Hi everyone!

We're into the last few days of the campaign now, and I'm hard at work getting the layout finalised so that I can get this book in your hands as soon as physically possible. Today I want to show you some of the things that changed during the course of the writing of this game, as well as giving you a playable preview of the book to check out while the campaign wraps up.

Before we get to that, there are a few projects I want to shout out. The first are my amazing campaign partners over at GAST. Their support behind the scenes during this campaign has been incredible, and it's been great to see them do so well. I know many of you are already backing both projects, but if you want to make sure you get the free bookplate you should definitely go and show them your support.

The second is being run by my friends at Beyond Cataclysm, and Patrick Buechner of The Soloist, both of whom have been big supporters of my work in the past. This one's over at Kickstarter, where they're raising funds to Solo Borg, a new set of solo rules for Mörk Borg. The project looks really cool, and I'm happy to see it fund so quickly!

A few of you have asked for a way to add additional print copies of Blood In The Margins to your pledges. These will be available in the pledge manager after the campaign ends anyway, but I've gone ahead and created an add-on for a second copy if you want to add one to your pledge now. 

Now let's talk about the development of the game a little, shall we? Traditional Wretched & Alone games contain 52 card prompts, one for each card in a standard deck of cards. Each suit represents a different facet of the game world. In The Wretched, for example, the suits represent the ship's systens, the ship's physical structures, the crew you lost, and the creature itself.

Blood In The Margins still follows this format, but the new three act structure means that the game contains a whopping 156 card prompts - a full set of prompts for each act. You absolutely won't see all of these prompts during play, but they're there and waiting for you.

As the acts change, so too do the things that each suit represents. Act 1 explores the crime you committed, developing your character and the nature of what you did. Act 2 represents the closing net, the web of the investigation drawing in, your rising paranoia. Act 3 is, of course, your unravelling. As the focus of each act shifts, the card prompts will help us hone in on the things that are important to each act.

My initial prompts for Act 1 focused on your motivation (Spades), the victim (Hearts), the consequences of your actions (Clubs), and the method of your crime (Diamond). But I realised after writing all the prompts that I hadn't given you any way to actually define the setting and explore the academy itself - a fairly important facet of dark academia!

Cue draft two, where I rearranged the suits to make space for this new addition to the game. Clubs and Diamonds were rolled together into one suit (Diamonds, now) that explores the crime in general, and Clubs took on the roll of defining the Academy itself. In doing so I went through all of the Clubs and Diamonds prompts I'd previously written and selected the best ones to form the new suit. This means that a lot of prompts got left on the cutting-room floor, but I think the game is better as a result of it.

If you'd like to take a look at what the prompts looked like originally, feel free to take a peek at this Google doc. And if you want to see the prompts that formed the new Clubs suit, read on...

(Of course, you can only read on if you've backed the project. So please go and do that!)