A 5th Edition supplement for building Strongholds and attracting Followers! And we're raising money to livestream my next campaign!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Update # = Update #+1
over 6 years ago
– Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 01:22:16 AM
THREE WEEKS since the last update. Well it’s only because we’ve been super busy!
Manuscript
The adventure is ready for testing, that’s like…I dunno, it’s like 50 pages right there. And the last chunk of the adventure is the Siege of Castle Rend which uses the Basic Warfare rules, so I had to revise and update those. But they are all now written, which means when I’m done with this update we’ll get started putting the packet together.
It’s a HUGE chunk of content we’re about to dump on the testers. I think you could probably play through the whole adventure in four 4-hour sessions, maybe less depending on your group, but of course it could take much longer. So the playtest for the adventure will probably never “stop.” We’ll always be taking feedback on it.
Which is also true for the whole book! Even with as many playtesters as we have, there are literally 10 times as many backers not in the playtest and of course once the book is out, and anyone can buy it, we may learn that people are using it in a very different way than we imagined.
It’s our responsibility as developers to support what people are doing with the book. If the book does well, and we do a second printing (that would be nice) we can make sure each printing has the “current” version of the rules, meaning updated to reflect the current design.
And we can update the PDF version anytime. Though we may be limited in our ability to alert folks who’ve already bought it that there’s an update. That’s something we’re going to look in to. It would be nice if a Strongholds av1.01 came out, folks who’d already bought it were told there was a new version to download!
I’m pretty happy with how the adventure turned out. James Haeck wrote it from my outline, and did a tremendous job. I edited it, so there’s still a lot of my writing in there and you’ll see my dialog here and there.
The Warfare system is going to be crazy to test. Any time you drop a system like this on folks with all these units and stats and rules, you’re going to get a lot of people who really disagree with the idea that, just to pick a random example, Archers are more valuable than Cavalry, but this is the job we’ve chosen for ourselves. :D
And of course the reason we expose these things to testing is to hammer on the math and the number, so hopefully folks will get a chance to try the Basic Warfare system out and give lots of feedback. I’ve seen people using it in the wild and reporting back, based purely on the stuff I posted online from the last stream and their reactions were all positive, so I have reason to hope. Fingers crossed.
Rather than me sitting here trying to remember everything everyone’s done in the last three weeks, I asked them for like, “what cool stuff have we done?”
Jerry Stuff
Jerry likes to refer to himself as the Pixie Wrangler, a reference to AvE’s videos. I think the easiest way to describe his responsibilities is; if you have to plug it in, Jerry’s in charge of it.
So for instance, not exciting, but we have a real enterprise-level network running with a real firewall and a server and tons of backup and redundancy. It’s pretty epic! But it means all sorts of things can go wrong while we’re streaming something live and it won’t shut us down. I mean, things can still go wrong, but as far as infrastructure goes, we’re already way more robust than a bunch of game devs streaming from their garage. :D
We want to be streaming…something, anything, by the end of July so that means doing a bunch of research on cameras and lights and microphones, but we haven’t made any decisions yet. We have a ton of gear from the previous stream and some of it will be good, but this space is very different from our last one and we’re a little more ambitious now than we were back when we were shoved into a conference room at Turtle Rock.
It’s tricky though because none of us really know anything about cameras and lenses and lighting and we’d like to avoid a scenario where we spend a lot of money on stuff and it arrives and we’re like “This isn’t what we need.” We’ve already had pros in LA reach out to us, so we’ve got options.
But…at least we have a place to hang those cameras and lights and micromophones!
It's huge
Check that thing out!! This is a serious truss. A truss is a structure used on stages to hold lights and cameras and I think I recognize this one from the Grace Under Pressure tour.
It’s a serious bit of kit but it means we can hang everything on it without worrying about it collapsing under the weight. No danger of that here!
Lars Stuff
Lars is in charge of all the Kickstarter rewards produced, getting shirts and stickers done, and the minis! Which is…it’s a lot. AND he runs the playest.
So we’ve spent as lot of time going over Packet Two talking about the feedback to the Spell Research system. It’s fantastic having Lars handling this because when there’s a great hue and cry over something, he can present the problem to me and he’s already started thinking about solutions, which is a HUGE help.
Lars had the shirt samples shipped to us last week so we all went to lunch wearing our THE EARTH ELEMENTAL STEPS ON YOUR HEAD TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE DEAD shirts. The shirts look pretty good! They seem like they may shrink a lot in the drying so maybe do what I do with all my shirts and hang-dry them.
I think we’re basically in production on all the minis except the Amethyst, it’s just the last one and they’re working on how to slice the model up to make it easy for everyone to assemble. Looking forward to getting that in front of you folks.
You can see the progress on two of the other minis here;
Lars has also read through the adventure and the Warfare rules in preparation for Packet Three. He had a lot of great ideas for which parts of the adventure should get art, that was very helpful.
Anna
Anna wrote her own update!
Hi everyone, Anna here!
Most of the work I do has been behind the scenes and isn’t as visible as building a new truss or putting together the latest dragon mini models, with the exception of a tweet every now and then from @helloMCDM. So, peeling back the curtain, here’s what I’ve been up to:
We finally, finally have everyone here on-site at the studio! Lars and I are splitting an office, while Matt and Jerry have their own offices. Lots of stuff is getting done so much faster and easier than before, but communication has become almost too easy meaning we (*ahem* well, Matt and I) are more easily distracted telling each other about cool stuff we see on the internet. You may have seen Lars’s unsuccessful attempts to curb this behavior. And then there was that time that all work stopped as we cry-laughed watching this video together.
Set up automatic bill payments so we don’t have the lights turned off on us
Built a snazzy DocuSign flow for our artists so it’s ezpz for them to sign on with us and get things rollin’
Reviewed and selected paper, exterior case material, and head/tail bands for the Strongholds & Followers physical books
Made more spreadsheets tracking our monthly/annual burn rate so we can forecast our remaining runway (aka When The Money Runs Out) and also figure out how much we need to make each month to keep this experiment going
Picked up toilet paper, pens, pencils, Kleenex, good-smelling soaps, tools, sponges, brooms, Lysol wipes, paper towels, etc. so our studio can actually be lived in and grabbed some other much-needed studio things like desk chairs, a microwave, and the Almighty Whiteboard.
Thanks Anna!
That's it for now. There's a TON of progress being made at all times on all fronts and there's no way to capture it all in an update, but I recommend you follow me on Twitter if you want a live sense of what we're working on at any given moment.
I Think We Skipped an Update
over 6 years ago
– Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 01:38:03 AM
Sorry folks I think we skipped an update late week. Let's see, what's new?
Employee #1
I'm not super into labeling the folks who work here with, like, ranks. Both Jerry and Lars were busting their ass on the streaming setup and the Kickstarter way before anyone else was helping with anything. But Anna is literally the first person here full time and also the first person I offered a job to.
Vice President In Charge of Production. Welcome Aboard Anna!
Welcome aboard Anna!
I couldn't do this alone. I'm glad I don't have to do this alone. I feel incredibly lucky to have Anna on board. Her experience in production is invaluable and she is fearless when it comes to tackling new tasks. She also loves the culture of tabletop, it's a blast watching folks discover this world.
Playtest Packet #2 is away!
Only about 10% of backers pledged at a level that included the playtest, so I realize the status of the playtest isn't relevant to most of you, but I mention this because I want folks to know that the manuscript gets closer to done every week and moreover big chunks of it are ready for prime time. The testers gave great feedback on the rules for Keeps and the benefits for Villains and Minions with strongholds.
Now they're testing the Spell Research rules for players who built towers and so far the feedback has been pretty positive. Lars hasn't scrubbed through it yet, so I won't have a clear picture of which benefits folks think are problematic, but I can see Google's pie charts and skim through the comments and I already see which parts need some spot-welding to make sure they function properly.
Carrier Has Arrived!
The new table from Rathskellers is here and assembled! You'll get a video soon of my friends and I assembling it, it was a lot of fun. This is the table on which we will be streaming the campaign.
The table is 4"1' by 6'2" which I think may be too small. We got the table that size on purpose because as I think you know by now my goal is to make sure all the players can reach out and move their minis without having to stand up and walk around. Well, realistically, the people sitting at the end will have to stand, but you get what I mean.
So we're going to test this table and stream some games once the New Rig (aka the truss that holds the cameras and the lights) gets here, but while everyone else thinks it's just the right size, I think folks are forgetting how much real estate D&D takes up.
NBD, if the table is too small, we'll get another one!
The table is pretty dope. The folks at Rathskellers offered me a discount last year when I ordered it and since back then I was out of pocket on everything, I accepted the discount with the proviso I make a video reviewing the table, which I will do. My first...and probably only...paid review. But while I'm sure that review will be affected by how cool the folks at Rathskellers were to me, I assure you it will be a "Warts and all" review.
More Art
This is the Ash Marshall an ally who'll appear if you summon a servitor from the Court of Arcadia. One of the potential benefits of building a Temple stronghold.
The Ash Marshall
The system makes no judgement about which of the SEVEN charts you roll on when you plead with the higher power that grants you your...powers, but if you're an Elf or a Druid or just generally down with fae creatures, the Ash Marshall may come to your aid.
Currently Working On...
Because folks are going to need time to actually play it, the next playtest packet will focus on the adventure in the book, which includes a Battle and so I have to edit the adventure and revise the Basic Warfare rules to make them ready for testing. That's a big chunk of the book! We are closing in on finishing the manuscript. Hopefully by early July.
You should start seeing a lot more art too and as we get our studio setup, we'll start streaming random stuff; test streams of unannounced, impromptu stuff just to get the kinks worked out. I'll probably run some D&D here and there, one-shots, just to get back into the swing of things. I'm pretty rusty! But the actual campaign can't start until I get the manuscript for Strongholds & Followers done.
So, again, tons of work getting done, lots of progress on all fronts. I hope you folks feel like you have a sense of where we are, and where we're going.
The Playtest Has Begun!
over 6 years ago
– Sat, May 26, 2018 at 01:47:42 AM
Holy crap the playtest started!!
We originally thought we'd break up the 3,000+ playtesters into waves. And not just because there are many of them, although that is one reason. Having several rounds of testing where you're always getting fresh eyes on the game is critical. Otherwise you have people grading the revision who already have opinions about both it and the previous iteration and you spend a lot of your time in an echo chamber fighting old battles.
But a lot of our planning was predicated on imagining a basically infinite timeframe for testing. We imagined breaking the book into "packets" and the testers into "waves" so we'd be able to get feedback on, say, Packet One from Wave One, revise Packet One and then send it out to Wave Two.
If this system worked, the feedback should get progressively more tame. By the time Wave...5 or whatever had read Packet One, the rules should be solid and well-tested and the feedback would be "Looks good!"
That started to make less sense as we looked at the schedule. We have time to get feedback and we have time to revise, but we don't have time for endless revisions.
Also, once we talked about what kind of feedback we wanted, multiple waves became less critical. Because I already know what kind of systems and design I want. Some folks will, inevitably, wish my system was more like theirs, and there are always some testers who just wish you were making a cupcake instead of a cookie.
But I have a pretty good idea how I want the high-level design to work, and there isn't time to throw that out and start over anyway. The testing I'm looking for is feedback on specific benefits and abilities.
So we decided to send out Packet One to all the testers at once! So far that's worked pretty well! About 425 people have filled out the Survey. We're not sure what that means, it may just mean people are waiting to use the rules in their game. But it's 425 more people looking at the rules than we had before!
The Survey questions are structured to shine a spotlight on problem benefits. If someone thought "All of these rewards are terrible," they could tell us that in a text box, but the multiple-choice questions force them to pick the MOST problematic one and that is incredibly useful as a way to decide what I spend my time on.
The Playtest Discord is Also Live!
This gets its own header because as much work as getting the playtest emails out to everyone was, setting up the Playtest Discord and getting invites sent out was just as much work. HUGE props to Anna, Jerry, and Lars for working on that so I didn't have to. :D
There are still limits, alas. You can't send out 3,000 unique Discord invitations for instance, you can only do 1,000 at a time, so it's a process.
But folks are in the Discord and they are asking questions and other testers are largely able to provide accurate answers without someone from MCDM having to manage every query and this is good. Folks will always have questions, but if the rules are good, other players will be able to answer them and by and large that seems to be what's happening.
I am not in the Discord because I have work to do and not only would it muddy the waters with people seeking my personal feedback, it's also a crazy rabbit-hole for me. Very easy to spend hooours just pouring over people's feedback.
Instead I rely on Lars in his capacity as a QA lead for years to read over all the comments and take the tenor of the room so to speak, then synthesize it all and get back to me. I think this is working. The other players can answer most questions, Lars can answer most of the questions they can't, so only a small percentage of questions actually require me to think about.
And the feedback has been super good. I judge feedback as "good" if the objection from the players is clear, and I am excited to fix the problem. So far, that's how it looks. But stay tuned, we still got a lot of work to do.
Art
We need a lot of art for this book and we've only just now gotten started. We should have started a while ago but I couldn't art direct it and write it at the same time, so I asked my friend Jason, who was already managing all the art and modeling for the minis to step in and art direct the whole book and he said yes. Thank god!
Jason and I have both worked with just a ton of incredibly talented artists over the years, so we immediately reached out to them and asked if they'd be willing to help and less than 12 hours later we got this;
1/2 of the Court of All Flesh
These are, obviously, very early roughs, but I'm already pretty happy. I think the Queen of Bone is going to get revised more than the others, but that's not up to me! We have an art director now! Muahaha!
In case you're wondering, these are some of the things you can summon if you found a Temple. Building a temple lets you plead your case to whatever Power grants you your...powers...and if you've been good (or, evil, depending) they reward you with a Servitor.
That meant I need a bunch of creatures between CR 5 and 10 that you could summon to fight with you.So you're going to get...I think if you include all the stat blocks for every type and age of Gemstone Dragon, 50 new monsters! Good lord!
More
I'm sure there's more but I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Offer letters have been sent out to the folks I want to bring on full time, and they've all accepted. Payroll is setup. Oh!
The Table
Our custom table arrives next week!!!
All the way from Greece, the fine folks at Rathskellers have been sitting on this thing for a while because I paid for it back when I hoped we'd be streaming from inside Turtle Rock Studios.
Then TRS grew and we got kicked out and that meant there was no place for the stream to live. And no place for Rathskellers to send the table. :(
But then YOU PEOPLE showed up and now we have an office for the table to live in and that means the table is on its way!! Man I'm getting...I'm getting really emotional just writing all that. It's sort of a miracle.
I'm already worried we need a bigger table. I think this one is basically 4x6 or 5x7 or summat. I don't remember. But I was at a friend's house with basically the same table and I thought "Uh oh."
But I wanted it to be "small" on purpose. I want everyone at the table to be able to reach out and move their minis. I want you to see us play D&D, the way people do normally, which means not having to stand up every time you take your turn. Not needing someone to act as a runner between the player and the minis.
It may be that my ideas are dumb and, in fact, we need a bigger table, but that won't be the end of the world. We'll find a use for this one. :D
Oh speaking of the office....
This post is being written from the new office! Thanks to Jerry we got a couple of desks assembled and we got WiFI and I brought in a spare monitor and plugged in my lappytop and we're in business! Got some folding chairs from Home Despot and pizza from Round Table!
First official pizza at the office!!!! The office you folks helped build! I mean not literally build, but make happen.
Finally....
I have not made as much progress on the book as I expected because of other shenanigans, but A: I am always making progress and B: the things we've pulled off so far; getting the office, getting payroll setup, health insurance, getting desks and electricity and cable and getting the playtest launched with all the docs we had to organize and bots for the Discord invites and getting the art director set up with contracts and an art schedule are significant.
We've gotten a lot done, a LOT done. And in what seems to be very little time. It's sort of amazing. And we have a LOT more to do!
The Pledge Manager is Closed
over 6 years ago
– Mon, May 14, 2018 at 02:32:13 AM
Here's your weekly update folks!
Design
Lotta design hammered out. Now that getting the company started is settling down I'm getting a lot of work done. I think I've mentioned this elsewhere but one big time-sink design-wise has been the Temple Summoning rules which I'm still not done with.
If you found a temple, the main benefit to your character is the ability to summon a Servitor to fight alongside you. The power of the Servitor is based on your Concordance. Basically the God/Extraplanar Power/Abstract Concept you serve reviews your account and says "Hmm...desecrated a temple to our enemies, that's good. Converted some heathens, A+. Oh, killed an enemy priest! Yeah let's give this one something juicy."
You get to pick which Servitor chart to roll on based on...well, whatever criteria you like, presumably the chart that most reflects the character you're playing. Each chart has six results. It would have more than 6 results, but getting 6 new monsters done for every chart is already a lot of work. Future editions of the book may have more.
You roll and add your Concordance and the higher you roll, the more powerful a Servitor you summon. Tons of fun! And literally right out of the 1980s playbook we were using, except A System instead of "The DM makes some fake rolls and just chooses something." Which you can still do! :D
The problem here is that the MM is mostly full of things to fight, which is to say mostly evil beasties. There aren't a lot of examples in there of allies. Which means, if I want this to be at all robust, I need to make some allies.
The servitor charts are as follows;
1: Undead. So, you're a necromancer. That's cool, we don't judge. Happily, there's already tons of undead in the rules, no work needed here.
2. Devils/Demons. Once again, you are evil, but I like you because you save me work. There are tons of these in the rules, so I don't have to make any up. This may be two charts; people who want to summon infernal beasties tend to get really particular about the difference.
Here's where things get time-intensive.
3. The Court of Arcadia. Fey creatures. There are some of these in the book but they're not, like...things you would necessarily get excited about summoning. "Yay I got...a pixie?" We can do better.
4. The Court of All Flesh. Creatures of Uttermost Chaos. Imagine if a Gibbering Mouther was too normal to be on a chart. That's these guys.
5. The Angelic Host. Yeah, there are really powerful angelic beings in the game, but they're sort of off the scale. I need stuff that's more mid-level.
6. The Inexorables. Beings from Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law. We have Evil (we have lots of evil!) covered, we have Good, we need Chaos and Law because I'm old-school and its neat. The game already has creatures from a plane of total law, I just think they're silly and, once again, not something you'd get super-excited about summoning.
7. The Elementals. Sure, there are elementals in the books, but I need some more to make things more flexible and also less boring. A whole chart full of "Another fire elemental, just with more/fewer hit points" is not interesting enough to get players excited about their rewards.
With all these populated out with actual monster stats and write-ups...you got some really cool options as far as Servitors you can summon, and enough options to support a wide-array of characters, and options that don't make assumptions about what kind of character you're playing. We have Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, Neutral, and some charts that aren't explicitly any of these.
Alas, this means making a bunch of monsters which, 5th edition, actually pretty easy to do. Way WAY easier than it was for 3rd edition, where I wrote an entire monster book and almost went insane. But it's still a lot of work, and work I hadn't really planned on. There's a difference between Doing It, and Doing It Right, and making Temple Summoning work as robustly and be as rewarding as I want means a lot of work.
My goal with all this stuff is; you see these charts and the art and examples and you want to DO it, you want to roll on these charts, you want to build a stronghold, play a character who gets to do these things. I have other, more noodly goals, but you get the idea.
Keeps and Towers are done, all the Improved Class Abilities you get for building a stronghold are done, all the Gemstone Dragons are done, all the follower charts are done. All the Artisan Followers are done. All the Units for the Basic Warfare System are done. Basically, I finish these Servitors, I finish the Establishment rules (Espionage!) and finish the Items, and the book is Basically Done.
Playtesting
I mean, we certainly have enough stuff ready to start testing, so testing will begin Soon™. Need to coordinate with Lars, he runs the testing. I can't say exactly when the first packets will be going out, it's more important to us to do this right, than do it quickly.
The Pledge Manager
Is closed! So we have lots of data now showing us all sort of amazing things about what kinds of products you folks are interested in, what kinds of videos, streams, best times to stream. Cannot WAIT to dig into that, and we'll share it all with you. You paid for it!
But more importantly, we raised another $440k! This is astonishingly good. This $440k is different from its brothers, and I want to explain why.
Many people who backed the Kickstarter were saying "Hey, thanks for the videos! Here's some money!" Which is truly humbling. And we're hiring full time people with the money so that, once the office is set up and the S&F manuscript is done, we can make LOTS more videos, and cooler videos. :D
But I was worried that, having given money as thanks for videos, that would be it. The well would be dry. I wasn't sure there was actual demand for a product from MCDM. Now, this wouldn't be the end of the world for me, I'm going to be ok. :D But I would hate to hire people and then lay them off two years from now because there wasn't enough "thanks for the videos" money. I feel much safer, much more confident, thinking that we'll be able to sustain ourselves by making great (cross your fingers) products.
That $440k is a pretty good indicator, to me, that people believe in the products we're offering, because it almost all came from folks who'd already pledged. In other words, the "hey thanks for the videos" part was already covered, and folks still wanted to spend more money.
We're already talking about making more minis, and which minis they'd be. Future minis will not be as expensive as these, because these minis were really positioned as like, souvenirs for donating money to the Book and the Stream. Future minis will be priced more competitively. And we have some cooool ideas.
I hope this stuff excites you folks, it excites the hell out of me. I love that I get to do this, I love that I sit down and write and design and I know there's an audience for it and I'm not just selling my labor to a corporation. I'm incredibly, incredibly lucky I get to do this, it's thanks to you folks, and I really, really don't want to let you down.
We get desks and chairs in the office soon!!!
You MUST Finalize your Pledge by MAY 11TH!
over 6 years ago
– Tue, May 08, 2018 at 12:55:22 AM
Yo, this is important. The pledge manager closes this Friday the 11th and we still have 11% of backers missing. Meaning, about 3,000 people still have not given us their shipping address! And, like, shirt size and whatnot. I suppose if you only ordered the PDF, you're ok, but if you don't go to backerkit, we can't ship you anything! Click here!
https://strongholds-and-streaming.backerkit.com/
If you can't find the email, check your spam folder. If you still can't find it, email us at "[email protected]" with your name and email as it appears on your Kickstarter account, and we'll help get you sorted out.
After May 11th, we will lock your reward selections and charge cards for add-on item purchases, pledge upgrades, and pre-orders.
You'll be able to change your shipping address until we lock shipping, which won't be until we're way closer to shipping the books.
Ok, with that out of the way, let's get to your weekly update.
Design
Feel like we're in the home stretch with the design of the book. Now that the frenzy of setting up a small company is settling down, I can focus on finishing the book and we're getting a lot done.
The dragons, 4 ages for five dragons, are all designed out. Villains now get special abilities if they have a Stronghold, based on what kind of villain they are, and their minions also get special abilities depending on what kind of minion they are.
All the class feature improvements are designed, so Bards now have an improved version of Bardic Inspiration, Monks have improved Ki, etc... And of course characters gets a cool ability just for having a stronghold. So, basically, you get two cool abilities. Both run out pretty quickly and you have to go back to your stronghold to recharge your batteries so to speak.
I'm working on the Simpler Followers system, I'd like that to be in the first Playtest Packet. Basically, reducing an NPC follower to a simpler set of rules to make them still useful, but much less burdensome to run in combat than an entire second character. The cost of detail is flexibility and some power comes from flexibility, but these are optional rules.
First draft of the adventure is in and I'm very happy with it. James Haeck did some great work and surprised me in several places. I'm going to have to make sure folks reading it understand that he came up with a lot of these ideas. Credit where it's due.
Super excited and a little terrified to get this all into the playtesters' hands. There's a lot here and we don't have a lot of time to iterate. That's going to be our biggest problem. We can always update the PDF and revise the print edition, but a lot relies on the testers. Good thing we have a ton of them!
The Office
We have an office. There's nothing in the office right now, but we signed the papers and paid the first six months rent! We have tables and bookcases coming! Oh, that reminds me, I need to order chairs!
So, this is half of what the kickstarter was for, folks. We want to stream our game, that means we need a multicamera TV studio, and that means we need a space for it to live, and that is this office! Need a catchy name for the space...
The Campaign
We started work on the factions and personalities of Capital on twitch last week. The past couple of streams have not gone up on YouTube, but they will!
I think generally we're seeing diminishing returns with the livestreams. Folks initially tuned in to see the process, and were engaged and when I checked chat, the feedback was of high quality, I thought.
But now, folks get it. They've seen several hours and they understand the process. Which means they engage very differently with it and when I check chat I get "You misspelled a word" or "that Italian word you're borrowing doesn't mean what you think it means" and in general I think there are better uses of all of our time than that stuff.
We'll do some more, but they're taking a back seat right now to getting the playtest stuff ready.
I think that's it! Ooh, the folks at Rathskellers posted this on their instagram!
