Just a quick update to let you know all of the books are moving in the right direction. The main Dungeon Denizens 2 Books (both versions) are in layout! Artwork comes in daily (see below). Right now the design teams are working on the appendices. All of the other books are either in layout, or very soon will be in layout. The next step after this is proofing the files.
Did someone say artwork? Here is abut a sample of what has recently arrived in our inbox.
Aethersplicer by Steven Gomez
Orphaned by Brad McDevitt
Trap Golem by Alex Coggan
Umbral Sorcerer by Brad McDevitt
Void Rift by Robbi Burns
Woodwose by Alex Coggan
Walking Eye by William McAusland
Which of these monsters is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
So let's get the bad-news-that's-not-bad-news-anymore out of the way first. One word: "Tariffs." To be completely honest, we had to pause on this project for several weeks while we tried to navigate our way out of the tariff maze. We contacted domestic box printers here in the USA, looked into publishing this as a hardcover or another format that was more feasible to print domestically, and generally spent a lot of time on the phone trying to understand what our options were. It was a long couple weeks.
Then the tariff situation evolved and... poof... the original plan looks feasible again. So, a month later, we're back to Plan A and revving along. There are a few maps to finish up in order to complete layout, and then we're looking forward to getting this boxed set to the printer. I think in the next update we will likely have some layout preview pages to show you.
For this update, the big progress is the first miniature sculpt is complete and in our warehouse. This is what hundreds of unassembled cloud giants look like!
Next update we should have a lot more progress on the "main books" to share. Moe to come!
Your weekly update for ACN is below, and, you should have gotten a notice from Backerkit as well, but....
#1 - Cards are being charged this week
I wanted to give another reminder! This will be for any add-ons and to cover shipping for physical rewards, and once this clears, I'll be working on getting all the physical products ordered!
If you filled out your survey after the lock order date and missed the cut-off for the first round of shipping, you won't be charged here but we can work things out later. I'm going to cover all the first round charges and shipping and then will come back around for any late order locks.
#2 - Adding audio!
I'm currently adding the audio to all the slides and will be sending out digital rewards as soon as that clears! If you want to listen to a few clips from the early game chapters, visit today's TTRPGkids Dev Log here.
I'll leave this update short and will give another update next week on physical orders! Until then... happy gaming!
-Steph
P.S. If you missed the campaign or have decided that you want to add the slides, make sure you're following the TTRPGkids profile on Backerkit or have signed up for the TTRPGkids newsletter so you get updates when things go live in the post-campaign fulfillment time. You should start seeing the game on DTRPG and itchio later in June and then on IPR and other indie game sellers in June to July.
First, I'm delighted to say that the final part of the puzzle is in place - Blood In The Margins has arrived!
Blood In The Margins, in the flesh!
I've spent this morning setting up the pledge manager with correct weights for all the items and I've sent it off to review. As soon as that's approved by Backerkit - which they say can take up to 2 days - I'll be able to send surveys out. These will allow you to select any add-ons you might want and provide your shipping address.
Once surveys are out I plan to leave them open for two weeks to give people time to fill them out. I'll send out reminders. Once they close I'll charge for shipping, and then I'll be able to get the physical books out to you.
Thanks again for your support on this project! I'm really excited to put these books in your hands.
For international backers, we have shipped the bulk deliveries to our fulfillment partners in Canada, Australia, and the UK. These palletized goods mean local-market shipments will start going out in roughly "1-3 months," depending on the destination market and the fulfillment partner's queue in each market.
For USA backers, the fulfillment lines are set up and boxes are being packed. We just uploaded the first 100 tracking numbers for packages the mailman should pick up today. Here are a couple photos, below. We anticipate more orders going out the door as a steady stream in the weeks to come.
This will be a slow burn. This is a huge project and USA fulfillment will likely take at least 6 weeks, give or take. We will keep you updated as it progresses but please be patient. As many of you know, Goodman Games runs its own warehouse in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We are bringing in four interns to help with fulfillment over the summer. In future updates we will introduce you to the interns who help to ship your pledges! Around the edges of shipping, they'll also be learning game design, art direction, marketing, wholesale and distribution, and many other skills related to the business of designing and publishing games.
Now some photos!
Fulfillment lines set up for packing
Caverns of Thracia books ready to be boxed
The first packaged pledges off the line, waiting to be taped up and shipped
Update on Canadian Tariffs
For Canada backers, in our previous update we mentioned the possibility of additional shipping charges. Long story short, there will be no increase to costs for Canadian backers.
Several backers asked for more detail. If you'd like the full story, google "Canada CARM." This is new Canadian legislation that went into effect in April 2025, after being delayed from a prior implementation date. It's just an unfortunate coincidence that it happened to go live at the same time as the tariff situation, so it appeared to be related.
After a lot of discussions with our Canadian fulfillment partners and some helpful representatives from the Canadian government, we have a better understanding of the implications now. CARM does have a negative effect on Goodman Games, unfortunately. Goodman Games now has to handle more administrative paperwork in order to ship our products to Canada backers, and a number of fees to the Canadian government have to be paid "up front" instead of "later." For now, though, it doesn't appear to directly increase total costs overall.
City State of the Invincible Overlord
We recently announced City State of the Invincible Overlord, and we really could have provided more clarity up front. Just to be clear up front, Goodman Games absolutely opposes any sort of racism, bigotry, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia. We never support it and don't want to be associated with it. The funds from "our" CSIO crowdfunding will be used to refund backers of the earlier, failed 2014 CSIO Kickstarter as launched by another company (Judges Guild). We're setting up an escrow account, along with limits to the print run, to ensure the funds are used properly and as intended. If you'd like to learn more, you can read this detailed post or watch this video. Please rest assured, we absolutely stand for inclusivity and diversity, and believe our approach to City State of the Invincible Overlord will reflect that.
If you'd like to follow our City State of the Invincible Overlord project, you can do so here. It's an amazing setting from the golden age of gaming and we'd like to do it justice.
Follow the project now to be the first to know about launch
Upcoming Fulfillment
Watch your inbox for tracking numbers! We will upload them daily as books are picked up by the postal service, and our rough plan is to post weekly updates with general overall fulfillment status.
As mentioned above, fulfillment will take a while. Please have patience. But the books are here and they're moving!
This update is primarily for backers being fulfilled out of Australia. Everyone else, you can ignore!
AUS/NZ backers - please accept our apologies for the unacceptable delays. (Well frankly, this applies to all international backers of this project!) The latest update is that our local fulfillment partner has received the physical goods and anticipates shipping them out within the next week.
Sorry again, Purple Planet backers.
Brief recap of other regions, in case anyone else has questions:
USA - complete
Canada - 97% complete. We're following up with our local partner on 3 shipments that appear to have been missed.
EU/UK - 92% complete. We're following up with our local partner on 15 shipments that we don't have tracking for. Not sure if we just haven't received the tracking or they are unable to ship for some reason.
Incomplete surveys - we still show 60 backers with incomplete surveys. If this is you, please finalize your survey so we can get your package shipped out.
Thank you all for your support, we're thrilled by the support for our Calendar!
We are pleased to say we have a tight turnaround planned for your pledges, so here is what the next few weeks will look like -
May 15 - Campaign ends Following 2 weeks - Backerkit charges cards May 31 (estimated) - Pledge Manager Survey sent out June 7 - Addresses locked & Shipping charged We will lock and charge in waves following this every 2 weeks to make sure we catch everyone!
Fulfilment (I will be able to confirm dates once I have the stock checked into the warehouses but we are aiming for everyone to have their calendar before August and hopefully in early-mid July).
We are expecting the Adventures to be released in August to give us time for playtesting.
As always thank you all so much for the support, we can't wait to get you your calendars!
Grab the preview packet, roll up a character, and share it in the comments! Here's a few characters I generated during development:
An indentured secretary who became a polymath naturalist wizard with skills in animal handling, medicine, and survival. He found a coded treasure map and got accosted by a Wyvern while searching for it. Unfortunately he had a terrible falling out with a romantic partner who became his rival and took his only child away with her.
A dwarf raised by a single witch into an adopted family of orphans. When the locals blamed the witch for misfortune and came with torches, she cried out to her mother's patron and was granted misty step as a means of escape. Seperated from her family, she took to crime to survive and ended up killing someone on a job and getting captured. After using the cover of a riot to escape, she studied under a religious sage before uncovering a heinous secret about the head of their faith, so now she's being hunted by an inquisitor. Ended up with two Magic Initiate feats, one Wizard and one Cleric, as a (fey?) warlock she crosses the barriers between multiple spheres of magic.
And secondly, we heard the feedback that our communication needed some work, we are now doing monthly (at the minimum!) updates on all projects, and we are always active on our Discord (which you should all come and join!). As part of this, we want to give you an update on all our projects, as we are shifting some announced projects back, and we are anticipating a minor delay on one project.
After an amazing 2024, the start of this year has carried on at a pace. We’ve released our first Starter Sets for Shiver, made several hundred unique items for Don’t Play This Game at a company retreat, and along with you all managed to fund SISTERHOOD. It's been a wild, crazy time and the team are flat out making our games as awesome as we can.
In the background, the team are tireleslly working to get your games to you from our outstanding crowdfunding campaigns. Don’t Play This Game is currently being fulfilled - admittedly, this is running a few months behind schedule. Delivering late is never our aim, Don’t Play was an ambitious project for us with some unexpected issues but we hope the wait is worth it!
We are on track with Sisterhood and will be ready to punch demons in 2026! We wanted to give you something to keep you all excited so have prepared a Sisterhood Lore Primer that gives you some more background on the Sisterhood, their Orders, and also the Cults of the Five Horsemen!
Lore Primer Cover
Over the next few months we'll have more updates rolling out as we have bits ready to share. We plan on sending monthly updates through backerkit to keep you up to date. If you have other questions we are more active on our Discord Server so this is the best place to get a response.
We are pushing the estimated delivery for this project back to Q4. Some workflow overlaps combined with wanting to give the game some extra polish before printing means we are moving the estimated delivery back to Q4. Whilst we are nearly there with the game (with some items already in manufacture), we anticipate missing the delivery by a few weeks. Alongside this, the digital files delivery we are now estimating for Q3 - we can’t wait for you to get playing, so we will be releasing this as soon as we are able.
We are ahead of schedule! We are aiming to have this to all our backers in Q3, ahead of the Q4 aim. We were aiming to deliver Classified before the Corporate campaign, but will miss this by a few weeks. We will be delivering the digital versions before this, however!
What if the worst job you've ever had was autopsying aliens, babysitting monsters, and constant death in an endless cycle of imperfect cloning? And at the end of the day they didn't even pay you? A darkly comic expansion for the award winning SHIVER RPG.
A new Shiver setting bringing all the comic Horror of the Workplace into your TTRPG.
Shiver: Corporate launches in July as planned, and if you follow now you can get a free quickstart guide (including a playable adventure!) for you to test the game out straight away.
Explore the galaxy in your mech with your friends in ION Heart Multiplayer. After the rave reception that ION Heart received we wanted to let people explore the Astral Union with all their buddies. Assemble your companions and take your mech friends into the stars!
We are pushing back to Q1 2026. With so many projects on we have some more development work on this before we launch the project. We are hoping to start the dev diary over summer to keep you up to date with our progress!
????????
You might have noticed a secret title squeezed onto that tracker in between Shiver: Corporate and Ion Heart: Multiplayer. You do have sharp eyes! The necessity of moving Ion Heart: Multiplayer back has allowed us the opportunity to release a new title (or is that titles?) that we have been really excited about for a while. Look out for an announcement very soon!
Tariffs
The situation sucks. We have friends who have lost employment already due to the ongoing tariffs, and are seeing widespread trouble throughout the tabletop industry, which is only going to get worse the longer this continues.
With the majority of our products being produced in Europe as a business we are quite well insulated from the Tariff issues on the majority of our lines. However we are not entirely protected from this huge industry disruption. Our dice, screens, and box sets are all produced in China. Specifically we have the full run of Ion Heart Dice and Mech’s Toolkits currently in production in China, estimated to be completed in the coming weeks. The tariffs on these items alone are substantial, and as a small company make a real dent into our ability to operate.
With the additional delay in delivery for Ion Heart we’ll be taking the time to review all our options and hoping that the situation is resolved by the time at which we need to make a final decision over the coming weeks. Once we have a clearer picture we will do an update specifically on this project.
Sisterhood is in a similar position, but further down the road.
In addition to this, we are now out-of-stock of some items in the USA and will not be able to resupply them until this.
As a business it is clear we stand firmly against the tariff situation, and support the actions of companies such as Stonemeier Games in trying to support the industry in these tough times. As a small company we are feeling, and will continue to feel the pain from this situation, and we can only hope for a swift resolution. We encourage all of our customers to reach out to their representatives, but we also empathise with the real-life effects that you are feeling from this situation not only in regards to games. We hope it will get better, for everyone.
On A Nicer Note!
I don’t want to leave this update on such a negative point, so let’s look at some of the other fun going on in and around Parable Games at the moment!
We currently have a Don’t Play This Game play-along on our Discord Server! Get a weekly prompt and join #TeamParable as we discover what the entity has in store for us all…
Next Month sees us attending TWO incredible conventions (UK only SORRY!)
Matt, Barney & Adam will be at MCM Comicon London on 23rd - 25th May
The WHOLE Parable team will be at the UK Games Expo where we are also hosting our FIRST EVER EPIC. Come and experience Shiver: Corporate early with 50+ other players in one mega game.
Our Patreon continues to release awesome monthly content - both for Shiver and new systems. With a FREE tier you can keep up to date with all the fun goings on.
We recently launched the Shiver: Director’s Club, offering FREE GM resources and rewards for players who want to run Shiver at their local store or convention. We’ve already been blown away by the response, but there’s always room for more Director’s here!
Let us know any other questions in the comments below or join our Discord Server. We’ve got a busy few months ahead, but it’s a really, REALLY, exciting time!
