Hello, family!

It’s the final day of this campaign, and boy howdy are we off to an incredible start! This morning you unlocked our latest stretch goal, increasing the size of Come Hell or High Water and adding more content directly from Cam Collins and Steve Shell, the creators of Old Gods of Appalachia.

Our next idea is a doozy: it brings together an interesting new game effect, immersive game aids to pull you and your fellow players into the setting, and additional contributions from Cam and Steve. We think you’ll love it.

Your intrepid group has tracked the switchback poisoner to the Old #9, and you’re planning to venture into the shaft at first light. Fortunately, your mamaw had a recipe for soup beans and corn bread she’d always make when someone had a run-in with a copperhead or timber rattler. So you gather for a meal, and the next day you set out feeling fortified against the dangers to come.

We’re going to make a set of recipe cards, just like mamaw’s. Each will include a recipe on one side, and a game effect on the other. If your characters cook and eat the recipe, they gain the effect—it’s sort of like making cyphers, but uses normal ingredients and cooking instead of the crafting process. Some of these recipes may have in-world sources.

And that’s not all. The recipes will be authentic, with contributions from Cam and Steve themselves. Imagine cooking up a meal straight from the family traditions of the Old Gods of Appalachia creators! That would make for a great game night, wouldn’t it? We’ll also include our advice on bringing your group together to combine a wonderful meal with a fantastic game session.

Oh, and one more thing! Steve will read these recipes to you as well. You’ll get additional audio files to go along with them. To recap:

Backers at The Darkness Stares Back and The Darkness Stares Back • New to the Family will get this recipe card set as a physical reward. Every backer will get it in digital format. And it’ll be available as an add-on. We’ll unlock Good for What Ails Ya at $800,000.

There’s a reason we call it a stretch goal. This is a whole new product, and a truly immersive and fun addition to your rewards. Can we make it there?

This campaign has been on fire today, thanks to your support. With a nudge, that goal isn’t out of reach. Let’s all get out there, share this campaign, and end it on a high note with an amazing new item added to your rewards! See the end of this message for shareable images.

Drop by the campaign page in the final couple of hours—we’ll be hosting a live stream right here! Shanna, Cam, and Steve are liable to drop by and visit with us for a while, and perhaps we’ll see some of the other fine folk who are helping bring the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game to life!

Thanks again for your support!
—Team MCG

P.S.: Here are a few sharable images. Right-click to copy or download them, to use in your own social media mentions of this campaign. We recommend you share this URL: https://mymcg.info/deeper-still-social. You can find even more sharable images and art in our last update.

Hello, family—

As we write this update, the campaign has passed its scheduled end point. But BackerKit has a new feature: as long as people keep pledging, the campaign remains open. Additional pledges are still trickling in! At this moment, we're just a hair shy of hitting the stretch goal and unlocking Good for What Ails Ya.

Perhaps we'll hit the $800K mark, or perhaps we won't—but even if we don't, we're so close, and we so very much want to make this new item, that we're going to do it. Consider the stretch goal unlocked!

We're going to call it a night, even though there are still pledges coming in. From the bottom of all our hearts: THANK YOU for your support! Your enthusiasm for this game has brought us three new wonderful tomes that will greatly enrich your gaming experience, not to mention all the other cool rewards like the dice set and tin, Resource Deck 2, t-shirt, stamp set, witch jar, trucker hat, and more!

We do want to give you a heads up on next steps, but there’s a few things to take care of first.

Many thanks are owed to our wonderful partners, Cam Collins and Steve Shell of DeepNerd Media, without whom the amazing property Old Gods of Appalachia wouldn’t exist.

And we must acknowledge the wonderful MCG team. Led by Shanna, MCG designers Monte, Bruce, and Sean are already hard at work on the new books they will be bringing to life for you. Bear and Javier coordinated the artwork and graphic design for this campaign, and will be making the books and other rewards as beautiful as they are functional. Jen, Olivia, and Kate have provided answers and are always available to provide support to you, our wonderful community. Teri, Dominique, and Tammie have corralled the words and tamed the logistics. Charles, the man behind the curtain, has planned and run this campaign.

Together all of us from both DeepNerd Media and Monte Cook Games send you our deepest gratitude. Your support brings the imagination of both teams to life.

Here’s what to expect as we move forward from here.

Running a crowdfunding campaign is hard work. We’re looking forward to the weekend and getting a bit of rest. You may not hear from us for a little while, but don’t worry. As we’ve said, the design team is already at work on these titles. We’ll post updates when we have something exciting to share. 

BackerKit began collecting pledges the moment the campaign closed. But it takes them a full two weeks to release those funds, along with the data on our backers, to us.

In the meantime, we will get the pledge manager fully set up. The pledge manager gives us information we need to fulfill your pledge and lets you manage your add-ons and make any upgrades you want. We’ll notify you when we open the pledge manager, which should be in about three weeks.

Once you’ve completed the pledge manager survey, we won’t need anything else from you until it’s time to start fulfilling rewards. We’ll be busy crafting your products and rewards in the months to come. We’ll post regular updates but, if you don’t hear anything for a few weeks, don’t fret.

At the same time, please pay attention when you do get communications from us. Our emails and updates include critical information about your rewards.

Every time a reward is ready for you, we’ll contact you by email to begin the fulfillment process. Generally, we’ll direct you to the MCG Shop, where you’ll log in, “buy” the product (for free, because you’ve already paid for it through this campaign), pay for shipping for physical items, and check out.

This is an important part of the process because it ensures we have accurate delivery information for every item we send out. (With thousands of backers getting rewards, it's amazing how many people will change their address over the fulfillment period.) You'll pay for shipping at that time.

Make sure to pay attention to communications from us—don't let our updates or emails go to your spam folder, or otherwise ignore them, because if you do you could miss out on some of your rewards.

The Woods watch you as you wander, lost among the trees.
The Woods don't care.
The Woods see you isolated, lonely, and in terrible danger.
The Woods don't care.
The Woods are ancient (eternal?) and vast (infinite?).
You are small and brief. Hardly worth noting—to the Woods.

Discover why mankind has always feared the wilderness. 

Can your characters escape the Darkest Woods before they are consumed by them? To do so, they'll need to discover and master ancient, primal secrets and perhaps even fundamental truths... about themselves.

Mythic witches, horrific monsters, hateful spirits, cannibalistic cultists, and other dangers have always called the Darkest Woods home, but even the cruelty of the woods in winter, of a burning forest filled with charred ghosts, of a region haunted by things churned up in a flood, or of the truly twisted inhabitants of the region known only as the Backwoods test the mettle of any who find themself lost within its dusk-dark, twisted paths.

The Darkest Woods is a standalone TTRPG mega-adventure and setting in the spirit of The Darkest House, usable with any rule system. You can insert The Darkest Woods into any campaign—including the one you're playing right now. The characters drawn into its mysteries don't even have to all come from the same world, campaign, or game system.

So many challenges await. But the Woods don't care.
You are on your own.

Brought to you by the mind that brought you the horror masterpiece The Darkest House, The Darkest Woods is coming to your game soon.

Would you like us to remind you when it launches? Sign up now!

Hello, family!

What a fast-paced week it’s been! We’re excited as a dog with two tails to announce that, after unlocking a stretch goal just yesterday afternoon, you’ve done it again. The Old Gods of Appalachia Prop Set is expanding, with new immersive props that will pull everyone in your game deeper (dare we say it: deeper still?) into your adventures. As promised, it will include canon props such as the Railroad Man’s business card, along with other items you can use in a variety of ways.

That’s certainly not the end of it—at this rate, we can easily unlock several more stretch goals before we draw this thing to a close. Let’s talk about that in a moment, family, but first:

BackerKit, our crowdfunding platform, has a nifty feature that allows us to livestream through the campaign page. Join us tomorrow in the closing hours of the campaign. Shanna, Cam, and Steve are liable to drop by and visit with us for a while, and perhaps we’ll see some of the other fine folk who help bring the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game to your dining-room table.

The surge of backers making these stretch goals possible is nothing short of inspiring, friends. They’ve found their way to this campaign through your efforts. Let’s keep that up! Big campaigns don’t just happen on their own—they happen when backers help spread the word.

A few short social media posts go a long way. Tell your friends and followers why you love this RPG and Deeper Still, and send them to https://mymcg.info/deeper-still-social. We’ll add a few images to the bottom of this update you can share.

Just sharing a few of our posts helps, too. You can find them here:

Cam Collins and Steve Shell are already, thanks to your support of earlier stretch goals, contributing directly to Come Hell or High Water, writing up a couple of key locations such as the Walker House. They’re busy people, but we’re eager to have even more of their input. At $740,000, we’ll expand Come Hell or High Water with new content from the Old Gods of Appalachia creators themselves!

Where will they take us? The Clutch? The Tabernacle of the Elder Choir? Maybe they’ll expand their coverage of the Walker House to include its other incarnations—Pleasant Evenings, or perhaps The Charm School? Ultimately that’s up to them, family—but wherever they take us, they’re sure to give us details and lore straight from the horse’s proverbial mouth.

Matthew Wimberley lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. His collection All the Great Territories won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Orion, Poem-A-Day, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Like the other horror and Appalachian creators we’ve been introducing in updates throughout this campaign, Matthew will be contributing to the color, inspiration, and atmosphere of the books you’re funding through this campaign.

In case you missed it, early today we released Special Delivery, a free product with new creatures, character options, adventure ideas, artifacts, and more. It’s all excerpted from the current drafts of Dig Your Own Grave, All Your Gods Are Dead, and Come Hell or High Water, so it’s a great way to get a taste of those books—with stuff you can use in your game right now!

Thanks again for your support!
—Team MCG

Here are some illustrations and other graphics you might enjoy. You can right-click to save or download them, if you'd like to use them to share Old Gods of Appalachia: Deeper Still online!