Grab your stake and join the adventure! Order 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:
Let's Celebrate! (plus a correction from my last update!)
9 months ago
– Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 02:28:05 PM
Woohoo!!! It’s all the way official—we’ve successfully funded and concluded our very first Kickstarter, and that’s all thanks to YOU! I keep wanting to film a thank you video, and then I start happy-crying before I can even get started, then I feel silly, and then I end up just typing the words I would have shared anyway.
But perhaps in celebration of the moment, we can just let writers be writers, and I'll share a few celebratory thoughts with you below:
I love the way Kickstarter words “bringing a project to life.” From the very first inklings of an idea, that’s how I think of it. Borrowing from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, when an idea presents itself to me, especially an idea in the form of a story or project, I see it as an idea faery fluttering down to land on my shoulder and asking to work with me to help her be born into the world.
(This particular Land-of-Vampires idea faery is perhaps bulkier in form than most and may also resemble a bewitchingly handsome vampire lord named Draego, but we can save those particulars for another day!)
A Correction from my previous update
I do have a correction from my update from earlier to share with you that I wanted to clear up to avoid confusion. Over the course of the next two weeks, we'll send out surveys and give you a chance to finalize your pledge and rewards, and then after that two-week period, Kickstarter will process pledges and charges.
I'm planning on putting together the backer surveys and sending them out this weekend, so you'll see an update here from me once that has happened. I'll have a clearer idea on next steps once the surveys go out, and I'll also share the special lore piece from one of Lord Draego's top advisers with that update as well!
I hope you'll join us in celebrating! We're about to head out to our favorite Mexican restaurant, so we'll be raising a toast in your honor, and I of course wore all black today to celebrate our campaign and vampires everywhere! 🖤
And please just let me say, one more time, thank you. I am unspeakably grateful and so exited about bringing this very wonderful idea faery to life and to you.
Happy adventures! And more soon,
💚 Beth
We did it!!! (a note for the final few hours of our campaign!)
9 months ago
– Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 05:46:08 AM
I wish you could hear the title of this update the way it sounds in my head, which is the moment in Anastasia when Vlad runs over and scoops up Dimitri and spins him around. "Weeeeeee did it!!!"
The main thing I want to express is gratitude—I am so delighted to be in this spot of having a fully funded campaign, so honored by your belief and support throughout this past month.
At the beginning of launching this campaign, I really didn't know how it would go, what to expect. The cool and scary thing about something like a Kickstarter is that unknown. But what I've gotten from each of you over the last 30 days is encouragement and belief which, to me, feels like wind in the sails of the future for D&D Duet and Grove Guardian Press.
I don't want to get ahead of myself, and I'm working to hold myself still right here, in this moment of celebration, without darting forward and ahead, always looking to what's "next."
I hope you'll dwell here with me for at least a little while today. You're part of something really special, part of a community of people who believe in the power of stories and storytelling, who want to share those stories with the people closest to them. That's such a beautiful thing!
I was struck with inspiration this morning for a really cool bonus for all of you from the perspective of one of Lord Draego's advisers about the history of Steymhorod—a way to whet your appetite for the adventure that's to come. I want to wait until it's ready to send it to you, so that will be coming later today or tomorrow. But that bonus helped me see some of the ways we can link this campaign with the wider adventures transpiring around Azuria, its past world of Eldura, and even wider through what I call the Storyverse of Verdigris.
(And I really hope the paragraph above makes you excited for what we're getting ourselves into! This is only the beginning!!! There's a whole universe of stories for us to share together!)
A Moment for Practical Matters
Before I get too carried away with the super fun things, I wanted to cover the next few steps briefly. After the campaign wraps up, Kickstarter will start processing charges, and I'll put together the backer survey.
This is our first Kickstarter, so I'm still learning the back-end of fulfillment and what that looks like. I believe it usually takes them a week or two to finish the processing, and until I know for sure, I want to wait to promise a reward timeline. I'll have another update for you with specifics when we know more, and that update will also contain information about the backer surveys where you finalize your rewards.
We are getting close to unlocking our first stretch goal of livestream Q&As and videos about running the campaign! It'd be so cool to make it that far before the end of the campaign in a couple hours!
Thank you again for embarking on this journey with us! It's been so exciting and uplifting, and I have loved seeing everyone coming together over a shared love of vampires and duet gaming!
More soon!
💚 Beth
WE'RE FUNDED!!!
9 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!
9 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%
9 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!
