I always forget how much time and effort goes into constructing a Kickstarter campaign. I suppose I could have asked ChatGPT to write the damn thing for me — I swear, there have been some Kickstarters lately that certainly read like they were written by generative AI. They’re just horrible and whoever was behind them is by definition both stupid and evil. But as I sit here right now, I feel like they at least saved themselves a lot of time compared to what I’ve been doing the last few days. At any rate, the campaign for The Hobgoblin’s Fortress and Path to the Hobgoblin’s Fortress is now in Kickstarter’s hands and I can’t launch until they approve it.
The manuscript of The Hobgoblin’s Fortress is now finished and I have sent it off to our loyal and long-suffering art department for layout. I predicted that it would top out at no more than 11,000 words and I worried that it would seem a bit thin compared to the other Places by the Way as a result. In fact, it is 11,250 words — and not only that, but when I referred to my manuscript of Places by the Way #12: Into the Royal Tombs to remind myself how to do the formatting, I realized that it topped out at 11,070 words. So I really was on track all the time and there is no point in feeling embarrassed by the word count.
As we wait for Kickstarter to screen my campaign for rules violations (and it will probably take them the rest of the week for the equivalent of flipping the pages of a flip book, I’ll direct you to EN World and Rob Wieland’s review of the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook. Unlike Rob, I did not receive a preview copy, so I can only go by what he and other reviewers have said about it. I’ll be honest, I’ve been dreading the 2024 revision because I’m not sure what effect it will have on Ramen Sandwich Press. How many rules will I have to unlearn and relearn in order to write material that stays current? Will the changes to the core rules invalidate my existing work? For God’s sake, don’t bug me with all of this. I’ve settled into a comfortable ass-groove in the couch, I don’t want to shift my position.
Rob begins, “Make no mistake. This is a new edition.” But he also states that this is more like the transition between 3rd Edition and 3.5 than a proper transition between whole-number editions — incremental but not revolutionary. Furthermore, almost all of the changes that he describes apply to character creation and not to the core mechanics of how you actually play the game. Since Ramen Sandwich Press focuses on DM tools, I don’t see anything that will have a drastic effect on what I do, at least not for now. So I’ll just keep writing to the 5E rules until it no longer makes sense to do so.
I will say, though, that “Dungeons & Dragons 2024” is just a terrible name. I’m not even going to admit any discussion in this regard. Would it have been so terribly wrong to call it 5.5, just as the revision to 3E was 3.5? Besides, it’s going to sound obsolete within four months of its publication. I wasn’t crazy about “One D&D,” either. Now there’s a product name that tells you nothing about anything. I guess we’ll see how well the Faithful take to it in about a month, when it actually hits the shelves.
At about that time the campaign for The Hobgoblin’s Fortress should be winding up. Stay tuned, I’ll post again when it launches.