As I’ve polished up my non-indexed draft of Advanced Rules for distribution to y’all, I’ve scratched my head as to how I would like to distribute this copy to backers. I’ve been sharing pre-release work via Google Drive and a backer-only portion of a post, but since this is the final product, I would like to lock it to being a backer a little more. Non-backers will be able to access the content of the book via the live site, so this version is reserved for folks who have purchased Advanced Rules.

To get this draft distributed to you, I am going to distribute the files via BackerKit, so I am now going to start the process of sending out the BackerKit survey for Advanced Rules, and you will receive your digital copy of this non-indexed version of Advanced Rules as soon as you complete your survey.

We are using the BackerKit feature, auto-lock and charge, so when you complete your survey, you will immediately pay for shipping or any add-ons, and it will lock your order. You get to choose when your card is charged rather than waiting for us to charge you. We know from experience that it can lead to financial anxiety when your card is charged at a bad time. We’ll just remind you to take your survey rather than having to remind you to take your survey and lock your order, and we don’t have to track down failed charges.

Unfortunately, since we first made our shipping estimate in January, our shipping prices have increased, and the book has gotten longer and literally heavier to ship. Our U.S. domestic rates have gotten a little higher, but we are able to offer better rates worldwide, and we are able to offer delivery duty paid shipping to backers everywhere

We’re now offering digital add-ons for the first time, so if you don’t want to add any physical add-ons, you can get digital editions, and backers for digital pledge levels can also purcahse add-ons with their order.

Pledge Level Shipping Rates

Shipping will be organized by RV Games via ShipBob for worldwide shipping. Rates on BackerKit will all be charged via USD and converted by your bank, but we have provided local currency conversions as a courtesy.

Add-Ons

Zines and pamphlets ordered as add-ons include free shipping. Heavier items include a $5 USD shipping charge on top of the pledge level shipping.

Retailers will be able to add items from a wholesale shop. Retailers are charged $13 USD + $1 USD/Item ordered for shipping.

We are awaiting final BackerKit approval for our survey, and we foresee that happening within the next few days.

We’ll upload our non-indexed draft of Advanced Rules into BackerKit, so it will be ready for distribution once surveys are distributed. We’ll send out our smoke test survey to 10% of backers once we are approved, and then we will send out surveys to everyone a few days after that.

Roz is working on the index, and we will be moving into physical production near the end of the month, so we can get books produced and fulfilled during October.

Once physical fulfillment has completed, we will then send out final copies to backers via DriveThruRPG and Itch.io before opening up sales publicly and to retailers. Since all orders will already be locked and charged, we will be able to quickly push out orders to the warehouse as soon as the books are available for your region.

We will keep Late Pledges open for the project until we complete fulfillment, so it's not too late to get a copy if you missed out during the campaign.

I’m really excited to share this work with you, and I appreciate you standing by as we start the fulfillment process. There are a lot of steps and a lot of gremlins that can get in the way between now and then, but things are looking good at the moment.

I can't believe we're already here at the end of August. It has been a hellacious summer for me. This is where I slip into my personal essay mode (which you may have seen in my newsletter, The Adventure Gaming Periodical).

My mother suffered a debilitating fall at the end of June. She suffered from a rapid decline of mental capacity after that. She's been getting surgeries and scans, and I've seen my father so beautifully rise to the occasion, but it leaves me taking care of him, I can't let him be Super Man. So, I've become the bookkeeper for the their family business. There are a lot of frustrations and emotions associated with this entire situation, eldest daughtering it to the max (my brother lives across the country). Combine all of this with the off kilter schedule that is working from home while children are out of school, frustrations and delays with other projects, and it's been enough to set off my ongoing mental health struggle with Bipolar 2 disorder.

I've exited out of what is called a mixed episode, where you experience portions of depression and hypomania simultaneously. What is this like? It's having impulsive, obsessive, recurring, rushing thoughts, and then having the inability to do with anything with them since they are coupled with lethargy and executive dysfunction from depression. It's being locked into a spiral state. It's forgetting to eat and take your medication. However, working from home, I could keep up with things on my uneven pace, I could make it to meetings, I've kept up with the projects, I've been going to therapy, I know how to cope, I do have the skills.

This project is the one that I couldn't come back to in the midst of everything. I was making incredible progress on the painstaking work of typesetting this book all the way into June. However, it's work that takes a lot of sustained focus, which was drained by everything that piled on this summer (alongside a full time day job). The good news is that school has started again, we're on a regular fall schedule, the frustrations are on their tail end and almost complete, and my focus has returned to finishing this book.

I apologize for the delays on this book, and I apologize to anyone I was snarky with in the comments.

While I finish the typesetting, this is a reminder that online version of the book is available. In a prior update, you were also given access to our stretch goal, the solo and Wardenless adventure, Return to STAR Station, if you were a backer.

Here is our updated timeline.

I have a release date to announce for the early copy of the print edition book as a PDF, Sunday, September 7. This will include all of the content of the book that has already been edited but it will not contain the index. Backers will be sent an update with access to this when it goes live. We also hope to have a draft version of the Advanced Rules Character Sheet and maybe a couple of the other stretch goals that will launch along side this draft. We will have a form, so you can report anything that may have missed our eyes, and you can ask for clarification about anything.

Developing the index and proofing the final draft are the final steps we have with Roz and should go smoothly once I am done with typesetting.

Thankfully, this is just wire bound book without a lot of moving parts, so production and fulfillment will go pretty quickly. We will send surveys and charge for shipping once the final draft is sent to the printers, and we will close to Late Pledges right before we start shipping.

Much love,
Violet

I’m here with a brief update on Advanced Rules. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of family issues for me, so work on typesetting has slowed. I should be finished typesetting the book next week, and Roz will be indexing the book at the end of August. It looks like we’re on track for fulfilling in during the month of September.

Within the next few weeks, we should be able to share the player and warden aid stretch goals with everyone, D.N. Wilkie has just about completed them.

-violet

Good morning!

I'm here with a brief update for the month of June. Typesetting has been moving along great! I'm almost done with three out of five chapters of the book!

Yesterday, my partner asked me why I was talking about this book going through typesetting instead of calling it layout like with the rest of RV Games work. There is a reason for this: Advanced Rules is a text-only book (with the exception of two b&w example images), so it is being built in the tool ConTeXt. ConTeXt is a typesetting tool that uses tags to layout text for you: it handles formatting and numbering section headers, building the table of contents, building the index, hyphenation, page layout, etc. Instead of laying out the text in design software, it is being compiled by a typesetting tool. Using the command-line tool pandoc, I am able to automate conversion of the markdown that I've been writing and posting to the web version of Advanced Rules into ConTeXt. However, like all automation, it is not perfect, and I have to manually tweak parts of it in addition to developing the style guide and framework for the book. I'll post a much more extensive dive into this workflow in The Adventure Gaming Periodical once the book is fully complete. All of the markdown and ConTeXt code for Advanced Rules is also available on Github, in case people want to adopt a workflow like this for themselves.

With that said about typesetting, I'm going to share a couple screenshots from the already laid out pages to give a better example of how the book is shaping up.

In this spread, you see an example of what the start of each chapter looks like. Every chapter starts on right-hand page and features a table-of-contents for the chapter (in addition to the table of contents for the entire book). Placing chapter intros on the right side of the page can lead to blank pages, so instead of leaving them blank, I am including a notes page wherever there is extra space. This is a reference book being printed on uncoated paper, specifically to be marked up, highlighted, dog eared, and generally used at the table, so having space for notes just makes sense.

This spread shows more of the features of Advanced Rules. You can see that all sections and subsections are numbered for easy reference. All of chapters, sections, and subsections are also automatically included as PDF bookmarks (the PDFs are automatically tagged and made accessible as well). There are also cross-references to other parts of the text with page number references, and these cross-references also work as in-text hyperlinks within the PDF version. You can also see that there are additional design notes and references included as footnotes. These give some extra context and designer insights without clogging up the rules text, thank you to Roz for working out the balance of commentary and content with me!

This spread shows an in book tool. You can lay the book flat on the table (Advanced Rules is wire bound for this reason), and then use the zone map to assist you with tracking distances during encounters.

Finally, this is an example of all of the pieces above put together, there are notes to fill out a mostly blank page, an example of a table, number sections and subsections, and a footnote. The reference manual aesthetic is strong with this book, and I'm really thankful for making the conscious decision that this would be a took that uses a partially automated typesetting approach. It gives the vibes of an old GDW book like Striker or Traveller, but it has a lot of modern usability built-in despite its intentionally archaic style and format.

By next month, we hope to be moving into physical production, but at minimum, we will have a PDF for you to peruse and look for errors, building the index for the book with Roz might take some extra time, but we are still generally on schedule.

Happy Summer!

-violet