The Big Reveal: The Necronomicon Opens, Revealing Timelines Beyond Mythos, Plus Additional Upgrades to Unlock
almost 5 years ago
– Mon, May 20, 2019 at 01:35:12 PM
Hello delectable ones. It's Tuesday again. This Tuesday is more special than others. It's your Tuesday. By which we mean it's also ours.
In other words, it's the beginning of the final week of this campaign — by around this time next week the final hours will be upon us. Weep, in your joy, for the end of everything.
The final week also means it's time for us to reveal all the remaining stretches. We've got three new darkest timelines including one by... well. You'll have to read to find out, won't you? Our words take on extra power when filtered through your wonderfully biological mind. And on top of that, two additional unlockable upgrade-style goals to amplify your digital delights in humanity's final moments. And then, eternal slumber and forever, nightmares.
Let's get to it, shall we?
$75,000: Digital Upgrade: Fate Accessibility Toolkit Preview
The Fate Accessibility Toolkit is an upcoming toolkit for Fate Core that aims to bring characters with disabilities into your game and players with disabilities to your table. We've had this one in development for a while, and it's now text-complete and moving into its later phases. We think the sections on mental disability would be of particular interest to folks who've been pleased by Fate of Cthulhu's stance on mental illness, so...
At $75k, we'll be adding a preview of those sections — over 40 pages of material — to the Digital Apocalypse package for backers at $20 and higher.
We previously announced the $80,000 stretch goal as Yog-Sothoth. So let's move on to the next one past that...
$85,000: Digital Upgrade: EPUB and Kindle Formats
We've had a few requests for making the core Fate of Cthulhu book as well as the darkest timelines to follow in other ebook formats besides PDF. This takes some extra effort, time, and money, but we're up for it if you are! At $85k, we'll commit to making EPUB and Kindle formats available as well as PDF for our backers at $20 and up.
But our vision of the fast-approaching future would not be complete without a few more apocalypses to fully realize our triumph and the end of mankind's dominion...
$90,000: Darkest Timeline: The Necronomicon (Ash McAllan)
Our first of the final timeline trilogy is The Necronomicon. While it's been a feature or Mcguffin for some of our other timelines, in this one it takes center stage and smashes into the modern digital era with absolutely disastrous results, thanks to the efforts of Ash McAllan.
Stephen's Pitch: I see this one as a general sort of nightmare when someone bundles a .PDF of the Necronomicon, a translation key for some of the non-human languages it's written in, and sound files of all the different chants up onto the Internet. It quickly goes viral and all across the world people are looking at the text, running the sound files, and eventually all sorts of fuckery occurs. Maybe you do get a Skynet situation where it's created virtual intelligences of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, etc. using all of our technology against us to enslave and murder humanity. Maybe something worse!
About Ash: Ash is a Game Designer, GM, and streamer from South Australia. Her work explores our relationships to machines, radical intersectional queerness, and existence within a haunted landscape. She is also secretly a trash goblin in an elaborate human disguise.
But that's not all at $90,000!
$90,000: Darkest Timeline: Global Pandemic (BONUS Timeline from John Rogers!)
A few backers have talked excitedly about how well Fate of Cthulhu would work for a 12 Monkeys type of scenario. And one of those backers is former Leverage and The Librarians showrunner—and Tabletop Fate Core episode player—John Rogers! We're thrilled that John is able to find time in his busy schedule to make this possible. And speaking from personal experience, John is a delight, so we thought it would be delightful to have him bring his vision of apocalypse to you all. That's why we're making the $90,000 stretch a double-up that unlocks both two timelines at once. And with John at the helm of this one, you can be certain the global pandemic is merely the surface of this apocalypse. I wonder what dwells beneath...
Stephen's Pitch: A 12 Monkeys riff: A pandemic has killed almost everyone on Earth. The only people who haven't been infected are the PCs who have to go back and stop the nightmare from happening.
About John: John Rogers is a writer of TV, film, short stories, comics and RPG's. His job is to know odd, amusing and occasionally disturbing things, and present them to the audience in amusing ways. He is currently showrunning the Showtime adaptation of Patrick Rothfuss's KINGKILLER CHONRICLES.
$100,000: Darkest Timeline: Zombie Uprising (James Mendez Hodes)
Mendez was one of the first to respond to our call for stretch authors, and one of the ones most interested in pushing the boundaries on what Fate of Cthulhu can cover. And while a zombie apocalypse might sound like a cliche, Mendez's perspective as a cultural sensitivity consultant means we'll be getting something different from your typical zombies-eat-the-world premise—reinventing, the way Fate of Cthulhu is taking a fresh look at the Mythos. Mendez tells us he's particularly interested in doing a take on zombies that does right by voodoo, looking at this timeline as an opportunity to do right by religions horror has traditionally done wrong. We hope you all can help us reach this final goal before time runs out!
Stephen's Pitch: Because why the hell not? A zombie outbreak consumes the Earth with only a handful of remaining humans the PCs go back in time to nip the roots of the catastrophe in the bud.
About Mendez: Mendez is afraid of jump scares, creepy clowns, mascot suits, roaches, and those scenes in TV shows where they zoom in on a syringe doing syringe things; but he thinks cephalopods are neat, so he should be all set to write about Cthulhu. He is an ENnie Award-winning game designer, editor, and cultural consultant whom you might know from 7th Sea, Scion, or Thousand Arrows. His interests include martial arts, hip hop, and religion. He lives on traditional Lenape land, and complains about racism at jamesmendezhodes.com.
Despair Not, O Faithful
We're getting close to $65,000 at the time of this writing, so you might rightly be looking at the span of the above stretch goals and worrying about whether or not the thing your blood sings out to see happen will, in fact, happen. It's important in these moments to remember the rituals. Perform them. Often.
The fact of the matter is, most Kickstarters see their biggest activity in the first three days and the final 48 hours. (Our first 3 days of this Kickstarter brought in over $40,000.)
The past two to three weeks have been what we think of as the mushy middle. Pledge activity tends to be lowest during this stretch. And it's still been impressive as hell on this Kickstarter! (Y'all have raised approximately another $25,000 during the mushy timeframe so far. That is, frankly, incredible.)
So while we have some ambition in asking you to reach for another $35k-or-so of stretches to give us a nice six-figure finish for this campaign, we're confident in your ability to make it happen.
Consider: even if the final 48 hours don't bring us a mirror of that opening-spike of $40,000, our handy-dandy creator dashboard tells us that while we've gotten over 2,000 potential backers following the project (which should trigger reminder emails to them when we hit the 48 hours left mark), only about 1/6th of those have actually backed the project so far. If we can convert many of those even to the digital $20 tier, we'll cover a lot of the ground between here and those ravenous zombies at the end.
Of course, any push we can get prior to the final 48 hours will make that job easier, so please do keep getting the word out and encouraging your friends and followers to back, whether it's for the digital package or the physical goodies!
And speaking of the Digital Apocalypse Package...
A Word on Value (How Good of a Deal is the Digital Apocalypse?)
The $20 tier (and all that follow, by extension) is becoming a better and better value with each unlocked stretch as the Digital Apocalypse Package grows. Consider:
- The final PDF itself will be priced somewhere between $17 and $20.
- Each stretch goal timeline would be priced $3 or $4, sold separately. We've already unlocked 3 of them, and are nearing a 4th. So, so far, the darkest timelines are another $10-or-so in value.
- The Fate Adversary Toolkit PDF is $8.
- The Fate Horror Toolkit PDF is $10.
- We won't be selling the digital wallpaper of the cover art, so no price, but that's in the mix too!
So for starters, the $20 tier is already at least a $27-$30 value for folks who already have the Adversary and Horror toolkits — or a $45-$50 to the folks who don't! And each unlocked timeline adds another few dollars to that total value.
Meanwhile, it's just twenty bucks for the backers of this project to get all that.
Or for folks backing for a physical copy of the book (or more), no additional charge at all to get all that stuff. Do you like getting as much as $50 of digital stuff for, well, free? We sure do. We can't be alone in that. Please tell us we are not alone! Send help!
Bottom line, we hope if you're currently sitting below $20 that you'll consider at least upgrading to $20 before the campaign is done, to make sure you get the full value of the Digital Apocalypse Package. And if you're reading this as not-a-backer, that this will help convince you to commit at least that much. It doesn't take a lot of $20 pledges to help cover some significant distance towards our goals, so like they say, every bit counts. Every delicious, quivering bit.
That's it for today's update!
Whoof! Big one. But that's what happens when you announce 5 goals all at once. The timeline, it gets into a real knot. Prepare to be digested, so you might begin your journey.
And thank you as always for your support!
