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Hey everybody!

I've been cracking away at finishing the text, art, and layouts of Doors of Dimensia. It will still be a few weeks before I have a proper beta PDF. In the meantime, the side stuff is going into production. I'll probably redesign the stickers for the bundle as the one on the crowdfunding page was kinda slapped together on the fly as was the patch mockup. Speaking of, here's a proper draft of the patch design I finished today.

The final will look pretty close to this! Old school punk style screen printing white paint on black canvas. Crisp.

See you in the next update!

Extremely grateful for the success of this campaign! I'm off to grind in the TTRPGs mines for a couple months illustrating and writing up the rest of the text. There are about 6 blank pages left to finish, and a lot of layout shenanigans will ensue.

In the meantime, here's a beta PDF of the current build. Everything in this version is subject to change (though most of it won't). Feel free to slap it on your table for play!

Doors of Dimensia was on the @weirdplace.bsky.social ZiMo stream yesterday! I got in the chat and had to tell Gabriel what a Depth Crawl was. Absolute legends. A massive pleasure to be a part of it! If y'all aren't familiar, please go check out their dope channel and their current kickstarter Residue.

Only $65 left for stretch goal #2!

www.youtube.com/live/sDalXw_...

I really appreciate everyone's support to get this project made! A good few of my personal friends have swooped in here in the last 48 hours to get Stretch Goal #1 completed. This means I'll make full stat block conversions for Knave 2E, Fabula Ultima, Troika!, and Cloud Empress. These will go in the digital package that comes with every purchase of Doors of Dimensia.

Now, on to the fun stuff! Over the course of this campaign, I became acutely aware of how few people actually knew what a Depth Crawl was (shoutout to the Weird Place ZiMo stream lol). I had this idea a few days ago after reading the extensive Example of Play section in Mythic Bastionland- a comic that quite literally illustrates the example of play for the Depth Crawl. This would show both above the table procedure for generating the Depth Crawl as well as the beautiful nonsense that befalls the player characters in the fiction. I doodled this little sketch on my lunch break at work today. If you think this is a cool idea and haven't pledged yet, here's your sign to do so!

The new and final goal is $1350. Can we do it? 47 hours to raise about $125. I'll be back at the end to give a general state of affairs. Ciao~

I put out a poll last week to see which systems my followers were interested in statblock conversions. The results were very surprising to me! The most voted for system is Cloud Empress. I have to say: damn, my followers have good taste! Everything else on the list got one vote (except for 5E lol). I really put that on there as a way to catch the normies at smaller conventions and fests but I am genuinely kind of shocked it got zero votes.

This really got me thinking about the hunger for supplements of newer cutting edge TTRPGs. What's the real demand for creators like me to make supplements specifically for games like Cloud Empress? With the market so sickeningly saturated with the slop slathered on the top crust of the big fish in this little pond, it is difficult to tell. There's a good deal of digital ink spilled trying to convey just how freakin' hard it is to get inside the mind of the gamer as they are and not how the see themselves or how they tell you they see themselves. I've seen a lot of data and pontification from game designers (admittedly mostly in the vidya industry) about how what a gamer tells you they want and what they'll actually *buy* has an insane disparity.

At the end of the day, an artist should only make stuff they're genuinely excited about, and I'm lucky that the game voted for was something as good as Cloud Empress. I don't know if people were able to intuit that it was the best choice for Doors of Dimensia, but in hindsight, I can see that it's true. The Depth Crawl in DoD matches really well with Cloud Empress' core assumption of being a road trip adventure and its stance on violence. Its dangerous and scary, but in a way that feels unique against most OSR-adjacent games and retroclones. Being build on Mothership, the game naturally focuses a lot more on the mental state of its heroes. All the strange effects to the Mind, Body, and Spirit in DoD (referred to as Dimenisas) pair like a charcuterie board of delicious pain and tragedy.

CE is one of those games that I would not expect a large swathe of the gamer base to jump for first simply because of how sicko it is. Part of me suspects it has star power because it is a Mothership hack, but it'd be really nice to believe that there are people out there actually clamoring to play it in new and weird settings. Because Doors of Dimensia is such an out-there concept as an adventure toolbox, my intent was to make it sYsTEm AgNOsTiC with easily hackable rules for other systems. Looking back on the development cycle, I can see why (though I definitely don't agree) there are dudes out there that will review bomb your release simply for it being so. It promotes kinda half hearted design decisions where you could make impactful ones that interact with the intended system the adventure is for. I tried to account for this by making subsystems that can sit on top of the mechanics for a few popular TTRPGs out there, but only the folks getting the book can decide if that was successful or not.

If you made it this far down my post, ayyy thanks for reading! If we pass this stretch goal, I have kind of a wild idea for a second stretch goal inspired by reading Mythic Bastionland's examples of play section.