If you’re the sort of clued-in, right-thinking individual who doesn’t need to read a few hundred words of marketing bumph to be convinced to click on a link, here’s the short version: we’ve got a new Heart: the City Beneath sourcebook coming out later this year. It’ll be great. We’re crowdfunding the whole thing through Backerkit starting on 1st July.

Click here and follow the project to be notified as soon as it goes live.

Ways and Means is more stuff for Heart. Here’s the excellent image that Elaine made, loosely illustrating the contents:

One half of the book - the “Means” half - is player-facing. Here, we’ve got three new classes (the walking druidic fungal colony BLIGHTBORN, the wide-eyed bardic WITNESS, and the 'biblically accurate' dungeoneer CRAWLER), and three new callings (Protector, Artist and Demagogue).

We’ve got rules for Hirelings - spods you can bring along with you to help out on Delves, like the legbreaker, the pole-carrier, the mumbler, the cook, and so on. We’ve got rules for pets, like the watch-hog, the decidedly ignoble heartsblood horse, and the so-called Useless Worm.

We’ve got more guns to shoot things with, more drugs to bung up your nose in search of enlightenment or oblivion, several thousand words on artistic supplies including a paint that’s the metaphysical opposite of blue, black market spells to buy from a shady wizard, real AND fake religious artefacts, and so on, and so forth.

The other half of the book - the “Ways” half - is devoted to Delves, and aimed at the Gamesmaster. We’ve broken down the Heart into domains and come up with hundreds of modular bits to shuffle together and construct into thematic, interesting and dangerous journeys between islands of stability in this red wet heaven. We’re also providing you with dozens of Bounties - one-page jobs that you can plug into any ongoing game to act as a reason for player characters to chuck themselves headlong into disaster.

Illustrated in glorious fashion by Sar Cousins and Felix Miall, and written in gory detail by an all-star team featuring Grant Howitt (that’s me!), Chris Taylor, Elaine Lithgow, Eleanor Hingley, Thomas Manuel, Taylor Navarro, Pam Punzalan, and Finley Palaniki, Ways and Means is jam-packed with stuff.

I always liked sourcebooks with lots of stuff in, and now I’ve had the chance to write one.

No problem boss, you got it - follow us on Backerkit here to be as ready as you possibly can for this.

That’s all.

- Grant “Red Wet Heaven” Howitt

Hey all, a handful of updates today so let’s get to it!

This post is dedicated to the lovely Delvers living on the other side of the world in a country that, by my reckoning, seems to operate with some kind of country wide ‘Hard Mode’ toggled on. You’ve all been patient as a waiting room saint, so we wanted to update you on where your books are. 

Currently Dagger is shuffling between boats around Malaysia and preparing to make the final leg to Sydney, where our fulfillment partners are waiting with open arms and abundant packing material to lovingly package your individual orders before slinging them overarm into your postboxes. 

As the wait is almost over, we’re aiming to lock your addresses by the end of May, so make sure your address is up to date! 

We recently heard from our US warehouse that Dagger has sold out in the states. This happened a mite faster than we anticipated (turns out folk like Dagger, whodathunkit?) So we’re in the process of printing a second run with our European printers. Alas our usual printers are a fair bit busier than normal, so it’ll be a wee while before you see Dagger on US shelves again. (It’s almost like a bunch of TTRPG companies have moved their printing from China to the EU for some reason. Can’t put my finger on why.) Still, we’re aiming to get the books printed and fired across the Atlantic as soon as possible for those who missed out on picking up Dagger during the campaign.

The RRD team is attending the UK Games Expo again this year! So from the 30th of May to the 1st of June, you can find us booth 3-924 in hall 3. 

This will be the first con since the Quinnpocalypse where we’ll have the full gamut of Heart books and accessories on sale, but just like the US, copies of Dagger are flying off the shelves, so stock might not last. 

So swing by the stall if you want to grab any Heart goodies you’re missing, want anything signed, or just want a chinwag with some of our very-cool-but-sleep-deprived staff.

Until next time,

- Elaine and the RRD Team

TL;DR: Canada, your packages are incoming imminently! Australia, New Zealand are delayed (details below)

Everyone else: your books are moving towards you, many have arrived!

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Fulfilment flies along and we’re on to Phase 3. Details below are laid out by area.

A quick note for all of our Backers who backed at the Original Art level. We are sending your original artworks directly from the UK. This way we can ensure the item is well wrapped and fully insured throughout its journey to you. The rest of your order will be fulfilled separately.

All UK & EU customers should have now received your packages. If you haven’t, please get in contact with our Customer Service team using the link below.

Final US orders from the first wave should be being picked & packed this week. We believe there’s about 100 orders left in the warehouse to go out before Friday. South & Central American orders should have left the warehouse by then as well. 

Canadian orders will begin shipping from Monday next week - keep an eye out for your emails and tracking information coming through.

It will take about a week to send out all those Canadian orders. You’ll get a tracking code and we will also update your order in Backerkit so you know when it’s shipped. We’ll also update you again when fulfilment is done.

The short version is: your books are moving slower than we originally planned, and they’ll likely be with you late April or early May.

The long version: we’ve had a complicated series of issues with our freight plans, and unfortunately there’s been no sensible way to get your books over to you that wouldn’t add an untenably large number to our shipping costs. Part of the problem is that there are more of you than we expected, so air freight is no longer a reasonable option.

That means your books are now going by boat, which prolongs our fulfillment window. We wanted to be able to say confidently that the books were en route before explaining what was happening. The new timeline sees the books arriving in Australia towards the end of April, with fulfillment beginning as soon as they have reached the warehouse.

When we get confirmation that the books have passed through Australian customs we will lock addresses for Backers in Australia, New Zealand and all AusPost Zone 2 countries.

An email will be sent out to all backers before then as well.

We’re now expecting those books will reach you in early May.

We’re really sorry for the delays that have occurred here. We’ve been working on this specific area since November last year, trying to find a creative and sustainable solution to the challenge. Unfortunately, the time spent trying to find solutions has also ended up costing further time on the shipping method. We’ve learned a lot, and we’re already changing up our approach for Hollows and Royal Blood - but we know that’s not much of a comfort to you right now..

We hope that one benefit to this delay will be a greater availability of RRD products for backers in the Australian market - your books are coming along with a batch of extras for your friendly local game stores - which will mean more players excited to join your tables to play the games you’ve backed.

Now that we’re in the final stretch, we’re going to be closing the Backerkit preorder store, and directing people on to our website. If you’ve yet to fill in your survey, please do so now - we’ll close the Backerkit completely once all our APAC backers have their books.

Thanks enormously for all your support, folks - we couldn’t do this without you. We’d love to see more pictures of your parcels as they start to arrive - you can tag us on Instagram, BlueSky or Facebook, or pop links in the comments here. If you’ve had your books for a while now why not join the Discord and let us know about your table experiences? 

As ever, there’s always a risk things will get dinged, damaged or lost in transit. If that happens to you, we want to put it right, so get in touch by emailing [email protected] if anything goes wrong with your parcel. 

xoxo

– Alex, and everyone at RR&D