Physical Books

All books have shipped, with the EU books the last to be sent out on Friday 18th. If you have not received your physical book, and have no relevant shipping updates, please let me know ASAP and I'll do my best to resolve it.

Stretch Goal Adventure

Will be sent out as a Backerkit reward tomorrow. Wormbait takes a group of adventurers on a small quest to kill some rats in a tavern basement. Lured in with the promise of free food and drinks on the house, what seems like a simple task quickly turns into a dimensional jaunt under the power of an abyssal godling and its bumbling warlock lackey.

The adventure is a single-session one-shot I've run myself, and comes with battlemaps in both colour, and print-suitable black-and-white. While I've written it to be setting-neutral, it actually features a tavern named in Vralkast in the docks of Sowshore, and the abyssal godling matches the setting's 'Harbour Gods'. As such, it fits into Vralkast with no changes needed.

With thanks to the wonderful Matthew Ayers, the one-shot has two versions - one for D&D 5e, and one for Cairn, in order to accommodate a wider range of dungeon-crawlers. That said, the only real mechanics are the stat blocks, and it would work just as well in other systems.

Lessons Learnt

I once again thank you all for taking a punt on my book. As my first crowdfunder, this has been a great and terrifying experience, and I've been somewhat riding by the seat of my pants to get this done with the timing and quality I expect of myself. I can only hope the book is worth it! If you use Vralkast in the future - or have any feedback whatsoever to help me improve for next time - please feel free to leave a comment here, or message me on Bluesky at @geckopirate.

I have every intention of returning again next year for Zinetopia, and hope you'll join me there; as such, I wanted to lay out some of the things I've learnt and intend to improve on, now that I've seen this process from start to finish. This might also be a fun insight into the 'behind-the-scenes' of running a crowdfunder like this.

Lessons:

Printing a book turns the cover significantly darker and muted; I'll be keeping this in mind next time to make the cover pop in physical.
Shipping is even more damaging than I thought. I need twice the packaging (though even that might not stop USPS and their boxcutters).
My local print shops do not have the capacity to print my books at the quality I need. Learning that lesson cost me a few weeks.
Even when I'm at my busiest, I need to keep providing updates. No radio silence! I owe backers that, even if there's no significant progress to report.
The more art I can get in advance, the better. Having all the character art from one artist is something I want to do again, but it does naturally increase the timeline. The more I can get in advance of the crowdfunder, the less delay there'll be next time.
The Pledge Manager isn't as scary as it seems. Navigating my way around it caused me a fair bit of stress and delay, and I did accidentally charge shipping earlier than you're supposed to while also sending the pledge survey later than you're supposed to. Whoops.
I should not offer an Early Bird bonus that's also an Add-On. This led to people accidentally getting it for free, but also buying it as an Add-On, which I had to work to refund and sort out to avoid feeling like a scam.
I should probably have used this to establish a mailing list. Ah well.

See you again when the tides turn,
Jamie Bernstein

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