Across a Thousand Dead Worlds

Battlemaps for everyone are a go!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 10:02:23 PM

You did it guys, another stretch goal conquered and defeated! Thanks so much to all of you for believing in this project! With this last stretch goal down, it means everyone who backed will be getting 4 battlemaps, so they can play their combat scenes in style! 

With this, we've revealed the next two stretch goals, but it's the 50K one that has me really excited: a whole new scenario written and designed by Donn Stroud! Most of you might know him as one of the creators and writers of the smash sci-fi hit Mothership RPG, and while I love his work there, what really made me love his work were masterpieces such as Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead, or The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion. Those two DCC supplements are among my favorite RPGs books ever!

I'm afraid we're blowing through stretch goals so fast that I'm running out of interesting things to tell you! I do bring with me something that you might find interesting: a full audio interview with me about Across a Thousand Dead Worlds! So if you have an hour to spare and want to hear me ramble about the game, go check it out! 

So yeah, that's it for now, I'm going back to designing terrible space monsters for you guys to face off during your travels! Thanks again for breaking all our expectations and crushing it with the stretch goals!

- Alex

And yet another stretch goal reached!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 10:02:16 PM

So here we are again, less than 24 hours after we unlocked the previous stretch goal! Thanks so much for making this campaign such a huge success so far. And we still have over a week ahead of us, so this is being incredible! This stretch goal means that we have LF OSR on board, writing a very unique scenario for us! We'll also have Vil doing some art for it, of course. I'm incredibly excited to have someone else join me on this project as a writer. It's going to be awesome to share this world with another person and see their take on the lore!

The next stretch goal is a very useful one: 4 battlemaps, both physical and digital for those who back at a physical level, and digital for the digital tiers. These should come in handy when our characters must face the many horrors they'll come across during their journeys! As it's the case with the Battlemaps that are being included with the Deluxe Murgo edition, these are designed and illustrated by Glynn Seal! Speaking of which, did you guys know Glynn just launched a bizarre and deadly adventure for DCC, D&D 5e, and Sword & Wizardry? It's almost funded, so go check it out!

Today I had the pleasure of being asked a ton of super interesting questions over at the Randomworlds TTRPGs Discord server. The conversation covered a lot of different topics, so if you have any questions, chances are the answers are there! The whole chat has been transcribed, for your reading pleasure! 

Last but not least, Vil is working hard on new landscapes, and he's sent us a bunch of basic, preliminary sketches. Some of them have the potential to be extremely ominous, so I love them! What do you guys think?

So that's it for now, thank you all for making this campaign a huge success! Let's keep it up though, cause I have quite a few stretch goals more I want to get to!

- Alex

And another stretch goal down!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 10:02:00 PM

We did it! I see you guys really want to die at the hands of even more exotic creatures... I'll gather my notes and start writing them right away! This should add a few extra pages to the book, and I'm hoping we can have each one of them have their own illustration. I'll keep you guys posted!

As you can imagine though this is not the end of the road, we have quite a few more stretch goals planned for you! And the next one is... a whole scenario written by L.F. OSR! For those of you who don't know him, Leo (the person behind L.F. OSR) is not only an extremely talented artist, a publisher, and even a musician, he is also a published author! He is known for his sprawling and deeply moody system-neutral settings, but this time he will be doing something that has me super excited: a scenario set directly in Karum Station! This should be a nice change of pace, for those tired of dealing with interstellar problems... Of course, things can get equally sinister at home, so be ready, and expect the worse!

Some of you have been wanting more details about the battlemaps, and how they work. As you probably already know, combat in ATDW is highly tactical: you need a battlemap and some tokens or minis in order to really take advantage of the rules. That is why we decided to ask Glynn to make a few for us, to include with the deluxe Murgo edition (which by the way, is exclusive to this Kickstarter campaign! It will not be sold afterwards). Here are a couple of them!

These are A4 size, and will be printed in cardstock, we want them to last! In case you are not purchasing the deluxe edition, or if you're simply tired of using the same 6 maps, don't worry! The book comes with a blank combat grid. You'll simply have to print it out, and use the random cover table to see which cover elements you'll have to place on it. Then it's just a matter of randomly deploying the characters and their opponents, and you're good to go!

If all this sounds like too much hassle though you can ignore the tactical elements and used the simplified zone-based combat. This alternative rules don't require any physical components, and although they don't have the same tactical depth, they don't require you to learn any extra rules so you'll be good to go!

I think that's enough for now, thank you all SO much once again, and let's see if we unlock some more content together!

- Alex

Stretch goal #2 unlocked! We're getting more art!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 10:01:43 PM

So we did it! Another stretch goal, and now things are going to start getting interesting. With this new stretch goal cleared, we now have funds for even more cool art (which is always an awesome thing to have in an RPG, wouldn't you agree?). Vil is already working on new pieces, so I'll be showing you his progress as we go! For now, here are some cool sketches (super basic ones but you get to see the first step of the process):

I'll be sharing more sketches in future updates. I'm excited about the next stretch goal though! Let me explain a bit what I have in mind: Although the places you and your crew will explore during your travels have long been left abandoned by the Àrsaidh (leaving almost no trace of their existence behind), more often than not other creatures have moved in. This often results in confrontations with all sorts of creatures, from clearly biological to mechanoid, and anything in between. Due to the vastness of space and the seemingly infinite amount of Àrsaidh sites and planets out there, Deep Divers rarely encounter the same creatures twice. This is not always the case, though... Far too many identical reports of creature descriptions across countless sites have made clear that there are certain "species" (some even say individuals) that, for some reason or another, thrive on multiple environments. These particular creatures are almost like a recurring cast of horrors, hunting and chasing after Deep Divers across the galaxy. The way they work is simple: each Àrsaidh Site you visit has the possibility of spawning these same type of creatures, based on the Site's activity; these unique horrors are tougher than a regular encounter, and each one of them has unique abilities and tactics. You can think of them as mini-bosses. Surviving an encounter against one of them is usually reward enough, but I'm considering spicing things up a bit and offer something interesting for your characters. This goes against one of my design principles for Across a Thousand Dead Worlds, which is not to incentivize combat in any way (there's no such thing as combat XP), but since these unique horrors can only appear randomly and there's no way to "farm" them, I think it's safe to do something different with them. In any case, I'm excited to introduce these, I think it will be a very fun addition to the game!

So that's it for this update, see you on the next one!

- Alex.

First Stretch Goal unlocked!
over 2 years ago – Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 10:01:35 PM

So that was fast! The "boring" (but damn necessary) stretch goal has been reached! This means that we now have Vi Huntsman as part of our team! For those of you who don't know, I've worked with Vi both on Seekers Beyond the Shroud and Disciples of Bone & Shadow, and they're some of the best in the business. Vi has worked with extremely talented people, helping bring forward amazingly successful projects, so their help is a godsend. Not only do they do the basic line editing, but they make sure the rules make sense and are written in a way that is easy to understand. Oh, and on top of that Vi runs Collabs Without Permission, one of the most creative YouTube channels in the RPG and OSR community! So to say I'm excited to have Vi working with us again is an understatement!

Moving forward, I'm pretty confident we should unlock the next stretch goal as well, which is going to improve the look of the game tremendously! More art from all of our art team is always a great thing.  I'm particularly excited to see more from Vil, who is absolutely killing it with the art he's given us so far!

So thank you everyone once again for making this possible. Let's see how far we can go!