August Update
over 2 years ago – Sun, Sep 04, 2022 at 09:10:47 PM

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

June Update - STL Drop and Physical Minis Shipping!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 08:37:17 PM

Greetings adventurers!

We have a big update for you this month.  First we are incredibly excited to share the first terrain STL drop that is available now, you can find more details below.  Second, we have finished printing the majority of the minis for folks who ordered the collectors edition and will be ready to start shipping them out next month!

Meanwhile we have been hard at work continuing to model more terrain, build out battle maps and work on the book at the same time.

Desert Terrain STL Drop

The Desert Terrain pieces are ready! This is about 1/3 of the terrain STLs we will deliver for the project.  You can expect more in the drop next month.  All files are available now via BackerKit and will go live on our MyMiniFactory in the next few hours.

All the terrain pieces are designed to print fully SUPPORT FREE on FDM printers (except for Palm Tree leaves).  They should print support free on resin printers as well.

Physical Minis Shipping

For those who purchased the Collectors Edition and Sand Worm Collectors Edition, we are in the final phases of printing and priming your minis! We will be packaging them up and sending them out in July. We are so excited for you to get your hands one them! Can't wait to see some amazing paint jobs!

The sand worms turned out beautiful.

What's up next?

Our focus is still on finishing the book and sculpting the rest of the terrain. But we haven't forgotten about those beautiful battle maps! We will be dropping those soon as well.

As always... 

Thank you for all the love and support! -Devin & Jon

May Update - Lost in the Astral Sea
over 2 years ago – Mon, May 30, 2022 at 08:23:53 AM

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

April STL Drop & Updates!
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 12:07:21 PM

Greetings adventurers,

We are back with a huge monthly update and a very exciting milestone.  We have finished all of the character/monster minis for the campaign!  This is a huge milestone and represents the bulks of the 3D modeling work.   Now the focus will shift over to the terrain and scatter files which should come much more quickly.  

April STL Drop

Without further delay, here are the models in this month's drop.
 

File Delivery & MyMiniFactory

For users downloading files on BackerKit, we have removed all of the individual download links in favor of one huge Characters & Monsters zip file that has all of the models in it.  We have made sure that this file is neatly organized and has all of the latest versions of the models along with render images of the model in each folder.  If you would like to be sure that you got everything and have the latest versions be sure to download this.   We have included a link to download the file on both our file server and a link to Google Drive in case one of the services goes down as it is a 2GB file.

We have started curating our MyMiniFactory (MMF) page and are in the process of putting up the models there.  We had a lot of requests from backers to distribute the models on MMF for fulfillment and we felt like this milestone was the right time to do this.  We are currently working with the team over at MMF to help us get distribution setup to our backers.  You should receive an email from MyMiniFactory sometime in the next week or so inviting you to get access to the models there if you would like.  If you don't want to use MMF you can ignore the email and continue to download the models on BackerKit.  If you are a MMF user check out our page and give us a follow, we have a lot of awesome photos of the models up there as well!
 

Adventure Book Update

We have been running our process to plan out the remaining writing for the book.  We are in the process of compiling play test feedback, pouring over our session notes and figuring out what still needs to be written.  Completing the character models is going to allow us to shift more of our focus and time over to this work. 

Critical Fail Physical Book Update

We were ultimately unhappy with a few print issues on the first run of these books that we couldn't resolve with the online printer we were using.  We have found a local printer here in Boulder that should be able to get us the results we want.  The proof we got back at the end of the week looked great and we should get the printed copies on Monday!  We have also updated the PDF with version 1.1 on BackerKit that includes a few minor corrections and fixes.

If you are one of the backers that upgraded to the print version of this book or bought the top level collectors edition, be sure that your address is updated in BackerKit not later than Friday April 15 as we will be shipping out the Critical Fail books before the end of the month. 

Schedule Update

As promised, here is an update on how the schedule is looking now that we have had some time to come up for air.

• Critical Fail Physical Book - Shipping by the end of April!
• Terrain and Scatter - July 2022, monthly drops between now and then
• Battle Maps - August 2022, potentially some monthly drops ahead of this date
• Adventure Book, VTT Package - October 2022, hope to have a draft version before then
• Collectors edition minis - Now that we have all the minis done, we will work on sending out the survey so you can select your minis.  Look for an update with more details on this next month.  We want to start shipping you minis ASAP.

Moment of Zen

We did a photo shoot of the bunch of the printed STL files a few weekends ago and they came out great.  Here are a few of our favorites below, you can see them all on the Arcane Hound MyMiniFactory page.

We hope this update sparked joy,

Devin & Jon

February + March STL Drop
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 06:04:29 PM

 Greetings adventurers, we are back this month with another update.  February was a short month and it feels like just yesterday that we were putting out the last update.  We keeping putting out our updates the first week into the next month which has really bothered us, so we opted to name this update the Feb+March drop.   That will mean that the next drop will be the April drop in about a month.  It doesn't really change the cadence, it's more of a semantics thing.  Surely it was bothering some of you too? No, just us? 

Based on feedback we are now including images of the model in the folder alongside it.  We hope that this along with the readme file helps.  If you haven't been looking at the readme, we put some printing tips and info on the model in there such as best support settings, layer heights, if it was meant to be printed support free, etc.

Here are some close up renders of the models in this month's drop.  

Remaining STL Files

Character STLs

For those keeping track, we have 8 character/monster STL files remaining to deliver.  We are planning to deliver these in the April STL drop.  At that point we will also deliver one big zip file of all the character STL files so you can make sure you have downloaded everything.

What about the terrain?

When Devin finishes the character STL files he will move onto working on the terrain.  Creating character and monster models is a painstaking process involving a lot of detail, support creation and test prints which makes it very slow.  Terrain creation on the other hand is a much quicker process and we expect to deliver these within 1-2 months. 

Commercial Printing

We have had a number of backers ask about a commercial printing license and the ability to sell prints of our models.  As we near the completion of model delivery we are ready to launch one.  We took a look at a lot of the programs others were running and wanted to make something simple and friendly for all parties.    You can find the details of the commercial printing program here along with information to sign up.  In summary here is what the program looks like:

• 10% royalty on each sale.
• No monthly fees or signup fees to get into the program.
• No free models, you must buy the models yourself (you already did as a Kickstarter backer).

You can find more info and signup here if you are interested.

Critical Fail

We got our first proof of the print version of the Critical Fail 5E Rules Supplement.  It is really exciting to hold a print version in our hands.  Unfortunately there are a few printing quality issues that came up and we need to do another round of iteration with our printer.   Here are some pics of the first test print.

Battle Maps

We plan to build out the battle maps as we create the terrain STLs and you can expect battle maps to be delivered alongside the terrain STLs.  We are building out the battle maps and terrain to complement each other and intend for them to be used together if you choose, but they also work great independently.

Menagerie Adventure Book Update

We have both been running 2 different play test groups through the campaign over the last year and both groups are about 1 or 2 sessions away from finishing the campaign.  We have mountains of notes, stats and learnings from our campaigns to incorporate.  We also have a lot of artwork for the book that you have seen in the previous updates and still more to come.  At this point we expect the book to be delivered later in the summer.  We are really looking forward to shifting our focus from models to the book.

Coming Next Month

A sneak peek at one of the models in the drop next month.  If you thought regular mummies were scary, wait until you see the stats on this one.

Moist wishes,

Devin & Jon