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Kingdoms & Warfare Kickstarter - Late Pledges

Created by MCDM Productions

Kingdoms & Warfare is a 5th Edition supplement for managing kingdoms, playing organizations, and waging war. This page is for anyone who missed the campaign but still wants to back the Kingdoms & Warfare project; it includes all the non-exclusive products we successfully funded during our Kickstarter. Fulfillment will happen at the same time we ship out Kickstarter Backer rewards.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Stickers & Shipping Update 2
over 1 year ago – Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 11:58:53 PM

Hey folks! Things are moving forward!

It took a lot of back and forth to get stickers to patch the book that we thought looked good. We sent files to a couple of different sticker companies, on purpose. We didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. And that turned out to be smart because one company who said “yeah we can do this” could not make the stickers we needed after many iterations.

But we did FINALLY get stickers that met the bar of quality we were shooting for. I.e. they look good and match the colors of the page they’re going onto. They are being printed as we speak and should be in the warehouse in early August.

At that point we start shipping to everyone who chose option A (“just send me the borked book”) or option B (“I’ll sticker the book myself”). I mentioned this in our last update, but we made the decision to include a sticker with every book, even if you said “nah just send me the misprint” because a lot of backers never saw the poll and we didn’t want those folks to get a borked book with no explanation or means to fix it.

So all those books should start going out…pretty soon! Sometime next month.

If you’re waiting for a stickered book, or a reprint, we have agreements in place to get all that taken care of, but we do not realistically know when it will happen. The folks stickering the books don’t have the stickers yet, and can’t give us an estimate of how long it’ll take until they do. That’s fair.

We are in the queue with a printer to get the reprints done. We believe the reprint will start printing in December, that’s the estimate the printer gave us, but the world is a particularly unpredictable place right now and so we’re not going to make any predictions or estimates about the future other than to say…we’re in the print queue and we think the presses will start rolling in December.

Again, we thank you for your extreme patience. While the creative side of the company is full-steam on our next project, the production side of the company is still 100% full time on this problem and making sure you folks get your books and minis and DM screens and just everything.

It’s been a colossal slog through this problem but everyone on the team is excited for folks to finally start getting their books and minis which, for some people, will start happening in just a few weeks!

Stickers and Shipping Update
almost 2 years ago – Sat, May 28, 2022 at 04:32:45 AM

Hey everybody, Matt Colville here! Figured it was time for a K&W update.

Obviously from the outside looking in, it seems like all anyone is talking about is the Monster Book, which we don’t need to go into here, this isn’t a plug. But that’s only the Dev side of the company. Me and James, Jason and the art team.

Meanwhile the entire production team is exclusively focused on shipping Kingdoms & Warfare and that is quite an extraordinary amount of work from my point of view, just based on the number and complexity of discussions happening in our internal Discord. So let’s break down where we are and what’s going on.

The Stickers & The Survey

The process of going through the survey and connecting every answer to a Kickstarter pledge OR Backerkit preorder has been a herculean task for the production team, but fortunately it’s a Hercule Poirot task, just requiring brains (which we have a little of) and persistence (which we have in great abundance), and not a task for the literal son of Zeus (who appears to be afk).

In fact this process is ongoing! Though we’re down to the last few now. Once this is done, we could start sending out shipments to the folks who answered “just send me my stuff I don’t care about the error!”

However, there are two other things to consider. Well, three if you include that it’s taken several weeks just to link the survey answers to Kickstarter backers.

First, several thousand people never filled in the survey. Ok, we knew that was going to happen, no way to force people to check their emails and fill in surveys. These folks are going to get their books and likely have no idea that there was ever a problem. So they’ll be surprised and confused when they find the printing error.

Second, the stickers look pretty good! They’re specially cut and designed to make it easy to peel and apply, there are instructions for how to do it and in general I feel pretty positive about them.

So when it was “stickers in a couple of months, or borked book now” the survey choices made more sense. But given that it’s taking time to link each survey answer to a Kickstarter/Backerkit anyway, and the stickers look pretty good, we’re getting to the point where there won’t be a huge difference in shipping times between sending out the borked books, and the borked books with stickers.

Therefore! I made the decision to include a sticker sheet with each borked book. So even if you answered “just send me my borked book,” we’re going to send you your borked book, we’re just also going to include the sticker sheet because the difference is only going to be a few weeks in shipping times, and that way all the folks who never answered the survey will get a borked book with the solution for fixing it.

This way, even the folks who’ve never heard about the printing error will still get a book and the patch to fix it themselves if they so choose.

Here’s what the sticker sheet looks like…..


The Reprint

There’s just no good news here, wait times for printing continue to get worse which we knew was possible. We are in the queue at a printer, but it’s going to be a looong time before we get to the front of the queue. This is not a problem that money or smarts can fix, it’s just that there’s no paper. Anywhere. We reached out to a lot of printers all over the world and got the exact same answer from every single one.

The only bright side is; we DO have a printer for this job, we ARE in a queue, the books WILL get printed. Only thing we can do now is wait. And work on stickers. :D

Meanwhile…

Jason is making assembly guides for all the minis! You can check some of them out here…

https://help.mcdmproductions.com/article/99-the-minis

Pretty cool! Eventually they’ll all have a guide. We also built a special filming set in our studio for the express purpose of recording Miniature Assembly videos. We also want to get painting videos done, but probably not by us. Stay tuned.

The Future of K&W and S&F

I just wanted to add a final developer note here which is that we had plans for all sorts of S&F and K&W support and products for the future, all of which were thrown into a cocked hat by the Shipping Apocalypse.

But we’re still incredibly proud of these products and the reception they received and we have no intention of just abandoning our back catalog. We had a ton of developer meetings this week and one of the things we talked about was more products using these rules, including a revision for Strongholds & Followers that drags it out of the “homebrew rules from the ‘80s we polished and published” world and into the “professionally developed MCDM product” world. So I’m pretty confident that’s gonna happen.

You folks already know how useful and powerful a tool the Domains and War rules can be, so the next step is making products (like adventures, setting material) that use these rules.

Thanks for your continued patience, everyone. I feel like you folks are as patient as we are persistent and together we’re gonna weather this ridiculous printing situation. :D

Link To The Book Fix Survey
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 11:39:07 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Kingdoms & Warfare: Urban Intrigue
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Apr 09, 2022 at 05:25:22 AM

Hey folks! Matt Colville here again. I come bearing gifts! :D

Back in the dim prehistory known as 2020 when we were all still working on Kingdoms & Warfare, our lead tester Pesto Enthusiast (aka Spencer Hibnick) was very inspired by the ideas and systems inside the book.

He was so inspired, he wrote an entire 38-page supplement for the book! URBAN INTRIGUE.

This book has three new city-themed NPC Realms that you can drop right into your existing campaign: a spy network posing as a book club, a mercantile guild run by kobolds, and a circle of ooze-studying wizards! Each domain has a unique title, features, and powers. Plus, there are five new units inside, including the Cubic Volume, a giant gelatinous cube that breaks into smaller oozes, and the Estate, a unit of gargoyles. Each new realm has an action-oriented leader and stat blocks for every officer—14 new NPCs in all. You also get three new magic items, including a revolution-loving, Dwarvish-speaking warhammer, and two new spells—bind ooze and conjure oozes!

Now, Spencer did this on spec, meaning for free, on his own initiative. Then he sent it to our lead designer James, who read it and declared...it was good!  James and I agreed that MCDM should buy it from Spencer and treat it like a real product, meaning put it through all the same testing, editing, layout as a normal product and then…sell it!

I think we still might do that! But in our Monday meeting James announced that testing and editing were done and I thought…well…why don’t we just…give it to people? For free. Just send it to the folks who backed the Kickstarter.

Sure we may yet illustrate the whole thing and sell it in our store, but that would be later. For now, given all the printing nonsense that just happened I thought “Let’s give these folks a break, they’ve been so patient. I think they’ll get a big kick out of this.”

So here it is! Just click the link!

https://mcdm.gg/UrbanIntrigueV01 

https://mcdm.gg/UrbanIntrigueV01Grey
 

"V01Grey" is for folks who might have some color-blindness and find the greyscale version easier to parse.

Spencer worked really hard on this, we put it through all the same testing as any other product (which is to say, quite a lot) and I think it shows off how powerful these rules are and the variety of things you can do with them!

Check Your Promotions Folder!
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Apr 09, 2022 at 04:18:20 AM

Hey folks! Matt here! We've gotten a lot of reports of folks finding the Unborking Your Book email in their Gmail Promotions Folder. So please check there if you think you haven't received your survey email yet. Could be in your spam folder, you never know. 

Stickers!

We're still sourcing stickers from a couple of different companies, because obviously we want to get this right. But we've already received some samples! 

This is an example of what one of the two stickers will look like. This isn't a GREAT pic, but it's also not the final sticker. We're just including it here because we want folks to get a basic idea of what the stickers will look like.

The final stickers will closely match the background and should be easy to peel and stick, no need for you to use scissors or a paper cutter or anything. And if we stick it for you, no need to do anything!

Once we have the final stickers we'll send you an update showing how they look.