The Book Error Survey Is Out!
about 2 years ago – Sat, Apr 02, 2022 at 12:52:41 AM

Ok folks, thank you very much for your patience. We have sent all backers and everyone who preordered on the mcdm shop an email, with a link to a google survey, that lets you pick one of four options for fixing the printing error with the books.

The email is sent to whichever email address we have of yours on file. Probably the email you used when you pledged. It takes a while to send these emails out. It's an automated process, but there's 24,000 emails to send so you may not see it until tomorrow, but check your spam folders and all your email inboxes.

The four options are;

• Send me my borked book now. This is the default option and the one that gets you your loot fastest.
• Send me my borked book and the stickers to patch it myself. 
• Nah Colville can sticker my book for me! 
• I'll wait for the reprint.

Whichever option you pick, all your loot will go out at the same time.  So if you want us to sticker your book, that's cool, just means you have to wait for that before getting your DM Screen or Minis, etc...

The survey will be live until April 11th. Anyone who doesn't respond (some people don't see the emails) will get one of the already printed books, which is the quickest option.

This was a ton of work getting an email list manager, our shop, backerkit, and probably a few other things I don't know about all working together and I want to thank Anna for handling it all.

I want to personally thank all of you: all the backers, everyone who preordered. When you pledged back in...well it was a while ago, you had no idea Covid was coming, no idea about the Shipping Apocalypse. The impact of all that is still ongoing, though getting better.

My attitude is always; you shouldn't have to worry about that stuff. It's our job to figure it all out and when there's a major malfunction, it's our job to un...bork it. And we have done our level best over here, not only to produce high-quality products you will love and use, but also unbork any problems that arise. Like this one! Grr.

Also thanks to everyone who replied to the last couple of updates and let us know how you'd like to see this handled. As I used to say when I was Lead Writer, "All feedback informs revision." If it wasn't for your feedback we wouldn't have these four options, which I think cover all the bases but also constrain the problem set to solutions we can actually implement.

Thanks again folks, I am very eager to see your reactions when your boxes of loot arrive!

Book Misprint Update
about 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 01:01:27 AM

This is Fleet Command….

Hey folks! Matt Colville here. Thanks for being patient while we sort everything out on our end.

As you know, there’s a problem with the books. Two problems in fact. There’s a text-flow problem that affects two pages, and the Deluxe Editions are missing their gold foil. We got some solutions in place that I think will make as many people happy as possible and which I believe in.

The reasons for all this are, as it turns out, many and complex, but right now I’m focused on solutions. At a high level the problem is; the manufacturing and shipping of the books was impacted by the shipping apocalypse in ways we, and our partners, didn’t anticipate. Even now that things are clearing up, just shifting gears from “we don’t print books right now” to “ok we’re printing books again” meant errors that don’t normally happen, happened.

Now, this sucks. It sucks that this problem exists! It sucks that after all of 2020 and then 2021 that we’re still dealing with problems like this. Also, let’s not forget the context here, it sucks that these books didn’t go out in 2021! Like we thought!

This means some folks are going to be upset that the books didn’t go out last year, some folks are going to be upset that there was a screwup with the printer. Being pissed about ANY of this is a perfectly legitimate reaction. I have been a pissed-off customer who just wanted their shit. Folks for whom MCDM’s reputation, or mine specifically, is permanently tarnished, I respect that.

But I believe in this product. I think when you see the goods, you will be impressed, so my goal is to give everyone an option that makes them happy. Including an option for “I’ll wait for the reprint.”

One of these options, I need to explain.

The Patch

The text-flow issue, which affects every copy of K&W right now, affects a small amount of text on two pages. It’s one column of text, and then a couple of paragraphs on another page.

One of the options is; we place stickers in your book with the correct text, that covers and fixes the error.

This sounds crazy, sounded crazy to me, but it turns out other companies have done this, for the same reason, and some folks on our team have those books! So I looked at the results and I was like “This is really good actually.” If you didn’t know there was a sticker there, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious. You might notice something, you’d notice it if you ran your hand along the page. But we’ve tested this solution locally, and it works.

Now, you may think just offering this as an option is…dumb, or bad. Ok, you have other options. But some people will be fine with the sticker solution and some people are gonna be curious to see the results! This is an option that will make some people happy, so we’re offering it.

This means us shipping the books from the warehouse to our office, then literally get everyone who works here together at the office and…we sticker the books! I hate that we have this problem, and I’m not hugely excited about having to sticker a bunch of books. But I admit, something about physically fixing the problem with my bare hands has a visceral appeal. :D

If you think “Stickers?? That’s ridiculous!” Ok, here are all the options:

The Survey

Next week we’re emailing everyone, including folks who preordered on the shop, a survey link with three options.

1: Just send me the book (and the rest of my stuff) with the misprint. This is the quickest option, since those books are already printed. This option was not hugely appealing to me until I saw the sheer number of people who let us know this was fine and the misprint wasn’t horribly egregious to them. Since we know there are folks who said they’re fine with this, we are including this option.

2: I’ll take a patched book. This is a book we literally patch with two stickers that we apply, you don’t need to do anything, and your book will have the corrected text. Other companies have used this solution when they’ve had similar problems, we’ve looked at them and it looks pretty good! In some cases it is not immediately obvious there was ever a problem in the first place.

3: I’ll wait for the reprint. This is a long-term solution as there are not printers who can do this book in these numbers with an open slot in their schedule right now. So this is a September/October option. This is the only option that will get Deluxe Edition folks their gold foil, but if you are one of them it means you WILL get your gold foil.

So you can have it now, slightly borked. A little later, patched. Or later later and the books are completely unborked. It’s important you know that whichever option you choose, your stuff will all go out at once. So if you ordered a book and some minis, and you pick the “wait for the reprint” option, you’ll get one box with all your stuff, just later this year.

It would be great if there were a “I want it right, and I want it now” option but that is not physically possible, so these options present the best array of solutions that I think will make the most people happiest and also actually get some people the books soon.

As I said above, some people are already irreconcilably pissed, some folks will be pissed at any or all of these solutions. But these are the solutions that we can make work and one of them means a completely unborked book, just later this year.

In spite of everything, this is the project I have worked hardest on in my life. This was more work than any video game I worked on, more than Strongholds & Followers and I am proud of it. I am proud of the design, of the art, of the minis, the screen, the whole thing. And I am hugely proud of this team, and this community.

I want everyone to get their shit, and this is how we’re gonna do it.

Edit: A lot of folks are asking if THEY can sticker their books. That is a good question an one of the first things we considered. Let folks sticker their own books!

But, and this is 100% my call, I made an executive decision, I want to make sure the stickers and their placement meet our standards before they go out. If we send you a sticker, you got one chance to get it right.  If it ends up misaligned, your book is now permanently Badly Stickered.

But A: we are gonna get REAL GOOD at putting stickers on books pretty quickly. :D B: if we screw up a book, we just don't send that book out. Our goal is to send out only well-stickered books.

Printing Error Update
about 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 06:06:44 AM

Hey everyone, it’s Anna -

This is a follow-up related to yesterday’s post, specifically about the part about the printing error we discovered. Sorry it’s taken this long to hear back, I wanted to make sure that the team and myself fully understood the scope of the issue and also have some serious discussions about next steps forward. The entire team is completely gutted that the books turned out like this despite all the work we went through to make sure this didn’t happen – especially after waiting such a long time, and this is the result.

Before I get into “next steps”, I want you to know that I feel absolutely awful for how I went about sharing that information, and even worse about the “solution” I suggested – which is obviously not a solution at all; it’s on us to fix this and me coming to the conclusion I did showed a total lack of judgment and misalignment with the principles that guide MCDM. It was completely tone-deaf and inconsiderate of the support and generous patience you’ve given our team as we’ve tried to jump over hurdle after hurdle with getting this project completed and into your hands in the way it was intended to originally.

While my intent was to be up-front about this, I admit to not having collected enough information after first learning about it to actually accomplish that and the impact pretty plainly speaks for itself, which is ultimately what matters most to us. You have every reason to be upset about the issue itself as well as how I presented it, and I also want to thank you for expressing yourself and appreciate the feedback on how I could’ve handled this much better than I did which I’ll be carrying with me into the future. We also want to thank you all for the suggestions; we’ve been reading through them and it’s been very helpful.

Which Content is Missing?

Now that we’ve had time to go over the print issue more thoroughly, I want to better define the scope of the  problem since my initial explanation wasn’t 100% accurate. What’s happened is the text under the “Communication Levels” section on page 25 isn’t missing – it’s shifted over to the right-hand column on the page instead of where it’s supposed to be on the left. This ends up pushing the rest of the text so on page 30 the text gets cut off in the middle of the “Building an NPC Realm” section.

Here are photos comparing the PDF with the print book; I’ve marked up where the missing text begins and ends in red, and the text still present in the printed book is marked in blue:

What Happens Now?

Let’s go ahead and cover what steps we’ve taken since finding this:

• We contacted the printer yesterday to suss out the root of the problem, and to discuss what options we can negotiate with them to best resolve this. They confirmed yesterday afternoon that it’s being investigated and gave us another update today that the investigation is ongoing and they’ll have more info early next week. While I have a hunch that this likely relates to their online file submission and review tool sending the old rejected file to the presses despite us providing the fixed one, we won’t know for sure until then.
  
• We are currently holding further fulfillment until we have more information. We know this sucks for those of you who are waiting on more rewards than the hardcover, but it’s of the utmost importance to us that we take the necessary steps to explore our options.
  

We don’t want to give you any more whiplash, so rather than suggesting a bunch of potential options that may not end up panning out we’re going to wait to hear back from the printer and in the meantime we’re exploring what else we can do.

Again, I am so incredibly sorry for the way I handled this yesterday. I hope that you find this update far more useful and informative. I 100% agree that something like this deserved to be called out separately, and that I should’ve given the team more time to thoroughly investigate this to avoid the stress it’s caused for everyone and be more respectful of your expectations for us, too.

We’ll provide another update as soon as we have something more concrete and useful to share with you.

Let's Look at the Rewards!
about 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 05:38:12 AM

Hey folks, happy Thursday (or Friday, for those on the other side)! Anna here again /waves

This update is going to be a lot of fun pictures of the Kickstarter rewards that we hope you enjoy. We've got pics of the books, GM screen, the warfare unit cards, and some of the minis. We're still working on putting together the final minis (we made a LOT and some of them are CHONKY), so we'll share those once we've made some progress and I'll take some photos of the t-shirts too.

The Books 

We finally received the advance production copies of Kingdoms & Warfare from our printer, and there's no way I can convey how beautiful they are. The paper stock used is absolutely perfect to show off Gustavo's cover art and all the lovely artwork in the book as it's slightly glossier which helps bring out the brilliant hues in each piece (as well as the border illustrations throughout).

I threw together a mini-photoshoot at home. Out of the bajillion and one pictures I took, these are the ones that made the cut—enjoy! :D

Happy Accidents

If you take a closer look on the bottom left of the standard book above, you'll find a surprise! The standard editions also have the red ribbon bookmark, even though it was only supposed to be on the deluxe editions. But! We're pretty glad this came about since the book is THICK. Having a built-in placeholder should be extra handy :)

Not-So-Happy Accidents

We ran into another kind of surprise, which is that the printer ended up using an older layout file where text was missing on page 25 :( This unfortunately affects all the books, and since the amount of text actually pushes the rest of the pages text onto the next pages, it ends up impacting page 29 and 30 as well.

Thankfully only these pages were impacted, and we've created a .zip folder that includes pages 25, 29, and 30 that you can print out and insert in your book. We'll also be adding these files to BackerKit, so you'll get an email when that happens where you can download them if the link above doesn't work.

Here's a couple pictures of the affected pages so you can identify it when you see it:

The PDF is unaffected, so that's always an option to easily reference this content as it was intended to be laid out as well.

The Deluxe Editions

While I was pretty certain that the case material on the K&W deluxe editions were going to match the Strongholds & Followers deluxe editions, I was still nervous that something might've been overlooked or gone wrong... 

But as soon as I removed the dust jacket, all my fears washed away — they're perfectly identical to their luxurious predecessor and will make quite the striking pair if you have both!

I've always loved books, so being a part of the printing process is super satisfying (even if I don't actually make the books :D ). Any time we get proofs in, my floor is usually covered in a flurry of post-it notes, various piles of different colored highlighters and pens, a forgotten mug of cold coffee, and then me hunched over all the papers triple-measuring everything and scribbling down notes to take back to our account rep.

The feeling I get seeing the S&F and K&W books finally together is difficult to explain. A lot of love and effort went into them over many years. We hope you enjoy using them just as much as we enjoyed working on them! ♥

The GM Screens

As seen in the picture above with the deluxe edition book, the GM Screens look wonderful and are full of encouraging notes from Matt himself. Once your players see you sitting behind the MCDM GM screen, they'll know they're in for a good time :)

Here's a few more shots when we received the finals at the office:

Warfare Unit Cards

The Warfare Deck contains 64 cards, with each card featuring a unique special unit to enhance your ability to run warfare using the rules from Kingdoms & Warfare. You can check out the full list of units here!

They're printed on 11pt card stock with a linen-textured UV coating to improve handling and appearance, and the deck is packaged in a classic paper tuck box with a high-gloss finish to increase its durability for many future game sessions (you might even catch a little easter egg when you open it for the first time!).

Since the cards are pretty aesthetically identical to one another, I only took a close-up shot so you can see the detail :D

The Minis

The minis featured below aren't all final production copies, but they were the assembled ones I was able to locate at the office (Jason is our mini guy, so most of the others are at his house with all the chickens). We do a lot of testing before finalizing the mini STL files with TrenchWorx to try and address any issues with sprue locations and ease of assembly. Many of the minis in this Kickstarter are extra-detailed, so we went through multiple iterations and we have two new batches of the final production minis arriving at the office soon so they can be put together.

Mini Assembly Instructions in Progress!

Jason's also been working on creating assembly instructions for the more complex minis, starting with the Onyx Dragon, Cthrion. This is 100% a work-in-progress, but should give you an idea of what's coming.

That's it for now; have a great weekend! :D

Kingdoms & Warfare has Started Shipping!
about 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 10:53:12 PM

Hello, Anna here! All of us at MCDM are very, very excited to share that physical rewards have begun shipping, starting with US backers :D 

There were a few more delays we ran into since our last update (we needed to get the deluxe versions of the book shrink wrapped so we could put a barcode sticker on them for the warehouse) and there was a SNAFU with the stickers which meant we had to get a new order of them reprinted and sent to the warehouse. But everything's there now! All the minis, gm screens, card decks, books, t-shirts, stickers... it's such a relief to finally reach this point in the project despite all the challenges we faced through 2020 and 2021.

US Fulfillment Status

Shortly after locking addresses for US backers, we were able to start shipping the pledges that didn't have books or stickers (since we were waiting for them to get to the warehouse), which helped us get more familiar with the BackerKit-EasyShip integration, and also to gauge how many shipments the warehouse is able to handle every week.

What we've learned has informed our current approach to fulfillment, which is to continue to ship out pledges for US backers in batches. The warehouse is still operating under new COVID safety guidelines (which we're in full support of) and that means they can only have so many folks on the floor to put together packages and ship them out. They're also still handling our normal volume of shop orders, so on weeks where there are less shop orders we'll be able to get more pledges sent out (and vice versa).

Shipping Email Notifications

• Once a shipping label has been created for your pledge in EasyShip, you'll receive an email with a tracking number from "[email protected]" (the sender name will be "MCDM"). The subject will be "Your order [order #] has been prepared!". Make sure to add that email address to your contacts so it doesn't accidentally get sent to your spam folder! :)
• Soon after you'll get an email from BackerKit letting you know your order has shipped, with a link to that same tracking number. The email address for this one is "[email protected]" and will be from "MCDM Productions".

Set Up Delivery Updates from Couriers

Most US rewards will be shipped through UPS or USPS. We recommend that you set up shipping alerts once you've received your tracking number email, and even more strongly recommend signing up for one of the online tools below depending on which courier is going to be delivering it:

•  UPS My Choice™: The basic version is free and will alert you about all packages being delivered by UPS to your address, and there is also a subscription option that gives you access to more tools that you'd normally have to pay for a la carte with their free version. Stuff like getting your package delivered on a different day, having it redirected to a different address, etc. which you might find useful.
•  USPS Informed Delivery®: This is also a free tool that will alert you about all mail and packages being delivered by USPS. It also has tools that let you reschedule and redirect packages if needed.

We expect that US backer fulfillment will complete by early May based on the sheer number of shipments we need to send out and the pace the warehouse is currently working at. It's always possible that if safety guidelines loosen that could help us ship more quickly, but for now that's an estimate we're confident in and we'll let you all know if that changes.

International Backers

We've been in a lot of meetings with the shipping teams over the past few weeks, especially with the invasion of Ukraine. Right now we're still going through the process of getting registered so we can import our products, but our partners have given us a heads up that processing could take longer than usual as there are currently bigger issues demanding the attention which is completely understandable. We don't yet know how the approval and actual importing process could be impacted, but after the last 2 years we're pretty familiar with the impacts on freight when there's a global emergency.

We're hoping that the registrations are signed off by end of April and we can lock in an ocean freight appointment before then, but right now we're in a bit of a holding pattern. Until things are more settled, we're going to hold off on locking addresses in BackerKit, so you can still update it yourself if needed. Click here to access your pledge. 

We really appreciate your patience, and are hoping to have some good news for you soon!

We're Confirmed UK-Friendly!

We were able to work out a solution with the shipping team so if you live in the UK you shouldn't have to pay any taxes or duties when the package arrives :)

MCDM Shop Preorders

If you preordered through the MCDM Shop, your order is currently scheduled to ship once all the backer rewards have been dispatched. We've started a new blog specifically for Kingdoms & Warfare development on the shop where we'll provide separate information so as not to create confusion between Kickstarter fulfillment and preorder fulfillment. We'll have more information up there soon, so stay tuned!