72 Hours Until Backerkit Locks / Wall Scroll Reprisal
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 01:38:01 PM

Hi everyone, it's Jay!

This is a quick update about Backerkit! As mentioned in the last update, we'll be closing preorders on Backerkit on Monday, February 15th. At that point, any preorders will switch over to our website, your orders will be unable to be modified further, and we'll place the charge on your card. It's been a huge journey, and this means that we're finally in the home stretch.

To celebrate, we're going to add one of our merch options back up onto the preorder store for just a few days. You see, we recently got the almost-final proof of Conner Fawcett's design for the great arc of the year, and it was so brain-shatteringly beautiful that we simply had to make sure everyone who wants one, can get one.

Here's Conner's art: 

and here's the final mockup of the wall scroll:

How Do I Add/Edit My Preorder?

Want to make sure everything is squared away, or want to add anything else to your cart before preorder? Great!

• 1. Go to wanderhome.backerkit.com.
• 2. If you're not logged in, you want to put in your Kickstarter email into the "Lost your survey?" section.
• 3. Add or update your preorder cart!
• 4. If there's any issues, please contact backerkit support through that website, and they'll be able to help you out better than I can.

What if I still haven't filled out my survey?

Lord, isn't this the 30th email you've gotten about this? It's okay though, just please do it as soon as possible! We will do our best, but we cannot promise the delivery of your book if you don't give us your shipping address and pay for shipping. If you need to retrieve your survey, please do so following the instructions above.

That's All!

Told you it was a quick update. Take care everyone, stay warm, and I'll see you next month!

Assorted Snowblanket Updates
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 11:17:29 PM

Good afternoon everyone, it's Jay here!

I'm writing this update from my office while I watch the snow tumble down. It's supposed to snow all through the next few days, and both my house and Grubby's house are barricaded down with enough rations and snacks to last a potential power outage. I'm tossing this post together to kick off February, so that's why it's going to be a little more minimal than others. Just some other projects to back, some reminders as we go into the new year, and all that stuff!

Fill Out Your Backerkit Survey

Please! Oh my goodness, please! We're going to be locking orders and charging cards in 14 (!) days! That's two weeks! After that point, preorders will be shifting over to the PCG website, and you won't be able to add onto your order. I'm always happy to support all of you, but it'll make everyone's lives so much easier if you make sure it's all squared away before then.

What Possum Creek Games Is Up To

Running a small business is a lot of work! When Grub and I aren't dealing with taxes and spreadsheets, or website design and marketing budgets, we're working hard on creating new games for all of you. I wanted to give a few updates on a few things we have coming down the pipe that might be of interest to all of you.

• Wanderhome is still deep in layout, and we've spent at least one whole day hanging out around Indesign bickering about font sizes and where various headers should be. (I didn't take any photos, but please picture the face Grub made when I had to print out the various mockups she made just to show her that no, 18pt is far too big for any book)
• Uncanny: A Sleepaway Expansion is done! The last bits of art have come in today, and we're sending it over to the printers. If you haven't read Sleepaway yet, please do so, and if you have — go preorder the expansion!
• Wickedness by M Veselak is finished up with edits and is going to get its layout done by Grub. You'll be hearing more about that game once it reaches our store, but for now you can still preorder it. It's a lovely and wonderful game by a dear friend, about three witches in a coven doing magic together.
• We've started hiring additional writers and artists for Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, a sprawling slice-of-life RPG that we'll be bringing to Kickstarter (hopefully) later this year, once Wanderhome is done. I have no announcements related to this yet, but I'm just saying — keep your eyes out. There's a first look on my Patreon right now, but this doc only just starts to scratch the surface of what we're going to be doing.
• I'm currently working on a new game with Kazumi, called The Academy At Halfway Station. It's going to be a magic school inspired fantasy adventure about teens studying magic and skipping class, all in a weird liminal university perched on top of an old train station. The first look will be coming to my Patreon sometime in the next few weeks, time permitting.

Additionally, we have a few projects we plan to publish in the next few years I can't even announce yet! Also, while Venture / Dungeon by myself and Riley Rethal isn't being published by PCG, it's on its way as well, albeit moving a little slowly at the moment. It's exciting! I'm excited. 

What Else Is Going On

Zine Quest 2021 is upon us, and that means there's a deluge of great small TTRPGs coming to Kickstarter! A bunch of really talented designers and creators, both established and new, are flocking to Kickstarter to raise funds to release their work in zine format. There are so many more zines coming to Kickstarter in the next month than I can count, but thankfully @pandaheist is maintaining a spreadsheet and blog post documenting them. Every year, Zine Quest is the cutting edge of RPG design, and I know I'll be keeping a close eye on everything going on.

Our Shores is three great RPGs bundled into one project. Including walking cities made of corpses, mecha inspired by Filipino mythology, and rich kids coming of age and lashing out against each other. I'm personally looking forward to the first stretch goal (which is only $3K away!) that will include another 9 games in the bundle. It's a great deal and an awesome project done by really talented creators.

The Sky Left Us is a queer visual novel by the team behind the LARP series Event Horizon, Quinn Milton and Sadia Bies. A romance set against the backdrop of a shifting alien climate, with music by the talented Mabel Harper and a crew of great artists and writers. I'm not normally a huge video games person, but I'm excited to check it out!

This last one is a bit more personal. Dox is one of my former campers and a dear friend of mine, and they're currently working on raising money for their top surgery. They're an incredibly brave and compassionate person who's been dealt a tough hand in life, and I'd really love to see them succeed. If you can pitch in or signal boost or just in some way pass it on, that would mean a ton. 

At Last ... A Little Art

We don't have much art right now — the last couple of pieces we're waiting on are due this week, so I have nothing for you at the moment. But! I have one little snack, just to close off this message. It's the back author art of myself and Grubby, sitting by the creek outside my house. It's not much, but in a cold winter like this one, when the creek is frozen over and I'm wrapped in three sweaters under a pile of blankets, it made me smile.

The Deep Chill Update: Getting Closer
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 08:26:26 PM

Hi everyone, the month of Snowblanket came and went in a flash, and now we're stranded deep in the endless Frostbite that seems to dominate the area I live in. I can see piles of muddy snow from my window, and I've taken to getting work done under a mound of blankets in one corner of my office. This update, like all the updates before it, is going to cover project updates, administrative information, upcoming announcements, and have some art at the end. So please grab one of the mugs in the cabinet, get yourself some hot cocoa, and let's check in about Wanderhome's progress.

Off To Do Layout

Wanderhome is finally fully edited, checking in at just a little over thirty-three thousand words. The text is, dare I say it (knock on wood) done. Now it's over to Ruby, who will be spending the next month with Indesign trying to fit everything together into one enormous PDF.

Which, quick sidebar! When we first launched this Kickstarter, we were intending to use Mixam Printing. Because of that, we were planning on the book being 8.5 inches, square. Because we've swapped to Taylor Specialty Printing, we can now print the book at 9 inches, square. It's a little thing but I'm still hyped about it.

So now we're in layout! This means we're sending a lot of screencaps back and forth, yelling about font sizes, printing things off of my cruddy little HP OfficeJet (to prove a point), and generally putzing around. The end plan is for each page to be a different color, but before we can do that we gotta get all the text onto them. So think of these next couple of screencaps as the lineart stage of layout — they're black and white so that we can get a feel for what the objects are like on the page, but the end goal is going to look a lot shinier.

Timeline

A note, before we get into anything else. I wanted to let you all know that Possum Creek Games has made the decision to remove Ajey Pandey from our team of stretch goal writers. His work will not be included in the stretch goal PDF. 

I'm going to take some time now to finally run over the timeline for Wanderhome as we go into 2021. I know a lot of you are expecting a June 2021 release, but the exciting news is that we'll be able to release the book at least a few months in advance of that. Here's the timeline as we go forward and how we expect things to shake out.

•  February 15th: We'll be locking everyone's purchases in and charging everyone's cards. This is your last chance to preorder Wanderhome through Backerkit! After this point we'll still be offering Wanderhome preorders, but we'll be switching over to our own website. If you purchased anything through our preorder store or add-ons, make sure you have the funds in your account, as this is when you'll be getting charged for everything.
•  Early April: Wanderhome will be all done and we'll send off a PDF to get a proof from the printer. That'll take a hot moment, but once we get something back we'll know how it looks. It should be in this time that we release the PDF copy for all of you!
•  Late April: We get the proof back, make some edits, and send our final order to the printers. 
•  May: You should be getting your hands on physical copies of Wanderhome, along with all the merch and addons! This is also when we'll distribute copies of the stretch goal PDF (hopefully, although the PDF might take another few weeks based on art)

Note that this is flexible based on life circumstances. Our timeline can still get thrown off by outside factors, and I refuse to crunch anyone involved in order to make sure we hit those deadlines. I'm confident you all understand.

Uncanny: A Sleepaway Expansion

It's been about a year and a half since Sleepaway, my first tabletop RPG book, was published. It's about a group of summer camp counselors helping protect their kids from a monstrous Lindworm. Sleepaway is an ENnie-award winning game that features a really unique perspective on gender, community, horror, and magic. Sometimes I joke that it's the most autobiographical thing I've ever written, and there's a lot there that — even though it's maybe not as polished as Wanderhome — means it has a special place in my heart.

And I'm doing an expansion! Uncanny is focused on the Strangeness, the mysterious creatures lurking at the edge of the camp. It is fascinated with the magic of liminality, in the way our dreams blur with reality at the crossing between one world and the next. Uncanny is all about that fascination, and this expansion adds a ton to the world of Sleepaway. With new strangenesses, rituals, playbooks, resources, and more, Uncanny is an incredibly supplement that brings the particular mixture of horror and care that fills Sleepaway to new heights.

You can preorder the digital copy of Uncanny on my Itch.io page, or the Print + PDF on our website. The book will be released on February 19th.

Streams And Interviews

I recently did an interview with Amber of Table Top Babble about care in Wanderhome and queerness. You can check it out here. I really love this interview and am really proud of the conversations we had.

Additionally, Dicebreaker just wrapped up a 2-part actual play of Wanderhome on their stream. It's a lovely and heartwarming game, and I love how it turned out. You can watch both parts here:

...Wait, there's more!

Additionally, come hang out with Joseph Fink (Welcome To Nightvale, Alice Isn't Dead), Brennan Lee Mulligan (Dimension 20), Alex Song-Xia (Squirrel Comedy Theatre), Nick Guercio (Fun City), and Carly Monardo (Rude Tale Of Magic) while they play Wanderhome on stream with the Fortunate Horse Dreamstream on January 23rd! This will be Joseph Fink's first time playing an RPG, and I'm very excited that his first exposure to it is going to be, well, this.

Finally! There's going to be more Wanderhome-related podcast news on its way. I don't have any specific updates, but we've been working with the folks over at Oneshot Network and I should have more information for you soon. 

Call To Action

Dustin Higgs is a Black man set to be executed on January 15th for a crime he didn't commit. The situation is deeply grotesque, horrific, and unfair. The United States is a country shaped by unimaginable violence against Black and Indigenous people, and in the face of unimaginable global collapse it becomes more important than ever to not only imagine better worlds, but put active effort into creating those worlds in the present. Please, look through this Twitter thread full of links and help out however you can.

Additionally, check in with each other. Be kind to each other. Step away from the computer and connect with the community around you. It's been a hard first week after an impossibly hard year, and now is when the most vulnerable members of our communities need us. I say it every time and I'll say it again—the world can be so cold this time of year, and it doesn't take much to save someone's life.

Merch Closes Tomorrow Midnight EST
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 05:55:28 PM

hey everyone! ruby here so this one will be very brief and not as poetic as usual. just wanted to remind you one last time that we're closing preorders for much of our merch tomorrow (tuesday december 15) at midnight est so that we can put in the orders! you can also click the backerkit link on the main wanderhome kickstarter page.

some art sketches, as an offering:

the above illustrations are from our dear friend jeeyon shim's incredible stretch goal piece about foraging, cooking, and eating in wanderhome. we just got a first draft of the text and as with all of jeeyon's work it is intensely thoughtful, ambiently cute, meticulously concepted, and deliciously playtested.

coincidentally--the kickstarter for her upcoming game, field guide to memory, launches tomorrow! it's a journaling game about cryptids and nature with lots of ephemera and artifacts and it's going to be a total banger. i'm doing the layout for the book. you can view the preview page and sign up to be notified at launch here.

thats all for today!!

xoxoxo

ruby

Feedback Form (and Website, Merch Reminder, Art and More!)
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 09:43:46 PM

Hi everyone, Jay here.

It feels like every year, the month of Snowblanket becomes shorter and shorter. It hasn't even started this year—Grasping is dragging on like an uninvited guest trying to sneak some cheeses off of the plate before anyone notices, all while sunlight becomes a more and more valuable commodity. I'm sorry for the frequent updates in this stage—a lot of really exciting stuff is happening at Possum Creek Games, and I want to make sure you are kept up to date. 

Backer Feedback Form

As we've been developing our plan for 2021 and what we want to focus on what all of you might be looking for from our work. We made a form to collect your thoughts! Don't worry, we're not going to treat this like gospel—we are always committed to creating the things we care about. But! It matters a lot to us to know how all of you feel, and this kind of feedback is incredible useful for us. 

Here's the link to the optional form.

Our Website

We have it! We have our website, finally! It took us a few months but it's here and it has an online shop and a bunch of fun things. I am so relieved it's all set up, and if you've been meaning to pick up some Possum Creek projects like The Flower Court (an RPG designed for online play, about a decadent court of nobles engaged in a complicated courtship ritual / murderous plot) or Esoteric (a series of ritual games that cannot be described) now you can! You can also sign up for our newsletter on there, and get a heads up the moment we launch preorders for our upcoming projects. 

You can check out the website here!

One Week Left For Backerkit Merchandise

We're only offering merchandise on Backerkit for one more week! On December 15th we'll be closing all merchandise preorders so we can place the orders to our manufacturers. We're figuring out some additional merchandise options once the book is out, but right now this is your only chance to grab wall scrolls, patches, pins, T shirts, and more!

Visit the preorder store here!

Book Progress & Art

Kazumi and I just finished up the initial editing process, and now the text is all set for the layout that will start in January. It's gonna be a huge endeavor, and we want to make sure we have everything together before we get started. Our art is trickling in, and I there's some really beautiful special stuff here that I'm SO hyped to show you.

That's all I have for now, take care everyone and be sure to stay in touch on here, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, Discord, or wherever else you find yourselves! 

— Jay