Hello friends, some of you have received surveys. That was the 5% smoke test! After I send out this update, I am going to go ahead and send out the full surveys to everyone. Thanks for your patience for these to get out there. I got it all taken care of though.
Some art I'm sharing from Salty Water. But I showed these to Patreon patrons already last week I think-- so I gotta do more for ya, right? Alright. Let's take a look at something else then!

This is the sketch for the Blackened Betrayer. This is a boss that you can meet in the Burrows area, where Ensu like your characters live in peace. But most Ensu who stay in the burrow HATE your characters for leaving. It makes them more vulnerable when travelers come through. Malefact or Aeons may follow you.

This hate usually comes across as passive aggression, or as being given the cold shoulder. But sometimes, it goes further. The Blackened Betrayer has chosen to leave the Burrows himself solely to hunt your kind. If he kills every dungeon delving betrayer, then his people can be safer. This hunter has been designed by Salty Water with the same incredible attention to detail as his other characters. His design for the armor and helmet come from tibetan prayer wheels, The armor and clothing details are pulled from Mongolian armor designs. 

Just overall, the character is going to be an incredible boss.

Hope you're all having a great weekend, and talk again in August!

7

Hello folks!

So it's been a month, and that's about our schedule on these updates from here on. Salty Water was waiting on me for a bit, but we have some illustrations in and are booking along on the remainder of the game.

This is the trait card for the Bulwark, which allows you to make any character a super armored one! If you want to wield two shields, or be just so armored up its ridiculous, this is the trait for you to pick. While it would go best on a character that is already tanky, you might think, it is unique on the glass cannon characters of the Wraith or Bonecutter, giving them huge survivability to go with their damage. But the bulwark would love to make you step in to defend allies, and that is something those squishy characters might not want to make use of.

And while we have already seen the class-tools of the Collector of Skulls and the Maker of Hands, their chain wrap and gilt hammer respectively, we now have the remaining class tools.
The Stoor-iron shovel of the Organ Eater, used to beat enemies over the head and dig up bodies to harvest.
The Benthine Daggers of the Caged Wraith, broken away over time but animated with their ghost blades.
The Aeon Call of the Aeon Caller, the harp made across their own torn apart wing bones which they use to call angelic horrors to their side, or to support their allies.
The Inward Knife of the Malefact Bonecutter, which they use to release their blood and bones to grow and turn into armor or weapons, or a weapon against foes in a pinch.

And then there's the Body Collector, a boss I talked about in the launch livestream. There are bosses that align with your soul's connection to the Aeons, the Malefact, The Road, but there is also this boss, which would love you to safeguard your soul by aligning it with yourself. Then it can collect a pure, undiluted essence of you. This is the latest progress piece on this boss, and it's coming along beautifully!

I have just given Salty Water another Trait, 5 Actions, and an additional Boss to illustrate next.

That said, I'm seeing two things on the horizon here. One is how much artwork there is to get from Salty Water.
We have some 40 small illustrations to do, 6 more beyond that for the class 'ultimate' abilities we unlocked as a stretch goal, another 4-5 for the Backerkit exclusive 'booster' for the game that people got free as a first 48-hours incentive, or that you can grab in your surveys (soon) for $5, plus 9 more bosses. This is just going to take a few more months to get pulled together on the illustration front, period.

Two is how much I keep changing the game. I think there is a good chance that I change the game even more as the process goes. I'm also considering returning the dice to the game, which is a whole thing. What makes this game strong is its uniqueness from my other small box games. MANY people have told me before (after seeing the ZOETROPE system) that ZOETROPE's system would easily lend itself to any genre of game, and early on I thought I agreed. That I could reskin ZOETROPE, add a few things, and have a new game. But that's frankly not good enough for me.

For this reason, I want to push the timeline back from maybe shipping September/October, to more likely shipping January/February. This is for a couple reasons, the stuff explained above, but also because I think I want to do the naughty thing and add more to the game beyond what we funded here. To do that, I need to bring in money from other projects to make HISTORIC the game it can be, rather than just what we brought in here to fund.

I want to put in the 7th class I was considering, a dedicated healer.

I want to return the dice to the game, and in doing so, raising the price of production by almost $4 a piece. 

I want to include a few more items, and a few more bosses. 

Financially, that together will cost about $2200 in art, $4000 in extra manufacturing costs. And I'm not asking any of you to pay that here, but it means I do have to bring in the money on what else I'm doing this year to cover it.

I considered doing an expansion later, but what I find is people get expansions less, which is reasonable. So I just want the game to be full, to have all its goodies in it right away, and not need to be expanded on later. For now, we will continue with things as-is, but with the extended deadline. And if, as time goes into October, it seems the money exists for this, then we may push back to March to slide in these extra goodies.

Thanks for your patience all, I want this game to be incredible. I don't believe anything can be perfect, but there were issues in ZOETROPE and WHAT WE POSSESS that I wanted to fix in a revised edition right away, and I don't want that here. I want proper time with making sure what I bring to you is right.

Thanks everyone, talk again in July with game progress and art progress updates!

7

Hello friends,

It's been about a month since our last update, and that's about the schedule we can expect for my projects after they have completed their funding. Though I'll admit normally I also then have cool things to share a month later. Unfortunately for the moment, there's nothing to share.

I've seen back to back this year that projects are doing much worse than I expect, financially. I think politics, economics, and the general world situation with wars, genocide, and the not-so-slow rise of very bad powers has really affected so much. And so many job losses, business cuts, the uncertainty of global trade, tariffs-- it's a rough time for small creators and everyone else.

Due to this, my focus of late has been hugely on my oracle dice project. I won't plug it more than mentioning it here, but it's live and a big focus from me because of the above reasons.

As I shared at one point here, the funds raised here on HISTORIC did not pay back the art costs, but more just focus the manufacturing and some of the art. As a result, HISTORIC and the pin project before it were very narrow margins, or just didn't pay back the costs entirely at all. That was a surprise to me. ZOETROPE and WHAT WE POSSESS both made a good 23-25k a piece, and I thought HISTORIC could as well.

The Oracle Dice likewise have underperformed massively. 2nd edition of the dice brought $180k in the first 24 hours. This time for the third edition here, we barely did $60k in the first 24 hours, and then spent the first 72 hours just reaching the base goal of $75k.

The leadup to, and now the support of that campaign has been massively important for the future of Publishing   Goblin as a business. So HISTORIC has not been touched until now, but Salty Water and I are moving forward with the art as of today. By the time we reach our next update, we should have a bunch of cool things to share from the game, including the Body Keeper boss, which I talked about in the launch stream, the main tools of the remaining classes, and more! We will also start talking next update about what was included in the Backerkit exclusive pack that many of you got for free as the 48 hour early backing incentive.

So stay tuned delvers, I'll be back with awesome stuff to take a look at here soon!

7DA
your pub gob

Welcome to the day after the campaign ended, friends!

In the end, we did crack the 12,500 goal and that means each class will gain an extra card to their deck with an illustration and a cool new effect that their deck didn't previously have. I'm really into this concept, and will get thinking about what that means.

According to the project page, we should have the game locked in around later June, and then we could potentially head toward manufacturing and then shipping close to October. That said, right now is a terrible time for table top games and the like-- the new tariffs our King in the US have put out would raise our production costs by 50%, which for any of us who had just ran a crowdfunding campaign for example, could not have accounted for. 

We will keep our eyes on the news to see how things change, get walked back, or undone hopefully, but if it comes to it and in September we still don't have tariffs rolled back, we may delay manufacturing until there is a change or we make money on another project that could cover that 50% increase. We appreciate your patience in that.

For now though, it's time for me to get in talks with Salty Water about the remaining art for the game! I'll start locking in the final elements of the game, lock in final card choices for the classes, get working on the Delve cards, and more. We will go down to once a week, or once every other week, updates here for a bit as elements come in for the game to share. 

But thank you, friends. We did it, and I hope to have awesome things to share with you very soon. Talk again soon,

7DA
your pub gob

Welcome back dear friends,

Today is the Wednesday Rest solely because we are flinging ourselves to the finish line tomorrow! And you should always rest and stretch before big labor like that.

We are 165% funded, and merely 100-200 away from the stretch goal to add ultimate abilities to our classes!

Some of you may have missed it, but anyone who missed out on the first 48 hour freebie-- a free booster pack of cards with a new boss and some extras-- have a chance to still grab it as a $5 add-on.

In case you've missed it in our social posts, Salty Water has been cranking out (unpaid?) art for this campaign on social media. We've got Ratsune Miku-- I mean the Maker of Hands, a precious widdle Organ Eater, a very Woe Be Upon Ye Malefact Bonecutter sicking his lizard mount on us, and a Jojo posed Caged Wraith, using his soul as his stand. I think they're just delightful and fun art, and shows how much Salty Water loves these characters and designs to just draw them on their off time!
I very much didn't ask for any of the pieces, they're just for fun.

I like to do live streams at the end and start of my projects. So I welcome you to join me tomorrow, 1.30-2.30 pm MST. (12.30 PST, 2.30 CST, 3.30 EST) I'll be live to chat about the project, the game, the art, and more likely, to just chitter about life and answer questions and be a dumb person on a live stream. You'll be able to catch the stream right here on the campaign page, so consider popping in to say hi!

I'll stay until the campaign is DONE-- that means if we get pledges and pledge adjustments after it ends at 2pm MST, the campaign stays live another 10 minutes from the time the pledge or adjustment is made. Since this was a smaller project, I'm betting we will go about 30 minutes or so after the close. 

So see you then, dungeon delvers!

7DA
your pub gob