Updates

We’re coming down to the end of Zinetopia. 2026 and I want to thank all of you who have supported The Book of Plagues. We have hit our funding target, work on the book is coming along nicely, everything is proceeding more or less according to the original plan.

The only hitch is that we are less than halfway to the campaign’s stretch goal and ginning up some extra content for your disease-ridden use and pleasure. Fortunately, there is a tool available for you to help with this, and I’m honestly a little surprised that more of you haven’t taken advantage of it: add-ons.  We’re offering our entire catalogue of RPG books at discount prices that you will never see again, since we just had to raise some of our print copy costs. Each item that you add on to your pledge counts toward the funding total, so it helps us along toward hitting the stretch goal.

At the moment, I am sitting in my hotel room in Aurora, Colorado, waiting for Day 2 of Genghis Con to begin. Day 1 was quite successful, and I am reminded of how appealing our Places by the Way and Found of by the Way series of location modules have proven to be once we can get through the signal-to-noise problem and actually draw people’s attention to them. My original intention in creating both series was to generate a library full of locations that you could drop into your campaign as needed or as desired to give your players a diversion from the main story. However, they seem to have proven more broadly useful than that — they have been run successfully as stand-alone mini-adventures, or even just scrapped for parts and individual NPCs and side quests used in a different context. It’s all good to me, and honestly, one of the most rewarding parts of this process has been hearing from DMs who have used something I wrote for purposes quite different from what I had imagined.

Now you, too, have the chance to pick up these useful additions to your library of DM tools at discount prices and help us along to the stretch goal. Add-ons! Don’t miss you chance at them!

... and it's mostly for Pathfinder folks, although any backer may answer. I've just added a new poll question: Do you want me to write my own rules for handling rabies, even though both editions have their own rules (in the Bestiary entry for dogs)?

I explain why I'm asking in this blog post.

Thanks again for your support!

I normally don't like to flood my backers with updates. I prioritize my incoming emails just as much as you do, and I don't want you to get into the habit of ignoring my updates because you're just getting so many of them.

I remember one campaign from the (much) earlier days of Kickstarter, where the creator would literally post an update very day, even if it consisted of only one, pointless word. Evidently, he had read somewhere (on Kickstarter itself, I think) that you should update your backers frequently to make sure they stay engaged. Those were the days before it became a fact of life that backers supported so many campaigns at once that there was no way you could keep up with frequent updates from every campaign you backed. So that's not how I roll.

But still, I always post an update to commemorate when we hit our target — and we just did! I don't think we've hit our funding target so quickly since my first Kickstarter a decade ago. Amazing. So I want to take a moment out of our day to thank you for helping us get here, and so quickly at that.

Now I can go back to writing The Book of Plagues. And you can always keep up by subscribing to my Substack blog, "I Think We've Been Playing It Wrong."

... and the symptoms have begun! Thank you to everyone who came out on Day 1 and helped this campaign get off to a good start. We're about two-thirds funded even though Zinetopia just started, so this gives me confidence that we'll hit our funding target sooner rather than later.

In particular, I'd like to welcome everyone who came here encouraged by our cross-collabs with Sneak Attack Press and Greedy Gorgon Press. The metrics tell us that there are a fair number of you, and I'm seeing a lot of names that I don't recognize from our past crowdfunding campaigns, either here or on Kickstarter (where we have a fairly long history). I assume that you're all new to Ramen Sandwich Press, so I'm glad to have all of you here and I hope you'll stick around and hang out with us for a while. You may want to look a our extensive list of add-ons to buy other books from our catalogue at a discount to their normal price (especially since we may have to raise some of our prices soon).

You may also want to take a look at the poll that we put up about which diseases you'd like to see added to The Book of Plagues in case we hit our stretch goal. At the moment, ebola (no surprise) and diphtheria (!) are out front, with syphilis challenging for the remaining spot. The poll really will affect the contents of the book if we get that far, so don't hesitate to make your opinions known.

I posted to my Substack blog yesterday with a comment on why I decided to add syphilis to the poll and rather than recap it here, I'll just link to that post and you can read about if you want. In general, "I Think We've Been Playing It Wrong" is a good source of news and insight into what's going on with Ramen Sandwich Press so I hope you'll stick around there as well. More and more, I think my crowdfunding updates will just say, "You can read it about it on my blog."

Thank you again for your support, and we'll talk again on the way to the sick room!