And now the news you’ve been waiting for: N.K. Jemisin has given us final approval for the game! This is a major milestone, and we are delighted we can move on to next steps. The approval included the Game Moderator’s Kit, so you’ll be getting a PDF of that this week. You will get an email with a link that will let you download the GM’s Kit from BackerKit. This PDF is for backers only, so please do not share it with others. If you spot any typos or other problems, send them in an email to [email protected].

Our next step is to review your comments on the core rulebook itself, and implement any fixes required. We will follow this same process with the GM’s Kit. Once the files are finalized, we send everything to the printer.

This should be a simple matter, but in 2025 nothing is easy. This administration’s trade war with other countries is creating economic chaos in a way we haven’t had to deal with before. The truth of the tariff situation is that American businesses pay the tariffs, not other countries. If we get hit with a tariff when our books come into port, all that does is increase our costs. We do print some of our books domestically, but that’s generally limited to softbacks. Printing hardbacks is much more expensive in America, which is why companies started printing overseas in the first place. Our GM kits in particular cannot be done domestically at a good price because we hardback the screens, so they are nice and sturdy. Some companies are simply increasing the price of their products to account for the tariffs, but of course in this situation that is not possible because you have already paid for the game. We are certainly not going to ask you to pay extra for something you’ve already bought. That means tariffs come right out of our profit margin.

The other factor here is instability. It generally takes 3-4 months to print something overseas. To plan for tariffs, they need to remain the same for that entire period. If we send something to print when the tariff is 10% but it jumps up to 30% before the job ships, that’s a huge problem for us. In the past six months, the tariffs have fluctuated wildly from week to week. It’s difficult to plan when the situation is so chaotic.

Now we have not been idle here. We’ve been tracking the tariffs and seeing which printers make the most sense. The current threat for July is a potential 50% tariff on the EU as a whole. One of our regular printers is in Lithuania, and at current rates they’d be a reasonable choice. Not if the tariff jumps up to 50% though.

I’m laying all this out now to provide transparency on what we are facing. Do not fear though. We are going to get this job done and you will get your books and screens. We’re just trying to time it right, so we lose as little money as possible to tariffs.

Chris Pramas