Grab your stake and join the adventure! Preorder your copy of Land of Vampires: Slipping into Shadow, a full-length duet 5e campaign AND support our creation of Part Two: Risen Retribution, for even more fun in Steymhorod!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
WE'RE FUNDED!!!
6 months ago
– Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 10:34:42 AM
Hello wonderful backers!
I am writing with the most exciting news—we're fully funded!!! Yay!
It feels SO good to be typing those words and to be able to add the fancy green "just funded" banner to our project!
I will be delighted to talk about stretch goals and next steps but for at least the next hour or two, I'm going to be celebrating, and I hope you will be too! 😍
I mean it when I say how much every single one of you mean to this project and to me. 💚 Without your support, we wouldn't be here, and this is such a fun place to be!
Thank you for believing in us and in this campaign! I am so so happy right now!
I hope you're having a beautiful day and that you'll celebrate with us!
With so much happiness,
-Beth
Coming into the final stretch!!! Update on rewards, bonuses, and stretch goals!
6 months ago
– Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 05:20:57 AM
If we think of the Kickstarter like a D&D campaign, then this precise moment, here before the final stretch, is one of my favorites in the entirety of a campaign arc.
The Steymhorod equivalent, in this case, would be the gathering of allies before the assault on Nassarq’s tower. I so vividly remember that moment in our home game. There was an excitement to it, like the air was sparking around us while we played. But there was grief for our characters as well as they’d just sustained heavy losses in their preparations for the fight. (This latter part luckily does not have a Kickstarter equivalent!)
The last few days have been so encouraging—we are so close to being fully funded!!! Here’s to that sparky and sparkling energy in the final couple days of the campaign!
Whether you’ve just joined us or you’ve been here from hour one, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. This really means so much to me and Jonathan, and we cannot wait to get this campaign into your hands!
Backer Bonuses and Add-Ons
Returning to our campaign analogy, one of my favorite parts of a pre-boss fight session is the chance to look back over how far your PC and their party have come. Taking a page from our characters’ books, I wanted to take a moment to share two changes that came about during the campaign to this point.
First, all backers will receive a digital player’s guide to Azuria for free as part of their pledge, yay! This bonus will help your player develop their character and their character’s backstory as they head in to the campaign and let them learn about their character’s origin in Azuria without any campaign spoilers.
We also revised our plans for where an added Part Two would fall as part of the campaign. Originally, Part Two was a stretch goal, but we’re too excited to write it and add this next arc to the adventures in Steymhorod. Part Two is an arc for after the events of Slipping into Shadow where a new villain steps onto the stage of Steymhorod following a few months of relative peace. It also adds two cities and the other two fanes.
Now, Part Two is available as a digital add-on to your pledge or in a tier by itself for those who have played through the earlier version of Slipping into Shadows pre-compiling. We’ll have a print edition of Part Two in the future, but unlike Slipping into Shadow, it hasn’t been written yet, so the turnaround time for it will be a longer. The Kickstarter price for Part Two is discounted, though we won’t know what its full price will be until we’ve finished the writing and design. What I can tell you is that it’s going to be really cool, so if you haven’t added Part Two, I’d like to encourage you to!
Revisiting the Stretch Goals
Based on our conversations with you throughout the campaign, Jonathan and I have made a few tweaks to the campaign stretch goals that I wanted to share with you. (VTT fans, this is for you!)
The biggest change we made to the stretch goals besides Part Two as covered above is bringing them closer to within reach. It’s way more fun to rally our energies toward goals that are close, right?!
So for our first, revised stretch goal, at $12,000, we’ll create a video series on running the campaign and/or host livestreams for backers with Q&As with me and Jonathan—I think that will be really fun! I like the idea of a video guide in conjunction with Q&A livestreams so we can cover some of the biggest questions before and then get into individual campaign questions to help you personalize the campaign to your player and their PC. Plus, we love connecting with you!
Stretch goal number 2—VTT compatibility with Roll20, Foundry VTT, and Alchemy at $15,000! Once we get closer to these VTT editions of the campaign existing, we’ll offer a Kickstarter-exclusive discount for each of the VTTs.
Coming in for stretch goal 3, a build-up to our final, big stretch goal—printables for a Field Guide to Steymhorod! I’m not sure who our fictional host for the field guide will be, but think of this as an add-on to the Player’s Guide to Steymhorod with some of the notable NPCs and their cool backstories from along the way. For those of you who are analog gamers like me, I thought these would make for a fun “gift” for the player during the campaign, and of course you could digitally gift the pages as well.
It’s kind of like a player’s log or the journal in a video game, where you can look back on NPCs and places you’ve unlocked on your journey and have them to quick-reference as you’re returning to an area after a delay. We’ll unlock this reward at $17,000—I hope you’re as excited about it as I am!
And finally, *drumroll* our $20,000 stretch goal is a Steymhorod world book! The main goal of the world book will be making your journey through Steymhorod easier and more vividly detailed, and we’ll add in some bonus NPCs and side-quests along the way! The best world books, in my view, empower the GM to make the world feel even more immersive and real without added prep work, so that’s what we’ll make for you!
And there you have it, revised stretch goals for this final push of the campaign!
For those interested in alchemy (not the VTT kind 😉) and cool ttRPG products:
There's a cool Kickstarter campaign running at the moment for an alchemy-based supplement for your 5e (or Pathfinder!) game. The creator reached out to us, and I think his project has some cool potential applications with Land of Vampires and that you all might be interested! I love adding unique substances and plant-based details to tabletop sessions, so if that sounds like something you're interested in, you can check out the campaign here!
The hand-drawn art for the campaign is really lovely, and I am already obsessed with the potted mandrake! (Mandrakes, coincidentally, play a major role in Part Two of Land of Vampires!)
Shew! What a fun update to put together! I am hoping to be sending you a celebratory email later today about how we're fully funded—fingers crossed! You've done so much for us already, but if you could share our campaign with a friend or on your social media platform of choice, we would really appreciate it!!!
More soon!
💚 Beth
Soooo close to 70%
7 months ago
– Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 03:40:34 PM
Hello wonderful backers!
We are coming into the final week of the campaign and super close to 70% funded which Jonathan and I are really excited about! We've been having so many cool conversations behind the scenes about details for Part Two of Land of Vampires and falling deeper in love with Steymhorod every time!
It's been so special to look back on where this campaign started for us, which I recently posted a video about, if you're curious to learn Steymhorod's origins.
I just finished a dark fantasy novel that revisits some of those favorite, familiar tropes around vampires, werewolves, and zombies but in a super fresh way, which has me thinking about the characters you'll be escorting through Steymhorod in the coming months and years. Depending on their backstory, they may know all the lore about vampires or they may have only seen them pop up in an Azurian fantasy romance from the bookshop in The Hardly Haunted Library!
One of the countless things I love about duet gaming is the space for personalization. I imagine a sleuth character who's been tracking the disappearances from the beginning of the campaign having to step out from behind their magnifying glass and face down mounted wights mid-campaign. How dramatic is that moment going to feel looking at where they started and where they end up!
On the other hand, a character who's an alchemist, for instance, might finally feel like they've found where they truly belong when they hop through a blood portal into a land with all kinds of strange plants and necrotic creatures.
I know for my PC in Steymhorod, Briseras, she finally found a place that made sense to her, where she fit, which she'd never experienced before. There's a similar storyline for one of the characters in Dawn of the Dead, I believe, where he hasn't really figured out his place in life until there's a zombie apocalypse. I think Land of Vampires could provoke precisely that experience for a character!
When we're designing for one-on-one play, Jonathan and I try to anticipate different types of characters, different personalities and play-styles, different drivers in your campaigns and at your table. I hope throughout this campaign you've been able to start thinking about your GMPC or PC as well, about your partner's character—I know how key a factor that is for so many of us who enjoy this type of gaming!
If you have a character you're excited about that you want to share, please do so! We'd love to hear about them! And if you're not sure yet, then I hope this has given you a few ideas!
💚 Beth
Happy (almost) Valentine's Day!
7 months ago
– Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 03:11:35 PM
Happy almost Valentine's Day!
Thank you again for backing our campaign! We are now over 65% funded, which is amazing!!!
Because of the nature of duet gaming, Jonathan and I always like to do something fun around Valentine's Day for the duet-ing community, and so this year, in honor of each of you and our Kickstarter, I made a special line of valentines that you can gift to your duet-ing partner as part of their Valentine's Day present! Or if they don't know that they're going to be playing Land of Vampires with you and you've been looking for a way to tell them, this should work perfectly! ;)
Part Two, here we come!
7 months ago
– Wed, Feb 07, 2024 at 05:38:49 AM
Hello wonderful backers,
Thank you again for joining us for this campaign! I have a quick update for you before I run off to campus to teach for the day—after much discussion and consideration, Jonathan and I have decided to go ahead and offer Part Two of Land of Vampires as its own rewards tier AND as a pledge add-on.
Many of our existing fans have already played through Land of Vampires (and loved it!), and they wanted the option for more adventures in Steymhorod, which is half the genesis behind Part Two in the first place. (The other origin half is our own desire to return to Steymhorod for what has become my favorite arc we've ever played in our home game and we cannot wait to share it with you!)
We are determined for this campaign to serve you and your needs as best as it possibly can, and part of that is going to involve bringing more people on board to make this campaign a reality. Jonathan and I will tweak the stretch goals accordingly—I need a little more time with those, and that will give us a chance to finish looking into Foundry VTT as well.
I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, so please either send me a message or drop a comment below.
