The PDF is Available. Emails are going out.
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 01:53:00 AM

Oh ye who turn the wheel and look to windward...  

The Preview
almost 6 years ago – Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 01:50:22 AM

I said the next update would have the preview, and this is that! Behold!

Sorry this has taken so long, but getting to this point was a lot harder than I thought it would be. The good news is, we are very close to getting a finished PDF to you! The PDF is laid out and we're making sure everything is optimized so the file size is reasonable. We're also setting up our digital distribution for the first time which it turns out is a whole other host of fun problems. :D

This is a lot of work and trial and error, as we've never done this before, but we're getting there.  

At this point, if you backed on Kickstarter or preordered, we've charged your card. I should have done an update saying "heads up, we're about to charge your card" but it didn't occur to me until after the fact, so I apologize. I was hyperfocused on finishing the PDF and it didn't occur to me. So some folks may be surprised.

Here's the straight dope from Anna:

All remaining Backers and Preorders have been charged!

If you had an outstanding balance with us, last night we began processing those orders which means that you may see some account activity from BackerKit or MCDM Productions. In case of success or failure to charge your payment method, you should have received an email from BackerKit letting you know the outcome.

(Likely) within the next week we’ll be sending you further instructions on how to download your Strongholds & Followers PDF (likely from our soon-to-be-live online store); if you still have an outstanding balance, you won’t receive this email and won’t be in the system to get your PDF until BackerKit has successfully charged you. We’ll be checking every few days to try make sure everyone gets taken care of, but it’d be really helpful to have folks who fixed their payment “[email protected]” to let us know so they don’t slip through the cracks and we can get to them even faster.  

Q: I got an email saying my payment failed. What do I do now?  

A: No worries! In most cases this just means that you need to update your payment method through BackerKit; once you update it, BackerKit will automatically re-attempt the charge and alert you if it’s failed again. You should have received an email with a link to your BackerKit profile so you could update your payment. If you didn’t, go to this website and enter in your Kickstarter email address and you’ll get a new email with a link to your profile where it’ll prompt you to do so: https://strongholds-and-streaming.backerkit.com  

Q: I think I paid, but I don’t remember getting an email. How do I make sure I don’t have a balance I owe?

A: You can follow the link below and enter in your Kickstarter email address, and then you’ll receive an email from BackerKit that lets you review your pledge or preorder of Strongholds & Followers. As long as you don’t get a prompt to update your payment method or red text and a negative account balance, you’re in good shape! Here’s a snippet of the page to show you what an account in good standing looks like: 

Here’s the BackerKit link so you can check it out for yourself: https://strongholds-and-streaming.backerkit.com

As always, if you have any questions you can reach out to us at “[email protected]” — please be a little extra patient with us during this time as we’re anticipating an increased number of folks getting in touch to make sure they’re in good shape. We’ll get to you as soon as we can! :)

Here, while we're at it. If you've read this far you get to see the Table of Contents! Someone on reddit asked for this as part of the preview and I thought it was a good idea.

Time For Another Update
about 6 years ago – Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 01:25:04 AM

I know I said, last update, that the next update (which is this update) would be the one with a sample of the layout, but we’re not at that stage yet and it’s been almost a month and I felt you were owed an update.

So EVEN THOUGH folks will see the alert and think “OMG!” and then be bummed when there’s no sample, I didn’t think maintaining radio silence was wise and there IS stuff to talk about. So let’s talk about it!

The Layout

Progress continues! Huge strides forward. We got a rough layout of the first 116 pages and while it looked good, I had a LOT of feedback. Everything from the choice of fonts used in the headers, to the body text size. To the way the border elements intersect and the use of art. So there was a lot of feedback and that requires reflowing the text, which isn’t starting from scratch but it does take time.

This is just the normal process of laying a book out, the layout affects literally every page so you want to make sure you get it right. And there are some places where I’m being picky, and other places where I’m choosing my battles, and also the process requires feedback from the layout artist. *I* may think this element is too big or small or whatever, what does everyone else think?

The tension in any layout is between “pretty” and “readable.” And both of these qualities are complex and nuanced. If you focus too much on pretty, you sacrifice readability and if you focus too much on readability you sacrifice aesthetics and while I still occasionally run into folks who say “I’d be happier if it were just a plain text document!” something I learned very early in my video game career is: presentation is part of design. How you present something has a big impact on how it is perceived and layout is huge for a game manual.

So I don’t know how long until the layout is done? But we haven’t yet caused our graphic designer to shout at us or pull out his hair or say “You’re mad!!” And we’ve given him fair reason to; we did a TERRIBLE job applying styles consistently (or, in some cases, at all) throughout the manuscript. That’s 100% on me, I was so excited to have a finished draft, I completely forgot about going through and fixing all the styles. This is probably my biggest area of ignorance when it comes to book production, I was never closely involved with the layout process at Last Unicorn/WotC/Decipher. But we’re learning a lot now!

Something that might not be obvious; this is THE layout. It’s the MCDM Trade Dress that all our 5th edition products will use. No, I have no idea how many products that might be. At least two! Strongholds and Followers, and Kingdoms & Warfare.

So while this may seem tedious because we’re in this “hurry up and wait” deadzone of no more writing or design or illustration, and believe me I appreciate that, it’s also an investment in everything we do moving forward. This is the company trade dress and when it’s done, we’ll use it in the next book and that means this entire step we can skip next time.

The Stream

Speaking of dead zones… We also haven’t launched the stream! I’m pretty depressed about this, but being depressed doesn’t get the work done.

I put a lot of work and thought into my campaigns and I have for years, for decades. I spent six months prepping the last game I ran at Turtle Rock Studios, because I wanted a *real* open world feel with many different adventures for the players to choose from, which meant prepping several different adventures before we ever made characters.

And then while we’re running I spend a lot of money on minis and terrain and props. And I often spend the time between sessions writing fiction about and for the game. Sometimes I take what we just did, and turn it into prose, sometimes I take moments that happened offscreen and write them up to give the players a sense of dramatic irony.

So given that this is my normal ground state, I want to do something *special* for this stream. Mind you, I think it’s all pretty bog standard stuff for most D&D streams, but it’s all new to us.

I want to get character art done for all the PCs before we launch. I want to get an animated intro--something folks have been saying I need for my YouTube videos for literally years. That means we need some graphic design AND some animation/after effects and all these things require coordinating with folks and schedules and communication and it’s just a whole THING.

But we’re doing it! We have a checklist of everything we need to launch the stream and all of it is either done, or being worked on. Two of the 5 PCs have their art, the logo for the stream has been mocked up and iterated on. We have MUSIC for the intro, we are making progress. 

Like the layout...I don’t know when it’s all going to be done. And the holidays are coming up and there’s at least one week I know folks will be out of town, so everything starts to get complicated.

And there’s still more to test!

Codenames

You’ve probably seen that we sometimes, and now more regularly, and hopefully at some point weekly, stream live boardgames from MCDM on Tuesday Nights. So far it’s always been Codenames and I have reasons to believe no other game we might play would be as well-adapted for streaming, but we are going to stream other games.

This is something I’ve wanted to do since we started playing Codenames at Turtle Rock Studios two years ago. I believed that our games were entertaining enough to stream and attract a modest audience.

It’s also just a great opportunity to test our setup and so far that has been a huge hit, purely in terms of what we’ve learned. We’ve learned a lot. We’re going to keep streaming because it’s fun and we like it and we have this studio 7 days a week anyway, we might as well build out more content we believe in.

But! The D&D stream will be more complex than the codenames stream to the tune of 4 more cameras using two more and each completely different, camera technologies, so we needed another test subject, closer to the real actual process of playing D&D.

So we played D&D.

O’D&D

It’s been over a year since I ran D&D and the prospect of doing it for the first time in over a year LIVE with dozens of people watching is more anxiety than I really need, so I decided a while ago I wanted to run a short adventure for my friend Matt O’Driscoll and anyone he wanted to invite as long as it was mostly noobs.

Obviously this also became a great opportunity to test all our gear and we learned a lot. We learned our tech didn’t work with that many cameras! Jerry’s working on that and whatever solution he comes up with will mean more tests.

Running for Matt was a blast. It relieved a LOT of worry I had, worry about a lot of things. Worry that I was rusty and it would show, but also worry about how good a DM I can be.

The last, say, 10 years, the D&D I’ve run has always been on a weekday after work, usually Thursdays. And because it’s after work, I would have to prep stuff the weekend before, and then forget about it, and on the day, start psyching myself up again, and I couldn’t reasonably start “getting ready” any earlier than 3pm and the result was; all the games I’ve run recently had a very “rushed” feel to them. I was rushing to get to combat where I felt more at ease.

Back in the 90s, before I had a career, I could basically take all day getting ready to run D&D and that was the era when I felt the most at ease, the era when I felt like I was running my best games, and it was all about how confident I was when I sat down behind the screen.

Well thanks to you, literally you reading this, I can now do that again. I can spend all day prepping D&D and when everyone sat down to play last Tuesday, I was relaxed and confident and I think it showed.

I was able to just let the players soak in the environment, not rush things, take time to describe the environment, role play the NPCs, let small talk happen in-character.

I think it worked. I think it worked great. We recorded it and, once the “real” stream is live and ticking along nicely, we’ll upload our O’D&D sessions complete with Campaign Diaries. So you’re not going to miss anything, I just don’t want to fake people out by broadcasting a D&D game that ISN’T the one everyone paid to see, UNTIL the one they paid to see is live.

So I realize this period is deeply unsatisfying; the playtest is over, the art is all done, the manuscript is finished, now we wait for the finishing touches on the book and the stream, but there’s nothing for it. This is part of the process.

I suspect all this stuff will come online all around the same time? I don’t know, it just seems like the graph lines of the Stream and the Book are sort of intersecting at some point in the near future. We’ll all find out together!

In the meantime, we deeply appreciate your patience and support. All the stuff we’re doing now, will make anything new we do in the future happen faster and on a more transparent and reliable schedule. But this is our first time together as a team and there’s a lot to iron out.

Next update, hopefully a sample of the layout!

Art Talk
about 6 years ago – Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 02:35:36 AM

Work on the book continues. The manuscript is getting it's 'final' pass from the editor and our graphic designer has delivered what I consider a near final version of the layout. All good news.

Meanwhile I didn't want to just maintain radio silence. I often show off art from the book so I figured it would be a good idea to talk about the artists and the actual process via which we got art for the book.

The Plan

The way this works, by the way, is you start with two factors; art per page and words per page. You write an outline for the content of the book and you estimate how many words each section of your outline will be. We originally estimated about 80,000 words for this book, and we ended up with about 110,000 I think.

Then you start thinking "ok how many words should there be on each page?" This gets down to things like readability (too many words per page and the reader's eyes bleed) but also value. If you try to pad out your page count with very few words per page the folks open the book and see huge margins, big font, lots of whitespace and they think "this is it?"

So you have to strike a balance and I think I estimated about 750 words per page which is pretty standard. Maybe on the high end of standard. You might not notice this stuff but when I open a new RPG book from a new company, I instantly look at stuff like how many words per page they used, how big are the margins, I check out the leading (the space between lines) and the font size just trying to get a sense of whether they are padding the book (trying to reach a certain page count) or desperately trying to cram in all the stuff they wrote without the book turning into a 50lb monster. :D The bigger the book is, by the way, the more it costs to make!

Once you figure out how many words per page you want, you figure out how much art per page. This could easily be less than 1, a fraction like 2/3rds. 2 pieces of art, every three pages (two attacks every three rounds!) which means one out of every three pages has no art. 

You tend to budget in terms of "pages" of art, even though most art is not a full-page piece. Smaller pieces can cost less, but not always. You can treat "one page" as the basic unit of art and budget from there. Like, if you budget "10 pages of art" it's up to you how you want to break those "pages" up by commissioning 20 half-page pieces for instance.

But all this is a hypothesis. When you start writing the book you realize some things NEED illustration (like items, and maps) and if you stick to your budget you end up with one section of the book having several pieces of art per page, and that means there must be other sections that will be almost entirely without art, so you need to be flexible. Which really means "you need to be prepared to spend more money, or compromise on the final product."

That happens everywhere, by the way, not just the art. Like, the word count? Well, I can write 80,000 or 110,000 words and have some sense of how many pages that will be but what I don't know is how many tables there are going to be. The number and size of tables in a book can have a massive impact on stuff like the layout and the page count and where you can put art. And there are a lot of tables in this book!

So you have a plan, an outline, metrics for things like word count and art per page and page count, and all that is critical to getting started and you have an outline and you can start talking to artists right away, but at some point you need to transition away from The Plan and start dealing with The Reality. That is a skill unto itself and one I think we handled pretty well thanks largely to the fact that we've all been involved in game production for decades.

With this plan in mind, MONTHS before we launched the Kickstarter, I approached our first art partner.

Conceptopolis  

At the very highest level, I knew we could get this book done with art I'd be happy with because of Conceptopolis. This was Step One. Find a partner that could if necessary get ALL the art done, at a high level of quality, in a timely manner. These folks are an art house that contracts with lots of artists and so can produce a lot of great work very quickly. 

I knew Conceptopolis could do it because A: I knew their strategy worked. Making video games you work with a lot contract art houses and B: they did art for the actual DM's Guide and Monster Manual! A lot of it and it's really good!

I needed art for the Kickstarter but because this was a very DIY kickstarter (we weren't MCDM yet) I felt like one piece of art would be enough, just something for people to look at so the Kickstarter wasn't just a wall of text. So with my own money I paid them and got this!

This took a lot of work to get right, I knew what I wanted; I wanted something that evoked a romantic fantasy past, Camelot, knights and princesses, that kind of thing, and I wanted the main figure to be small, dwarfed by the Keep. That's a theme that runs through the book, where a Stronghold is featured, the Stronghold is the main character. Lady Avelina appears elsewhere, though. A 'Follower' companion piece to this Stronghold art.

The folks at Conceptopolis were great, we just kept iterating with roughs until it looked right and then we got this spectacular final piece which was exactly what I wanted.

As this was our only piece of art, and a good one, we did a mockup of the book in photoshop for the Kickstarter with this as the cover art. I had just assumed this was an interior piece, maybe the art for a Keep, but having used it as a cover mockup people seemed to really like it and when I said "Oh this isn't the final cover art" they were disappointed. So we promoted it and made it the final cover art! 

Conceptopolis

Also, they have a Kickstarter live now! I know some of the folks working on this, I predict it will be dope.

I didn't think we needed a lot of art for our Kickstarter, especially since paying for the art was a big part of why we needed a Kickstarter, but I felt strongly people needed to see what the Gemstone Dragons would look like, so I needed someone who could draw a kick-ass dragon.

Anthony Sixto

Working on the manuscript in 2017 I realized that there weren't enough cool neutral dragons for someone to recruit as an Ally on the Follower Charts, so I decided to reach back into the mists of time and resurrect the idea of gemstone dragons, analogous to metallic and chromatic dragons. But done my way. :D 

I didn't want "Fantasy dragons" because there's a million of those and I felt like, if you want classic fantasy dragons there's already more art for that than you could ever use in a lifetime and I wanted something unique. 

So I contacted my friend and former coworker Anthony Sixto. Anthony was a concept artist while I was a writer on a video game project that never saw the light of day (which is common but in this case tragic, because it would have been dope af). And I LOVED the look of his monster designs. He is not only a great artist, he's a great designer and that's something I'm not sure most people understand.

One of the jobs of a Concept Artist in video games is to design the look of things. If the game requires Flying Cars, for instance, while the rest of the team is designing the game, using something as simple as Literally A Grey Cube as a stand-in for the flying car, the concept artist is answering the question "what do our flying cars look like? What is the logic of them? How do they WORK according to the logic of the game's universe?" The result is something that looks good, and can be functional, and which many other artists and modelers can then use as a basic template for making lots more different flying cars that all look like they belong to the same universe.

I needed Anthony to not only draw a Gemstone Dragon, but design one. What kind of creature is it? This was going to be the only other piece of art on the Kickstarter page, so I was going to be really, really picky.

But at the same time, I don't want to overstate my role. I wasn't asking Anthony to implement my own design, I was asking for his design. I wanted his implementation. So while I gave feedback, I didn't give orders, if that makes sense.

This is the result.

I explained that these guys don't have classical "dragon wings." They might not even all be hexapods (six-limbed, like normal dragons. "Normal" dragons. :D) Because of their fantastic, reality-bending mental powers, they can fly using telekinesis. They don't need wings. So here you see one species of dragon, the Ruby, whose wings have atrophied.

Of course, I loved this. This was exactly what I wanted, because this is an Anthony Sixto Gemstone Dragon. The dragons are born "organic" and as they age, they become more crystalline.

Anthony's Artstation Page

Because we are making minis of these dragons, and because the minis are Kickstarter exclusive, folks ask if we'll be making more and the answer is; we are definitely going to design more gemstone dragons. Probably for Kingdoms & Warfare They just won't be these exact dragons in these exact poses. Now that Anthony has designed them, other artists can invent and iterate based on that design. Concept Artist.

One of the big setbacks in development of the manuscript, probably the biggest, was my decision to invent new monsters for PCs to summon when their God answers their prayers. This was a classic component of the campaigns I played in, in the 1980s. PCs in facing overwhelming odds praying in the middle of combat in the desperate hope their god answers their prayers. Which actually happened! It was a great way to reinforce the idea that this is a fantasy world, and the Gods are real. And that depending on what kind of life you've been leading recently, the gods might answer you. You didn't have to be a Cleric or a Paladin, but it helped.

Hence my rules for Concordance which are in Strongholds & Followers and any character can use. Building a Temple just grants you a big bonus to your roll. 

Because I assume the players are between 5th and 11th level when they're using this book, we needed extraplanar allies for you to summon who would be a little higher level than the PCs and the problem with that is there just aren't many of those in the game. That meant we had to invent a lot of stuff, because the core rules don't have a lot of options for this stuff outside of demons and devils.

People right now waiting for the book to come out say things like "That's ok, I'd rather they take their time and make it good, than rush it." But right now that's not how things work. We are not taking longer right now to make it better, we're just making the book. This is the normal time it takes to do that. The place where I decided to take more time to make it good was back in June when I decided "I need to invent 30 new monsters." 

Well, those monsters need art. Rather than begin with a bunch of monsters, and try to find artists for them, I began with the artists I knew, and thought about what kind of stuff they liked to draw.

Justin Cherry

Justin Cherry is a legitimate genius. I've met lots of brilliant artists, but Justin is annoyingly brilliant across a wide array of skills and different categories. Justin and I worked together on Evolve and I felt like I had a pretty good sense of the stuff he likes. We talk a lot about video games and movies and Justin has a very eschatological outlook. He loves things that focus on the dark, mirror opposite of whatever life is. When we were doing promotional videos for Evolve and had makeup and hair people come in to make us look like people and not game developers, Justin said he was doing his own makeup. "I'm going to paint a third eye on my forehead and wear a dark veil." You have to understand that, in context, this was literally the most normal thing he could say. Like, you're Justin Cherry, of course you are doing that. Anything else would be ridiculous.

I knew I wanted something like Angels in the book for characters who serve good-aligned powers and before I knew anything about them, I knew I wanted them to be Justin Cherry angels because left to his own devices, he's going to draw the kind of Hideous Alien Power angels that you get in a lot of gnostic art. Like get out of here with these guys, I want to remind the player that looking on the face of God could shatter your mind.

It turns out, as with a lot of the artists here, Justin was already asking if I needed any art. The Kickstarter attracted a lot of attention and a lot of people I worked with were eager to help. When I asked if he wanted to draw the angels and described how I imagined them, he was like "Hell yeah I want to draw those things!" That's how we got these guys...

Wow. I'm still gobsmacked at these things. I know it's not actually true in the strictest sense, but I feel like only Justin could have drawn these. His art was a huge inspiration for the writing and design of the Celestial Court in the game. I think when you read that section you'll see how really I'm just describing the world and creatures the art implies, not the other way 'round.

Justin also did the Court of Arcadia, the realm where the True Elves retreated to be with their god after they lost a cataclysmic war in the Mundane World. Arcadia is a real idea, it's not something I made up, so like the Angels it was easy to ask Justin to invent the look and feel of a Fae Realm that harkened back to an age where the fairy realm was considered beautiful and terrible and deeply, deeply unconcerned with humanity. 

Justin's Artstation

We understand that "chaos" can mean Elves and Fairies and wilderness, but we also imagine chaos to be shapeless changing horrors from beyond time. So I thought we should have two courts of chaos, Arcadia representing natural chaos, and the Court of All Flesh representing, not evil, but certainly sinister chaos.

I wanted crazy nightmare monsters, so of course I went to Oakley.

Stephen Oakley

Look some artists just want to draw monsters, ok? Oakley's monster designs are so stunning, they formed a major part of the design of the monsters and wildlife of Evolve. By no means the only one! The art bench for Evolve was deep and star-studded, if anything I wish I had recruited more artists from Evolve. Well, we got more books to do...

Through the grapevine Oakley let it be known that if I needed art for this book, he was down, which was good because I was sort of counting on him for the Court of All Flesh. :D I literally imagined them as "Oakley monsters" and so by definition I was happy with what I got.

Wow. All I wrote was "The Queen of Bone" and let Oakley do what he liked and here we are. This is a repeating pattern. 

Oakley's Artstation

Of course, we got more than monsters to illustrate, we have a whole adventure, one that features Orcs, but I have my own ideas about what Orcs look like...

Nicholas De Spain

Yep! That's them! Nick is one of those guys who should be making his own books with art and lore, his stuff is so deep, these orcs don't really tell the story of his art, he's basically Guillermo Del Toro, you just want to see his creations come alive in their own world.

Nick also let it be known in our circle of friends and colleagues that if I needed anything to let him know which, again, thank God because I was sort of counting on these guys. I didn't really want to do Orcs unless I could do Nick De Spain orcs. 

Nick also did ALL the items for the book, which is crazy. In every instance, I gave no art direction, just a name and maybe a little description, I was more interested in what he came up with. I think he spent about as much time designing the look of these new magic items as I did designing their mechanics, and it shows. But it doesn't show right here, because I want to keep some things for when you see the book. :D

Nick's Artstation

A big part of the book is Followers and specifically the Artisans you can attract. I mean, they're not all literally artisans, but I felt like "specialist" evoked something more science-fictional than fantastical.

Because I wanted to present these Artisans as people you were meeting, I needed someone who could draw people you believed in.

Zachary Madere

Another Evolve alumn Zach's stuff is beautiful.

TONS of great characters in the book thanks to Zach. I'd rather be showing you Zach's amazing starship designs, but this isn't that book, alas. Maybe some other project. :D 

Zach's Artstation

The last artist from the Evolve class of 2015 is one of the people I enjoy working with the most because we are very like-minded in the kinds of things we like and the way we work. I needed someone to draw the Inexorables, the machine-things from the Plane of Uttermost Law for players, so I went to someone who loves drawing robots.

Jason Hasenauer  

WOW. Man do I love the Inexorables. 

These guys took by FAR the longest to do because these guys were the one time I abandoned my strategy and tried to, like, art direct. Instead of just describing these things and letting Jason work, I referenced specific artists I liked. I was trying to help, but the problem is; saying "draw like this other person" when you are not an artist doesn't work because the artist wants to know; "what did you like about this? The style, or the design?" I dunno, I just like this artist?

Not helpful. So we went back and forth on these guys and only started to make progress when I stopped talking about other artists, and started talking about the Inexorables. I references a specific kind of brass used in medieval navigational instruments, and weathering and the way they were like pieces of art as well as scientific tools.

That immediately solved the problem. And the results speak for themselves, we never would have got here if I just paid an artist to draw like some other artist. 

Jason's Artstation

Jason also did all the 3D sculpts for the Gemstone Dragon miniatures. So when you hold those dragons in your hand, you're looking at Anthony Sixto's 2D illustration turned into a magnificent 3D model by Jason Hasenauer, which is a skill all unto itself. You make a lot of choices when you turn a 2D picture into a 3D model and those choices have to be both artistic and technical and then ON TOP OF THAT the 3D model has to be something the team at Trenchworx can actually turn into a mini. Big minis need to be assembled from smaller piece and that means the 3D sculpt has to be something that can be broken up and if your modeler isn't conscious of that, the folks actually making the minis are gonna have a bad time. So Jason worked closely with Trenchworx to make physical models that looked great and were easy to product. Not a lot of artists can draw Inexorables and create 3D models that can be turned into miniatures. I think probably I know literally one. :D

In spite of reaching out to six different artists to draw dragons and monsters and artisans, we still needed a lot of art! There's over 100 pieces of art in the final book. We probably could have relied on Conceptopolis for all of it, but I wanted to make sure we didn't put all our eggs in one basket. I wanted to reach out to other art houses and see what was out there. 

VOLTA

VOLTA is another art service provider like Conceptopolis and as we had WAY MORE Artisans than any court of monsters, we needed more art to cover them and Volta delivered.

Awesome, and very much in line with the work Zach was already doing.

VOLTA, check them out.

Of course, "art" covers a lot more than just illustrations.

Maps

We need a lotta maps! I very strongly felt we needed example stronghold maps for players so if they read the text and thought "yeah sounds cool, but what does my stronghold actually look like??" there would be answers. Something you could just grab and use. That means we need some cartographers!

Jared Blando

I feel like we were incredibly lucky to land Jared as a cartographer, his style is unique and you've seen it in official D&D products! His maps are real pieces of art, like mosaics that belong in an ancient Greek temple. Speaking of temples...

This is a Level One Temple. You can upgrade your stronghold until eventually it maxes out at Level Five. There are no hard and fast rules for, like, "how many rooms is a small stronghold" or how many square feet? There's advice, but expecting players or DMs to start counting squares or calculating square feet seemed like a red herring to me. It's exactly the kind of judgement I think DMs should be making. So we give some straightforward advice and rely on them.

Check out Jared's Maps, you'll see some great stuff and probably a lot of stuff you'll recognize!

Not all players are inspired by the same things, I wanted to make sure we had different styles of stronghold maps based on all the cool maps I've seen in products over the years and something that always impresses me is a map that shows what the structure looks like in the world. More of an illustration.

Miska Fredman

Miska's maps are great and he does lots of different styles including starship deckplans. We asked Miska to show us what a Wizard's Tower might look like.

Basically exactly what I hoped it'd look like!

Miska Fredman

We also needed a lot of maps for our adventure, The Siege of Castle Rend including a map of the town of Gravesford, my stab at a classical fantasy starting town. This is something I have very high expectations for, I've seen a lot of great maps for starting towns over the years and I knew what I wanted. We reached out to a lot of artists.

Maxime Plasse

Look at those little insets! So good. Gorgeous and functional. Incredibly happy with how these turned out. Can't wait for you folks to see all the art in this book.

Max's Maps

Graphic Design

Technically there's literally art on every page because every page has graphic design on it that frames the text. Like the Inexorables, this is something I knew I was going to be very picky about. I had a style in mind, I wanted the book to look like an Illuminated Manuscript. This is not a theme propagated out in all the art, the art doesn't look like it was all done by monks in the 11th century, thank god, but it does match the wistful, romantic, medieval look of the cover and that was important to me. This was another long process of finding someone who got it. Took a while, but we found someone. :D

Mary McLain

I don't want to spoil anything, but when you see this all laid out on the page I think you'll be...just...just look closely at the borders of the final product and you'll see what I mean. And once you'd done it on one page, look at some others. This is another home run where I feel like we got really lucky finding Mary. 

Mary McLain

The actual, final layout is also a combination of art and design, but that isn't finished yet, we'll do another update when we can show that off. Soon! :D

The unsung hero of all this is Anna Coulter, MCDM's VP of Production, she spent months scouring twitter and the internet looking for artists, contacting artists, hunting folks down. It is not a simple process, lots of great artists aren't available, lots of great artists who are available don't work in the style we're looking for. She went out and got books, lots of books, new RPG books to find artists and graphic designers, and old Time-life books to find ref for some of the graphics and visual design. If not for her...well, we wouldn't have all this art. We'd be boned. :D

By combining strategies, using different art houses and different artists we know, we can do a lot. We can create unique monsters, we can fill a book with great art, and we can do it relatively quickly. We didn't get started on most of this until late in the process. It took a while for me to realize I couldn't write the book and art direct it at the same time and if we'd realized that earlier...well I don't know what would have happened; the art and layout and manuscript are all basically finishing up at the same time, so I don't think starting earlier on the art would have got the book done any faster, but it would have meant less panicking on our part. :D

But it means we are well-positioned for book two; Kingdoms & Warfare. One of the reasons you do something like this is to learn how to do it and having learned how to do it you feel like there wasn't much point in it, if you don't immediately turn around and do it again, better, thanks to what you learned.

Hopefully some of this was actually informative, hopefully you have some idea of the actual process and strategy for getting the art done. I know one of the reasons folks backed the Kickstarter was because they wanted to see the process of getting it done, I've had a lot of people tell me they're really interested in hearing the nuts and bolts of how you produce a book, and this is sort of the beginning of that. We'll do more stuff like this moving forward.

Update 29, I think
about 6 years ago – Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 02:33:23 AM

This update is mostly to remind folks that the PDF will not be out in September. We mentioned this in the last update but now that Sept. is almost over folks are checking in for the first time in a while asking “where the pdf at?!”  

I think we’re maybe a week away from a final draft of the manuscript? That’s an estimate. Mostly we’re waiting on some art and graphic design. I think the layout is probably the limiting factor here. So when folks ask “how much longer?!” I can only say “I dunno. How long does it take to lay a book out?” That is a question I don’t know the answer to. We’re gonna find our together!  

Once all the physical products ship, we’ll do a post-mortem and talk about everything we learned (and that’s a LOT) but certainly near the top has to be “your release date should include the time it will take to do all the stretch goals.” Kickstarter doesn’t really have a facility for changing the release date based on how much stuff you unlock. Although it could, I don’t think that would be difficult.  

So the PDF will be out whenever the last pieces of art and the layout is done. Speaking of art…

Oh and we got the art for like 27 items, but I'm at home and don't have them here. They look cooool though!

I’m looking forward to sharing a final, laid out chunk of the book with y’all. That will probably be the next update unless anything weird happens. When you see that you’ll know we’re close to the end. The sheer amount of stuff in this book is staggering from my point of view. Once its out, we’ll have plenty to talk about. Until then, we wait.