New Year. New Timelines
over 3 years ago – Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 09:39:20 PM

Greetings time-travelers!

Three of our seven stretch goals are written, edited, in layout, and in a prototype state ready to share with you.

These prototype drafts are available now in our Digital Downloads section of the Fate of Cthulhu BackerKit. While we'll be doing our own internal proofreading, if you spot a typo or error that you'd like to let us know about, we've got a feedback form here.

Once the art is done along with releasing the full PDFs to you, we'll also expand our Roll20 modules to include these new timelines as well!

The Rise of the Basilisk

by Ash McAllan

A Basilisk is any idea which is dangerous to the beholder. A catchy tune that gets so stuck in one's head as to become harmful. Certain visual phenomena that cause damage to the vision processing areas of the brain. The Basilisk we know, the one called Godthink by those infected, subsumes its beholder entirely. The Basilisk we know is not some errant sound or image that maims or kills those who come across it. It is a way of thinking, a worldview, a community of minds so aligned and so connected as to become a single gestalt force, bent on expanding itself infinitely and destroying or converting any opposition. The Basilisk we know will consume everything.

When the Google digital books project meets up with the Necronomicon (not to mention three other dangerous tomes), a Basilisk is unleased. Can you go back and contain it?

The Rise of the Quiet

by John Rogers

Content Warning: In 2019 when we started drafting this up, we had no idea how life would imitate art. This timeline features a global pandemic. 

In early 2030, the world struggles with climate change, the collapse of objective news thanks to Deep Fakes/nationalized troll farms, and resource wars. But there are also great advancements in medical technology, outer space colonization, and bold, new social movements. Although life can be difficult, it is not a life without hope.

One of the curious news stories humming in the background of this chaotic world is an outbreak of what the media dubs the Quiet. A disease that causes near catatonic states. Can you find the cure?

The Rise of Yig

By Alastor Guzman

In 2020 a surprise eclipse, visible only in northern Mexico and in the southern United States, shadowed everything under it. It was a strange astronomical phenomenon. During the eclipse and ensuing darkness, Yig awoke.

Yig started walking and destroying civilization in his wake. His full power led to a psychic disturbance around the world: terrifying dreams of snakes and other reptiles, sudden convulsions when near those animals, and an increase in betrayals among friends all the way up to entire corporations. Secret organizations such as the Center for Defense against Elder Threats from the UN, the Chimalli Union and the Dark Light Net had contingency plans for Great Old Ones, but never accounted for Yig, due to him being considered a lower threat than other Old Ones. They were wrong. Can your last-ditch effort to save the future succeed before Yig's grasp coils around the world?

In case you missed it up top: these prototype drafts are available now in our Digital Downloads section of the project's Backerkit. If you spot a typo or error that you'd like to let us know about we've got a feedback form here.

"Viral" Update
about 4 years ago – Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 05:17:43 PM

Hello all, just a quick note from the middle of Quarantinelandia, where it is most certainly not the end times, nope, nope.

We're continuing to work on the stretch goals as time permits. As you might imagine, the virus has gotten ideas into its pretty little head about what we should be doing with our time, which has spread the cognitive resources a bit thin. In a mild bit of irony, John Rogers' global pandemic timeline is the one furthest along in development, and is currently in the hands of our system-folk to get it fully built out and ready to move on to later stages of production. The Necronomicon timeline is right on its heels. (Others are at various stages of development, owing to our various delicious contributors having lives and day jobs and whatnot. This is all largely as expected, modulo the actual global pandemic.)

Speaking personally, I've found that lockdown means I have less high quality brain-time, not more. I imagine that's the experience for at least some of our contributors, too. In the grand scheme it's still pretty early to get a handle on what the New Working Order looks like.

There have been some scheduling hiccups with our specialist's efforts to get the epub/kindle version of Fate of Cthulhu done. It remains on a "it'll be done when it's done" kind of footing, and we'll be happy to share the results with you when the day arrives.

Fate Condensed work has continued in parallel to all this (not at all handled by the same people, just to be clear, so the one doesn't impact the other). We've released a laid-out version to the world, done several revision passes for improved clarity and function, and are investigating the possibilities of putting the book into print. Or at least we were investigating it, until mandatory nonessential business closures hit — our book printer has shuttered for the duration, as has our shipping partner (who is also the country's largest national tabletop games distributor). Luckily for this Kickstarter, we concluded our physical shipment phase some time ago!

Stay safe and handwashed, y'all. Cleanliness keeps the dark ones out. We'll share new horrors with you when we can.

Non-Euclidean Geometries Enable Startling Condensation
about 4 years ago – Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 02:02:57 AM

Our first stretch goal of the campaign enabled a whole cloud of possibilities (hideous delights lurking in every one). One that excited us in particular was this one: 

"In addition to all the above, there's a community component to this stretch goal: we'll commit to providing an open-licensable version of the system components of the game (with our setting and Cthulhu derived IP taken out, for hopefully obvious reasons). By and large, this will be a 'condensed Fate Core' plus a couple other bells and whistles, but we think there's potentially some real value in that. Til now, Fate Accelerated has been the primary 'condensed Fate' for folks to build their third-party Fate games from; the 50-pages-or-so version we have in Fate of Cthulhu cleaves more strongly to Fate Core's defaults, while still leaving a lot of room for original content for folks looking to build their own stand-alone Fate games."

Today, we are sending all backers a PDF version of Fate Condensed, just ahead of us releasing the content in SRD form on www.faterpg.com/licensing (and likely soon followed by Randy Oest adapting it for use on www.fate-srd.com). 

We started with the condensed Fate Core presented in Fate of Cthulhu, but once we got that extracted we did an additional development pass on it. The result still lands close to what's in FOC, but we decided to clarify and streamline a few elements of the system further, making the result a sort of lightweight "Fate 4.5" (Core is 4.0). We give an overview of the differences between Fate Condensed and Fate Core on the first page (just past the table of contents), inclusive of the changes FOC itself made, for the curious.

We've been wanting to offer a less wordy Fate Core SRD for a while now that doesn't leave people feeling locked into the Fate Accelerated build of Core (even tho it doesn't), a core chassis for the system that makes it easy to create stand-alone Fate Core games without bulking out the resulting book overmuch. Fate Condensed is that chassis, and it's due to your support of this project.

Thank you so much for making this a possibility! 

We've also updated the Fate of Cthulhu page on Evil Hat's site to include a downloads page with character and timeline sheets, and the accelerated "conversion" guide, for those who want access to those files outside of the Kickstarter/Backerkit bubble. 

The Darkest Timeline stretch goals continue development, a little slower than I'd hoped, but for entirely understandable reasons — we've got a bit of a bottleneck at the creative direction approval stage (how dare someone have a day job and a career as a novelist) and we're looking at ways to loosen that up a bit; a few timelines are also taking longer to get started due to disrupting life events for their creators. That said we're expecting John Rogers' global pandemic timeline, The Quiet, to make it through the process first—it's the closest to entering the later phases of layout, art direction, art acquisition, and release. I'll do my best to share progress updates in the months ahead!

That's it for today, delicious ones. Thank you, as always, for your support.

Problems with your shipment? Let us know.
over 4 years ago – Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 02:09:13 AM

In the wake of a few people reporting problems with their shipment in the comments, I just want to dash out this quick note: if you've gotten a defective item, or a wrong item, or a missing item in your shipment, please don't report these issues to us in the comments. 

We can't ask you specific information that would disclose your personal details such as your address or phone number in a publicly visible comment — that wouldn't be right. Though we're sure the Great Old Ones would be delighted at you providing such easily located targeting information. Operators are "standing" by...

If you have a customer service issue to report, the correct avenues are through private message here on Kickstarter, or better yet, by email at [email protected] — make sure to provide enough information (who you are, address you received package at, Kickstarter screen name or email address if it's different from the one you're emailing us from) in your initial message such that we can quickly confirm which backer record is you, otherwise we're going to end up doing time-wasting back-and-forth emails with you trying to get to a point of sufficiently complete data to fix your issue!

One trend we've seen so far is a few folks reporting that they received a copy of a card game expansion rather than the Fate Points they were due. If this describes you and we haven't already replied to you about it, please let us know so we can get a handle on the full scope of the issue. In all cases so far it's been because the product codes for the two items differ by just one digit, and if this problem was repeated at scale, it'll be better to get our shipper to implement a fix at scale sooner rather than later. (No need to communicate with us if you got all the correct stuff! Happy as that is, we need to make sure we're focusing on things we need to fix.)

If you haven't received your package yet, never fear, it should be on its way shortly if it's not already, assuming you took care of filling out the backerkit as requested a few months back. We'll be sending out tracking information as soon as it's made available to us by the shippers.

Thanks as always for your support!

Quick Shipping Update!
over 4 years ago – Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 01:51:15 AM

The books are in stock and working their way out the door. 

Over 1000 have been shipped already; batch-processing on groups of identical orders is fastest for our shipper, so they hit all those single-book-only shipments up front. I've loaded tracking where I have it into BackerKit and gotten those into BK's email queue, so if you fit that bill you should get an email from BackerKit soon. 

A little under 400 are still in-process. These are either due to complexity (individually handled shipments because they don't fit the one-book-only batch-processable model) or small hiccups like a credit card needing to be re-processed (high likelihood this isn't you—BK sends a message to someone if their card didn't process right and gives chances to fix, and there was only a small handful of these as it is) before shipment could happen. Regardless they're shipping out this week or next, and I'll get tracking emails out through backerkit on those as soon as the shipper can provide that data. 

Around 50 are not in process, because there are about 50 folks who haven't responded to their BackerKit survey. I sent out a reminder message yesterday to those folks, make sure to look at your spam folder if you suspect this is you. You can get to the backerkit at this address, which'll let you see where you're at. If you haven't followed the process all the way to the end, please do, so the system knows it's ready to go and can let me move it forward. https://fate-of-cthulhu.backerkit.com/

That's the shipping news! Bottom line, we're on schedule for meeting our commitment to delivering this month for everyone who made sure to fill out their info in Backerkit. 

As mentioned previously and elsewhere, we'll continue to work on the Darkest Timelines digital rewards. The planning and writing on those started when the campaign ended, and depend on the individual schedules of the various creators. We'll spool these out to you as available, but I expect we'll be deep into 2020 before the first ones are fully complete. 

Fate Condensed SRD work is still underway. It got delayed by some family medical issues and other crises (including a total drive failure on Evil Hat's webserver) over the past month-plus. Ball's in my court, though, and we're mainly looking at revisions and review work at this point. 

ePub/Kindle has been farmed out to a freelancer, and will get done on whatever timetable they're able to manage. Freelancing life's like that, yo. We'll deliver this to y'all digitally once it's done.  

That's what I've got to tell you. I must get onward to the next things! Thank you as always for your support. 

Now you may enjoy this perfectly innocent video that definitely won't make your eyeballs melt. Do make sure you stare into the light. And please, if you must scream, make sure to muffle it. 

It sounds better that way.