The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. The softcovers have been completed, with the inevitable hiccups you’ve all been expecting. Instead of holding them for pickup, they attempted to UPS ship 18 boxes of books to me. OOPS. Luckily, we were able to intercept them before they arrived and get them back to our garage/warehouse before it caused more than a little bit of a delay in starting to get the first round of shipments out the door.
K&T Softcovers
The hardcovers take longer to be printed since the case-bound covers and binding are outsourced to another vendor. We’ve gotten printed proofs of the cover and aside from a small spacing adjustment on the back cover, we think they look great and are excited to get those in! Those are currently on track to be done by the second week of July.
Hardcover Proof
Shipping schedule & details
It’s going to go more or less like this:
First round: The simplest shipments go out first, because we're having to do our own fulfillment. That means the 220-ish U.S. domestic orders for a single softcover book are the first ones to process. This weekend, Ryan begins packing and shipping those orders (now that he's back from another work trip).
Second round: The prep for single book, U.S. domestic hardcovers are next, and will get weighed for postage, labels printed, then packed, and shipped.
Third round: the more complex and international orders. This is a minority of orders but will take the most amount of planning and energy and we need to make sure we have all our ducks in a row in order to get those packed up correctly.
Last round: any very-late or leftover orders that came in after we set deadlines and started printing postage. I think there are maybe two or three of these at this point, but who knows what that'll look like when we get to it!
By the time Gen Con rolls around in early August, we are expecting to have shipped out the vast majority of books, which is great because we’ve already sold out five tables of K&T games.
The future of K&T
Ryan has started drafting and testing some of the play aids we’ve got planned, along with revising the ones we already have up (as they need updating). We’ll post them to the Galileo Games product page when they’re ready. We'll also periodically announce updates to those materials on our social media, and plan to have them as a free DriveThruRPG product you can "buy" so you get notifications of any additions.
As shipping progresses and other big projects that are looming come towards closure, we’ll begin putting together more specific project plans for the planned supplements. Ryan has been silently hard at work with all the supplements, including developing notes made over the last week about how hunters and technomages should take advantage of new concepts, how a variant of the showdown mechanic could be fun for people who want to change their game up after a bit, etc.
But our priority for the rest of 2022 is to get the books out to you, get play aids done so it's easier for people to play the game, and to settle on the supplement order.
Books are headed to print!
almost 2 years ago
– Thu, May 19, 2022 at 07:12:25 PM
All of my memories keep you near. / In silent moments imagine you here.
This is the final notice for backerkit surveys. Because....
The books have been sent to print! Here's what our rough expected logistics look like for the next little while:
6-8 business days; printer will turnaround a proof copy for us to review.
Once we approve the proof, printing begins. Hardcovers and softcovers are on slightly different timelines.
6-8 days projected for the softcovers, 24-28 days for the hardcovers.
We're hoping to start mailing out softcovers and the backstory cards add-ons during the first week of June, before Origins. All orders with hardcovers will necessarily ship out later than that. As an aside, we are not intending to have books for sale at Origins; we're not releasing anything but the PDF to the public before all shipments to backers are sent out.
We have roughly 500 packages to pack and ship across roughly two batches. Hopefully, that will go quickly and smoothly and we will be done by the end of [date approximation redacted because how well has that ever gone for us?]
JUNE. End of June.
Dumb jokes aside, we're looking forward to getting these books out to you.
-Tim
It is done. Go get it at BackerKit.
almost 2 years ago
– Sat, May 14, 2022 at 12:42:03 PM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Printing Update
about 2 years ago
– Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 10:15:38 PM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
February ‘22 Update
about 2 years ago
– Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 08:02:22 PM
Hey Katanakateers! We've had the book in your hand for nearly two months now, which gave us a few weeks off from the project. Ryan spent all of January moving from an apartment into a house (during snow season), and is currently recovering from surgery he had literally the day after he finished moving. Tim is in the middle of a very intense semester at school, plus a couple of week-long travel stints including a sibling’s wedding, all while working on making progress on other projects. And now we're back to full-speed on this!
Still calling for typos and book issues!
For the first update of 2022, we have a request: if you have any notes regarding typos or other issues with the PDF, please let us know! We got several within the first few days of release. We're going to implement the changes in our queue soon, so we're putting out a call for any last-minute typos or other issues in the book;please post them to update #51!
(A little behind-the-scenes frustration: Every time Ryan opens one of the InDesign files in our shared folder, random cross-references desync and need to be manually re-established. That doesn't happen when Tim opens the files, so we have a bottleneck due to something weird about our InDesign setup.)
That also means you can expect an updated PDF in late March.
The horizon
We're currently in the process of working with our artist for cover art, and we’ve gotten through two rounds of 8 thumbnail sketches. Nothing to show yet as we sent back some significant notes on the sketches—thus they wouldn't look anything like the final cover—but we're hyped for it! When we have something worth your attention, we'll for sure plaster it on an update. :)
We’re still targeting March for submitting our print order. This is (perhaps obviously) contingent on the cover being done, but isn’t otherwise blocked at this point.
Both of us have been talking for over a year about what supplements should be in the pipeline, and our main consensus is: Once we know when we're shipping the book, we can work from there to handle our supplement production schedule. As far as what to produce, we have a list, but we'd like to see how people play the game and what negative and positive elements they find before we cement a publication order.
