Updates

Just a quick update to let you know that Book of Plagues is written and I passed the files off to layout this weekend before leaving for Salt Lake City and SaltCON Spring 2026. You haven’t received the pledge manager because I haven’t quite finished putting together yet, but I figured it was more important (and a more substantial load off of my mind) if I were to finish writing the manuscript before I left town yesterday. I’ll get as much work done from the road as I can this week.

While The Book of Plagues is in production, I will move on to our next project, which is already on the drawing board and slated to be part of Backerkit’s Pocketopia event in May: A new Places by the Way/Found by the Way location module set in a rainforest and called “Children of the Mountain God.” It’s still early days, but it could use some followers to improve its visibility.

Thank you to everyone who participated in Zinetopia 2026 and backed The Book of Plagues! The campaign just ended, but there remains work to do — in addition to finishing the pledge manager and getting it ready for distribution, I have to organize my part of the two cross-collab cross-promotions that came with this campaign. This will happen as quickly as possible.

Of course, work on the Book of Plagues continues, and the writing is close to finished at this point. I finished writing the introduction while on the road earlier this week (more about that soon on my Substack blog, where you can always keep track of what is going on with Ramen Sandwich Press), and this leaves only a handful of entries and a brief appendix of random disease table to write up.

Unfortunately, we only made it 2/3 of the way to the stretch goal. But who knows? If the book proves popular enough, perhaps there will a Book of Plagues II, or perhaps additional material will find its way out in another form.

In the meantime, thank you again for your support, and I'll be in touch soon!

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."