It's been a week already since the campaign ended. Bloody hell. It's still sinking in. 

Firstly: THANK YOU ALL! We've been making RPGs for a while now, but we're still a small studio and it always means a lot when people put their hands in their pockets to support us. There are tons of other things you could have chosen to do with your money, and we appreciate you making the (smart, savvy, discerning) choice to do this.

Extra special thanks to those of you who came here via Backerkit's Creator Backers feature. We owe a lot of Meatbags' success to Grant Howitt, Rowan Rook & Decard, and Chris Bissette. If any of you don't know these excellent people and publishers, I fervently recommend you check them out.

Now - on to a rough overview of what you can expect in the short term, and of course how new US tariffs are going to affect us (spoilers: not a lot, surprisingly). 

I'll aim to send you monthly updates to keep track of how production is going, but sometimes the gap between 

updates will be longer: if waiting a week means I can show off some cool artwork or page designs, I'll do that. 

Now. This book's been... a bit more successful than I thought it would be. There are more stretch goals to add. I'm adding a character advancement system and that's going to need playtesting. I am no longer entirely sure I can get all the revisions done in April. I mean, I could, but they wouldn't be my best work. So I am extending the timeline to: 

At the risk of immediately cursing this entire endeavour, we've been pretty fortunate in the unfolding US tariff situation. It looks like books will be exempt (though I am watching the situation closely over the next few weeks), and almost all our materials are being produced in the UK and EU, where tariffs are... not as bad as they could be. Currently. Who knows how long that will hold up.

We have been lucky so far. I don't think there's a single TTRPG creator confidently predicting our good fortune will last. But as things stand now, at time of writing, the tariff situation doesn't affect our plans. The horrors persist, but so do I, etc. 

I never told you what that luxury book treatment stretch goal was going to turn into, did I? I'm still not going to, but I am at least going to hint.

It's green and it glows.

Bye for now. 
Chant

Oh blimey, we've got less than a week to go. That snuck up fast. Two bits of good news today: 

If you're a fan of very average people barely keeping it together in outrageously challenging circumstances (of course you are, you're here, backing Meatbags), it's very likely you'd enjoy Chris Farnell's Fermi's Wake series. The books follow the ragtag (shit, that's putting it lightly) crew of the spaceship Fermi, which is both the fastest ship and the deadliest weapon in the universe.

Join the crew as they visit, and then inevitably destroy, a series of bone-chillingly wrong planets, making terrible choices and living to regret them. Then play the crew in Every Which Way is West, a micro-setting by Chris Farnell for Meatbags that takes the crew to a desert world inhabited by plant monsters in definitely not cowboy hats, to encounter a lone gunman on a quest for vengeance.

When you pick up the latest Fermi's Wake novel, Graveyard Orbit, or the season pass from Scarlet Ferret, you'll get Every Which Way is West FREE and IMMEDIATELY.

We're so happy with what Chris gave us for Every Which Way is West that we immediately asked him to write something for Meatbags backers too. We've just received a pitch about a roadside diner and some distinctly metatextual scares. We're extremely on board, and wildly excited to get it to you as both a PDF and a printed pamphlet we'll ship with the hardback book.

This is in addition to the stretch goals and book content already announced, by the way. Working with Chris is fun and we just wanted an excuse to do more of it. 

We haven't forgotten about a poll on other micro-settings and an update on luxury print elements. More news coming over the weekend! 

More soon! 
Chant & Lore

Hello! 

We're officially in the slow, oozy middle bit of the crowdfunder, but you're all still here and that's pretty amazing. And, despite the apparent quiet, quite a lot's happening behind the scenes.

We've been talking to a possible US fulfilment partner, and it's good news: we now have a way to fulfil US and Canada orders from the US. This is, for obvious reasons, a hell of a lot cheaper than shipping every individual book from the UK.

The important bit: shipping The Mimic pledge (just the hardback book) is going to cost £7 (about $US10) and The Colossus (the whole bundle) will be £11 (about $US14-15 ). That's a reduction of 40-50% on what I thought we'd have to charge.

Seems like getting GPSR registered would be a benefit, eh? I've started talking to some possible services, so before the end of the campaign we might be able to take European orders. Fingers crossed... 

We've got quotes in for some absolutely wild luxury touches for the book, but I have to sit with them for a while so I don't just add everything with no regard for sound financial strategy or good taste. Anyway, more on that over the weekend, I think.

"Can you draw The Beast?" I asked.
"What's the Beast?" Lore replied, with the tone of weary resignation my art 'briefs' sometimes provoke.
"Big monster. Grrrrr. Very scare."
"...Sure."

And that's how we came to have this humongous rodent the width of a city street, dragging itself towards you by the strength of its gnarled claws. Is it too big to reach you? Definitely. Will that stop it? Absolutely not.

The point, here, is that while the Monsters in Meatbags are archetypical - we have concepts like The Beast, which has a buffet of powers you can swap in and out for werecreatures, prehistoric things, or a gorilla big enough to swat a helicopter from the sky - but they're not stereotypical. You can create classic movie monsters very easily, but you can also pick and (re)mix to make this urban wildlife nightmare.

Thank you for making it to the end of quite a long update. I hope the shipping's good news, and I hope you like Lore's two-headed possum (see the babies on her back? Cute!). 

Talk soon,
Chant

We made it to £3,500! That means LUXURY FINISHES!

Still haven't fully decided what, but this opens up a lot of options. Some of them are sensible, expected even - bit of metallic foil on the cover, or some unpleasant glistening on the cover monster's tentaces.

But what if I had blood dripping down the spine?

What if the cover glowed in the dark?

Anything's possible. I'll start investigating and see just how silly fancy this can get... 

We're officially making (at least) two microsettings! The first one's going to be a Twin Peaks-y small town. It's a good, default setting that you can place a lot of games in pretty easily.

But the second? Tricky.

There's an almost infinite number of possibilities, and I'd have fun with most of them. So what do you want? Abandoned space station? Gothic catacombs? Fog-blanketed Victorian city? Mini apocalypse?

If you've got a favourite setting for horror, or ideas of what you might like to see, or just strong feelings about favourite horror tropes or sets (I can mine them for inspiration), let me know in the comments! Hopefully we'll get enough that I can run a poll to make the final decision...

(It's going to be incredibly embarrassing if there are no comments on this update, isn't it?)

(Please comment. I need this.)