Book of Hidden Paths: Random Encounters for Pathfinder RPG

One week down, three to go
over 2 years ago – Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 09:43:01 PM

We’re at the quarter-pole of the campaign, which is not a bad time to check in with all of you. Work on Book of Hidden Paths is progressing at a good clip; I’ll post another update about that soon. At the moment, I am making a second pass on Chapter 3, the Forest chapter, which will be the longest chapter, perhaps by a wide margin. Good Lord, but there are a lot of fey in Pathfinder. A lot more than in D&D 5E. Not that this is a bad thing — from my perspective writing this book, fey offer a more interesting proposition in that how they deal with a party of PCs will not boil down to a simple eat them/don’t eat them proposition. But there are a lot of them. And pretty much, they all live in forests.

As for the campaign itself, we are off to a solid start, but as is often the case with Kickstarters, pledging has leveled off after the first couple of days. It’s always a bit of a letdown when it happens, but it happens (I don’t want to play the, ”The D&D crowd showed a lot more enthusiasm for their random encounters book” card — yet). I’m sure you veteran backers can look at the numbers and read them as well as me.

I will say, though, that Kickstarter’s analytics tell me that there are more than twice as many people following this campaign as have backed it. If all of them come down off the fence and join the party, this campaign will fund without problem. Perhaps they will; there are still three weeks left.

As for the state of the stretch goal, we obviously need a lot more backers to make it happen. On that score, I should point out that copies ordered through the Backerkit store after the campaign will also count. So it ain’t over even if the campaign is over; I don’t know if I made that clear. Also, if this campaign funds I am considering an experiment: After the Kickstarter ends I may try to squeeze some more juice out of the crowdfunding lemon and open up on Indie GoGo and/or Game Found. I’ve seen a couple of Kickstarter creators go this route recently, so I might try it also. In this case, print copies ordered through them will also count. It will be like Oprah giving away cars: Everybody gets a hardcover!

This is, however, contingient on the Kickstarter funding. I’ll keep plugging away to spread the message and get more backers; as much as I’d rather sit back, let the campaign run on  auto-pilot and focus on the book itself, it can’t be helped. Anything you folks can do to spread the word will help. Thank you to everyone who has pledged to this point, and I’ll be back in touch soon!

Day 1 of 28, or rather, 27
over 2 years ago – Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 09:41:26 AM

This is something that has always bugged me a little bit about Kickstarter, although they are, in fact, right to do it: Whenever I launch a campaign, their countdown clock begins and tells me that there’s one day less left than I’d specified for the campaign length. Yesterday, I launched a 28 day-long campaign, and from the moment I hit the button, Kickstarter told me that there were only 27 days left. Since they round down to the nearest full 24-hour period, this is correct. And I understand that it helps creators by putting an illusory bit of time pressure on potential backers. Don’t snooze and lose! There are only 27 days left! But it also squeezes my perception of how much time I have left to raise the money that we need and there are days when I just don’t need that kind of stress.

Anyway, the first 24 hours of this campaign is almost in the books. Welcome and thank you to those who have pledged!  I see both new friends and old friends, and as I had hoped and expected there are more of the former than the latter. In all honesty, I’m hoping that this campaign will help us get a stronger foothold in the Pathfinder community. We haven’t quite gotten the response to our Pathfinder books that we had hoped for, so in a way this campaign is a test of whether or not it was a good idea to tap into the Pathfinder OGL. If you’d like us to keep publishing for Pathfinder, please help us spread the word about this campaign and gin up some enthusiasm that we haven’t yet seen. The campaign for Book of Chance Meetings set a bar that we’d like to meet with Book of Hidden Paths, and it’s not a low one.

In any event, I’ll be back to keep you updated about progress on Book of Hidden Paths and I’ll start a running tally of the stretch goal, perhaps this weekend. I’m not one of those creators who feels the need to pepper you with updates. First of all, I need to spend time actually working on this book that I’ve promised to you. And secondly, I know that, contrary to what a lot of Kickstarter gurus say, it can be counterproductive to pepper your backers with updates just for the sake of posting updates. As a backer myself, I know how annoying it is to find your inbox clogged with them, especially when you’re backing multiple campaigns at once. So I’ll get back to work and I’ll let you get on with your lives. I’ll get back in touch soon enough!