It’s not a group related but product related.
My group played through The Way of the Wicked by Gary McBride and Firemountain Games and got all the way to the end of six books - level 19, pretty awesome campaign that took us 2 years or so.
Gary launched a Kickstarter for a drow campaign called Throne of Night, that made the excellent Rise of the Drow look like a minor spelunking expedition. Full Hexploration over hundreds of miles of detailed caverns. Amazing locations, demons, a secret aberration threat from below, a ruined dwarf city and a wicked drow city and kingdom building rules. There were options to play as heroic dwarves settlers or to build a new drow house from the ashes.
I went all in with several hundred other people, I think £180 for hard copy books, PDFs, poster maps etc. it started well, if slowly. The first pdf was released and was everything I’d come to expect - absolute quality adventure. The second pdf came out even later, also brilliant and imaginative so it was worth the wait… though no sign of the first hardcover. Then the wheels came off.
After promises of better communication Gary McBride just stopped talking to us. No updates were forthcoming, we emailed him, emailed Kickstarter no response. People wrote to him at the fire mountain games registered address, no response. We escalated the complaints to Kickstarter, they said they would reach out to the author… no response was forthcoming.
We contacted the artist working on the project who said he had delivered all the art for the project on time and had been paid for it. He promised to reach out to Gary but he too was unsuccessful. Eventually stopping responding to as his part in the Kickstarter had been fulfilled. The firemountain website was closed down, as was the Facebook page. A small number of backers still post five years later keeping the hope that one day we might see any more of this p. Gary sits on the $40,000 he defrauded from his backers without even the good grace to explain what happened and apologize.
Most heartbreaking of all, and the piece that makes me want to buy a ticket from England to Beaverton Oregan and hunt the man down, is that since he went silent, Gary McBride still has a Kickstarter account and has backed over 500 other kickstarters on the site. Since he went silent! Presumably receiving all the updates from those projects and casually ignoring the emails from those he defrauded and Kickstart do nothing!
I could weep!
