A reduced-size image for Yrisa’s Nightmare. Art by Monica Marie Doss.

There are some projects that excite because of their content. There are others that entice because of the track record of the creators. And some projects simply ooze style and content. Today, I’m going to write about a project that ticks all three boxes.

It’s another product from Embers Design Studios, and its called Yrisa’s Nightmare. Long-time readers may remember me gushing about the value embedded in their previous project, The Book of Terniel, in Things That Are Easy, Things That Are Hard, which was inspired by the difficulty in what they were trying to achieve. They are being no less ambitious this time around.

GMs can never have enough resources to draw on. One of the big ticks for me in the previous project was the sheer quantity of content that could be expropriated and dropped in anywhere that the GM saw fit, and this is also true this time around. Rather than focusing on one big manifesto piece, this time I thought I would focus more on that content.

We start with the heart of the offering:

An adventure to interest

I have to admit that as soon as I grasped that Yroden was a town and not a person, the pitch for the adventure enticed. “Highhouse Yroden has been cursed. Apparitions stalk her streets, gnolls lurk in the nearby wilds, and a dragon has taken interest in the town. Yet the curse runs deeper still. Nightmares plague the townsfolk’s dreams and madness grips their waking minds. If something doesn’t happen soon, Yroden will be no more.”

That raised the question in my mind of how (and if) GMs promote their adventure plans to the people who matter most, the players. Do you:

• …tease with content, even if its from a subjective perspective that may not necessarily be factually true in actual play?
• …tease with the adventure’s title?
• …end one adventure with an omniscient-perspective prologue to the next, shorn of the context that explains it, and chosen to promise action, drama, mystery, or some other attractive quality or qualities?
• …end an adventure with a revelation or imminent confrontation that will propel the plot in the next adventure?
• …use a recap of trends and developments in the wider plot arcs with the promise that things are about to come to a head?
• …or, is the next adventure nothing more than a chapter in the ongoing campaign, deemed to sell itself by virtue of that association?

I’ve used all these techniques in the past – rarely all in the same adventure at the same time, mind you! The last one is probably the choice I’ve employed least-frequently, but there have been times when any sort of hint would let the cat out of the bag. The most common pattern is to work hard on the adventure title, at the very minimum, as you can tell from the two-part article I wrote on the subject (Part 1, Part 2), and then to use one of the other techniques as an occasional supplementary piece of internal promotion.

A lot depends on the structure of the adventures themselves. Right now, in the Zenith-3 campaign (as an example), the structure is to start with some slice-of-life content that evolves the campaign background and circumstances of the team, and have the primary action within the adventure emerge from within those routine activities, either as an unexpected disruption of the routine, or as an unexpected consequence of them. In the most recently-completed adventure, a visit to a coffee shop for one PC, another volunteering at a soup kitchen for the homeless, and a third attending an art class, all fed directly into the main adventure, while the other PCs experienced encounters that were incidental to that plot but that built toward future plots. Over the next year or two, those ‘slices of life’ will gradually become less common, and there will be more cases of ‘you are at X, doing Y, when…’ and propelling the team directly into adventures, and a few occasions when we join them at the tail-end of a situation that ultimately contributes nothing to the campaign but simply shows the team doing what the team are there to do, i.e. catch bad guys and stop their schemes.

Quite often in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, we will use the ‘You are at X, doing Y, when…’ approach to propel the team directly into the plot. (For the next couple of adventures, we have a deliberately slow-burn introduction, because it suits our plot needs to build the suspense gradually – something we have also done a time or two in the past when it seemed warranted). We will only occasionally tease the content of the next adventure, though we will often reveal the title of the adventure to come – once again, putting quite a lot of effort into getting that right. (For the record, the team are in the closing stages of “Prison Of Jade”, which will be followed by “Boom Town” and then “Lord Of The Flies”. These last two were originally conceived as occurring in a quite different sequence – but I can’t go into that without spilling beans).

The goal is to build up the anticipation of the next adventure as a bridging mechanism between it and the one just completed. In other words, the intent is to manipulate the emotional intensity involved. TV shows have been doing this for decades, for one simple reason: it works.

That’s one of the greatest challenges of writing back cover copy for an adventure – how much do you reveal? How much remains hidden? In some ways, the needs of marketing, promotion, and – in the case of a kickstarter campaign – fundraising, are all at odds with the ideal choice in terms of actual usage. Which brings me back to Yrisa’s Nightmare, and the summary blurb used to describe it.

In terms of enticing people to get ahold of the adventure, it works admirably (especially with a few other snippets of information thrown in); but in terms of keeping the nature and subject of the adventure secret from a potential player, it seems rather explicit. Unless that’s a deliberate deception, which is not best marketing practice. Frankly, this is a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation.

There’s only one solution that satisfies everyone, and that’s if the situation being described is one that’s going to be presented to the players as`soon as they arrive. And personally, it’s my impression that this is the case this time around.

So, to specifics: This is an adventure for 4-5 characters of 2nd level. It promises action, roleplaying and mystery. And implies a strong Gothic Noir undertone that should appeal to a modern audience.

It took me three levels of zoom to be able to show how the map for Yrisa’s Nightmare will look at full resolution. Cartography by Stephen Garrett Rusk.

A map to entice

As with the The Book of Terniel, the map is a definite selling point. Maps are a constant headache to those creating adventures; once again, the problem is the same: how much do you reveal, and how much do you keep hidden? For Assassin’s Amulet, I produced excerpts of each room and blacked out the surrounding spaces so that you could cut out each room and place it on a darkened player-version of the map, purely in an attempt to solve this problem.

Other problems are as much stylistic issues as they are questions of practicality. Maps have changed a lot in nature and character in the course of the last few centuries, and user expectations have changed along with them; the modern priority is accuracy, whereas older maps where as much pieces of art as they were depictions of where things were located, relative to each other. There have been maps in the past which made not attempt to indicate where things were located in any geographic sense; instead, they depicted the relative size of each settlement that one would come to along a given route. Others incorporated theological perspectives or metaphysics. The reason, of course, is the difficulty of measurement.

The evolution of maps and cartography is a fascinating subject!

Map style, like any other illustration, can convey facets of the subject that would take hundreds or thousands of words to convey in a less-effective manner. In particular, a well-rendered game map tells you something about the fictional cartographer who made it, and by extension, the world in which they supposedly live. (Sometime when you have a spare couple of hours to kill, work your way through or , and you’ll see exactly what I mean).

Computer games have been employing the same technique for ages. I particularly remember the maps from 1996’s Heroes Of Might And Magic II, in which the different realms had very different styles – from the more traditional adventurer to the far more gothic Necromancer’s Castle, and so on.

The map for Yrisa’s Nightmare is in a similar sort of old-world style to that which Tolkien employed, and which is a lot harder to do well than many people realize. The result is a sense of intimacy between the mapmaker and the geography that he is depicting, a feeling that he has drawn what he knows – and not drawn what he doesn’t, leaving the areas beyond as fuzzy and unknown. There is a lot of symbolism and metaphor in this style of map – one tree rarely signifies one tree, but simply says “there are trees here”. The exact borders between a wooded area and the surroundings are not defined, as they would be in a (more accurate) modern map.

In other words, what’s shown on the map is what was supposedly important to the map-maker, and the map serves as a window into his world. This artistry doesn’t happen by accident – and is something that I wish more module makers – and GMs – thought about. But, in the meantime, you at least have this one to contemplate.

A reduced-size image for Yrisa’s Nightmare. Art by Gennifer Bone.

A creature to haunt

One of the centerpieces of the adventure is a new monster, the Blackclaw Gnoll, which is “an an unholy merging of demon, dragon, and gnoll”.

GMs have been merging two creatures to create a third for decades. It started with Tolkien’s Uruk-Hai, a ‘blending of orc and man’, I think, long before there were any such things as RPGs! But the infusion of a third species seems profoundly unnatural – which, I think, is exactly the flavor that the creators of the adventure were aiming for.

I’ve seen, from time to time, similar blendings from amateur GMs on the net, and they usually evince a cringe-reaction from me. Too often, they seem to be abominations in which different elements are thrown together haphazardly to form an incoherent melange that exists for no particular reason, or on the most spurious justification. “I want it to be inhumanly strong, so I’ll mix in some dragon…”

For some reason, I don’t get the same sense from this particular creation, and I think that it results from the clear purpose of their creator. I hope that I’m right about this, that some thought has gone into the inherent qualities of each of the contributing species and how the blend will be shaped by them. What qualities would be reinforced? What incompatibilities would have to be solved, and how was it done? Why Gnoll and not Troll, or Bugbear, or whatever?

In short, I’m hoping for coherence in design, and have the sense that it might just be there.

That’s because, if I’m right and this creature is instrumental in bringing about the woes described in the adventure blurb, it means that the credibility and believability of the entire adventure is riding on the credibility and believability of the creature – and Lucas and the others at Embers Design Studios are smart enough to have realized that, and put the hard yards in on the design.

Art to immerse

I’ve talked about the value of illustration to generate a sense of immersion before, but never discussed the difference between “found illustrations” and bespoke artwork of the kind that featured in The Book of Terniel, and is a prominent element in Yrisa’s Nightmare. I note that supporters of the new campaign also have the opportunity to pick up Terniel at a discount, with a bonus supplement in which the art from the previous adventure is highlighted and the artists interviewed. Much of the art team is the same this time around – and that adds to the certainty that there will be content to relish.

It’s all well and good to do as I do. and go searching for an image that can be used to illustrate something in a game (with or without a little digital manipulation). I’ve found some wonderful photographic reference using that technique, enriching my games immensely.

But it means that you are adapting to the source in question as much as you are adapting the source to your adventure needs. You have to take what you can get, and do the best you can with the best that you can find.

Bespoke artwork has no such limitations. It depicts something from the source that simply can’t exist anywhere else. Skills as an artist, of any sort, are such a huge expansion of capability for a GM. Sure, you can get along without it – Blair, my co-GM in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, openly admits that he can’t draw. Ian Gray, who GMs Star Wars for myself and Blair, commented recently that while his character in the Zenith-3 campaign is learning to paint (at his suggestion), he doesn’t want to do so – which is fine, nothing wrong with that. Time is a precious commodity and priorities have to be set. But artistic ability, if you have it, when bent to the production of campaign illustration, adds massively to what you can bring to the gaming table.

Firebird I (unfinished, and only about 30% of the size of the final illustration will be), © 2015 Mike Bourke.

Two examples will prove my point. First, Firebird I (though the name is not finalized yet, and neither is the image). I know that in the adventure now in-progress (“Matters Of Faith”), I am going to need to describe, in detail, the newly-completed space station that is the headquarters of Zenith-3’s parent team. Every level has a function, and the size is indicative of the volume required to perform that function. I could describe all this in words, but simply doing so would drown the players in narrative – and not especially interesting narrative, at that. By the time I finished describing the last deck, it’s a sure bet that the details of the first will have been lost. And the second, and the third – and so on, for almost all of them.

One of the final steps required to complete the illustration (besides the unfinished shield generator on the rendered side) is to label each of the decks and salient features on the outlined side. Once that is done, I can deliver the narrative as it becomes relevant to the story, i.e. as the PCs move from place to place, using the illustration to tie them all together. In addition, I don’t have to provide boring details like relative deck sizes – that’s all obvious from the diagram, or will be when I add a scale, further accelerating the delivery of narrative – all of which enables me to focus on the events that are to transpire within, which is the interesting bit! Now, I could have gone searching for an image of a space station, and maybe found one from Star Wars or Babylon 5 or whatever by a much better artist than I am – but (a) the technology embedded into the station is unique, (b) as I said, every deck has a clear purpose, and (c) the design actually reflects the design necessary to achieve the functions and design ethos that would have been involved in its creation. Any other design would compromise one or all of these, and so the result might be prettier (though I’m darned proud of how it’s turning out) but it would not have been as effective or useful.

My second example derives from the Fumanor campaign. When we sat down to play, I got out my a3 sketch pad, and while play proceeded and I GM’d, I drew up an arid and rocky landscape, with unique terrain features. Several of the players were as fascinated by the image taking shape beneath my pencil as by the adventure in which they were taking part, and wondering whether or not I was really GMing on autopilot, and what that boded for the future of the campaign (others, more used to my ways, were sure that I had a reason for what I was doing – I always did, in the end). After playing for two-and-a-half hours or so, the action reached the point where I was able to say, “and when your vision clears, you see this”, holding up the A3 pad. I had used the act of rendering the illustration on a blank page right in front of the players as a way to build up the suspense and intrigue leading to the big revelation. The act of creation itself made the result more effective than any canned image – or even a custom image prepared in advance – could have been (I’ve used those, too, so I have a reasonable basis for comparison).

So my artistic skills, rusty as they may be, provide several extra strings to my GMing ‘bow’.

Make no mistake, however – any illustration that serves a purpose within the game is better than none. You can describe a Tangerine Gosset (to invent something off the top of my head) until the cows come home; no matter how clear an image you build up in the player’s minds, it can’t provide the visceral experience of seeing one.

Which is where the art in Yrisa’s Nightmare, and in The Book Of Terniel before it, come back into the discussion.

Another key factor in determining the usefulness of art as illustration is in the quality of the work. If something looks like a two-year-old drew it – with all due respect to the artistic abilities of two-year-olds – it is not going to be as useful or effective as it would if drawn, painted, or otherwise depicted by a skilled artist who knows what they are doing. And the art for Yrisa’s Nightmare is superb, as I hope the examples used in this article can confirm.

An App to game with

Yrisa’s Nightmare is going to be available in three formats: Print, PDF (optimized for tablets and mobile phones), and The City Of Brass.

City Of Brass is “a fully-featured [web-based] app specifically designed to manage the mechanics of pen-and-paper games allowing you to focus on what matters:” Playing the game. Actually, it’s a suite of four interconnected Apps, in my opinion. These four modules are the World Builder, the Entity Builder, the Story Builder, and the Campaign Manager – and all customizable to work with any RPG, according to the blurb at the above link.

Funding of The City Of Brass is on a subscription basis, but they offer a 30-day free trial. $3 a month gets you access beyond that 30-day window, or $24 a year (saving 33% off the monthly fee) – I assume the prices are in USD. But, if you buy Yrisa’s Nightmare, there is a special deal on offer: $20 for a year, or $90 for a year’s subscription for your entire group (up to 5 people), so that your players can use the character builder, have access to the game world, etc. Think about that for a moment: 5 people’s annual access would normally cost $180 (at the standard monthly rate), so $90 is as little as half the usual price.

Now, I don’t know if the primary purpose of Yrisa’s Nightmare is to market City Of Brass, or if they are simply looking to capitalize on the publicity raised by the Kickstarter Campaign. Look at it this way: either the option is yet another bonus add-on to the module that you can and should consider, or the module is a bonus and and enticement to sign up. Either way, it’s clever marketing and you get a bonus!

Is City Of Brass better than the other campaign management apps out there? I don’t know. Not only have I not played around with City Of Brass, I haven’t used any of the competing products to have a standard of comparison. All I can say is that it sounds good, if you can afford it.

I personally have a great deal of uncertainty about such Apps. First of all, I can’t afford the learning curve to get the best out of them; second, I can’t afford the data entry time to convert my existing campaigns; third, I don’t know how compatible any given app would be with my methods and work practices; and fourth, I distrust the idea of becoming dependent on a piece of technology that might vanish at some future point in time.

• Learning Curve: Every new piece of technology has a learning curve associated with it. With some software, it’s short; with some, it’s an investment of hundreds of hours over a period of years. Campaign Mastery, like all WordPress-platform blogs, runs on CSS; I have never found the time to learn CSS, even though I use and rely on it every week. I’ve picked up a few bits and pieces, I managed to set up the class attributes for the tables used in the Tavern Generator to get them more-or-less the way I wanted (though I did a lot with line breaks, non-breaking spaces, and brute force, too), and can work out some things from general programming experience. There are lots of free courses and even more paid ones that promise to teach you CSS; I simply haven’t had the time to even seriously contemplate one. I tweak the CSS for Campaign Mastery with trepidation, semi-educated trial-and-error, luck, and careful backups. Mostly, I find a workaround that’s near enough and let it be. I’ve never been able to get bullet lists to perform exactly the way I want them to, for example.
• Data Entry Time: Back in the days before there were Apps, I got myself a copy of Redblade 3.5 to make it easier to create and update NPCs in the Fumanor campaign. After a year of learning the software on-and-off as time permitted, I was able to use it for the purpose, making a lot of manual adjustments to the finished characters. I then calculated how long it would take to input all the feats, classes, and other reference material that would be needed to make it fully operational for the intended purpose. The total: 28,000 hours of data entry. At maybe 3 hours a week (tops!!) that comes to just under 180 years. Not going to happen. The rules for the Zenith-3 campaign, to take another example, total more than 435,000 words on over 720 pages – NONE of it campaign-specific material. It represents years of work over multiple decades. It won’t go into anything overnight – but these are the rules that I use most often.
• This appears to be a less-serious objection. The question is, taking the learning curve into account, what is more productive – adopting my work practices, which have been tweaked and optimized to give me the most bang-per-work-second that I can obtain; or employing what may be more efficient practices (I don’t have a monopoly on good ideas) or may be less efficient practices, that are technologically supported, in hopes that the sum total is more effective than the current techniques. All things being equal, I suspect that the tech support would make the difference, and that I would be better off adapting to the new ways than being the best horse-and-buggy-maker-going; but all things are not equal, and the learning curve would more than consume the gains. Certainly, over the length of the subscription, it wouldn’t make enough of a positive difference to leave me better off. There is, however, one killer argument in this category: a lot of my gaming takes place in a location in which I don’t have internet access. No web = no web apps = no game.
• I truly wish the City Of Brass longevity. Lucas is a nice guy, and I’ve been nothing but impressed with the work he and the others at Embers Design Studios have done. But I’ve been burned before. Heck, right now, Google Docs won’t let me access some of the online material I had set up; if I were relying on them, as we did when planning Assassin’s Amulet, we would be well-and-truly stuffed at this point. So I make it a rule of thumb not to be dependent on any given piece of software if I can help it.

Of course, none of my objections need apply to anyone else – and certainly, if I were setting up a new campaign, I would be a lot more receptive to a change in fundamental infrastructure and technique. If you have even the slightest suspicion that it might be worthwhile, sign up for the free trial period!

The great thing is that if you view this as just an extra add-on that you choose not to adopt, it not only doesn’t cost you anything, it has absolutely zero impact on your receiving value for money from the rest of the offering.

The Campaign

Which brings me to the Kickstarter campaign itself. Let’s break it down.

The basic packages get you access to the module in one or more of the formats. Additional options permit a number of extras to be added to the package – I’ll go into that in a moment – and there are a limited number of early-bird options that get you a discount (which are going fast!). There are also options to sign up as a play-tester – one way to be sure that your players haven’t read the module before you!

Add-ons

These include extra copies, the Book of Terniel, the World Builder package that enables you to collaborate on the adventure, City Of Brass subscriptions at the discounted rates, City Of Brass d6’s and bumper stickers, and the play-tester option.

Bonus Rewards

For every four achievements they reach – that’s backers for the Kickstarter campaign, new City Of Brass subscriptions, getting funded by 200% or more (see “stretch goals” and “the target” below), Facebook likes, social media shares regarding the campaign, or followers for the Twitter account – there will be something extra added to the package. At least four of these goals were reached with The Book Of Terniel so it’s entirely possible – but if you want to reach the second or third tier, you – and several other people – will have to hustle.

The reachable goal unlocks monsters, backgrounds, and traits – extra content, in other words. The goal that will only be reached if the campaign is wildly successful adds a player’s guide, which will enhance the adventure and may contain extra art. The third goal, only reachable if the campaign is a monster success, will unlock a mystery bonus.

The thing to remember about these rewards is that if everyone tries, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like them, post about the campaign, and/or tweet about the campaign, and you encourage new twitter followers and facebook likes. These help persuade others to back the project, increasing both the degree of funding and the number of backers, and potentially the number of City Of Brass subscribers. So some social media activism contributes to 6 or 7 of the achievement bonuses – a solid reward for effort.

Stretch Goals

On top of that, there are 5 stretch goals. At funded-plus-50%, there’s an expansion that adds to the adventure environment and inserts a new scene into the adventure. At funded-plus-100%, not only do you unlock one of the achievements, but there’s a post-adventure extra that deals with the fallout from the adventure, helping to integrate the adventure into a campaign. At 250% funded, there’s another adventure extra, and at 300% you get details of the lurking villain responsible, his goals and followers, and his realm. Still more campaign-level goodness, in other words. Finally, at 400% funded, not only do you tick off a second (and quite possibly a third and fourth) bonus award, you get a side-adventure that can either be integrated into the Yrisa’s Nightmare or run as a standalone adventure.

The Pledges

Pledge levels that actually get you a copy in the event that the funding goal is reached start at $5 (plus add-ons) and range all the way up to $100 (which includes the $90 whole-group subscription to The City Of Brass).

My only criticism of the pledge levels is…

Flaws and Problems

The print copies only ship to the US. As someone who resides outside of this area, this irks me somewhat; but, given that this is their first venture into physically-printed products, I can understand the desire to limit the unknowns. Still, I would like to have seen this included in the stretch goals at the very least, so that if the project is a success, there is incentive for a second wave of backers from outside the US. And possibly even an intermediate step that adds Canada to the list of destinations.

The safest way of adding these destinations is by making international delivery an add-on; this is the routine practice with most Kickstarter projects with a physical print product. I’ve seen requests for an additional $5, $10, and $20 per copy; the latter is probably excessive, but the middle value is fairly reasonable.

The alternative is to duplicate all the pledge levels involving a physical copy, incorporating the extra cost of international shipping. It wouldn’t cost much more for Canada (which is why most campaigns who offer a print copy make it deliverable to either the US or Canada for the one price. Anything more distant is a different story.

But the bigger hole is that there is no group-backer option that doesn’t include a print copy. There are lots of roleplayers in other countries, and I think this is a mistake.

The biggest complaint that I have about the content is Y so many Y’s? We have Yrisa, and Yroden, and the unfamiliarity of both as names makes it easy to confuse the two. I mean, even the product description – it’s called Yrisa’s Nightmare, but the intro text never mentions Yrisa. Lucas replied, when I mentioned this criticism, that it was done to make everything sound a bit more Norse/viking/northerner, and I can understand that – but they remain a bit of a tongue-twister. I would certainly prefer to see the township renamed “Iroden” for ease of pronunciation (it’s the worse of the two in that respect) and clear distinctiveness between Yrisa and the township. He’s giving that as much attention as he can spare, at the moment.

Finally, there is the potential for some confusion about the add-ons vs the pledge levels. Several of the pledges include one or more of the add-ons but the price charged is NOT the same as the two listed separately. For example, the $20 pledge gets you a year’s subscription to City Of Brass AND the same things as the $5 pledge. That adds up to $25 because the discounted rate for CoB subscription is also $20. There’s a similar problem with the group-subscription-for-a-year. Either the CoB subscriptions is more heavily discounted than mentioned, or someones’ made a mistake with the math, or an attempt to be brief has conflated the price of extra subscriptions with the discounted price of subscriptions. Or maybe it’s supposed to be a limited early-bird offer. This needs clarification ASAP – the more people that have pledged, the harder it will be to straighten it out.

The Target

The Book Of Terniel asked for $500 and got $2000 plus. This campaign asks for $2000 and will get… what?

Well, let’s break that down. For electronic forms, there are 25 copies at $7 (now all gone) and unlimited copies at $10 for the PDF. There are then a number of options that give you Yrisa’s Nightmare in two different formats, for $17 and $18, respectively. Finally, existing City Of Brass subscribers can get the CoB version AND the PDF for just $5.

I don’t know how many subscribers CoB has that might take up that offer, so let’s assume for the moment that none do. The other non-print options (excluding the early-bird offer) cost $10, $8.50, and $9.50 per copy. There’s also a $25 version that gets you three versions (two PDFs and a CoB), or $8.33 a copy. Those four average out at a whisker over $9 each. So, deducting the early-bird copies at $7 that are sold out from the target, we get a further $1825 that needs to be raised from copies of Yrisa’s Nightmare. That works out to 201 copies.

The base price of a print copy is $25. So every print copy counts as about 2.8 electronic copies. So 72 print copies will also get the campaign over the line. Or, to put it another way, every 5 existing CoB subscribers who accept the $5 offer, one print copy needs to be sold.

PDF products routinely meet goals of $2K, and print products $5000. On the face of it, the goals are quite reasonable. Heck, I’ve seen $20 PDF products reach $5K targets and $40 print products reach $20-$25K. And they weren’t selling City Of Brass subscriptions as extras. So there’s no reason this campaign can’t get to well over the $5000 mark.

The big unknowns are in the effect of restricted distribution of the print copies, the lack of emphasis that non-US customers can still get the electronic versions, and the absence of the CoB discount packages for out-of-USA sales. But it’s a good bet that whatever the campaign gets, it could reach targets 5-10% higher by correcting these problems.

Here’s another way to look at it: For every print copy that might have been sold outside the US, they need to get 2.8 PDF sales outside the US to get to the same money. I’d hate for that to be the margin between success and failure, or the funding of a stretch goal. I already know one GM who prefers print products over electronic ones and who would have considered backing the project – if not for the distribution issue making the product unavailable to him.

The Comparison

Ultimately, the inevitable question is, how does Yrisa’s Nightmare compare with The Book Of Terniel?

You don’t have to look very hard to see similarities in style – in fact, I haven’t shown any character images from Nightmare because they were so similar in style to the one that I displayed when reviewing Terniel. The majority of the creative team behind one is essentially the same as for the other. That means that I would expect it to very much have a similar look-and-feel to the previous project, and everything that I am seeing on the kickstarter page accords with that assessment.

As with Terniel, this is a quality product that you can either use as a standalone or as a collection of a great many excellent resources to mine for your own needs.

How could the product (as opposed to the campaign) be improved? Ummm…. Ahhh…. more pages, maybe. And a version of the map without labels. And fixing the Y’s. That’s about it, I’m coming up empty for further suggestions (at least until I’ve read it!)

The Conclusion

For a change, I’m getting this in very early in the fundraising campaign, thanks to Lucas giving me an in-advance heads-up. As I write this, there are 27 days to go and pledges so far are already at the 36% mark. There is no telling what the future will hold, but if it takes 6 days instead of 3 to get the next 36%, I estimate that it will be fully-funded by about the half-way point. Of course, it would be completely egotistic to expect this review to accelerate that process; sometimes, these do, sometimes they don’t.

I think Yrisa’s Nightmare is worth backing. I know it’s worth your time in checking it out. To do so, click on any of the images from the product (that’s all of them above this line except the space station!) or on This Link. I doubt that you’ll regret it.

And, While I Have Your Attention

I get many more invitations to review/promote projects than I can possibly accommodate (strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have reviewed Yrisa’s Nightmare either – but it was too gorgeous to resist, and Lucas is an active supporter of Campaign Mastery to boot. Not that I would let that influence my judgments of the product or campaign – I value the trust that readers place in my writings, and letting bias creep in is the fastest way I can think of to lose that trust).

On that basis, I wanted to briefly mention a couple of other kickstarter campaigns – one in its’ final days (and is fully funded), Congrats! – and one that has yet to launch, but which has a ‘remind me’ service to notify you when it does – and a forthcoming novel. Call it a promo-roundup of things that I thought my readers might be interested in!

Awaken – A Dark Fantasy Tabletop RPG

From The Games Collective, via Studio 2 Publishing, comes “Awaken”. $19,984 raised against a $15,000 target, and four days to go. I love a fully-funded fundraising campaign, it takes so many unknowns out of the equation! So there will be a product, barring some sort of disaster.

The Jarillo Domain map from Awaken The Games Collective are a small team from Croatia (go, guys! always happy to see another corner of the world getting into RPGs!), “stationed on Mediterranean coast”. Here’s what Zoltan had to say about Awaken when he contacted Campaign Mastery: “Fans of dark fantasy games, creativity and story driven experiences, will feel at home in Awaken, a pen and paper RPG heavily influenced by Slavic and Mediterranean folklore. The Kickstarter campaign features the core game at $45, and will be shipped worldwide. The logistics and publishing of Awaken are supported by Studio 2 Publishing, the sales, warehousing, and publishing partner of many game companies, including Pinnacle Entertainment, Exile Game Studio, Crafty Games, Engine Publishing, Hunters Books, Paradigm Concepts, and many more.” Lots of nice eye candy in this one, too. Definitely worth a look, but time is short, so don’t dilly-dally; click on This Link or on the graphic above. And again, congratulations to all involved on a successful fundraising campaign!

Neodygame Scenography

Neodygame haven’t yet launched their Kickstarter campaign, but that means that there’s an opportunity to get in not only on the ground floor but though the basement!

An example of Neodygame ‘s Magnetic Scenography Neodygame have a new idea: 3D magnetic scenery that locks into place sufficiently firmly that walls won’t get knocked over. They are going to launch a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter in December to bring the project into reality. The project is based on 6 key characteristics: Their “Easy-link” system (which allows every tile of the RPG scenery to connect and stick to the others automatically), high definition textures (which the image samples make very obvious), double faced, resistant (durable and waterproof) and ready to play. I don’t think I’ll get the chance to review the campaign when it actually launches – I’m already planning what to write in February! – so I wanted to give it a shout-out here and now. The product looks great, but price is (right now) a big unknown. If you use Minis in your fantasy games, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. If you visit their website, you’ll find a promotional video and lots more information and images. You can also sign up for a reminder when their Kickstarter campaign actually starts. Just click on or on the graphic above.

Pathfinder: Bloodbound

I was recently offered the opportunity to interview the author of this new book, an opportunity that I had to decline for logistics reasons. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell you about the book!

Pathfinder: Bloodbound by F.Wesley Schneider, Published on December 1, 2015 F.Wesley Schneider is one of the co-creators of Pathfinder and a veteran game designer. He has published countless gaming products for both Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons, and is a former assistant editor of Dragon magazine. Schneider will also be one of the Bosses of Honor at Gaymer X in mid-December. “Pathfinder: Bloodbound” (a Tor Paperback, on sale December 1) is his first novel. “The gothic city of Ustalav is home to two societies, one belonging to humans and the other to vampires. Larsa, a dhampir – half-vampire, half-human – is charged with keeping the peace. When vampiric invaders breach the long-standing but shaky truce, a conspiracy ensnares Larsa and her companions – a priestess of the death goddess, a foppish vampire, and a Pathfinder – in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. This unlikely alliance proves that in the darkest of times, relationships can be forged even across different worlds.” There’s a bit of Gothic flavor (continuing the general theme of this article!) and a definite sense of Eberron about the premise as described – but it also sounds like a lot of fun. You can pre-order the book at Amazon (and get an early-bird discount) for only USD$11.24, or just read some more about the story – just click on This Link or on the cover.

Whew! Three products, all impressive/interesting in their own ways – four, if you count the featured product from Embers Design Studios. Hopefully at least one of them will be of interest. They’ve certainly stimulated my thoughts in different ways over the last few days! Now it’s back to working on that space station…