Hello, everyone!

Thank you for your patience while we prepared everything to open the pledge manager. We’re happy to report that after a swift test with a small percentage of backers, we’ve just clicked the button to begin sharing access to all backers. These emails may take a few hours to arrive, so if you haven’t received yours, click here to start the process manually.

Were you thinking about upgrading your pledge? BackerKit has provided a helpful walkthrough on how to upgrade. Please check it out, and if you have any questions, leave a comment. 

Now that the pledge manager is open, we need to share some dates when we expect to take action on our side:

Pledge Upgrades & Late Pledges close: 7/21/25

Lock Orders: 7/21/25

Charge Cards: 7/21/25 - 8/4/25 

Shipping: TBD - Based on assembly

These dates are always subject to a bit of wiggle room depending on how we progress with assembly. We will keep you updated if there are any major changes. 

Our newest crowdfunding project from the Possum Creek team has been chugging right along. Last Train to Bremen has not only surpassed $50,000 in total funding but has also received an ENNIE nomination for the Best Game category. With more than two weeks left to back, there is still ample time to climb aboard and see what all the buzz is about. 

As always, if you have any questions, please leave a comment below or a message on our help site. 

– Darryll

Wow, thanks for the support, everyone! We’ve had a lovely influx of new guests over the last 24 hours, and hope to grow our gathering even more over the final day of our campaign. So what comes next for Dahlia’s?

First, we’re going to print! Due to the uncertainty around tariffs when this campaign launched, we pivoted to printing locally in Atlanta, GA. Once Dahlia’s comes off the presses, we will be hand-assembling the sets “in house” – literally in SJ’s dining room – before sending them off to Warehouse 23 for fulfillment. Our collation coalition has already been convened, but if you’re a maker or enthusiast in Atlanta, and are interested in getting involved for future local endeavors, drop me a line.

Next up on Dahlia’s social calendar: a (soon-to-be-announced) preview party in Atlanta and several game events at Gen Con! We’d love to make your acquaintance at either one. 

Best,

Irene

Backers,

Thank you so much for your support! Our campaign closed this afternoon, and we're delighted with the reception that these eight games have received. And if you missed your first opportunity, don’t fret – we  have opened late pledges!

As this campaign concludes, we are getting ready to go to print! We continue to share updates throughout the printing and assembly process.  Also, keep an eye out for an invitation to complete our pledge manager when it is ready, as well as any upcoming deadlines and other fulfillment information.

Thank you again for your support. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or visit our help page. 

- The Team at Steve Jackson Games

Hello, future party attendees!

We’re very excited about our progress so far;  thank you so much for supporting Dahlia’s Diversions and the eight RPGs within! We have about two weeks remaining to back the campaign, and you can expect to see the party continue to grow as we get closer to the final days. Please help by sharing Dahlia’s Diversions within your social circles – it’s an affordable and approachable way for roleplayers of any familiarity level to jump into different roleplaying experiences without a big commitment.

As we mentioned in our first update, we sat down with our multiple designers for interviews in various formats. We invite you to read through our first interview below:

Ash Cheshire, the designer of Overdue, in conversation with Irene Zielinski (IZ), the editor of Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties.

ASH: I’ve been a roleplayer since high school – back in the ‘90s – and have always loved storytelling. While I was earning my master’s in counseling psychology to become a play therapist, I was taking a lot of refuge in roleplaying with my friends while also studying from a therapeutic angle how play is a healing, self-revelatory process, and started thinking, “what if I design some games to use with my clients?”

Eventually, I found that clinical work was not for me and moved to focus much more on game design, kind of stealing the fire from my master’s program and making what I’d learned about play accessible to more people.

ASH: For as long as I can remember, I have daydreamed about a mystical, magical, interdimensional library. I have taken refuge in libraries my whole life. Some of my earliest fond memories are of going to the library with my mom, where she set me and a friend up to watch VHS movies in the video kiosk. In high school, my friends and I would hang out there after school, often roleplaying in the stacks.

Overdue is a stand-alone game, but it came from a daydream of creating this larger, more intricate, ornate game about the library, with minigames . . . the first minigame would be your apprenticeship, creating characters for your first foray into the library. That’s how Overdue was born!

ASH: I am absolutely delighted! Most of my work is self-published, and I was excited to hand it over to people that I admire and trust and say, “Give this game of mine a glow-up, please!” The graphic design is incredible, working with you on the editing process was such a delight, and the detail that y’all went into on the application form! It’s both beautiful and magical and weirdly bureaucratic – I just. I kvell.

ASH: It was so perfect! And I clearly heard the open offer that, if anything didn’t feel right to me, that I’d be able to share it with you. It was a really good, strong collaborative match – I was never worried that anything that didn’t land quite right was going to go to print.

ASH: I do! I have a game coming out soon from Evil Hat Productions that I’ve been working on for many years now, called Abyssal. The full fancy title that it wears to important dinners and for SEO is Abyssal: A Monstrous Undertaking. It’s a Forged in the Dark historical fiction game about human characters that are slowly turning into something else. You are stuck in your “liminal form” – neither fully human nor fully abyssal – and both worlds are tugging on you.

The settings are places and times with a great deal of turmoil. You can play in 1793 Paris, the year that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded. You can play in 1888 London, the height of Victoriana and the year of Jack the Ripper. Or you can play in 1973 Las Vegas, which has Hunter S. Thompson and Elvis and a lot of fun and weird stuff happening.

ASH: For Abyssal updates in particular, Evil Hat is on the socials, and there will be more updates as our marketing engine spins up.

Personally, I don’t do a lot of social media; I spend most of my time being a weird little cryptid in the woods, making my strange art and vibing. But I put self-published games on my itch.io page, Ash Can Games. An ashcan is an industry term for a game in a rough draft, so it was heartening to realize that I could do a pun for my business name, acknowledging that these are often spontaneous pieces of art that pop into my head.

I also have a Patreon where I give my backers those games, if anybody has a couple of bucks a month that they’d like to toss to an earnest and independent game designer.