Wow! We've cracked an incredible funding milestone today and the project has gone above £100,000 pledged! I am supposed to be a professional writer of words but I am running out of ways to express how unexpected this was! Thank you so much to everyone who has pledged, spread the word, commented!

As a special extra for breaking this funding milestone, all backers are now eligible to receive a PDF adventure zine titled Awful Bliss. This adventure module will take PCs into the chaos of the Great Gloating, a Cacklemaw-only music festival in the depths of the blue desert. I've had the idea for this one for a while and I'm really glad to get to make it a reality.

Awful Bliss will be worked on after the core rulebook is complete, and I'll let you all know once it's in production. 

Hello seekers, what a week it has been! Since I signed out to take some much needed time away from the screen, we have raised another £30,000! This is so far beyond my expectation that I just don't know what to say. Thank you everyone!

I've given a lot of thought to how to expand the scope of the campaign without slowing down production, and I think an extra digital reward is probably the way to do it. It keeps postage costs the same and can be easily distributed to everyone via Backerkit once it's complete.

So: once the campaign reaches £100,000 raised (how insane it feels that this is a possibility), all backer tiers will receive an additional PDF reward: Awful Bliss. This will be a zine-sized adventure module that focuses on Vaarn's horrible hyena-women, the Cacklemaw. I have a special place in my heart for them and I think they can easily carry an adventure. Expect ritual puppets, 'fun' and 'games', repulsive food and drink, and dreadful live bands at the Great Gloating, the annual weekend gathering of all the Cacklemaw Clans. The Great Gloating will be part music festival and part espionage survival-horror as the PCs infiltrate the gathering to rescue a kidnapped Hegemony Consul and become embroiled in the plots of She Who Laughs Last, a legendary Cacklemaw assassin. 

The Shrike, my enormous infernal OSE adventure module, won the gold ENNIE award for Best Longform Adventure on Friday night! I am officially now an award-winning writer for the rest of my days which is fun. I'm not currently able to offer this adventure as an add-on because I don't publish it myself, which makes fulfilment a bit tricky.

That's all for now! I'll be updating at least weekly for the remainder of the campaign, and should be around to reply to questions on weekdays excluding Wednesdays. 

Thank you everyone for believing in this weird little world, I am so grateful. I definitely was not expecting to fund the project within twenty minutes. It is quite difficult to put into words how much this means to me! 

Thank you especially to everyone in the Vaults of Vaarn community and who has supported earlier iterations of this game for the past five years. I wouldn't be able to do this without you. 

It's great to feel confident that I have already hit the target necessary to produce the books, it takes a massive weight off my shoulders and I can start working on the project asap with renewed energy. 

My goal with this campaign has always to provide a lean, focused offering and ensure that everyone gets what they paid for as smoothly as possible. To that end, I've been really hesitant to offer stretch goals as I don't want to take my eye off the prize with the core book. However, the support is looking so strong that it may be viable to offer everyone something extra so watch this space!

 

Hello everyone, thank you again for the enormous outpouring of support over the past 24 hours. It's been a sunny day here and I've spent it outdoors with my son, so I haven't been able to attend to your comments and questions yet. I hope you understand the need to take a few days away from the computer following the preparations for the campaign. I'll be back 'in the office' next Monday and will be in full customer service mode then.

Let me say once again, thank you for the support. I didn't think we could clear £60,000 raised in a month let alone a day! It's lovely to see such enthusiasm for the project from old fans and new faces as well. I am still considering how to reflect this unexpected level of support without weighing down production.

I'll sign off just by saying that the early bird reward, Fragments of a Blue Ruin, is still available until 21:00 BST tomorrow evening. There's been a few questions about what this is exactly, and it's essentially a collection of prose fragments and flash fiction set in the world of Vaarn. Some have appeared on my blog before, and others will be brand new. You can see the cover down below:

I hope everyone's having a good day. More updates soon! If you have a question or comment pending, rest assured I will get to you as soon as I can.