Some Goodies
about 6 years ago – Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 04:41:09 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

That’s a Wrap!
about 6 years ago – Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 02:25:42 AM

An entire month went by in a weird blur, and now the funding drive part of this endeavor is finally finished. There’s still a lot left to do of course, but we’ve passed a pretty significant milestone in good form, nearly 400% funded. Anyone who missed the Kickstarter will still be able to do preorders through BackerKit. (And note that you’ll be able to add the Deck of Dreams, Maid RPG, and copies of any of the GSS books to your order through BackerKit if you're so inclined.)

In the meantime, I have been and will continue to be very busy with doing research, writing, and translating, plus working on all kinds of other stuff relating to getting the book ready. (Today I got an ISBN and barcode for Twilight Tales!) As I mentioned in the last update, I have some drafts of stuff nearly ready to show you guys, so you can expect a backers-only post soon, probably over the weekend.

In any case, thank you all for your support. We genuinely couldn’t do it without you.

The Home Stretch
about 6 years ago – Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 01:02:49 AM

We’re now well and truly in the home stretch, the part where the Kickstarter page lists the time left in hours instead of days. We broke $21k, which means that the magical girl character type is indeed happening and we’ve reached our final stretch goal. There’s just under 2 days to go in the funding drive, after which the business of getting a book polished and sent to the printer can really begin.

I’ve been putting kind of a lot of my free time into working on stretch goal material, and I expect to have some first drafts to share with backers pretty soon, along with early Twilight Tales PDFs so you can get into trying the mononoke out in your own games.

Almost There!
about 6 years ago – Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 04:26:02 PM

I just woke up to find that this Kickstarter broke $20,000, which is pretty fantastic really. I still find people’s enthusiasm for this rarity of a non-violent RPG humbling and hopeful. We’re now very much on the home stretch, with one more stretch goal left (the magical girl character type) and 4 days to go.

The Colors of the Sky POD Book

Since we broke $20k, we hit our penultimate stretch goal! With the original GSS Kickstarter we ended up producing enough bonus material to be able to put together a supplement of comparable size to the Japanese supplements, so I ended up creating a PDF called “The Colors of the Sky.” For the amount of stretch goal stuff we did for this second Kickstarter, it became clear we were going to have enough to do a second such PDF, which I pretty quickly decided to call “The Colors of the Sky Volume 2: Kappa and Oni’s Excellent Adventure.”

But regardless, that’s generally kind of a lot of game material that hasn’t yet been in print, so we’re going to take both volumes and make a larger Colors of the Sky book, and commission some new art besides. It’ll be available via POD later on basically because getting it all ready will take enough time to unduly delay fulfillment of the main part of this Kickstarter. (That was one of the things we learned the hard way during the original GSS Kickstarter.) Backers will get a discount code so you can order the book from DriveThruRPG for cheap if you’re so inclined, and it’ll be available through Amazon and Indie Press Revolution (and thus through local game stores as well).

Miscellaneous Updates: Kodama and the Deck of Dreams
about 6 years ago – Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 09:22:20 PM

Apparently we’re doing something right, because I got an email from Kickstarter saying that they made this a “Project We Love,” which apparently means a little badge appears by the video and the project gets more prominently displayed on the site. Thank you all for helping us get this far!

Anyway, a few small updates on various things:

Kodama

As I mentioned last time, a super-generous backer took the second Narrator level slot, which means we’ll be making them a new character type to her specifications. I talked to the backer in question, and she settled on kodama as her choice. Kodama (木霊) are tree spirits, and while you may remember the bobblehead version of them from Princess Mononoke, the mythology around them is ancient and takes many forms. I started brainstorming a little, and that got me really excited about this one, because it’s different enough from previous character types that it’s making me go into some new territory. My take on kodama is shaping up to be sort of a “tree henge,” where the character is a magical tree that can take human form. The backer suggested having the signature kodama character be a peach tree, which got me thinking about different kinds of trees, and led to ideas for Additional Powers for things like blooming or bearing fruit. It's still very early in the process, but I'm definitely looking forward to this myself.

Deck of Dreams

Since the Deck of Dreams got funded, yesterday I sat down and put together all the stuff for it to send to Clay so he can start on the designs. I ended up combing through a Japanese stock photo site and settling on some delightful watercolor art for the card faces. Clay will be getting into that along with assembling the Twilight Tales book when he can find time amid his usual tsunami of freelance work.

I decided to have each card have a little snippet of encouraging text like “So cute!” or “You’re great!”, and in the process of writing 54 of those I ended up looking online for ideas, which is how I found a list of 100 compliments, which had some good ideas and also some totally baffling ones like “I bet you sweat glitter.” GSS isn’t the game where that really makes sense as a compliment, and I kind of want to see the game where it would work. (My Twitter is like 40% random things I encounter in everyday life that I find funny for obscure reasons, so naturally I'm sharing that with you.)

Oregon I Guess?

Another random thing that seems relevant to GSS fans: the state of Oregon recently put out an animated tourism ad that’s just generally 90 seconds of Miyazaki-inspired gorgeousness. I’ve never been to Oregon and I’m reasonably sure there are no sky whales there, but the video is pretty great regardless. Apparently it's from a Copenhagen-based animation studio called Sun Creature.