D&D 5E FGG Kickstarter The Blight Richard Pett's Crooked City

[mach1.9pants]

Froggies rock, let's kick the stretch goals and get it physical too

Thanks for going the extra mile, and working that Shadow Demon like a Dretch slave!

 

[Zaukrie]

I don't want a print version....But pdf? Great

 

[Matthan]

I saw the update on the Kickstarter last night and pledged for a pdf. Not that I would change anything at this point, but I wonder if you could have added a pledge level just for 5E pdfs. I know you can't edit the live pledges, but I think I've seen new levels added. Anyway, if you went that route, you would get a sense of the 5E support as it came in.

 

[JRedmond]

In for 5E PDF as well just pledged, I'm mad I just missed the Borderland Provinces KS.

 

[qu0zl]

Unlucky on missing the Borderland Provinces, I think it'll be good.

The Blight is half way to funded (37.5k pledged already) or as I prefer to think of it, 37.5% funded. I'm counting 100,000 and 5e in hard-back as fully funded

 

[Charles Wright]

Some words from Richard Pett, the author of The Blight.

'Blimmey that was hard.’

Writing a whole adventure path is tricky – very, very tricky - and those who do it all the time, James and Rob and all the lovely Paizo crew, deserve some sort of medal.

So why did I decide to write the Levee Adventure Path as part of the Blight city guide? Was I ill, mad or just masochistic? Probably. More importantly, how was it going to hold its own in such fine company and why would people support it? The end result is very pleasing, but there’ve been some tricky and dark moments on the way to completing Levee, the companion-piece to the Blight city guide and which forms part of the kickstarter book. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a few thoughts on this adventuring beast as she seems to have slithered beneath the oozing bulk of her kin the Blight city guide and been hidden.

First up, the Blight is at the dark and sweaty and gritty end of role-playing; friend or foe is never easy to determine, although being righteous amongst all the sin is something to really be proud of. There are lots of fantastic settings on the market, but to me, great though those settings are, they only really come to life when you walk the streets – when you and your friends take in the air, mingle with the locals and soak yourselves in the atmosphere of the place imagination has birthed. In short, when they have adventures.

For the Blight to truly come to life, she needed to be explored without bounds. So the Blight’s crooked sister Levee was conceived...

Levee is a 9 part AP taking PCs from 1st on to 10th level, where they’ll be attracting the attention of some – if not several – of the Blight’s more formidably unpleasant characters. This doesn’t mean that the AP is a short one, however, it runs to over 300,000 words – in fact as a draft there’s more AP than setting. When I started Levee with Chapter One – Hereafter – I decided that I’d like to keep the whole setting lower level, so the whole AP uses the slow advancement track. There are several reasons for this – first off the setting is low level – it’s almost impossible to get to high level without getting noticed and upsetting someone – or several someones. The second and more important is that lower level is more dangerous, death is a constant potential companion without cure, and to me dangerous is good. To give you a taster, to set out the claustrophobic angle I wanted in the third adventure – Sea’s End – set aboard a demented whaling vessel and her equally disturbing crew, it’s important that escapes are limited, if not impossible, from the vessel the adventure is largely set on.

The players must rely on their wits as much as their talents to survive.

Levee is an urban horror AP with plenty of twists and turns, and quite a number of moments where I hope you’ll all go ‘what?’ and doubt my sanity as much as I do.

I also love really well developed NPCs, and Levee is brimming with them, from the early foreshadowing of the BBEG (villain? – perhaps, perhaps not…) to the climax, which brings together all the threads and major NPCs of the AP into a final, potentially very twisted, ending. To give you a sample of that, Chapter 6 – the Susurrus Theatre - is very role-play driven, it needs to be as a foretaste to the carnage and fear of the next adventure in the series - My Benefactor. In this adventure, the PCs wander the Dark Theatre districts of the Artist’s Quarter, and come close (perhaps intimately and uncomfortably close) to some of her strange locals. This interaction is more relationship than just communication, so that as the AP comes to its climax in Utopia, the friends and enemies you’ve made are happy to put their lives on the line for you – or against you.

A good adventure, as James is always happy to point out, needs great monsters, and there are some new and horrible ones to interact with, particularly those birthed in Between, the crooked shadow that lurches alongside the city. A good adventure needs plenty of dice rolling as well as role-play, and there are many moments where a slaughter-without-dialogue approach is the best way; sometimes talking too much might just get you all into a heap more trouble.

So what is Levee? It’s the Twilight Zone meets Hammer Horror, it’s gothic meets Eraserhead, Alice and Frankenstein, Barker and Doyle - it lurches from one district in the city to the next, and sometimes back again. By the time you reach the climax (if you do) the Blight will be home, but by then you’ll have seen her swollen underbelly, her crooked corners, her selfish days and her inbred nights, in gruesome intimacy. Perhaps by then you may have grown to love her - or hate her.

And just to be clear again as Greg has mentioned, I’ve no intention of leaving her; if she does well and there is demand, there will be more and more adventures in the Blight. I love to walk her streets by night when the noise is clearer.

As we begin to drift in the Sargasso of our Kicktstarter – after an awesome first week, thank you - we need all the help of our friends on the esteemed Paizo boards, where I’ve had the privilege of slithering and hobbling for a long, long time now. Please do come along and check out the website for updates, whiz a question or five over these boards and I’ll be happy to help, but do support us if you can – it won’t happen without you.
Rich

 

[mach1.9pants]

Very interesting, thanks Charles

 

[RealAlHazred]

I am a huge Richard Pett fan, and consider "The Styes" in Dungeon #112 to be one of the best scenarios ever written for D&D, in terms of atmosphere, characterization, and plot. "The Weavers" in Dungeon #138 is also a solid adventure with great characters and atmosphere.

Nevertheless, nowadays every gaming dollar counts and I refrained from backing until this news. I hope this funds to the necessary level to get a print copy, but even at pdf I'm happy.

 

[mach1.9pants]

More info from Greg about 5E and FGG perspective, from the comments (#160)

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...-the-blight-richard-petts-crooked-ci/comments

Just for some perspective though ('cause we get asked this a lot), you are correct about Kobold and Sasquatch. But neither has Kickstarted a comparable 5e product to The Blight. We feel good about the numbers to fund our PF and S&W versions based on existing fans and a slow, steady growth model, but 5e is the big question mark and the big risk.
Kobold has Kickstarted a 5e monster book (which did amazing) but was not a massive $100+ campaign setting/adventure path book. Monster books for a new system almost always do well (hence our release of 5e foes).
Sasquatch has Kickstarted a really cool 5e campaign setting book with adventures but it was a re-issue of a previous book for 4e (so the writing, art, etc. was already paid for I assume), the physical copy was a $60 buy-in rather than $135, more than half of its backers were for pdf only (442 of 870), and though it was wildly successful for what it needed to raise its total funding level would not have successfully funded the current Blight KS funding goal of $75,000.
So while I get what you're saying, and really want it to be true, we've got to play it a little conservative and make sure we don't sink the company trying to prove a hypothesis that the evidence does not yet support. Now the hypothesis may well be true, and you may be right on point with it (did I mention that I really, really hope you are), but we can't play quite that fast and loose with the company and IP that we've been painstakingly building for the last 5 years (15 years if you count continuing development the Necromancer Games legacy). And jumping in blindly on a 5e project of that magnitude and having it go bust could easily destroy our ability to make much in the way of future products if not just outright wipe us out completely. We're a company that's known for delivery on our promises, I think, and if we lose our shirts on a product bust then it seriously jeopardizes our ability to fulfill our commitments to our customers and fans.
I know to a lot of the 5e fans that this KS not having been done initially in 5e somehow feels like a slight. I can only reiterate that it is not. We fully and firmly believe that 5e is a great system and that it has a TON of great fans. We just have to ease into assuring ourselves that the 5e fans are also FGG fans. We want you, we just hope you want us.
So as a result, we have phased in our 5e plans. It began with the 5e Kickstarters for monsters (5e Foes)/rulebooks (Book of Lost Spells)---usually surefire sellers in a new system, has extended into adventure anthologies with Quests of Doom (we've got a lot of those in the queue for you), and made tentative exploratory steps into campaign setting material with Borderland Provinces (we're still a couple weeks from getting the full data back on that). Honestly, we've jumped the gun on our schedule a bit by opening The Blight up for a 5e pdf, but the customer demand seemed to indicate that was the way to go, and a fail on a pdf doesn't kill us like a fail on a 900-page print book does. So we're fully behind you guys on this. We just have to step a little more carefully than a lot of folks would like before we go and just bet everything on black...or red if you prefer, use the analogy as you see fit. ;-)
Anyway, thanks again Brett for your support as a customer and a fan of Frog God Games. And thank you for speaking up about it. We loving hearing what fans want. We love knowing that they care what we do. I just wanted to again reiterate that there's no begrudging or reluctance in our support of 5e. The fact that we didn't launch this as a 5e book is not an indictment against 5e or its fans, it's merely a strategic acknowledgment of our existing fans who we love and who have been loyal to us for years, the uncertainty of the 5e market in particular as it pertains to non-WotC campaign setting material, and a healthy awareness of our own financial limitations. We're a little company made up of part-time hobbyists who love D&D in all its forms. We're not big dogs, and we're not trying to be. But we do want to be able to make the products that we like and that our fans like us to make. We hope that includes 5e versions. It's up to you all to show us.
Now, you guys get out there and make me look like a big idiot by blowing the roof of this KS and getting us to and past a 5e hardcover stretch goal. I'd be ecstatic for everyone to be able to point at me at Gen Con and say, "See, told you so!"
Greg

 

[Greg V]

The holiday weekend was good to us and leaves us at well over halfway to initial funding with 48 days to go, and that with only a 5e pdf on the table so far. Once we hit the normal funding goal, we'll tack on that 5e print stretch goal and hope to shoot past it as well.

I get asked about the lack of 5e on this initially a lot, and I know there's a lot of misunderstanding of why it wasn't on this KS to begin with. One of our 5e backers was asking good questions on the KS page and making some valid points, and after answering him thought it might be worthwhile to post it here as well for anyone interested in the topic.

Brett commented:
I am in for $1 but if a 5E print version becomes available I will pledge for that. I just find I don't use PDFs near as much as an actual book. I do think FGG might be too conservative on your approach to 5E. Kobold Press and Sasquatch have done very well with 5E kickstarters. I think there is big demand for 5E stuff due to the slow release of official material.

He then explained how he had already bought our previous 5e products to show that he wasn't just whistling Dixie. (Thanks, Brett!)

My reply to his support and his question/comment was:
That's awesome, Brett. Thanks! Just for some perspective though ('cause we get asked this a lot), you are correct about Kobold and Sasquatch. But neither has Kickstarted a 5e product comparable to The Blight. We feel good about the numbers to fund our PF and S&W versions based on existing fans and a slow, steady growth model, but 5e is the big question mark and the big risk.

Kobold has Kickstarted a 5e monster book (which did amazing) but was not a massive $100+ campaign setting/adventure path book. Monster books for a new system almost always do well (hence our release of 5e Foes).

Sasquatch has Kickstarted a really cool 5e campaign setting book with adventures but it was a re-issue of a previous book for 4e (so the writing, art, etc. was already paid for I assume), the physical copy was a $60 buy-in rather than $135, more than half of its backers were for pdf only (442 of 870), and though it was wildly successful for what it needed to raise its total funding level would not have successfully funded the current Blight KS funding goal of $75,000.

So while I get what you're saying, and really want it to be true, we've got to play it a little conservative and make sure we don't sink the company trying to prove a hypothesis that the evidence does not yet support. Now the hypothesis may well be true, and you may be right on point with it (did I mention that I really, really hope you are), but we can't play quite that fast and loose with the company and IP that we've been painstakingly building for the last 5 years (15 years if you count continuing development the Necromancer Games legacy). And jumping in blindly on a 5e project of that magnitude and having it go bust could easily destroy our ability to make much in the way of future products if not just outright wipe us out completely. We're a company that's known for delivery on our promises, I think, and if we lose our shirts on a product bust then it seriously jeopardizes our ability to fulfill our commitments to our customers and fans.

I know to a lot of the 5e fans that this KS not having been done initially in 5e somehow feels like a slight. I can only reiterate that it is not. We fully and firmly believe that 5e is a great system and that it has a TON of great fans. We just have to ease into assuring ourselves that the 5e fans are also FGG fans. We want you, we just hope you want us.

So as a result, we have phased in our 5e plans. It began with the 5e Kickstarters for monsters (5e Foes)/rulebooks (Book of Lost Spells)---usually surefire sellers in a new system, has extended into adventure anthologies with Quests of Doom (we've got a lot of those in the queue for you), and made tentative exploratory steps into campaign setting material with Borderland Provinces (we're still a couple weeks from getting the full data back on that). Honestly, we've jumped the gun on our schedule a bit by opening The Blight up for a 5e pdf, but the customer demand seemed to indicate that was the way to go, and a fail on a pdf doesn't kill us like a fail on a 900-page print book does. So we're fully behind you guys on this. We just have to step a little more carefully than a lot of folks would like before we go and just bet everything on black...or red if you prefer, use the analogy as you see fit. ;-)

Anyway, thanks again Brett for your support as a customer and a fan of Frog God Games. And thank you for speaking up about it. We love hearing what fans want. We love knowing that they care about what we do. I just wanted to again reiterate that there's no begrudging or reluctance in our support of 5e. The fact that we didn't launch this as a 5e book is not an indictment against 5e or its fans, it's merely a strategic acknowledgment of our existing fans who we love and who have been loyal to us for years, the uncertainty of the 5e market in particular as it pertains to non-WotC campaign setting material, and a healthy awareness of our own financial limitations. We're a little company made up of part-time hobbyists who love D&D in all its forms. We're not big dogs, and we're not trying to be. But we do want to be able to make the products that we like and that our fans like us to make. We hope that includes 5e versions. It's up to you all to show us.

Now, you guys get out there and make me look like a big idiot by blowing the roof of this KS and getting us to and past a 5e hardcover stretch goal. I'd be ecstatic for everyone to be able to point at me at Gen Con and say, "See, told you so!"

Greg