It's a long weekend for a lot of us in the US, so I'm taking some extra time to work on stat blocks. More on that with the poll at the bottom of the update!
Surveys Sent
The smoke test went pretty much without a hitch, so I sent out the rest of the surveys Friday morning. About 60% of you have responded already, which is great!
For anyone that missed the campaign, you can also place a late pledge via the pre-order store. Speaking of pre-orders, I mentioned during the campaign that I'd be continuing the stretch goal for environmental backgrounds for each monster illustration into pre-orders for a bit. We've currently reached around 66k total out of the 80k that we'd need to meet that stretch goal before layout begins.
Also, here's the finished "Inscrutible Sphinx" (working name), by Gibbs Santos
PDFs for Released Books
PDFs for Injuries and Vile Deeds and Tome of Intangible Treasures (Vol. 1) have been sent out via the pledge manger to all backers who pledged for a copy as an add-on during the campaign! If you're one of those backers, you should have gotten an email notifying you of your downloads. You may need to complete your survey first to be able to access the download.
Important Poll
With the release of SRD 5.2 for 5e 2024, I now officially have the option to natively support 2024 stat blocks in the book. The book will support both 5e 2014 and 5e 2024, but in order to best do that I need your feedback on which version you'd like to see actually present in the book!
Personally, I like the clarity of the new stat block formatting (the way abilities are written with targets and effects is often cleaner and more concise) but 2024 monsters also tend to be a bit stronger, with a "medium" difficulty encounter actually providing a moderate challenge to players rather than the cakewalk they tended to be in 2014, so there is a different balance to them. 2024 monsters often also have automatic on-hit effects rather than hit+save to avoid effects (when present).
Which 'edition' would you rather see the stat blocks balanced and formatted for? A section providing guidance on using 2014 stat blocks in 2024 or vice versa will be provided to support using stat blocks for the edition not chosen. My understanding from talking to people I know who've used stat blocks from one edition with the other is that it's not too hard to do, it just takes some minor adjustments with how you treat their CR (but definitely let me know if your experience is different!)
The poll will run for 2 weeks to make sure everyone gets a chance to vote, after which I'll use the results to make sure that all my stat block design effort is going toward the correct edition.
