ship worldwide and the shipping destination is only screened if we're expecting to actually ship you a book.

Good news: If you pledged for the PDF Only tier and now want a physical book, you still can get one!  (Caveat being: you reside in one of the countries we ship to: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, Ireland, or Norway.)

Upgrading from digital-only to a physical reward can be done when you get your survey. When you start the survey, the first form will contain a drop-down box showing whether you have a Digital-Only or Physical Reward coming. If you want to upgrade from Digital to Physical, you switch the option in that drop-down box, it credits you for the money we've already collected and then you go on to pick whatever Physical tier you want. We'll be happy to walk you through the finer details of that once surveys have gone out.

Long update, but we had important information to share and we're trying to anticipate as many questions as we can.

Thanks for your time and attention. Look for your BackerKit survey soon!

Wow. We started with a modest goal of $30,000 and one month later, when it's all said and done, 5,486 of you raised over $266,000.

We are so grateful for the massive showing of support.  This has been our third-largest crowdfunding campaign, next to Thirsty Sword Lesbians and the original Fate Core effort which we launched a decade ago. Thank you for stepping up and sharing your passion and hard-earned dollars for Girl By Moonlight. It's been an amazing 30 days.

And if for some reason you're getting this update and missed the campaign, never fear - we'll open BackerKit up to pre-orders here soon and you'll be able to get in on the full menu of rewards we've had on offer throughout the campaign.

What Happens Next

Most of the next steps happen behind the scenes. BackerKit will process pledges and transfer the initial funds to us. (If you missed out on an add-on or want to upgrade your pledge, don't worry - that will be possible when we shift into Pledge Manager mode.)

On our side, the book is text complete and the final art has been sourced. So while there's still a bit of work to be done, in very short order we'll be gearing up to start the back-and-forth process of submitting print files, reviewing galleys, etc.

If you've never backed an Evil Hat crowdfunding campaign, we do our best to deliver on time or ahead of time.

Our most recent crowdfunding effort, Monster of the Week: Codex of Worlds, funded in March, was scheduled to deliver in September 2023, and will begin fulfillment for backers on July 10th. That's at least 2 full months ahead of schedule. So while delivery of Girl By Moonlight is set for January of 2024, we're hopeful that (barring supply chain disruptions, printer meltdowns, or extradimensional invaders) we get your books and other rewards out before then.

We'll keep you updated here along the way. In the meantime, you still have the text-complete rules PDF and access to the Roll20 Quickstart (and Roll20 character sheets). You're ready to begin your Magical Girl adventures right now.

In terms of the stretch goals that make up the Zine By Moonlight, the work on those is just beginning. Shortly we'll be sending out final contracts and setting up the tools to create the many different eclectic pieces of Magical Girl inspiration from our talented roster of contributors.

A quick reminder: the stretch goals will be delivered separately from the physical book. We don't have definitive dates for them, but we'll likely release them in batches as they are complete. The intended format is one PDF you can print at home (or at your local copy shop). We're still ironing out the details on that one. But they will in no way hinder the work on creating your rewards.

Thank You

We've never published a game quite like Girl By Moonlight, and right out of the gate you blew away all our expectations. Quite frankly, we ran out of reasonable stretch goals we could confidently deliver - and we had a pretty big list of contributors on board in the first place! To see the outpouring of passion and excitement for this innovative, transcendent, and very queer game has been humbling. We were especially touched by all the press interviews, podcast pieces, and social media love this project got.

On behalf of Andrew and the whole team at Evil Hat, thank you. We are very, very grateful for your support.

With two and half days left to go in the campaign we've crossed 4500+ backers and raised over $225k! At this point all stretch goals have been unlocked and now is the best time to finalize your pledge.

As we tick down to the final hours of the crowdfunding phase, take this opportunity to consider upgrading to the Limited Edition cover, one of the Bundles, or just adding an extra book to your pledge. This won't be your last chance - you will still be able to do add-ons once we shift into the pledge manager - it's just your best option.

Thanks for all the continued support and remind your friends to get in before the campaign ends on Thursday, June 22nd at 8pm PT.

And now we turn it over to Andrew for another Design Diary, this time focused on the various audiences they hope to reach with Girl By Moonlight.

Who is Girl by Moonlight for?

There are some very self-evident answers to this question. GBM is for fellow queer and trans people, for whom its symbolism of transformation and embodiment will resonate with experiences of coming out, fluidity, and embrace of the self long denied.

In getting into all of that, it’s a game that is reflective of my own queer experience, and those themes are as fundamental to the game as its rules and systems. There are ways in which the rules and systems are queer, for that matter. It goes beyond aesthetics, into design practice, and the structure of the game.

One part of the player agenda in GBM is to see things through a queer lens, and in there I say “This queer lens extends beyond identity—ways of being—to include ways of acting, and seeing.” For me it runs deep into the core of the game, in how it imagines adversity, frames possibilities, and operates moment to moment. The protagonists are not just queer in their identities, they are queering the world through their actions. 

I also like to think that the game is for folks who are really into Blades in the Dark. 

Players going from Blades to GBM will have a lot of fun experiencing all the differences, big and small, that distinguish the two. Hacks, like mashups in music, re-contextualize and energize the works they combine. You hear the new thing, and it makes you want to revisit the established thing, and you see that in a new light when you go back to it. In that way GBM is a love letter to Blades in the Dark, and Monsterhearts.

I’m very pleased with the hacking and remixing of Blades that I’ve done in GBM, and I think there are some useful insights for enthusiasts and designers. I learned a great deal about Blades while fiddling with it, breaking it, and repurposing its pieces. It feels important to put this back into the design continuum from which it was made, and keep the cycle of design, remix, re-imagine turning.

So it’s my hope that GBM might break out of its niche a little bit as it makes its way out into the world.  I worked real hard on it, and I think it has some valuable things to add to the broader TTRPG space (I would not have published it if I didn’t think that, I suppose). That said, if it resonates with other queer and trans folks, I’m happy. It’s for that community first and foremost, even if other folks are invited too. 

-Andrew

Today marks week 3 of the campaign. We've crossed over $200,000 and unlocked all four achievements to bump up our core book contributors' pay!  That means we'll be doubling the money promised for their hard work. Thank you for enabling us to reach this milestone.

With just 9 days left, it's time to rally your friends to get on board and share the excitement for Girl By Moonlight.

In line with that train of thought, here's a roundup of links to recent interviews, actual plays, and more:

So if you're not already busy planning your new Girl By Moonlight series, there's plenty of inside insight about the game you can delve into. (And we didn't even mention the previous articles and interviews we highlighted in Update 3!)

The support for this game has been truly astonishing. Thank you. We hope you're having fun reading the backer PDF and will share the campaign with your friends as we surge ever higher toward the end of the crowdfunding phase!

While the pledge train keeps rolling (our core book contributors are getting a 50% pay raise, with another bump firmly in sight at $190k!) we'd like to take a pause here and share some design insights from Andrew. Today's topic: the role of promises in the game.

We'll let Andrew take it from here:

Given that a crowdfunding campaign is a promise of its own, I thought I might talk about promises in Girl by Moonlight. Promises are defined thusly in the book:

A promise is an in-character statement, a belief about something you will do (or will never do) because of how you feel about another character. These promises aren’t necessarily something your character has ever said out loud—at least not to the other character—but they are conscious beliefs that guide their actions.

I was short a couple ways to give the protagonists XP, having pulled some bits out of Blades In The Dark. I loved the XP prompt “You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session” and wanted something similar in Girl By Moonlight, but I didn’t have Trauma, or anything really analogous to it. 

So after some iteration I came into this idea of a connective element between protagonists, something with intention and hope behind it: Promises.

Each playbook has two Promise prompts, and protagonists are expected to have each filled out, connecting their character to two other protagonists. So immediately we get the much celebrated relationship triangle, with not only some detail of the connections, but asymmetry, and intent in there as well.

Writing good Promises is a skill, and it can be difficult at first, especially with limited context to write them in. The good news is that bad Promises won’t get in the way of play, and over time you can hone in on who your character is, and what they want for the other protagonists, and then change your Promises accordingly.

My hope with this element of the game is that it will drive the protagonists to think about each other, and how they all interlock as pieces of the larger narrative. The group is the primary unit in play, so having fruitful group dynamics, internal tensions etc is essential.

It’s something that I think is a good play habit in any game, really, and a natural extension of ideas like ‘be a fan of the other players’. It’s one of the many places in GBM where you can see my thoughts and opinions about roleplaying come through. And since I wrote the rules, I get to insist that other folks try it out.

-Andrew

Hello friends - all 3000+ of you!!

We had high hopes for this project but with over $155,000 raised, these last three days have absolutely overwhelmed our expectations. On behalf of Andrew, the many contributors, and the whole team here at Evil Hat: thank you!

Obviously, we're not going to drown in you Updates every time an achievement is unlocked. Suffice to say, within the first week of the campaign you've funded all ten Zine By Moonlight issues. That's essays, fiction, and art from 40 different creators.

Reminder: these zines will be released as individual PDFs, with pieces bundled together as they are completed by each creator. They're on a separate production timeline and will not affect the delivery of the core rewards.

For our next set of achievements, we're sharing the success of this campaign with the team that helped make it happen. Starting at $160k, and for the next three increments of $15k thereafter, we'll bump up the pay of the contributors to the core book by 25%. That means if the project tops $205,000 we'll be doubling the payment for their hard work. With 27 days left, we think that's very achievable.

We hope you're enjoying the full-text backer-exclusive PDF of the game and have taken a chance to redeem the Roll20 Quickstart which is also free for everyone who pledges.

(Make sure you're logged into BackerKit and scroll down to the bottom of  Update #1 for links.)

Want even more Girl By Moonlight? There's already some terrific content out there!

The crew over at The Pixel Circus is running a 4-part Actual Play every Sunday night at 6pm PT! Catch "In The Name Of" over on twitch this Sunday and watch the first episode here on YouTube!

Designer Andrew Gillis talked to The Mary Sue prior to our launch and most recently was interviewed by Gizmodo to share the design philosophy and some discoveries that took place during the process of creating Girl By Moonlight.

You can also hear Andrew talk about Magical Girls, anarchism, and bicycles on this episode of the Good Enough Games podcast. 

Elsewhere you can catch Grinds-Alchemist with a flip-through review of the backer PDF here on twitch and read Dicebreaker's coverage of the game.

That's the buzz as we head into a holiday here in the US. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your passionate support. Have a great weekend and do let us know in the comments if you get your friends together to play. We want to hear how your Magical Girl adventures unfold!

10 hours in: more than $93,000 raised from over 1700 backers!

We are truly overwhelmed by the amazing response you've poured into this very innovative and deeply queer game. Thank you so much for your support.  Together you have unlocked six different stretch goals with contributions from 16 amazing creators. The light is shining bright and wide!

Let's take care of some common questions that have popped up in this first stage of the campaign.

Not one bit. The zine stretch goals will be a digital reward which you can print and assemble at home - like all good zines should! They will be delivered separately from the books, PDF, and Roll20 rewards. This helps us keep our timeline tight. It also means you will be getting zine PDFs after you've already gotten the main rewards.

We're targeting January 2024 for the delivery of the main rewards and we have a track record of hitting our dates on-time, if not earlier.

We've created four different Series Jumpstarts to help you quickly dive into each of the unique genres contained within Girl By Moonlight.

Each Jumpstart is based on one of the Series Playsets and provides a cast of playable characters, some tailored choices around the series, and a starting situation. They're ideal for one-shots and convention games, or as a quick way to get your campaign going. If you don't want to go through the entire Series Creation phase of the game, you can use these Jumpstarts as a shortcut.

The PDFs for the Series Jumpstarts are included at every pledge level. If you want a more portable, physical version you can scribble notes in, you'll have to upgrade to the Jumpstart Bundle, Magical Girl Bundle, or Transcendent Girl Bundle tier in order to get the separate, full-color printed folios.

The Limited Edition will feature an alternate cover by Zakiya Goggins, embellished with spot gloss varnish. The Limited Edition will also include a special design for the endpapers, plus two ribbon bookmarks. While we may release some overstock books from the print run after delivery of the rewards is complete, the Limited Edition will not be reprinted after this campaign. In terms of content, both versions will contain the exact same interior text and full-color artwork.

If this is the type of keepsake version you like to have on hand, we're proud to offer it. We think it's going to look gorgeous. But if you're worried about missing some extra bonus content because you can't afford the Limited Edition, never fear: the game is exactly the same.

Between Brexit and the pandemic, the cost of individual shipping varies wildly by region. That means we're simply not able to offer a shipping option during this campaign that will service everyone. Trust us, we're just as frustrated by this as you are, but the alternative is charging some customers $40 or more in shipping (that's not including VAT or import fees) just to deliver a $30 book.

We simply don't think that's fair or reasonable.

If we do not offer shipping to your country, consider backing at the PDF or Roll20 level and picking up the physical book once it reaches your FLGS. It's a much, MUCH more affordable option. We work very hard to get our games into international distribution within a couple months of reward fulfillment.

We posted links to the preview PDF and handouts and a code for the Roll20 Quickstart in Update #1. Note that this is embedded in a backer-only portion of the update, at the bottom of the page. Make sure you are logged in to your BackerKit account to view them.

Reminder that unlike the preview PDF we put on DriveThruRPG, the backer preview contains the full text of the game - all the rules, all the setting and character playbook info. It's the complete game with placeholders for the art. You can use it to start playing Girl By Moonlight right now!

Yes! You're now free to go back to reading through the backer preview and setting up a new game on Roll20. Enjoy!

Thank you for your generous support. It's been an amazing first day.

Keep spreading the word on social media, discord, and more. We really appreciate your word of mouth efforts!