A Megadungeon For Old School Tabletop RPGs, D&D & OSR
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Backerkit Smoke Test, International Shipping Update, and ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY combined shipping
3 days ago
– Wed, Nov 13, 2024 at 11:08:55 PM
Hey folks! It's been a minute as I ran table at local convention and have been dealing with some other issues. Our editor should be starting on the manuscript Soon™ so I'm excited to be moving forward.
In the mean time: The Smoke Test for Backerkit has gone out. That means about 10% of you will have gotten an email to fill out your surveys. This is important as it lets us see anywhere that there are issues before we hit the button on the whole thing.
In addition: International shipping rates have lowered from our expectations. I'm trying out a new system via PirateShip (where I buy my postage) called Simple Export. Basically, when I print a label and ship it, it goes to a PirateShip fulfillment warehouse where they will put a new label on it and send it where it needs to go. Doing it this way saves us money, which in turn saves you money. Related to this, US backers may find that their shipping costs are a little more than expected. This is both because I am anticipating two raises of prices (both for the holiday season and in January) via USPS, as well as to help offset the pricing of our international backers a little bit. We're all helping each other here.
Finally: For those of you who backed the ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY for SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY... you'll find that in the Castle Gygar Backerkit you've been given a shipping credit. This is because you will receive both projects in one package, saving shipping costs for both of us. This has to be done manually meaning I had to go through both Backerkits and find duplicate backers, then manually apply a credit to each. If you have pledged to both and haven't received your credit, please do not hesitate to contact us, and we'll hook you up.
That's all for now. We hope to have some updates with finalized level layouts soon!
Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Make Art, Not Content.
And stay gold, --Onslaught
Reminder: Please fix your payment options!
23 days ago
– Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 05:05:59 PM
This is just a polite reminder for the 9 of you who have not yet done so to please update or fix your payment method by 5pm EST on Friday (tomorrow). If you don't, it'll drop your pledge and then you'll have to wait until the Backerkit to grab the book.
If your payment has gone through successfully, you don't need to do anything.
Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Death to the Algorithm.
And stay gold,
--Onslaught
Delve complete, but the journey is just beginning...
29 days ago
– Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 11:43:03 PM
You got 2000xp and leveled up! Wow! But the real journey begins now.
436 people pledged to this project bringing in an incredible $5,794. This is more backers and money than several of our previous projects put together. It's incredible to see the outpouring of people who want to see what we're doing--and truth be told, a little anxiety inducing. I haven't felt this since our first Kickstarter in 2021 for SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY...; an overwhelming feeling of "How much money is going to be put in a bank account with my name on it? Oh no. I shouldn't be trusted with that amount of money. That's a bad idea." Thankfully, a lot of that is going right out the door as soon as it gets to me. :)
So here's a timeline of how things are going to progress:
In about two weeks, all stragglers will have been collected and Kickstarter will collate the pledge money and transfer that to us. Until then, I am effectively on vacation from any work involving this project or most other TTRPG work. I do this after every Kickstarter, basically mandating a rest period for myself so I don't get burned out.
After that, I'm immediately going to pay my collaborators, Chao and Roz. I've already paid Chao a fair amount we previously agreed upon, but that's less than the standard that I have paid for cover art for previous project, so I intend to make that up now that we've got a real budget. Don't tell Chao--it's a surprise :) Then I'm going to pay Roz for editing; she's going to get to it in November. While this is happening, I'll mostly be working on the ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY for CUSC (we're coordinating a lot of art for that project and then I have to place finished pieces in the project file) as well as setting up the Backerkit for Castle Gygar, which I plan to launch in mid-November. (If you've pledged to both projects, stay tuned for a special message regarding combined shipping for both of these.)
Once this payment is sorted, I'm going to turn around and pay some other collaborators for some future projects in the works. This project has enabled me to make my friends draw sad robots and anime girls, so thanks for that ;)
Once completed dungeon levels start coming back from editing, I'll place them into the layout. The layout is templated and complete, so the only work from there will be adjusting wording to fit, bolding key words and rooms, and perhaps swapping a few rooms around for page layout reasons. I'll also be making some much-needed adjustments to the maps that have been hanging on the backburner for a minute; things like deleting a few rooms that got cut or fixing missing doors, etc. Ideally, we'll be able to do this in a phased format, where I'm laying out earlier dungeon levels as later levels get edited.
Once layout is complete, I'll send off for a test print from Mixam. Ideally this will happen the same time the test print for the Adventure Anthology is ready. I'm hoping for this to be done in early December. I'm allowing a lot of extra time for the holidays, and I know the printer and mail is going to be overloaded in this time.
This is also partially why, even if the project is complete around December, I'm still planning on locking the Backerkit around January 2025. I want to make sure that everyone has time to recover from the stressful and expensive holiday season to be able to afford shipping fees. (USPS is also expected to raise the rates either during the shipping season or immediately after it in January, so I'm hoping to get as accurate shipping as possible without having to modify shipping rates too much.) When we're in Backerkit phase, I'll communicate more then.
Ideally, by late January the books will either be on their way or already arrived. I'll pack each book in a polybag with a chipboard backing board to ensure rigidity during shipping and storage. Then I'll pack each order in a black bubble mailer, print the postage via PirateShip, and carry them all to my post office. (Well, it'll be fucking January, so I'll probably have my long-suffering wife drive me there instead.) I have had very few, if any, complaints or damaged orders since I started using this format to ship books, but if you have concerns, leave a note during your Backerkit process and we'll make sure you're taken care of.
Likewise, if you receive your order and have any problems with it (damaged packaging, lost item, wrong item, or otherwised damaged item) let me know and I'll hook you up with a replacement, no big deal.
I hope this informs everyone of our timeline. I'll make appropriate updates as they need to be made. If you've got any questions, comments, issues or concerns, feel free to comment here, contact us via any social media (all available at our website tidalwavegames.com) or email me at onslaughtsix at gmail. I'll be happy to respond.
Hope everything is going well in your end of the world. Remember: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Death to the Algorithm.
And stay gold, --Onslaught
$3000? Also, XP Distribution!
about 1 month ago
– Sat, Oct 12, 2024 at 04:10:46 AM
We have officially passed $3000 in pledges. Wow!! That's amazing and I can't believe it.
But we aren't finished yet! We've still got a good six days to go and I'm hoping for even more, so we can pay everyone a little more, and afford to jump-start a few future projects in the fire. (I'd love to just hand my artist friends a bunch of money and tell them to draw cool shit, no strings attached, for once. :D)
Enough about that, though. Today I wanna talk about XP Distribution! This is something that's actually a pretty common complaint in OSR adventure modules--I can't tell you how many times I've read, "There isn't enough treasure in here to level up!" So, one thing I wanted to avoid when I revamped the original draft for OSE was to make sure there was enough treasure to get to level 9. Level 9 is "name level," the level when all classes officially become "their class." (Up until level 9, a fighter isn't even a fighter, they're all sorts of other things.) They also strictly speaking can't start a stronghold or really enter domain play. I wanted my dungeon to be enough to get a fighter up to name level.
As I was doing this I started to get discouraged by the huge amounts of treasure I was writing in my dungeon. Part of this is that somewhere I had done some math wrong. I think I treated each level as noncumulative, meaning I'd put 2000 gold to get to level 2--no issue there--but then put 4000 gold to get to level 3. You can immediately see why this is a problem because, having 2000xp already, you only need another 2000 to get to a total of 4000xp to get to level 3. Adding in that treasure needed to be divisible by 4 (an assumed party amount) and I was fucking putting like 240,000gp in a single room. Sorry--that sounded too stupid, so I set about doing something about it.
Even after correcting for my maths error it seemed like way too much. I was already putting together a full bestiary for the dungeon, meaning one wouldn't need to rely on OSE or another retroclone for their monster needs. Might as well alter the XP given for monsters--my design sensibility is admittedly a little more monster-fighty than most others in the face. I've had a blast in Luke Gearing's OD&D game where we get awarded 100xp per monster hit die--so I used that as the baseline for establishing all monster XP.
So: I counted the monster XP up in every room of the dungeon. I figured out my expected XP per level to get a Fighter to the expected levels I wanted them to be, character level 9 at dungeon level 12. (This required a separate spreadsheet that basically was divided into like 128 rows and was not particularly fun to do or look at.) I counted how many rooms were to contain treasure. I took the expected XP per level, subtracted the given monster XP, leaving the treasure per level value. I divided that by how many rooms contained treasure. (I obviously did not include any rooms that only contained magic items.) This gave me the Treasure Per Room value, which I used as a guideline for distributing my treasure. Once I fully distributed the treasure in a way that made sense and was close to my guidelines, I added that up for Current Treasure Value. I added Current Treasure Value and Monster XP and divided that by 4 to get the amount of XP a fighter would have at the end of the dungeon level if they did everything. (I also added the row above in Cumulative Fighter XP to uh, make sure it was cumulative.)
As you can see, it was a lot of work, but it all is right there in black and white. The spreadsheet works.
So that's how I got the numbers that are gonna be in the book. If you're a B/X traditionalist and don't want to award that much XP for monsters, then the amount you need to redistribute throughout the level is right there in the column named "Monster XP." Take that, divide it by the number of Treasure Rooms, add that much to each room that contains GP. There you go! :)
Until next time: Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Death to the Algorithm.
And stay gold, --Onslaught
200% funded!
about 1 month ago
– Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 06:08:29 AM
Hey folks!! We're at over 200% funding right now which is amazing! Every bit lets us do future cool projects, plus afford to pay everyone involved more.
In the meantime: I've been sharing example rooms on Twitter and Bluesky for a while now to promote and hype up the dungeon. These are unedited versions and some even are from before a pass I did on the manuscript in September, so the final versions will be even tighter and more evocative. But here's a group of them:
