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Hey friends, we are happy to announce that all four volumes of Designers & Dragons: Origins have been sent to the printer!

This project has an epic scope so we had quite a bit of editing and proofreading legwork to do to get everything ready but the files have been handed off.  (Big shoutout to Karen Twelves, Jenn Martin, and Gabriella Rincon for their heroic work!)

Actual production of the books will take a couple months - the printer sends us galleys to review and mark up, we send them back with further changes, they spin up the presses etc.

In the meantime we're also working on the slipcases. The vendor has signaled they want actual dimensions from the finished physical books which would potentially put a delay in our delivery timeline. We're trying to avoid that, but we'll keep you posted as we learn more.

In the meantime, if you have friends who missed the crowdfunding window, it's not too late to make a pre-order and get included in the main wave of fulfillment. Pre-orders are open here.

Thanks for your support, and we'll check back in when we hit another milestone or have news to share!

Hello friends,

Just wanted to give you a quick check-in and the short news is: We are still on track for delivery in July.

If you're following the project and have not pre-ordered, there is still time to be included in the crowdfunding fulfillment. Click here to reserve your copies.

Production Status Update
All four books of Designers & Dragons: Origins have been through a (very lengthy and intensive) editing and proofreading process and are now in final review. That's expected to take through the end of this week.

Then we make the necessary tweaks to dial the files in for production and sometime in March we expect to send the whole works off to our printer.

We're very excited to get this handed off to our printer and begin the process of riffling through the galleys and doing further proofing.

So far we are working to our project plan with no unexpected surprises. We'll let you know if any pop up.

Finally, You may have noticed we launched another project in the past couple of weeks.

Blades '68 takes the central setting of Blades in the Dark and catapults it one hundred years into the shiny, dystopian future.

Tense spy operations, action-packed heists, and brain-twisting paranormal encounters all mix in this official 450-page expansion. New crews, fresh playbooks, and alternate rules mechanics all await visitors to Doskvol 968.

The good news here is that there's very little overlap in managing the production of Designers & Dragons: Origins and the crowdfunding campaign for Blades '68. That campaign will not affect our schedule for producing your rewards.

That's the update! We'll check in again once we hit another production milestone. Thanks for your support.

Hello friends, just a quick update here as we enter the New Year.

1) The project remains on track. Proofing of all four books is done. We're doing another editing pass to collate the notes from proofing and those will then get filtered to our designer to flow them into the layout. This is a massive project - over 450,000 words across all four books - so we're happy to say we're still working to plan.

2) Today we launched a "smoke test" to a small portion of backers. Basically we send out fulfillment surveys to a random cross section of backers and then check the results as they fill them out. This allows us to shakedown the configuration of the surveys to make sure things are set up properly. Assuming that goes fine, next week we'll send out surveys to all backers next week. Don't worry you will have plenty of time to upgrade/adjust your pledge or change your address, we are still several months away from fulfillment. Mostly this step allows us to enable another feature of the BackerKit page, which is...

3) Pre-orders are now open! If you have a friend who missed the project they can head to https://designers-dragons-origins.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders and join the campaign. Pre-orders have access to the same reward tiers we offered during the campaign and we send out their books and PDFs in the same wave as the crowdfunding pledges. If someone you know missed the crowdfunding window, let them know this is the best way to get locked in on this treasure trove of D&D history.

That's the latest! We'll have another update the next time we hit a big milestone.

Thanks for your support.

Hey friends,

Thank you so much for supporting Designers & Dragons: Origins! Over 1500 of you helped bring this project to life and in the final 48 hours we put on whopping $48,000 to bring us to almost $250k.

If you haven't voted in the final poll, there's still 90 minutes left to get your vote in!

Remember, we are putting the top three choices into the Adventurers' Hoard but you can only vote for one product. So vote strategically.

(We won't say who the current leader is but it rhymes with Something Something Daniel of the Plains so just.... keep that in mind when you're looking at who might place second or third...)

The next couple weeks will be fairly quiet in terms of updates. BackerKit needs to collect and distribute your funds to us. And we have a lot -- and when you're talking 400,000+ words over 4 books, we mean A LOT -- of proofreading to do.

We'll keep you apprised as we hit milestones, but for the near future we'll be busy working behind the scenes. We take pride in delivering our crowdfunding rewards ahead of schedule and we're going to make every effort to do that here.

Finally, if you have an issue with your pledge, your payment, or anything else you need our customer service team to tackle, please email us at [email protected]. We do our best to monitor the comments here, but emailing us directly is the most efficient way to get eyes on your issue.

On behalf of Shannon and the whole team at Evil Hat: thank you again for being part of this project!

We know this was an ambitious undertaking. Shannon spent a decade compiling, revising, and researching the history of these products and we really wanted make sure that the final result was worthy of those long hours.

Thanks to you, we are certain it will be.

We're in the last two hours of this amazing campaign. We want to thank all 1500+ backers who are making this ambitious project a reality.

To show those thanks, we're holding one last poll to grow the Adventurers' Hoard and it's a big one: a lineup of classic products selected from all four volumes.

We'll take the top three results and add the entries for all three to the backer-exclusive preview.

Vote wisely however, you can only pick ONE product in the poll so the final ranking will be determined by the desires of the overall backer population.

Thanks again for your support and if you've just been following along, this is your last chance to get in and vote to unlock our final set of product entries!

Pledge now to claim this treasure trove of TTRPG history and your share of the Adventurers' Hoard!.