Hey gang,

Hope you're all doing great. We’ve got a few important updates to share with you on Wages of Sin, so let’s get right into it.

We’ve been deep in the weeds the last few weeks untangling the new U.S. import tariffs and how they’re going to affect our timeline and budget. Things are a little chaotic industry-wide, but we’re in a good spot. 

Right now, our plan is to eat the 10% blanket tariff for our U.S. shipments. That’s higher than ideal, but still manageable. If things change (and they might), we'll let you know as soon as we figure out our next move. A lot can change in a week as we've seen.

That said, the tariffs did cause some minor turbulence in our production and shipping timeline. Nothing major—but enough that we’re going to push fulfillment from Q2 to Q3. We know delays are never what anyone wants to hear, and we really appreciate your patience. To be clear: this isn’t a problem with the book itself. It’s basically a mix of logistics and scheduling.

Adam is this close to finishing up the layout, and we couldn’t be happier with how it’s coming together.

The new location pages have been a huge hit here.

These really bring the bounties to life. Just flipping through the PDF you get a sense of what the missions or jobs might be in a certain area and you can sort of quickly decide whether you'd want to run a session there or start a campaign there. The big utility is it doesn't feel like a d100 book of bounties it feels like a bunch of smaller campaigns and with these location/setting details it's a lot easier to figure out how you'd integrate it into your game.

A couple more of the bounty hunters. We're adding one more piece of content to these spreads which is a "Wounded/Tactics" table which will give you a quick table to show how the bounty hunter reacts when wounded, or what they're general approach is. We've had a lot of fun with this and plan to include it for our VIP horrors in future books (and maybe even in an updated hardcover Unconfirmed Contact Reports).

One thing about the ODC prison module, and this thing really is module sized, is that it's inspired by the classic Traveller adventure, Prison Planet. One thing they did really well was you got a roster of basically everyone in prison, what they knew, what rumors they had heard, and who they were affiliated with. This makes for such a great sandbox style campaign where you have everything you need to run these social encounters right at your fingertips.

Thanks so much, as always, for your support. We’ll be back soon with more details (and hopefully a print timeline update). If you have any questions, please reach out to Tyler at [email protected]. As always, stay safe out there. And we'll update again soon!

Hey gang,

Sorry for the delay in the updates! We've made a ton of progress on the book and things are looking beautiful, so I thought now would be a good time for a progress report.

Right now, Adam is working on finishing up the layout. Adam just started with us late last year as our Creative Director and he is doing just a phenomenal job on Wages. This book is massive. It's clocking in at just over 300 pages right now. And he's made it so easy to navigate, and so fun to read. Aside from just how much content there is, I feel like this book really will stay right next to the Warden's Operations Manual in most Warden's games. There really is just so much content there.

We've got d100 bounties as you all know. But we've broken them down into locations. A lot of areas have more than one bounty in them, which makes them perfect for a campaign setting. Here on the Bounties index, we've got them organized by location, average bounty level, and then we'll have a 2-3 word summary of each bounty as well so that you can quickly find something you're looking for on game night.

The meat of the book is the bounties themselves. Each one is a complete mission with everything you need to run them. Several are 2 pages, and a few are 4-8. They've got maps, tips, stat-lines, and at least one has one of the brand new ships we unlocked (a pirate ship!).

What's cool though is that every location is now getting a summary page. So you're not only getting 100 unique bounties, you're also getting almost fifty fleshed out locations to run your games from. Right now Luke is writing up all this new location data to fill these pages with useful info on the all the locales and factions and relevant NPCs you might find alongside the bounties.

This addition was a late in the game one that popped up during layout and we're so glad we've made it work. It really turns this book into something really special where you can build a campaign from just a handful of small bounties. I'm really excited about it.

After that we've also got 10 bounty hunters to hunt your players down (or be hired???). We've done these up like expanded Unconfirmed Contact Reports entries and we've really focused on using them as horrors rather than just run of the mill contractors. It's a bad time when they show up. Your players will be afraid of them.

The ODC prison complex is a sixty (60!!) page prison adventure at the back of Wages. We go for a different layout style here and it's turning out just beautiful. What's cool about this adventure is that it's sort of like a sandbox location. You've got the daily routines of the prisoners, what the work and living conditions are like, we give you a new weekly turn procedure, and then set your players loose.

There's new items and equipment from the prison's internal economy. There's 100 prisoners that each have access to different rumors the players can use to try and escape. There's four prison factions and 100 staff as well.

Outside of the prisoner is a dangerous world as well with alien animals and terrors ready to maim the players should the escape from the prison. The whole thing is just so much fun and it's the perfect thing to throw at your players after they've been stealing and wrecking Company property for a few sessions.

So the book now has over 300 NPCs, 40 new locations, 10 new aliens, 3 new ships, a prison complex, and tons of procedures for running crime and punishment on the rim.

Right now we still look like we're on track for Q2 but we'll let you know if anything changes when we get closer to printing.

Oh! We've also done a new round of edits on the supply pod cards and they're looking great as well. These cards contain all the info you need to run these NPCs with a full piece of art on the front and all the stats on the back. We've formatted the stats in two ways in case you want to run them as PCs, which means players can just draw a card from the deck and start running them. Also, we've added an Input Code for the Mothership Companion App, so if your players want they can import the character directly into their app and start using them in the Companion's VTT or just keep the character with them wherever they go. We're super happy with these and we think we're going to keep doing them every year.

That's all for now! We're finishing up layout and then we'll be sending the draft to all of you so we can get your final feedback before our proofreaders dig in. If you run into any issues please give Tyler a shout at [email protected]

Thank you!!