My inbox is slowly filling up with mixed signals. On one hand, I'm getting some really excited praise by the handful of people who have received their books. On the other side, I'm getting some messages about people getting really anxious about receiving theirs. But, with complete certainty, I can guarantee that your books will arrive within the next 3-6 months!

Haha, haha, ha... humor. See, that was humor. I was using it to loosen the mood. (Mostly mine.)

I realize that I haven't posted a picture of the final product! I hope Lisa from Turner's Tokens won't mind me stealing the picture she took!

Isn't it beautiful?

The Progress

I've shipped the majority of North American backers getting just one book. We have all of the dicebags done, and my extra shipping supplies (I ran out of envelopes and boxes fast!) are arriving tomorrow. I'm going to be honest for a moment: shipping is WAY more expensive than I thought, something that several of you warned me about when the kickstarter went live. Of course, I also didn't ever expect to get as much international appeal as we did. (Who am I kidding? I was happy when we broke our goal of $1,000! Our kickstarter was definitely not designed to break $20,000.) 

We'll be packing and shipping for the next week or so. My goal (fingers crossed) is to have everyone's package in the mail by the end of next week. I am going with the cheapest shipping method, but the post office workers (people I've been seeing a lot of this past week) tell me that the difference is a matter of days, not weeks. 

Adversaries

The adversary book is getting pretty close to completion. We have most of the adversaries done in their roughest form. A lot of you still haven't seen yours, but that's because part two (where I take the adversary, clean it up, and put it in the correct formatting) takes a long time. But step 1 for us, the actual drafting of the adversaries, is nearly done. 

I also have some rather good news on that front: we are working to make it so that every single adversary has art. That's right, every adversary in the book is going to have some fun graphical representation included. We've included a wide slew of artists, but Katy Amicone, the artist of Winged Cat Machine, is putting her talents to work filling in every hole that we left. So... yeah, you do have to wait another month or so while we finish up this adversary book. But hey, at least it'll be GORGEOUS.

And, for those of you who don't follow Tephra's facebook page, here's some samples of the artwork that our staff artist, Victor Helton, has done! 

...and...

Priorities

You, my kickstarter backers, made Tephra happen. You're my top priority right now. That's not to say that I'm not also trying to get Tephra into distribution, finishing up some expansion materials, creating a promotional poster (I will share this with you as soon as it's done, and believe me, it's going to ASTONISH you), and building a viable business while trying to keep my life together, but rest assured: you are priority #1. 

Thanks for your continued support, and, as always,

Cheers & Gears,

Daniel

Greetings loyal fans,

I have some great news today: we now have Tephra books! They are beautiful; I couldn't have asked for a better looking print run. The colors on the cover came out fantastic, the art inside is gorgeous, and my fans are telling me the game is even fun to play, too! Who would've guessed?

I couldn't tell you how excited I am to get them into your hands. But first, a bit of business:

Please Update Your Shipping Address

If you've moved in the last few months, please message or e-mail me (Daniel@CrackedMonocle.com) your updated shipping address. I would hate to be mailing these precious books off to the wrong people!

What to Expect?

We have all of the dicebags and books ready for shipping. We'll start shipping them this week, so you don't have much longer to wait! If you are getting one of our Kickstarter Adversary Books, that will be shipped to you soon, but it will be in a different shipment. We're not quite done with it (there were a lot of awesome adversary requests, but they're taking us a while longer than expected!), but we will definitely get them to you soon.

It's Time for Retail!

We are trying very hard to get the book into retail stores now. If you have a local retail store you think should carry Tephra, let us know! We'll contact them. But if you could walk into your retail store and tell them about Tephra, even better! The more vibe and word of mouth we get, the better!

Join our Community!

We want to build a strong, interlocked community! Please join us at our facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Tephra.Steampunk) or on our website (http://www.crackedmonocle.com/). Our goal is to get 4-5 updates on our site per week, so that you'll always have new information to help enhance your Tephra game!

Are you near Austin or San Antonio?

Swing by Dragon's Lair during one of our open gaming days (San Antonio on Saturdays from 6pm to 10pm or in Austin on Mondays from 7pm to midnight) and you can pick up your book! I love cutting down on shipping costs (cutting back on shipping costs lets us upgrade our website, create new art, or get you better supplies for your gaming), so any help would be super!

Thanks for everything,

Daniel

I've talked with a lot of retailers about how to succeed in the RPG industry. One of the primary responses I receive is to hold true to your promised deadlines. One of my goals for Cracked Monocle is to get to the point where we never have a missed deadline or a late book shipment. With that in mind, I've decided not to make any official announcements about when a product will be available until I know every single step in the process of editing, publishing, printing, shipping, and distributing. 

I'm learning! I promise. 

So where are we now? 

The book is 100% complete (a weird thing for me to say after spending 4 years on this project). I have cover art in, and I'm working closely with the printer to get the books done right and done soon. Our dice bags are very close (about 90% complete), and I have a huge assortment of dice ready for you. Last week, I ordered "system complete" editions for my staff so that we can really get into the thick of everybody's custom adversaries. We have about 50% of the art done for the Kickstarter Adversary Book, and I'm getting more art constantly. 

Time for Goodies!

Since I can't send you the book just yet, I thought I might share some goodies with you. First up, the rough draft for our cover! I'm still tweaking it to make sure the colors work correctly and it looks beautiful, so if you have any thoughts or critiques that would help me improve it, let me know. I can't guarantee a ton of changes, but I'd love to know your thoughts!

Last week, I posted a preview of one of our favorite races, the farishtaa. If you don't follow us on our Tephra Facebook Page, you can check it out here: http://crackedmonocle.com/company_files/previews/Final/farishtaa.pdf

Lastly, I'm proud to say that Tephra won the Best of Steampunk 2011 award in the RPG category. 

It's both really exciting and really humbling that we won such an award when our book is only in open playtesting. I guess our playtesters really like us!

So... right, when are we getting the book again?

I'm hoping I should be able to ship out everybody's book in May. Please don't take that as a total promise, but if it's any later than that, I'm going to start sobbing myself to sleep every night. 

Hank and I are hitting the Custom Adversaries really hard right now. If you sent in an adversary, you should start seeing drafts soon! 

Also, before I sign off, if you haven't checked out our Special Thanks page on our website, please make sure you're listed on there correctly. I found two errors earlier this week, and I hate the idea of there being more problems. 

With all that said... go follow us on our Tephra facebook page! We post on there constantly. 

Cheers & Gears,

Daniel

I might have gone too long without an update - there's way too much to talk about! 

Foremost, we promised that at $13,000, we would create a video of us dancing in celebration. Now, we obviously made that goal (and bypassed it by $10,000), so we let our community vote on what song we should dance to over on our facebook page. Winning with 84 votes (some 53 votes higher than second place) was LMFAO's Sexy and I Know It. We enlisted the help of DJ Kineticz and the Marquis of Vaudeville to truly bring our video to life. And I must say - for a group of tabletop RPG designers, we put together a pretty decent video. Without further ado: 

Awesome, isn't it?

Our Thank You List

We've compiled a list of all of the donors on our website, which you'll find here. If you don't find yourself there, please let me know! (It might also mean that you haven't responded to our backer surveys, which were sent out a few weeks ago. If that's the case, let me know and I'll get the required information from you.) This is the list that we'll be printing on our banner, so I'd like for it to be correct. 

And while I'm talking about our website, you should check out a page that we recently created: Where We Came From and Where We Are Going, a history of Tephra and Cracked Monocle. You could then jump over to our forums and join our great community!

The Unfortunate

Daniel, you might be thinking, this all sounds really awesome. So what's the unfortunate part that's alluded to in the title? Well, I must be honest with you all - there's pretty much no hope of getting your books to you this month. When we first began this process, I had lined up a solid print-on-demand company that could print and ship our books to us within a few weeks. But they're designed to do print runs as large as 500 books. Well, you've made Tephra quite the success, and I've upped our print run:

We're printing over 2,000 books.

First, thank you!  But that comes with a slight delay. Because of the big jump in our print run size, we're going with a traditional printer which requires 5-6 weeks for printing. So, though I'm sad to say it, we are going to be a little behind. 

(Dana, our prized craftswoman, is quite happy with this delay. She's been burning her fingers trying to sew over 200 dice bags to fulfill y'all's orders!)

I hope you'll forgive our delay. This is our first time doing anything like this, and we want to do it right. We don't want to squander your generosity and support, but we need just a little more time to get it right. In the meantime, I hope you check out our Cracked Monocle and Tephra facebook pages, join our community, and get previews of our next products and ideas we'll be sending your way!

The Adversaries Book

We're off to a solid start on the adversaries book, but we're primarily just getting it set up right now. I'll be comparing my list of orders against the people who have submitted their information later this week; if you don't get a message from me, it means that I have your adversary and it's looking AWESOME. (Truly, I am so impressed by these adversary commissions.) We're also getting some awesome artwork done for them, which we'll be posting periodically to our facebook pages. 

What's Next?

We're hoping (fingers crossed) that Tephra: the Steampunk RPG will be lining the shelves of your local game store come this May (or, more likely, sometime this summer). Please, talk to your local gaming stores, let them know that you want to see Tephra nights and Tephra demos and Tephra games and Tephra products. The more you talk about us, the more likely we are to end up growing, and the more products we can create for your enjoyment. Your support means everything.

And if any of your friends would like to pre-order our book, we're taking pre-orders through our site's store (located in the top right corner of our website).

And until next time,

Cheers & Gears,

Daniel

We can't break $20,000 and not put up something new and awesome, right? So, we're going to play game.

On this, our final day, at $20,000 and for every $200 after, we'll commission a single black & white illustration to represent a custom adversary. (So if we get to 20,200, we'll get two done, at 20,400, we'll get three illustrations, and so on.) We'll be choosing the adversaries that get the illustrations, but if it's your character, we'll send you a digital copy of the illustration and you can use it however you'd like.

See you on the other side of 20k!

Daniel