Thank you for all of the input over the last week. We have been working with the BackerKit team to resolve a the issues that have been brought to our attention. Here are the solutions they have helped us with!
You selected Pay Over Time, have completed payments, but did not receive a survey when they were initially sent out.
Backers that have selected Pay Over Time will not receive their survey until all of their payments are complete. Thank you to the backers that let us know that they had completed their payments but did not receive surveys. We worked with BackerKit and apparently they have to manually run a chore to"refresh" those backers into the mega pledge manager and that had not been done in their review. It has since been done and we can confirm that all backers that have all payments complete as of last Friday should have received their survey this week!
You selected Pay Over Time, but have a remaining payment(s) and have not received your survey.
All Pay Over Time payments should be completed by October 6th. After that our BackerKit rep will run the chore again to refresh these backers so they can receive their surveys as well, which will take about a week. BackerKit did not clearly communicate to us that the surveys could not all be sent until all Pay Over Time funds had been collected. (This is only our 2nd project using this feature and for the last project we opened the Pledge Manager Survey after 4 months of the campaign ending.) All surveys will be sent by mid October, therefore we are pushing back the lock order date to October 16th. Most backers will have answered their surveys by this time and even if you have not answered it, you will not be affected by them locking, as an incomplete survey cannot be locked. We cannot wait too long into October to lock orders because we need to prepare for the early fulfillment of the OSE Referee's and Player's 2026 Printing Books to the backers in those pledge tiers.
You didn't do pay over time and you still can't find your survey.
Please make sure that if you are not accessing your survey via the email invite, that you are selecting "Old-School Essentials Month" Pledge Manager Survey. This is the group shipping survey and includes the Pledge Manager Surveys for the following projects:
Digital Backers that received physical Early Backer and OSE Month Booster Pack physical rewards in their cart causing a shipping charge to appear.
All digital backers that received the physical Early Bird Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire - Hell Realm Postcards Set or Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire - Monster Deck Foil Booster Pack as a reward for backing Demonic Grimoire + 6 OSE Month projects, those two physical items have been removed from your carts and replaced with the digital versions.
If you are a digital backer that would like to pay the shipping to receive the physical version of the reward despite being a digital tier, we are happy to add it back in for you if you reach out to us at [email protected] or to BackerKit Support.
If you are a digital backer that paid $6.66 for the exclusive pre-launch reservation Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire - Limited Edition Demonic Grimoire Monster Deck then the shipping amount you are seeing is the shipping price for that physical item you purchased before the campaign began.
I'm still confused, please help!
If you need assistance with your pledge or need to report any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] or to BackerKit Support for any questions or assistance.
Exalted Funeral Customer Support has been receiving a very large number of requests this week so it may take a little longer than normal to get back to you, but we are working through the requests and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We want to make sure every backer is taken care of.
This morning I am pleased to announce to all of you that the HELLCRAWL PDF is now available.
What an amazing process this project has been. 3 years ago, when I set HELLCRAWL aside, I truly never thought I would ever be able to say "You can now download the PDF and send your players to Hell!" Now, thanks to Necrotic Gnome's encouragement, today is the day!
I believe that this is our best book yet. Tim's art is amazing and I love the way he hit every speedball I threw at him out of the park. I've learned so much through this process and it has been a dream come true. I loved going back to the work I had done in the past and tweaking it, improving it. I hope you enjoy the months of work that went into this.
Fulfillment If you follow the ENNIES Emporium you'll know that I've had a hard time with fulfillment. I'm going to share this information with you because I believe some of you may want to run your own crowdfunding projects in the future. I'm lucky that I've had other people in this industry act as mentors for me. Maybe you can learn from my struggles. Fulfillment is the most arduous and difficult part of these projects. In the past I've been able to sit in a room by myself and stuff boxes and envelopes. HELLCRAWL is the largest project we've had so far so I looked into finding a fulfillment partner.
Studio 2 Originally, my plan was to work with Studio 2, who is currently our distributor for Agamemnon Press books. I like Jim and his team a lot. They charged $2 a box to pick and pack which is pretty reasonable. The problem was that a lot of boxes needed to be shipped to Studio 2. To ship a carton of books from Arizona to Tennessee costs $40 a box, so that expense racks up quickly.
But then I found a fulfillment partner here in Arizona!
Gamer's Guild I was really excited to work with Gamer's Guild. They're here in the valley, I could just drive my stuff to their warehouse and they'd handle it. We had a positive phone call in July, then we had an in person meeting at GenCon (which is funny to me, we could have held the meeting in Arizona). Then a month and a half after GenCon I finally got the fulfillment quote from them. $14 a box!
This is an absolutely deranged number and I have no clue where they came up with it. They have not responded to my messages since last week about this. This $14 a box does not include shipping by the way, it's just $14 a box on top of shipping. This would add up to about $13,000 which is wild stuff.
Where Does That Leave Us? In a way, this is an opportunity rather than a set back. I've decided, rather than pushing off responsibility for fulfillment onto another company to improve my methods and get better at it. BackerKit has a lot of great tools you just have to learn how to use them. The team at BackerKit has been amazing.
Finally, rather than pay another company I have hired Agamemnon Press's first employee Julie! Julie will help Kayla and I pack boxes and ensure speed and accuracy.
Timeline Now that you have the PDF I want you to read through it, run it, and enjoy it. Before we send it off to the printer I want you to help us stomp out any typos and provide feedback. Please use this form to provide feedback.
We will send this to the printer toward the end of October because I want to have time to go through this one more time piece by piece before we send it off. If all things go according to plan (HAHA!) I expect fulfillment to begin after Christmas. Thank you again for your support. It truly means the world to Tim and me.
I think we were able to figure out the PDF distribution without surveys and successfully distributed PDFs via your BackerKit dashboards and DriveThru. If you are a digital level backer and you did not receive your PDF, let me know and I will make sure you get it. Also, if you were a print only backer and would like to add the PDF, I can do that through DriveThru by sending you a direct link with the discounted upgrade price. Get in touch here or email me at [email protected] and I'll set it up for you. We would normally offer the option in a survey, but we're not doing them. Speaking of which, you should all have received surveys from Exalted Funeral if you ordered physical books, or multiple projects during the campaign. I filled mine out last week and was really happy to see how low my shipping costs were. Thanks Exalted Funeral! I plan to have books printed and shipped to Exalted Funeral's distribution center next month, where they will be inventoried and consolidated with any other products you got during OSE Month for their mega-shipping-event. I'm not 100% sure when those will be going out, but I think it's somewhere around the start of the year 2027. I'll let you all know when I know more. Oh--and if you missed out on backing altogether, the PDF is live on DriveThru. You can get it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/581270/emporium-of-the-damned Thanks again for your support and for keeping the table clean!
When I access the digital downloads, there are two files each for both the Player's Book and Referee's Book. One of the links has "(Early Shipping)" after the titles.
They appear to be the same documents when I look through them. Am I missing something or are these in fact different documents?
Ok the Smoke Test has been sent for the Pledge Manager Survey! In case you are not familiar with what this is, it is a test of the Pledge Manager Survey where it is sent out to 5% of backers (301 backers in this case) to give us an opportunity to correct anything before it is sent out to everyone! Usually after 24 hours or so, if everything is looking good then we would send out the remainder of the surveys. I'll check in on responses tomorrow to see how everything is going. If you encounter anything odd, please reach out to us at [email protected] instead of BackerKit over the weekend, since they are out of the office.
As soon as you answer your surveys you should get the available PDFs for Demonic Grimoire in your survey. Many of the other projects participating in group shipping have likely been communicating with you about how they are delivering their project's digital files. We will let you know if there are any other projects that we will send PDFs through this BackerKit Survey as well.
We will have another update when the Smoke Test is complete and all of the surveys are sent as well as when the Pre-order Store opens.
Tim is finishing the last few pieces of art, which are the Deck of the Damned. This is a deck of powerful effects players can draw from every day, but doing so deals despair damage to them. This brings them ever closer to eventually becoming demons. They are bartering pieces of their soul in exchange for temporary power.
Let's take a look at some of the final full illustrations of the book.
TIMELINE
I expect the layout for HELLCRAWL to be done by the end of September. By the end of September (hopefully sooner) we will have the PDF in your hands. Then I'd like you to take some time and help us look for any typos. I'll share a google form with you so that you can provide feedback. Then we will send it + the cards to the printer in October. After that HELLCRAWL will go to our fulfillment team. The HELLCRAWL shirts are already ordered and ready to go. The Art prints are on their way from Australia.
The Painted Wastelands 5.5e
Our next project is The Painted Wastelands 5.5e, it launches October 13th. For non-5.5e fans we have a lot of options. We are producing two shirts, a dice box, some fancy dice, ectos, and a few more surprises I have to wait to announce. Make sure to follow us at https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/agamemnon-press/the-painted-wastelands-5e
The T-Shirt Pledge is designed for Agamemnon Press fans (who aren't 5.5e fans) and an opportunity to add any other items you'd like. Our past catalog will be available, and returning backers will receive a special pin, the seal of the bleeding eye. This hard enamel pin is 1.5" across and not available for purchase. It can only be earned by those who've been by our side all along. It's a small symbol of how grateful I am for all of your support. If it weren't for you, where would I be?
