Just a little midweek check-in. It appears our mining cart has gotten stuck. We could use a little help getting it unstuck and moving forward again. The best way to do that is by sharing this project on social media. We still have a few Stretch Goals remaining, and I'd love to see this project reach it's full potential.
One of my favorite things about the Heroic Adventure! (HA!) series has always been Bob's writing. It's fantastic. It just drips with flavor and atmosphere. The first adventure we worked on together, HA! #1 - Evil Never Dies, is a 2-part story about a time-traveling ChronoLich who you (hopefully) manage to defeat in the first act, only to be whisked backward in time to face off against his mortal self as well as the ChronoLich again. The adventure is full of traps and puzzles, inventive monsters, and some really immersive writing.
Our second project together, HA! #2 - Vault of the Murderworm and The Wormfather's Apprentice have not only a fully developed town, with a cult, political intrigue, wilderness and subterranean encounters, and an outsider god!! It even has extra-dimensional hunters. Once again, Bob's writing is spectacular in both of these books. Not just the descriptions, but the whole sticky vibe of the town, its corrupt elders, and the menace in the forest.
I'm telling you all of this because, when I say Veins of the Fallen is the best thing of his I've ever read, possible one of the best DCC adventures I've ever read, I need you to know what that implies. His work on this book, HA! #3 - Veins of the Fallen, is incredible. Bob has always done atmosphere and mood well, but these mines are seriously creepy. Bob would send me articles and diagrams, about different mining methods and techniques. Bob's Dwarves didn't just Diggy Diggy Hole... they engineered this mine and it shows.
And when things went south, not all of them made it out alive. They're still down there. You'll meet some of them, but calling them alive is a stretch. Some might enlightened, but others might say possessed. And the mithril? It's not just alive, but sentient. It has goals. You're a part of those goals. We all are.
When I got to the first big reveal (there are two), I think it was about 2am. The house was dark, and quiet, and I had to get up and take a minute and let it sink in. The first big reveal is a doozy, and (if we hit the $4500 stretch goal) comes with its very own cult. It's a big enough deal to possibly warrant a sequel adventure in a few years, because time means different things at different levels of power.
The adventure builds to the first big reveal, you know something is coming, you just don't know what. The second reveal hit me like a paint can to the face. I never saw it coming.
I worked with Bob on the first two adventures, we shot ideas back and forth. This book is all Bob and it's glorious. It's like looking at a craftsman home. The attention to detail, the flourishes, the obvious devotion to the genre. Bob packs the book with so much stuff that's useful beyond the confines of the core adventure. It's part of why we had to go with perfect bound books early on, instead of saddle stitched. There's just so much in there.
It's also what makes the deluxe hardbacks appealing. Aside from larger fonts (hey, some of us need that...), larger art, zoomed in map fragments for each encounter, gorgeous covers, etc... these adventures deserve a deluxe format (and so do you).
But first, we still have a couple more tunnels to explore in that Stretch Goal Mine. We're almost to the end of the mine, but we need some help pushing that mine cart.
We use essential cookies and our own first-party analytics to run BackerKit. With your consent, we also use cookies to measure our marketing and share data with advertising partners to show you relevant ads. Accept to allow all cookies, or reject to turn off the optional ones.
Read our cookie policy.
