Kickstarter The Book of Plagues: Infecting D&D 5E and Pathfinder

[doogx]

Ramen Sandwich Press is coming back to crowdfunding to raise money for our next project, The Book of Plagues, an efficient, flexible way for making your player characters sick. It's designed for compatibility with Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition and 2024) and Pathfinder (both 1E and 2E), but it can be adapted to any d20-based RPG system with some conceptual mapping and simple math.

The Book of Plagues will feature 30 or so IRL diseases, ranging from the potentially lethal (bubonic plague) to the merely irritating (swimmer's itch), with the chance of contracting it, circumstances under which you might contract it, incubation period and symptoms expressed in terms compatible with D&D 5E and 2024 as well as both editions of Pathfinder.

Why would you want to introduce diseases into your fantasy RPG campaign? Well, maybe your players are getting a little too high on the hog and you want to force them to spend some resources, like a spell slot committed to cure disease or having to spend gold on a cure from the local temple. Maybe they've been dawdling and you want to use the risk of influenza or cholera to urge them to leave an encampment or a comfortable urban dwelling. Maybe you just want to add a touch of grim realism to what is, after all, a pre-modern world. Diseases with a creature vector, like malaria or Lyme Disease, can add a dangerous bit of potency to certain encounters.

The Book of Plagues will launch on February 2 on both Backerkit and Kickstarter. On Backerkit, the campaign will be part of their Zinetopia 2026 event, and we will have cross-promotions going, one with Sneak Attack Press and another with Greedy Gorgon Press, for backers who back both our campaign and theirs. Follow us on either or both platforms to make sure notified when we launch!

 

[doogx]

We're just a couple of days away from simultaneous launch on Kickstarter and Backerkit! On Backerkit, we're pleased to run separate cross-promotions with Sneak Attack Press and Greedy Gorgon Press as part of Backerkit's Zinetopia 2026 event. The details and linkage are now part of our preview page on Backerkit: If you back our campaign and Sneak Attack's campaign for Tent and Bedroll we'll kick in a free PDF copy of Tome of the Utility Drawer and they'll add a PDF of their campaign setting Drakonheim: City of Bones. If you back our campaign and Greedy Gorgon's campaign for "Great Hexpectations," we'll throw in a 30% discount on both of our random wilderness encounters books (both of which are said to be useful for hex crawl campaigns) and they'll add a whopping 50% discount on their 5E-meets-Fantastic Voyage adventure, The Body of a Wizard.

The fun begins on Monday!

 

[doogx]

Well, our campaigns launched on Monday... and we have already hit our funding target on Backerkit!

Our Kickstarter campaign is only halfway to its funding goal and could still use some help, but after just two days, we're still in a good place. Whichever platform you prefer, don't miss out on your chance to back us!

 

[doogx]

Our campaigns on Backerkit and Kickstarter both ended successfully last Friday! Thank you to everyone who participated and supported this project. However, it's not too late to get in on the fun: Late pledging is available on Kickstarter and it will remain available until we go to print.

In the meantime, we're pleased to report that the writing phase of The Book of Plagues is almost complete and it should be finished today or tomorrow.

 

[doogx]

The primary crowdfunding for The Book of Plagues, our forthcoming book on incorporating 30 IRL diseases into D&D and Pathfinder, is over but you can still get in on the fun through our Backerkit pre-order store. Thank you to everyone who has supported this project! The writing is complete, the manuscript is into layout and we hope to have it to the printer by the end of the month.

 

[doogx]

The Book of Plagues is still in process; it looks like we will have it ready for the printer a couple of weeks later than previously estimated. You can still pre-order it through our Backerkit pre-order store, but we will stop taking orders on April 29 so we can get a count of how many copies we'll need.

Things are moving quickly at Ramen Sandwich Press; our next crowdfunding project will hit the Interweb On May 7 as part of Backerkit's Pocketopia 2026 event and Kickstarter's Micro May event: It's the 15th module in our Places by the Way (or D&D 53) and Found by the Way (for Pathfinder 1E and 2E) series of location modules, Children of the Mountain God. Your party enters a rain forest and finds a village that relies on a steady stream of gemstones produced by a nearby volcano to trade for goods it needs from the outside world. But a hungry xorn has emerged from the Plane of Earth and it's eating the village out of house and home. Can your player characters rescue the village from a predatory elemental — and perhaps defend it from angry traders and their henchmen as well?

Whatever your crowdfunding platform of choice, follow our campaign to get notified when it launches. We'll appreciate it, because the more followers we get, the better we look!