TLDR: Shipping happening this month, small Journey Rule update
Hi backers! You'll be happy to hear that later this month I'll be shipping all your Downcrawl goodies to you (and releasing the final digital version as well). Read on for some details about the process and when you can expect your items.
A fraction of the 2200 Tack coins that needed hand-sorting and bagging...
Multiple shipments. Note that most orders at the $45 pledge level and above will arrive in two separate shipments. If you are receiving a Downcrawl core rulebook plus an item from either of these categories-- 1) Card Decks, or 2) Any Other Item-- you'll get your core rulebook in a separate shipment from all your other items.
You'll receive a tracking number via email for both shipments. The non-rulebook shipment will be synced to your BackerKit order (so you can see the status of your shipment on your survey page, for instance). The rulebook shipment will just be a notification via email, as BackerKit only allows associating one tracking number with your order.
Regardless, please keep an eye on those tracking tracking numbers once you get them. If something goes wrong with your shipment, the sooner you can let me know about it, the sooner I can figure out what happened and/or get you a replacement. If you don't notice until sometime next year that your shipment never arrived, my options to make things right will be more limited. I'll send out another backer update once all items have shipped, at which point everyone should have gotten all tracking numbers; if you haven't received one by then, feel free to reach out.
Shipping schedule. I just found out this week I'm a bit under the gun to get shipments out: on April 1st, my book printer is raising prices significantly in response to the uncertainty over the US tariff and trade situation, by up to 70% in some cases. 😱 This hopefully won't affect this project since I'm planning to have all orders placed with the printer before April 1st, but it does mean there's a fairly ominous ticking time bomb I'm extremely aware of...
My current plan is to submit book and card orders to the printer the week of March 17th. (I'm currently waiting on one last sanity-check proof to arrive, just to make sure my final PDF didn't get corrupted during upload or anything.) These orders generally take around 7-12 business days to print, and another week to ship (for US orders; other regions can vary), so you should expect to start seeing books or standalone card orders arriving in the first week of April. (A few folks might see their orders earlier since I'll be processing about 10% of orders this week as a trial run.)
If your order includes bonus items from higher pledge tiers, those will ship along with your card decks the week of March 24th. You should expect to also see those orders start arriving the week of April 1st (or possibly later, if outside the US).
Digital Rewards. These will be released on or before April 1st via BackerKit, along with player aids and any other free digital materials. (I think I've figured out the issue that caused access problems before, so hopefully this time will go more smoothly.) A few of you playing the prerelease game have asked about the bonus materials already; I just haven't had time to get them ready to post yet, but look for them soon.
Preorders will remain open until April 1st when the game officially goes on sale. After that date the price will go up (because of the aforementioned cost increases), so reserve your copy now if you want to lock in 2024 prices.
Unresponsive Backers. Please note that if you haven't filled out your survey to give me your shipping address, or never paid for shipping, you've now unfortunately missed the cut-off for receiving your order in the initial shipment. Get in touch as soon as you can and I can hopefully (depending on how much later you're reading this) arrange a late shipment for you. Note that I can only hold unclaimed pledges or offer refunds for a limited amount of time (see the bottom of the Project FAQ for full details) so reach out ASAP if this is you.
Journey Rule Change
Finally, a design note about the actual game of Downcrawl, which I do vaguely remember exists somewhere underneath the piles of bubble wrap, mailers, packing tape, and shipping labels I'm currently drowning in.
For those of you who've already started playing Downcrawl 2E with the prerelease PDF, I wanted to highlight a last-minute update to the Journey Rules, to patch an exploit that effectively made it possible to farm Tack during journeys if you adopted a certain mildly obtuse play style. The change makes a couple tweaks across the set of Journey Moves, including:
You can now only regain Tack as a consequence of a Journey Move if you actually spent some during that move.
Instead of a flat penalty for having more Failures than Successes at the end of a journey (and in fact any Venture), it's now a cumulative penalty: but only if Failures outnumber Successes. This disincentivizes a strategy of deliberately failing all rolls before the last one to save resources.
Speaking of that final Arrive roll, you must now get a 7+ on it to reach your intended destination. Combined with the change above, this keeps relevant the choice of when and how much Tack to spend for each and every roll during a journey.
I've made a few other small tweaks to Journey moves to avoid similar exploits (for instance, it's now a bit less appealing to overuse Encamp as a way of avoiding journey penalties). In general, I think these exploits weren't super likely to come up in earnest play-- Downcrawl is not really a game designed for munchkins-- but these tweaks definitely make the system less obviously exploitable, and help keep journeys properly stressful at all times, as they were intended to be.
(And on the topic: if Journeys in your campaign are consistently feeling too hard or too easy, it's easy to tweak the amount of Tack rewards to account for the dynamics at your table. For example: try increasing the Tack awarded for reaching a new place in "In a Volume" from 1 to 2 if journeys feel too hard, or removing that reward entirely if they seem too easy.)
That's it for now! Look for another update once all orders have shipped, hopefully before the end of the month. Can't wait to hear your stories of adventuring in the Deep, Deep Down!
