Hello all,
It's now the merry month of December, which means we move over from the Production team sending out emails to your regularly scheduled updates...
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Elaine Lithgow
about 1 month ago
Locking Pre Orders
Hey delvers!
Quick update for you today. As we ramp up to fulfilment in the new year, we’re going to lock and charge outstanding orders & preorders ov...
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Elaine Lithgow
about 1 month ago
Dagger in the Heart, November Update
Time For An Auditory Adventure
Til Death Do Us Heart, the official actual play for Heart, is now streaming! Come join the gang as they go on an ill-fa...
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Elaine Lithgow
3 months ago
Dagger in the Heart September Production Update
Welcome once more to all you delicious delvers. It’s been a hot second since we last spoke, so let’s dive right into the updates.
Printers Go Brrr
Since we released the PDF pre...
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Elaine Lithgow
4 months ago
Dagger in the Heart PDF Preview Available For Download!
The time has come! -drumroll-
Print preview files for Dagger in the Heart are now available for download for those who backed physical or PDF versions of Dagger in the Heart...
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Grant Howitt
4 months ago
PDFs inbound, charging cards and locking orders
Hello!
Grant here - Elaine's off so I'm stepping in to have a chat with you all.
We're excited to announce that the PDF preview of Dagger in the Heart will be released to camp...
If you know a Delver who perished in a memorable way, post a short obituary to honour them here! If we reach the Echo edition stretch goal, their obituary might even show up in print.
Note: Ideal these obituaries should be short, punchy, and tragic. (Aim for for a couple of sentences and ~10-20 words at most).
Some example obituaries:
Fingers-Grace-The-Blade, decapitated by the angel he tried to worship.
Lynd Vassail, finally shed her skin and became one with the Heart.
Dafwyn Pek, crushed by the Vermissian to save their beloved Mayid.
Now that we've hit our £40,000 stretch goal, we will be adding a 24 page booklet to the Heart GM screen! We are very excited to cram this booklet to bursting with useful tables, references, and handouts that will let GMs take their Heart games to new heights (or depths?).
The idea being that you crazy GMs can cut out parts of the booklet and stick them all over your screen, to create your very own 'red-string-murder-board' GM screen custom made for your game.
With that in mind, what sorts of tables or references would you like to see in the GM booklet? Comment below and we might be able to add them in!
Here are some ideas provided by the RRD team and the Rowan Rook and Decard Discord to get your creative juices flowing.
Tables: - Trinkets, rubbish, and pocket-lint. - Random NPCs and Delvers. - Havens and what makes them unique. - Environmental descriptions by Tier. - Strange sights.
References: - Skills, Domains, and their associated uses. - Equipment tags. - Fallouts. - A flowchart of how Delves work. - An index of the rulebook. - A simple rules summary. - Class Beat Sheets.
Handouts: - A ratty return ticket for the Vermissian, never used. - Strange sketches of creatures, landmarks, and other disquieting sights.
It's now the merry month of December, which means we move over from the Production team sending out emails to your regularly scheduled updates coming from the Fulfilment team. Everything is in place and on schedule to lock addresses in mid-Jan. Here's what goes into making that happen:
Final Production Parts:
Heart GM screens sailed through final set-up and checks at the printers, and the presses started rolling on Thursday morning last week.
Progress is steady, and printing is now the final element we are waiting for.
Following the current plan we should have those delivered from the printers just before the end of the year.
Once those are in the UK warehouse we’ll finalise sending them across to the US and 'press go' on the Australian air freight delivery.
We’re planning for this to happen at the very start of January, and then we’re fully in to Shipping Season.
Shipping Plans:
Current plans have us closing BackerKit preorders & locking your addresses in mid-January, followed by a short window where we crunch & clean that data, before we send it to our fulfilment partners.
We've already begun briefing the fulfilment teams at all warehouses in preparation for the orders to go out.
UK/EU/ROW
We’re working to the timetable that the first UK & EU backers packages will go out at the end of January/beginning of February, starting with the smallest orders and working up to the largest packages over the following weeks.
We will fulfil customer backers first, followed by pre-orders & retail backer orders concurrently.
If you're a retail backer, expect to see your copies arriving around the end of Feb/start of March. This gives you almost a month before other stores can begin stocking and selling the new products.
Americas
Things are coming together nicely. As I type this, our first major freight shipment to the USA is starting its passage. We're expecting the shipment to touch down at our US fulfilment centre just before the festive period begins..
We're hoping we might have dedicated Canadian fulfilment up and running in time for us to deliver Dagger in the Heart orders through our new partners. If not, then the fantastic team at Studio2 Publishing will be covering all of our Americas fulfilment from their base in the USA.
For USA/Americas backers, we’ll begin the fulfilment process in early February, with a staggered schedule, moving from simple to more complex orders over the weeks.
We will fulfil customer backers first, followed by pre-orders & retail backer orders concurrently.
If you're a retail backer expect to see your copies arriving around the end of Feb/start of March. This gives you almost a month before other stores can begin stocking and selling the new products.
Australia/NZ/Asia-Pacific
We've begun working out our pallets for freight shipment to our Australian fulfilment centre – they'll be handling everything Asia-Pacific-related through the AusPost system. These will go onto an airplane in early January and will be at the fulfilment centre by the end of that month.
This will be the last group to stagger start, kicking off around mid-February.
As above, we will start with the smallest orders and work up to the largest packages over the following weeks.
We will fulfil customer backers first, followed by pre-orders.
Exciting
All the UK team at RRD have now had a chance to put hands on a copy of these new books. They are looking absolutely GORGEOUS, and we're excited to be so close to sending them out to their new homes.
You can expect another update from us once the GM screens have arrived in the UK, otherwise it will be in mid-January, just as we're about to lock addresses and charge for shipping.
Quick update for you today. As we ramp up to fulfilment in the new year, we’re going to lock and charge outstanding orders & preorders over the coming weeks. This largely affects pre-order folks and any stragglers from the campaign itself who haven’t paid yet. So, if you have outstanding payments to make, best check your card details are up to date.
The first round of charges will take place on Monday the 18th, after which we’ll be hitting the ‘give us your money’ button every couple of weeks until the books ship. Again, this will only affect folk who haven’t paid yet, so no need to worry if you’re squared up.
As part of this push to get books in hands, you’re also going to start seeing some updates from our fulfilment team. They’re best qualified to talk about the finer details of where books are in the world and when you can get your grubby mitts on them. (I, in comparison, am happy to lurk beneath my shroud of blissful ignorance when it comes to global logistics. I’m here to make books, not negotiate with curmudgeonly import officers over head-scratching tariffs and obscure import laws. So be nice to them!)
Til Death Do Us Heart, the official actual play for Heart,is now streaming! Come join the gang as they go on an ill-fated journey to stop a wedding down in the Heart’s depths, or die trying.
The show features Keiron Gillen as the maniacal Gamemaster, alongside Nathan Blades, Naomi Clarke, Grant Howitt, and Edward Spence as the chaotic delvers under his thrall.
The first three episodes of Til Death Do Us Heart are available now, featuring two episodes of the actual play itself and a bonus session zero for the real nerds. From here on out, we’ll be publishing a new episode of the show every week for 8 weeks, for a total of 11 episodes.
If you want to join others in discussing the show, be sure to check out our Discord where like-minded-weirdos can nerd out together, aggressively ship characters, speculate over how many drugs Castor can fit in his mouth, or whatever it is that fandoms do nowadays.
For those folk who are attending Dragonmeet, there’s also a super-secret live prequel episode taking part at Dragonmeet on December 30th at 4pm in the Podcast Zone (aka: the Pouilly Room). So make sure to swing by if you’re at the convention.
Books, Books, and More Books
The printers have been hard at work turning all our gorgeous illustrations and lurid words from a digital dream to a printed-on-dead-trees, reality. Behold! The printed books in all their glory!
The tear out character sheets from the new Heart quickstart are very satisfying.
As it stands, that’s all the books printed. Now we’re just working from the GM screen, which is currently finishing up in the layout stage before it can be prepared for printing.
Bookmarks!
That’s a lot of books, So you’re going to need some bookmarks for those. Thankfully the designs for the free antagonist bookmarks are now finished and off to print as well! Sneak peeks below:
Pretty pretty bookmarks with the big bads on the front, and all their nefarious schemes on the back
We also decided to splash out on some red foil treatment on these, so expect some proper luxury bookmarks to cram beneath the pages of your book. As a reminder, a pack of these will be included in every physical pledge.
Shipping On Strange Tides
That's a lotta books. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
Now onto the not-so-great-news. No two ways about it, we’ve had some timeline slippage. This is largely due to us needing to squeeze in a complete reprint of the entire Heart line amid the chaos of fulfilling Dagger. An unexpected surge in popularity selling out all our stock is a good problem to have as a company, but it’s still a problem that takes time to solve.
We’ve got the reprints sorted now (as evidenced by the deluge of paper pictured above) but it’s delayed us long enough that we’ve run head first into the pains of shipping pallets of books across oceans during the holiday season (and I hear some rumours about a US election or something? Which is making logistics companies all across the globe very nervous about putting stuff on boats in November).
All this is to say that it’s looking closer to January before we can get books across the right oceans to begin physical fulfilment proper. It’s not ideal, and it ain’t what we wanted to happen, but alas it’s where we’re at. Hopefully you’ll agree that the extra couple months is worth the wait.
That’s all for now. Make sure to check out Til Death Do Us Heart, and stay cool, delvers.
