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By now, almost all of you should have received at least one email from me with your digital rewards attached. Most of the physical copies went in the mail yesterday and today, so you should get yours by early next week.

So the fulfillment process is almost over and this campaign is almost at its end. There are just a couple of loose ends to tie up; for some reason Backerkit did not add the postage surcharge for international buyers who wanted a print copy, so I will reach out to them individually to resolve it.

I apologize for bringing this in two months behind schedule. I could make any of a number of small excuses why this happened, but there's no point in dwelling on any of them. What matters is that we can cross Lair of the Storm Giant and Path to the Storm Giant's Lair off the list of things to worry about as we enter the holiday season. 

And I can go back to focusing on Backerkit's Holiday Market and willing more buyers to spend money at the Ramen Sandwich Press store. For everyone within reading distance of this email, you've probably been getting emails and updates about that already. As always, I am convinced that if I just keep staring at our storefront page and focusing on it with my mind powers, new buyers will appear.

Thank you again for supporting Ramen Sandwich Press. I wish you all a happy holiday season, and if you want to keep track of what we're up to and confirm that I am still alive and working on something, you could do worse than subscribe to my Substack blog, "I Think We've Been Playing It Wrong."

I was shocked to learn this when I looked it up just now, but Trevor Denman retired as the track announcer at Santa Anita a full 10 years ago. It shows my age, but I can't quite imagine the horse racing highlights on the news without his distinctive call, rendered in his equally distinctive gravelly voice and Australian accent: "And away they go...."

It comes to mind because we are, finally, close to ready to go to print with Lair of the Storm Giant and Path to the Storm Giant's Lair. I got the layout proofs this weekend, so now it's up to me to check them over. That means we're close. Proofreading has always been the most tiresome part of the process for me by a country mile, but it doesn't take long.

Therefore, I'm going to stop accepting pre-orders this weekend and finalize the print count so we can place our order. There are still a couple of backer surveys out there, but if you didn't want to order any add-ons and you didn't need to clarify whether you want the D&D version or the Pathfinder version, I suppose we'll get by.

I hope this finds all of you well and having had a good summer. We'll get this project wrapped up soon!

In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith, I love it when a plan comes together. Thank you to everyone who backed this campaign!

Now, we move on to the next stage of the process: I have to admit, I'm not entirely clear on when Backerkit will collect your initial pledge and send the funds my way, but it will happen. I already have the pledge manager ready, including the option to buy add-ons from the Ramen Sandwich Press catalogue. I'll submit it for approval very soon, and I expect it will function pretty much like the Backerkit post-campaign store we used to open after every Kickstarter.

Not gonna lie, it took me almost an entire day to assemble the pledge manager this time and it was a real pain in the ass. I was hoping that Backerkit would let me import items from my previous Backerkit stores, but I guess that would have made it just too easy. We can't have that, now can we. I get the feeling that Backerkit has put its various functions in silos, so that its relatively new functions — hosting primary campaigns and pledge managers — are effectively sealed off from its old post-campaign store business. So I had to create all 32 listings manually, which is not terribly difficult from a mechanical point of view, but it is brain-numbing and requires periodic breaks to uncross my eyes.

I didn't even dare make any entries for Ramen Sandwich Tees items, because, with with possible size and color combination being a separate SKU, it would have become a nightmarish spider web of separate items that I would have to double- and triple-check for mistakes that got input when by mind went blank. I'd still like you all to check out Ramen Sandwich Tees and buy whatever you find interesting, but I'll just direct you to our website instead.

I'll be in touch soon to let you know about the next steps after the next step!

This is no doubt long overdue because we're already more than halfway through the campaign. But I just posted a design diary-type glimpse at some of my thought processes behind Lair of the Storm Giant to my Substack blog. I hope you find it interesting, and if you haven't yet backed this campaign I hope it encourages you to come off the fence and get a copy for yourself. No matter how many pledges we get, we can always make more copies.

I also hope that you'll find "'I Think We've Been Playing It Wrong'" interesting enough to subscribe and keep up with it. I'd like to build a strong following for the blog and Substack seems to differ not at all from other self-publishing platforms in that success breeds success; the search algorithm rewards you if people pay attention to you and punishes you if they don't.

You can subscribe for free and keep up with announcements about Ramen Sandwich Press and Ramen Sandwich Tees, get my quick reacts to game industry news and some game reviews. Or you can get a premium subscription for $5/month or $30/year (that's the least that Substack lets me charge) and access longer essays like my ongoing series about the cold, hard realities of game publishing, as well as book and other media reviews, more board and digital game reviews and tips and hints sheets and convention photo rolls. I'm still working on adding audio content and guest posts from my friends in the game industry as premium content. If you prefer to support the blog through Patreon, you can become a member for $5/month and I'll gift you a premium subscription for as long as you care to keep it up.