Backer payment info update

I am shocked and delighted at how well this has done!

Thankyou so much everybody!

Dear Backers, your link is in the super secret backer link.

For your convenience I have included a complete list of traits. One by alphabetical order, one by descending cost. One great piece of feedback I've received is that this sort of table really speeds up making so I'm including it from the get go as a digital download.

What a roller-coaster and wild ride the last few days have been! Thankyou so much! I'm sure my heart has grown at least three sizes! :)

PJ Coffey
on behalf of
Homebrew And Hacking TTRPG Design

Apologies this should have gone out on Saturday! There is a small box that I did not tick and which I have now ticked!

In this update:

- What's in the book!
- Delivery schedule
- Revised Print option

What's in the book?

9 chapters and 6 Appendices

1. Crafting heritages. A step-by-step guide on how-to make your own species compatible with all the major 5th edition versions. A5e, ToV, 2014, 2024, Free5e. Appendix A provides even more information including how the complete character creation process compares between versions. Appendix B provides a worked example for the fully playable culture, the Whiskerlings, Tiny mouse folk suitable for any game.

2. Crafting Cultures. Complete with a random Culture trappings generation system, this details how to make a culture to put in front of your players that will really come to life for them. Broken down into an extensive list of ways to provide exciting concepts for a culture: spiritually, geographically, and socially, it also explains the best way to present this to your players.
- How does a culture see themselves, how do others see them, and how does the culture see adventurers, allowing you to get the important parts across.
As an aid to role-playing, there are 50 different ideals and taboos which you can use as a basis to help your players understand what they should value about the culture and what they should try and avoid.  Appendix C provides

3. Crafting Backgrounds. A complete guide to making backgrounds for Advanced Fifth Edition completed by Dave Clark of Full Moon Storytelling. This veteran background maker with hundreds of examples of work provides a breakdown of how they created the oracle and the processes that go into this oft-overlooked aspect of the game.

4. Crafting Feats. A crash course in feat construction, looking at full feats, half feats, feat chains, feats with prerequisites and the very cool and eminently transferrable synergy feats and transformational feats pioneered by the creators of Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition.  Appendix E provides a concise summary of the pros and cons of variant character ability score creation methods for adding variety to that part of the game.

5. Traits by Type. Nearly 90 pages of the various traits available from a wide variety of games systems. Neatly costed and sorted this mammoth undertaking will allow you to easily pick, choose, and substitute whatever you need to make your players happy and more fully envision your world!
Traits come sorted by
- Anatomy
- General
- Combat
- Exploration
- Social
- Science Fiction
and include Weaknesses, exciting ways to have naturally escalating rules for say being a Fey and dealing with Cold Iron, that you can tune to your tastes and the tastes of your table. With over a dozen subcategories, it's easy and convenient to make what you want. This includes the rubric to help you evaluate your own work against the existing and really do your own game design with confidence!

6. Premade Heritages. 7 immediately playable heritages with three never seen outside of niche fan circles and one of those exclusive to this book.

Arboreals - Large tree people. ENTirely different from dryads.

Brownies - Tiny with wings. More than a little pixie-ish. Will work for bread and milk.

Firmhadrai - They’re dogs that think they’re people. Aww. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette)

Hengeyokai - Triple stated fey that can shift between tiny animals, regular humanoids or a cross of the first two.

Snowfolk - Short lived constructs that will lead you a merry dance if you let them.

Unicorns - Like, a horse, but with a horn coming out if it’s head? 

Whiskerlings - Tiny, mouse-like. Prone to scampering. (They’re in the illustrations.)

7. Premade Cultures. Revamped and revisited from first edition with the Squeaklefolk, exclusive to this book.

Cuberos - Underground slime herds with a sideline in barrel making. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette.)

Island Hoppers - Explorers and sailors, the like of which the world has never seen

Pastoralists - A herder culture pushing their animals across the steppe.

Rho-Bhur - A former nomadic culture that’s settled down but still remembers the old ways.

Rover - an itinerant traveling culture delighted to see the world.

Reef Singer - an oceanic culture that uses communal song to create islands to live on. (Previously in Gatepass Gazette.)

Squeaklefolk - the Whiskerling culture, distrustful of outsiders, desperate to protect their families.

8. Premade backgrounds. Covering the niches left unexplored!
Beachcomber

Clerk

Cube Herder

Gravedigger

Tavern Server

9. Premade Feats
45 Feats including synergy and transformational.

Appendix F. Analysing Maps.
With the amazing maps from Jog Brogzin, I'm looking at maps that you can use for your own personal, inspirational use, and discuss them through the lenses of economics, environment, politics and history in order to help you you enrich your game.

The time for delivery goes closer!

There have been some problems and miscommunications about expectations within the team about the importance of due dates, in all senses of the word, and art direction.

Current revised schedule:

1. 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 12pm PST Monday 3rd March.
Delivery of Manuscript via DTRPG as PDFs. The book is edited, has art that it needs and is fully complete, it's just that last magical transformation from words to a TTRPG book that is not where it needs to be.

Two links will be sent out to backers. The first is to the download for the manuscript itself.

All ~90k words have been professionally edited and rechecked. However, it is the nature of publishing that typos will try and insert themselves. So a second link for putting in queries and bug submissions will be included.

2. End of March. The laid out text is predicted to be available.

3. Mid April - Proof copy should be received.

4. End of April, books should be ordered and on their way.

Remember: This is Backerkit. Shipping costs are only charged when we're ready to order the books out to you.

We are delivering through DrivethruRPG.com so if you live in a country where they do not deliver then do not order a physical copy of the book.

Revised Print Option
With the revised cover, we've updated the physical print option, this is making it appear that there are no backers!

Rest assured if you backed at the physical print level, you are still getting a book! We've just changed the picture on the pledge level to make it look prettier.

Hello! 

Three part update

Well, here comes the colours... I'm working with Juan to create a vibrant picture to reflect the colourful worlds I hope to help you create! The cover is still in draft and I'm working with Juan and Nicolas to get something quite special made, but these things take time!

Random Culture Generation and sample layout
Here's a sample layout, still in early days, but this particular page showcases the start of a bit of random culture generation. Obviously you are never going to be constrained to just what I happen to know about and think and you should dress it up how you like, but I feel that you're going to get some rather good ideas to play with from this. As you can see Nicolas is currently using different colour dice to help differentiate the major categories and sub-categories.

Apologies for the lack of alt-text I haven't worked out how to make Backerkit do that! 

Currently we have:

Ideals and taboos
And I'm also going to be introducing ideals and taboos. Basically I heard about edicts and anathema from Pathfinder 2e, thought it sounded nifty and have produced my own take wherein a culture gets three ideals and one taboo. This helps you focus the culture on what you want it to be about and it helps players decide to reject, conform to, or take a completely different angle on.

In terms of presentation, the original 2014 player's handbook had a "What they think about themselves" and "What others think about them" format which I thought was quite good, and so I thought "How do they typically regard adventurers" would also add to the mix.  Don't worry! There's plenty of examples, included one worked one, and it's making it all much easier to write!

Anyway, things are progressing well, and I'm looking forward to getting this book out to you. :)

On behalf of Homebrew and Hacking TTRPG Design

PJ Coffey