The DUNGEONCRAWL THAT RULES THEM ALL - Now updated for 5th Edition. And with exclusive miniatures!
Hammerdog Games would like to wish you and yours all the best this holiday season. Whether you celebrate these holidays or not, we'd like to thank you so much for being a part of this project. All our best. - Danny
Hello folks! I hope this finds you all well, especially as the holiday season approaches.
I am writing today with mostly good news – the products you’ve backed are going to be awesome! But sadly, the book and miniatures have suffered delays. I’ll explain each below and share some information about Dead Dog Dungeon that I think you’ll find to your liking. And also, for anyone that wants to jump into Jing, we’ve got a PDF ready to go for you. So here we go, by the numbers.
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It’s time to lock down orders. We are calling for final orders by December 8th. We will charge cards around the 10th. I will send a reminder before either thing happens. About 10% of you haven't finished your surveys yet, and I encourage you to do so. If you are in financial distress due to the holidays - no worries! Just contact me and we'll work things out.
If you didn't fill out BackerKit b/c you live Down Under and were in shock due to the freight - good news! I am in negotiations with an Australian fulfillment house that should be able to help us all save some freight. Just send me a message and I'll let you know what's happening.
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When push came to shove, fixing the errors I reported last update were more time consuming than expected. I expanded the Bestiary and made the changes but the damage to our timeline had been done. Layout couldn’t get to the fixes when I handed them back and we lost a lot of time before they could. I was 100% expecting to have the book back from the printer in December but it’s pushing into January now. The worst part of that is that it will hit Chinese New Year and that will likely delay it a bit more.
Now some of you are veterans of Kickstarters and to you delays of this type are no big deal - and are even half expected. But to those of you who wanted or needed the book by the holidays, I’m truly sorry. Although I’m sure you’ll love the results of what we’ve put together, I failed to deliver on this part. And for those of you that don't care about delays but like to be informed better - an apology to you as well. I didn't realize how much time had passed between updates.
The good news is that the book is awesome, and if you are REALLY hungry to get your hands on some content, we’ve got a PDF ready for you. It contains the super chunky Introduction which starts with an awesome short story by Dave Gross, author of Queen of Thorns and other novels. It then goes on to explain the temple, it’s architecture, it’s special rules, and so on. It contains Adventure Hooks, Quests, and Storylines – everything you need to start adventuring. It also has 4 dungeon levels that introduce players to the concepts and ideas of the Grande Temple. All-in-all, it’s 90+ pages of content and it should be enough to satisfy until the book drops.
To get your hands on the “PDF For Hungry GMs” please message me directly.
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OK so the miniatures got delayed because the company we were hoping to use ultimately had to turn us down because they got too busy after telling us they could help. But that’s OK because we are proud to announce that we have chosen Trenchworx to fulfill our miniatures! These industry veterans are the best in the business and we are in good hands. Trenchworx fulfilled our minis for The Dread House, and people are STILL drooling over those.
And that brings me to one of the silliest, but most used miniatures in the Grande Temple of Jing – The Caretaker. This super enchanted magic mouth pops up at the strangest times and tells the group information about the temple. It’s half awesome and half annoying and all things Jing. Get your radio announcer/game show host/sports announcer voices ready, because you are going to need them with this figure!
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I just wanted to tell you how much fun I had creating this level. I had wanted to do this adventure for years and you earned it as a PDF-only stretch goal. If you recall, the premise of Dead Dog Dungeon is that the group suffers a TPK and Jing reincarnates them all as dogs.
Well when I made the banner for the stretch goal, at the last second I wrote “You can also experience this from the side of the cats.”
After the Kickstarter ended I wondered “Why did I put that bit about the cats on there?” I’d had the idea for years but I had never EVER planned to do that! What was I thinking? It gnawed at me for months.
But it turned out to be easier than I’d thought, and as soon as I sat down, the adventure leapt onto the graph paper. In Dead Dog Dungeon there are 2 levels and you can choose whether the group is reincarnated as cats or dogs. On level 1 these two groups of animals are separated by panes of glass – so that they can bark and hiss at each other while they run the same gauntlet. Who will finish first? The strong but distractible dogs? Or the dexterous but vainglorious cats? You decide!
On level 2, the group of canines – or felines – encounters a series of caves that is as close to a 0-level dungeon crawl as you will ever see. Because you know. Everyone is just a dog. Or a cat. Seriously no powers or spells.
See why I had so much fun with it?
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OK folks, that’s it for now. Thanks as always for your patronage and patience, and don’t forget to reach out if you want the PDF.
Stay warm folks (or cool if you live Down Under).
All my best,
Danny
Don't sweat it if you can't finalize your pledge at this moment. Lockdown will not happen for at LEAST one month. If you didn't get your invitation from BackerKit, please LMK.
We're going to be increasing community engagement over the next few months and into next year. We want to know what you like best about the The Grande Temple of Jing - the book itself, it's content, and it's specific levels. We're going to want to hear stories about how you used the temple to mess with your players - or how you took something in the temple and made it even more sick than it already was. We're going to want to see pictures of you playing, pictures of your setup, pictures of your toys. And we're going to want to hear about epic death scenes, tpks, and famous last words.
Please join the conversation by liking and following us online! I hope to hear from you.
Danny
PS: It would be GREAT if you could follow me on Kickstarter if you aren't already. Thanks!
Hey folks! BackerKit came through and fixed things up for me.
Therefore I have issued a "Smoke Test" which is a new thing in BackerKit (since last I used it). It sends surveys to 5% of you to test the pledge manager. So *SOME* of you will get your invitation today, others after the test (in about 24 hours).
Hope you are all having a great day!
Danny
Hi folks!
It’s been a while and we have gone beyond our targeted delivery date. Everything is still happening, we just fell behind on the book for a few key reasons that I’ll share below. This update is huge and should have something for everybody. Enjoy!
Last update I described our issues with finding a printer in China, and then domestically. We decided to go back to China but that delayed us in the queue. Well we ended up settling with a solid printer and we are very confident they can deliver. So this aspect is settled.
The issue is now with our PDF which we anticipated being completed some time ago. Perhaps we were too aggressive with the August release date but everything looked good for a long time. Then we got bit by 3 things that slowed us down.
The first is that after 20 years I left my job. Now this is not a terrible thing, it was just something I wasn’t planning to do until the end of the year. It messed up my timeline as I had to get things organized on the home front. As of this writing I am now moving to make Hammerdog a better company, one that is better at communicating and hitting deadlines. But it takes time. I hope you can all understand and will root for me/Hammerdog going forward. I’ve got some exciting stuff planned for 2020 and I hope you will come along for the ride!
The second thing is what I’d like to call “Edition creep.” During our final proofread it was obvious that something had gone wrong somewhere. We had some bad stats in the book, especially when it came to things like CRs. You see, the 5th edition SRD is very light on monsters. Well Jing was written originally for 1st and 2nd edition, back when there was no such thing as an SRD. I would create monsters by simply tweaking existing ones and giving them a new name. When 3rd edition came along I was able to use *some* monsters not others. Then Pathfinder came and I could use almost anything. Then 5e came and restricted me again. This caused an error pattern with certain monsters – a bad name, a wrong CR or hit points, and stuff like that. It really should have been caught in editing but it got missed. I’m in the process of fixing these right now and I’m expanding the Bestiary to encompass more unique monsters that can be found in the temple. I’m well aware that many of you will never run these monsters or will switch them out for ones you like better, but until then there is no such thing as an “Elder Elemental” and I think you need one. So now you have one. Plus 4 para elementals. Have fun with them. :)
The third thing is “Layout creep.” Jing is designed like a magazine, which is to say each level is like an article that fits into its own page count. You can’t run over for any reason. Well we struggled with this a bit simply because a new layout person means new styles to play with. We had layout creep for about a half dozen levels and we are fixing those while I fix the stat block information.
So all of this to say we are still going nicely. And the book really does look fantastic! Here is a sample of a 2-page spread from a Draft of the book (translation: this is not the final, no need to point out any errors).
Ah the minis. What fun these little devils are. I’ve not mentioned this before but Jing is the creator of Jingxes, magical effects in the temple that mess with your spells. Well we noticed a “Life imitates art” thing with Jing the first time around. That is, he likes to Jinx people working on this project. Around Gen Con, he “Jingxed” *BOTH* of my miniature specialists, breaking their 3D printers. Oh the humanity! So I did what I thought was right – I bought a 3D printer and did the prototypes myself. I brought some to Gen Con and did a short video to show you some of them. Then Jing struck again, refusing to allow me to post the video no matter how many times I tried (translation: service in the hall sucked)! But here it is now:
Please ignore the fact that I call STL files SDZ files. The doors to the hall were opening, I was rushing, and I'm an idjit. BTW, never try to post video from the floor of Gen Con. :)
Now the point of prototypes is to make sure they will cast properly. Everything you see here is 1st gen so we are working to make all of them look a bit better. I am super happy with the special doorways. If you purchased them AND the DM Toolbox, you’ll have little cardstock cutouts to put in those doorways. Plus you can always print/draw/make your own if you like. Details like this are what I’m all about.
Well after *4* attempts over almost a month, BackerKit finally contacted me today. Our best guess is that they were SPAM filtering me. They had the Review in their hands 2 hours after helping me and now I simply await their approval to launch. I'll comment when it goes live!
Some of you asked for the ability to print Jing figures yourself. We are pleased to announce this as a bundle for $25 dollars. This is our first time to attempt this as a product and we hope you are pleased with it.
We are pleased to announce that we have signed on with Fantasy Grounds to provide Jing to the VTT crowd. Unfortunately due to the size of the book we don’t have a guarantee that they can put a team together soon so we are not including it with BackerKit, sorry.
We are also talking to the people at Arkenforge, who are putting my other book The Dread House into their VTT right now. But Jing is a beast of different stripe and we are not sure if we can get that translated soon.
So folks we unfortunately have not begun to print the book yet but will soon. We are in “preflight” stage with the printer. That’s where they check our proof pages to make sure we don’t have any color/saturation issues. We hope to deliver the finalized PDF soon and should have the book in your hands still in 2019. I’ll keep you appraised.
That’s it for now! I hope you are doing well with fall/back-to-school/planning your Halloween costume/whatever it is you do this time of year.
And for those in the US and Canada – enjoy the long weekend. I’m sure you’ve earned it.
Best,
Danny