Hardcover Stretch Goal! And Other News
over 4 years ago – Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 03:51:59 PM

Hi everyone, Jay here!

Four days in and the adrenaline is settling down. I've spent a lot of time in invisible meetings dealing with business logistics - shipping services, printers, fulfillment platforms, manufacturers, etc. We prepared Wanderhome with our average resources in mind, and with your help this is becoming anything but average, and that means I have to have a lot of Zoom calls with people who are so excited to pitch me on their UI service or innovative technology. With the weekend approaching, my best friend moving in, and everyone on Earth telling me to take a break and catch my breath, we're going to announce some stuff that might not kick in until Monday. My replies might also not be quite as rapid as they have been all week, although Ruby will still be prowling the comments section and we'll both continue to be available on Twitter to the best of our ability (I'm @jdragsky, she's @rubylavin, and our company is @possum_creek)

Before I get to the main event, I wanted to shout out a couple of press events that I've been a part of, that you might not have gotten to see. These are all great avenues to learn more about Wanderhome and some various perspectives on it. I especially recommend Pen & Paper People with Nevyn Holmes and Party of One with Jeff Stormer for some 1-on-1 Actual Plays of Wanderhome, and my interview with Brie Beau Sheldon on Thoughty Games for some of Wanderhome's philosophy. I also really love John Battle's video about liminality - people are only just starting to mess around with video essays on RPGs, and I'm so honored to be a part of that.

Liminal Space - Halo II and Wanderhome, a video essay by John Battle.

Jay Dragon & Wanderhome, on Pen & Paper People with Nevyn Holmes.

Party of One Podcast Episode 243 - Wanderhome, with Jeff Stormer.

Wanderhome write up on Dicebreakers.

Interview about Wanderhome with Jay Dragon on Thoughty Games.

Hardcover!

A ton of you have been clamoring for a hardcover stretch goal, and I'm so excited to get to announce that we'll be able to add it. At $115,000, we'll be able to print a hardcover edition of Wanderhome. It's going to be pricy, but we'll be sparing no expense in its production to make sure we're bringing you something truly special. We're still figuring out its exact features, but we know the hardcover will have a dust jacket with alternate art by Sylvia Bi, our covert artist. The focus of the art will be the changing of the seasons, and I'm so so excited to reveal more as it develops.

More Stretch Goal Writers

At $125,000, we'll be hiring a second set of stretch goal authors to help develop the world of Wanderhome even more. They'll be just like the first five, each creating a playbook and two natures, and they'll be a part of the supplemental zine.

•  Brandon  O’Brien (Twitter, Patreon). Brandon is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game  designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the  2014 Alice Yard  Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary  Competitions, and is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange  Horizons, Fireside Magazine,  and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean,  among others. He is also the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
•  Luke Jordan (Twitter, Itch). Luke is the conceptual editor for Wanderhome, and will also be putting together a stretch goal for the project! They are a game designer, editor, and educator who writes games that are  specific, sincere, spooky, and sad. They love painterly landscapes,  heartfelt poetry, slice-of-life storytelling, and Watership Down (and,  therefore, Wanderhome).
•  Ajey Pandey. (Twitter, Itch) Ajey is a game designer, game reviewer, lightning mage, and (by day), a  researcher on clean energy. He’s the writer of the BOLT RPG Engine, as  well as smaller projects that try to use mechanics as a means of  inducing specific emotions in players. He tries to be a healing presence  for the people around him, and he hopes he isn’t screwing that up.
•  JR Goldberg (Twitter, Itch). JR Goldberg is a game designer living in Philadelphia. Some of credits  include the Townes Van Zandt TTRPG collection and Doikayt. His  collection of professional wrestling essays, Methlab BattlArts, is  forthcoming.
•  M Veselak (Twitter, Itch). M is a games tinkerer, body liberation essayist, and the author of the  soon-to-release Wickedness RPG! Her works center mythological identity,  transformation and community-building. When she’s not writing, she can  most often be found lounging around like a modern day Venus of Urbino  and untangling the complexities of N-dimensional gender space.

Spread The Word

A lot of folks have been asking me how to help spread the word about Wanderhome, and I figured I'd give some tips and tricks on how!

• Talk about us! Especially if you're in a space we don't frequent, like fan spaces (hi Critters!) or on Reddit or Tumblr, outside buzz is incredibly useful. This is doubly true if you have a small following or the people you talk to are new!
• Create fan content. Please tag me in your fanart. I've never seen a salamander I didn't love. That is all.
• Play the game! If you're a streamer or podcaster, feel free to reach out to me for a resource pack. I'll be happy to send you all the materials you need to promote, including assets, fonts, and a couple special playbooks that aren't available to the general public.

Also, if you're an interviewer or other news person, please reach out and I'd be happy to send you assets and information your way, or chat about the project in any capacity. Just give me a heads up! 

Art and Sketches

The artists for Wanderhome are an incredible crew, and as the project continues I'll be sharing their work will all of you. There's two things I want to highlight.

Letty released a wonderful Patreon update talking about her method for creating each of the playbook illustrations. It's an in depth look at the care and thought she gave each illustration, and has me so so hyped to see what she does next for the rest of the book. It's available to everyone and you don't have to back, but check it out and consider becoming a backer anyway just because she's got a wonderful Patreon!

Also, here's some really amazing sketches by Lauren H! We talked a lot about Bruegel and Northern Renn art, and I'm sure you can see the influence on these ruins.

Press, Plugs, and Art
over 4 years ago – Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 01:55:47 PM

Hi everyone, Jay again! This is a pretty small update - I just wanted to recommend a few games and things going on in the larger RPG world that you might not know about. I meant to put all this in yesterday's update, but I forgot, so here it is instead!

Press

I had a wonderful interview with Taylor LaBresh (one of our stretch goal authors and host of Game Closet) about Wanderhome. I really get into the philosophy behind Wanderhome, the approaches I took to writing it, and also what it means to me. I'm really proud of this interview and I hope you check it out. It's going to be available to everyone tomorrow, but today it's on the Riverhouse Games Patreon, and I really recommend backing Taylor's Patreon and getting more info.

Other Kickstarters

Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall is wrapping up its last few days on Kickstarter. Jiangshi is an incredible game in every sense of the word - beautiful art, amazing design, gorgeous props, and a wonderful production. It's incredibly important to support marginalized designers, and Wet Ink Games only produce masterpieces. Check the whole thing out, and I think you'll really feel how it can speak to you.

GUN&SLINGER is a post-apocalyptic 2-3 player RPG about a traveling hero and their only companion, a sentient gun, as they navigate a magically-warped apocalyptic world. Emotionally it's similar to Transistor, while aesthetically it reminds me a lot of a neon Mad Max: Fury Road. It's launching on August 13th, so subscribe before then to get notified the moment it launches!

The BOLT RPG Engine is a fast-paced violent system perfect for stories about rebellion and conflict. It's explosive and fun and ideal for hacking apart into something new. And the designer, Ajey Pandey, is one of our stretch goals! You can already check out the core of BOLT on Itch.io here, and the Kickstarter itself is launching on September 4th - the day after Wanderhome wraps up.

Other Games

I also wanna take a moment to shout out a few other games that have come out recently, that you should have an eye on. This is especially relevant to everyone for whom Wanderhome is your first exposure to Indie - I hope these games can give you a glimpse to the amazing world that's possible in RPGs.

BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home is a game by my dear, dear friend Jamila Nedjadi of Sword Queen Games. It's a decolonial cyberpunk RPG built on the Belonging Outside Belonging engine about elementals rooted in traditional Filipino folklore, fighting against a cruel dystopian corporation-government. It's powerful and dynamic and even though aesthetically it couldn't be further from Wanderhome, I trust that if you look at them side-by-side you can feel the DNA tethering them together. Jammi and I have been bouncing ideas off of each other for months, and their design philosophy can be felt inside Wanderhome's nature.

One of the strangest and most fun games I've ever read (and it came out yesterday!), They Came To Play Ball is an RPG about eldritch monstrosities playing baseball, built on the Firebrands framework of interlocking minigames. It's inspired by the cultural event Blaseball (go Millennials!) and Space Jam, among other things. It's steamy, flirty, dynamic, weird, and a huge delight. 

Thousand Year Old Vampire is legitimately my favorite game of 2020. I got my physical copy a month ago and I've played it a half dozen times since then. It's a solo RPG about a vampire struggling to hold onto their memory over the course of centuries. I tend to bounce off of most solo RPGs, but this one captivated my mind and has been a huge delight for me. My favorite vampire was a young Ukranian trans boy who spent a thousand years hiding in the forests of Germany, convinced he was a living Saint, who eventually got to Victorian England, went to a prep school, joined the budding counterculture queer movement of the early 20th century, and fell in love with a fallen angel (who was unbeknownst to both of them, his best friend from when he was in the Ukraine a thousand years ago). Also the book is a work of art. Go buy it!

Art

And as always, I wanna close off this announcement with an incredible sketch from one of our artists, Jo Thierolf! Jo is working on a wetland/swamp scene, and I'm so in love with the entire approach and design. Jo's working on the color right now, and I'll share that with you the moment I have it.

Day 2: New Team Member, Stretch Goals, and more
over 4 years ago – Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 12:15:30 AM

Good morning (afternoon, evening) everyone, this is Jay! 

Ruby has already said most of what I'd want to say about our endless, outrageous appreciation. I have a lot of feelings, but I'm not gonna try to fit them all in here. Suffice to say that the past 24 hours have been lifechanging, and that I've spent much of it excitedly texting every friend I know, passing numbers back and forth with Ruby like two amateur baseball statisticians, and sobbing into a takeout container of (really good!) chicken tandoori.

A special big thank you to the fans of Critical Role. Your enthusiasm is infectious (and sometimes overwhelming), and all of you showing up in force has been incredibly impressive and humbling. I hope my strange adorable hopeful queer world is a place where you can feel welcome and at home, and throughout the rest of the Kickstarter I'll be making recommendations for other Indie TTRPGs by some of my favorite designers. 

We have a lot of stuff planned, and a lot of it is going to require research. Kickstarter bloat is a real danger, so I don't want to promise the moon and back, but I can say specifically for all you hardcover book fans, we are looking into options (especially for dust jackets!). We're also looking into other presses - Mixam is an outstanding press and I firmly recommend them for your projects, but they work better at smaller scales and lack some of the options we can find when printing at a larger scale. All of that is very ephemeral, so I'd like to focus on what I can promise you!

New Team Member

Accessibility and safety are enormous priorities for me both philosophically and morally, and from the beginning our objective has been a screen reader accessible and friendly PDF. To that end, we're so so excited to bring Jaden Tyler on board as a member of our core team. Jaden is an accessibility consultant who works with the Dots RPG Project to create games and spaces that are accessible for disabled gamers. They're going to be consulting on any digital copies of Wanderhome to make sure it's it's screen reader compatible.

New Stretch Goals

$60,000 - Even! More! Art! The goal for Wanderhome has always to be a beautiful book, as well as a practical one, and to highlight the incredible strengths and variety of talents available to a bunch of different artists. At $60K, we'll be including yet more art from incredible artists Sylvia Bi and Jennie Lindberg. 

$75,000 - Fill Up The Book With Art! When we brought Letty on board we made a plan for what we felt was affordable, although we were all aware she had a ton of skills that we weren't getting to use. At $70K, we'll get to commission a ton of illustrations from Letty, enough to pack the book with her gorgeous style. 

$90,000 - Wanderhome Recipes Zine by Jeeyon Shim. Jeeyon Shim is an acclaimed and incredibly talented RPG designer, who just wrapped up her very successful Kickstarter Wait For Me. She's also a skilled outdoors educator and naturalist, and her games embody her philosophy and relationship with the land. She posts about both on her Patreon, which is still one of the best Patreons I've ever been a part of. Wanderhome is shaped by my conversations with her, and I'm so excited to have her on board to write an entire supplemental zine for Wanderhome. She'll be putting together and creating a bunch of recipes inspired by the world of Haeth and its seasons, and including a minigame you and a friend can play in-character while preparing food for the rest of your Wanderhome group (either in-person or remotely). 

The physical zine will come with all tiers that involve a physical copy, and a PDF will accompany all tiers.

$105,000 - More Playbooks and Natures by Guest Designers. The core of Wanderhome lies in its modular and expansive nature. While the base game features fifteen playbooks and thirty-six natures, everyone involved from the beginning has been aware that there's perpetually so much space left untapped. These five designers will each bring their own perspective to Wanderhome with a playbook and two natures, helping bring to life the world of Haeth from a huge number of new perspectives. 

• Adira Slattery (Twitter, Itch). Adira is a trans Jewish game designer, poet, and podcast human. Her work spans comedy, horror, and intimacy. Adira is also the designer coordinator, who will be working with the core team to keep all the designers for this goal (and any future design stretch goals) on track.
• Jamila R. Nedjadi (Twitter, Itch). Jammi is the creative force behind Sword Queen Games and believes in the  power and magic of creative play. Their game BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home  was nominated for the IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award for best setting.  They are also a co-host of The Gauntlet podcast, which focuses on games being played in the online gaming club that is The Gauntlet community.
• Taylor LaBresh (Twitter, Itch). Taylor writes weird queer games under the Riverhouse Games brand and  hosts the Game Closet podcast, an informal chat show w/ rad queer/LGBT+  RPG folks. He loves going fishing!
• Viditya R Voleti (Twitter, Itch). Viditya is a QPoC game designer and writer who loves exploring the  medium in several avenues! A true goblin of the community, he wears  different hats from making games, consulting, Twitter worldbuilding,  streaming live design nights, reading and reviewing games, and really anything he decides will be fun! All of this gets collected on his Patreon.
• Riley Rethal (Twitter, Itch). Riley is a pharmacy student, camp counselor and ttrpg designer who likes to write games about Marxist alienation and introspection. You  may know her from designing Venture, co-organizing Doikayt: A Jewish RPG Anthology, or one of her many other games. 

All of these additional playbooks and natures will go in the supplemental zine, and will be handled the same way.

Possum Creek Games

As Wanderhome has grown rapidly outside of our little corner of the RPG ecosystem, Ruby and I wanted to take a moment to more fully introduce what we do and what we're working on. We are the co-organizers of Possum Creek Games, a young and upstart RPG publishing company in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. While we've published a few projects in the past, Wanderhome represents the first time Possum Creek has had the chance to really shine. You can follow along with Possum Creek Games on Twitter, and you can email us at creekhousegames(AT)gmail.com.

In a lot of ways we're still very embryonic - our website is a work in progress and we don't even have business cards. In other ways, this has been a long time coming - Possum Creek Games is the culmination of nearly 20 years split between us in shared work in advocacy, game design, project management, artistic creation, graphic design, and creative ingenuity. We built Possum Creek to prove that it's possible to have a tabletop RPG publishing company that values the people who work for it, that foregrounds equity and the plurality of marginalized experiences, that explores innovative new approaches to printing and manufacturing, and that emphasizes artistic styles and design choices you don't normally get to see in the RPG world. 

Ruby is the artistic director, and so she's responsible for picking out and communicating with the artists to build the world. She's the funniest, prettiest, and evilist person in RPGs, and I really recommend following her on Twitter.

I'm the game designer, which means I'm the weird chained lightning elemental at the heart of the furnace. You can follow me on Twitter (right now all I do is scream about Wanderhome) or you can back me on Patreon for the Possum Creek discord server and all my newest games as I release them.

All of our big projects are available on Itch.io. Here's a rundown of a few of the most popular:

• Sleepaway was our first Kickstarter, and is an ENnie Award winning queer horror RPG using the same base as Wanderhome (although taking on a very different mechanical form), about a group of summer camp counselors at a camp for marginalized kids, trying to keep their children safe from a skin-stealing monstrosity. It was also nominated for two IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Awards (Most Innovative and Game of the Year), and is the second highest rated Physical Game on Itch.io.
• The Flower Court is a post-cyberpunk political intrigue game about the noble post-gender court of the Chrome Dynasty as they sit atop the Neon Spires, engaging in their strange flirting ritual that might result in the throne - or in death. It's designed for online play, and even has a Discord bot with incorporated functionality.
• Esoteric is a lyric game, a rapidly emerging genre of RPGs on Itch.io based around prosody and ritual. It is a rule that I can't tell you anything more about it.

You can check out everything else we've released at the Jay Dragon & co. Itch page, and follow along there for notifications whenever something new goes up.

Black Trans Lives Matter

Wanderhome is a game that supports marginalized voices and experiences, and takes a stance against icarceration, brutality, and fascism. Wanderhome is a game written on stolen Esopus Munsee land, and its existence within the United States cannot be decoupled from a legacy and current reality of horrific colonial violence. Possum Creek Games believes in materially putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to supporting marginalized liberation. While Kickstarter won't let us declare we're donating any proceeds, we can at least remind you of these various donation drives and shine a spotlight on other ways to materially support marginalized people in these turbulent times. The first fund we want to spotlight is the Okra Project, a non-profit dedicated to providing food to black trans people, who are one of the most at-risk categories of people for houselessness, economic uncertainty, and malnourishment. If you have the means, toss them a couple bucks - I know I will be.

200% Funded, Stretch Goals
over 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 01:20:38 AM

hi everyone! im ruby, the art director and layout artist at possum creek games here to bring you some midday updates. we just hit 200% funding in 10 hours and i simply can’t overstate how excited and grateful and dazed we are by the success of this gentle freeform traveling game. jay started writing this game during quarantine as an escape from - and perhaps also a guide to making it through - the absolute fraught state of the world and we’re extremely touched that so many people are going to experience that hope.

because we funded so quickly we were not prepared to announce our stretch goals so quickly or at such high numbers, but we worked things out and have added stretch goals for hitting $40k and $50k— more art and spreads from some of our incredible illustrators! check out the project description for specific details.

also, people have been asking lots of great questions through kickstarter, please continue to do that! especially if you want a different reward tier or add-on, let us know! jay is responding pretty quickly and we’re eager to provide you guys with whatever you want and works for your specific situation.

thank you so, so much. this level of support is way, way more than we ever expected and we are blown away. pretty much all day jay and i have alternated between feverishly sending screenshots back and forth and just staring at the ceiling unable to comprehend that all of this is happening. thank you so much for coming on us with this journey, especially on the first day just as we walk out the door and get our bearings.

yours,

ruby, @rubylavin on Twitter

Funded in 3 Hours?!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 12:27:38 AM

Hi everyone this is Jay! 

I thought I had more time to write a more coherent and full appreciation, thanking you all for helping me fund this. I thought I'd have at least a couple days, minimum. Instead, you crazy sons of guns have raised almost $20K in 3 hours!?!

I need to swing hardcore into preparing and announcing Stretch Goals (and you'll get a formal update about that pretty soon) but I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you, thank you, thank you! I knew Wanderhome was something special, but I never in a million years would've expected this level of excitement so fast and so loud.

And just think - we've only just hit the road! Imagine what's coming next!

As a special treat, I've also included a couple of sketches from artists that didn't make it onto the Kickstarter page. Be sure to check out the art and support the artists - they're all so talented and deserve your support!.