Last 24 Hours for my Our Golden Age Backerkit Campaign
And, finally, the free beta of the Vastlands Guidebook.
Here we are now, nearly at the end of this backerkit sprint. 24 hours to go and 909% funded. Look at all this stuff …
There’s only one achievement (stretch goal) left: a reissue of the original eyeburner UVG dice from 2019, this time in black with gold print (well, pale yellow).
Yesterday, I finally signed off on the bootleg beta of the Vastlands Guidebook. It’s the culmination of probably a decade of my game mechanics work distilling the kind of old school game I like to run. Loose, fast, with room for improvisation and expansion at the players’ discretion. You can get it for free here:
It is not the final version — it’s yet to receive its final editing and proofreading pass. Some art is temporary, missing, or just a placeholder. Oftenplace pXX stands in for the accurate and nice page reference. So it goes.
If you’re getting it, whisper a thank you to the good heroes of the stratometaship and the golden backers of the campaign. Their generosity has given this book its freedom.
Culmination
Yesterday, after finally signing off on the guidebook for release I literally felt like my brain would drop out of my forehead. I was soooo exhausted. I don’t recall ever working this hard.
A crowdfunding campaign is certainly emotionally tasking, but it’s also a physical challenge. Keeping up with the campaign and communications, preparing marketing and social media materials, keeping on top of the project to make nothing breaks the team or the bank. Factor in the time zones and I’ll be honest—the regular meetings with Exalted Funeral were great, but having meetings at 6 a.m. on top of working 10-to-6 is pretty brutal.
But this was just the last month! In the two, three months leading up to the campaign, we prepared every achievement (stretch goal), made sure everything was feasible, got everything laid out and ready for presentation, checked the production costs and timelines on every piece of the puzzle. I’ve always felt nervous about my layout skills and so would often procrastinate putting together the files, even if I had the art and text ready. Now there just wasn’t time to procrastinate … so I got everything set up for layout. Every book and zine, card and screen, map and brochure. Compared to the UVG, we got everything set up far better.
But this was just the last quarter! In the two years leading up to the campaign, I cleaned up the UVG for a reprint (the 2E edition) that would work with the Vastlands Guidebook (i.e. taking out a bunch of the general rules), condensed and refined the rules from UVG and Uranium Butterflies (the unpublished 250-page rulebook I finished back in August 2022) to create the Vastlands Guidebook, and wrote up Our Golden Age from notes and half-written locations. I honestly thought I’d manage to have the Our Golden Age book at 100% written on launch, but … prep intervened.
It was really hard work. But … looking back over it, I have to say that I have learned so much over this time and visibly (to me) improved my skills. That is quite a relief.
I’m going to take a short holiday next week, then survey the aftermath of the campaign and get to work delivering everything.
Take care folks.
We’ll be back to our story times soon.
Very glad to have backed it!