Grand Heist: Look at All These Stretch Goals
over 7 years ago – Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 07:54:38 PM

Hello, friend. Welcome to the stretch goal sprint that this campaign has suddenly turned into.

In the time since I went to bed last night we've punched through four more stretch goals, which have brought five new promo cards to the box and some sturdier tokens. Let's take a look at what we've got, shall we?

$31,000 brings us our next Legendary Thief promo card.

They said it couldn’t be done, and she took that as a dare.

They said you’d need a team of talented burglars to make it happen, so she did it by herself.

They said it couldn’t be stolen, but when they opened the case it was gone.

And in the end they said that there was a shadow on the roof that night, and a silk rope lowered down from above. They said someone found scratches from a grappling hook wrapped in muffling cloth on the stone edge of a tower, and light footprints in the mud on the shore of the river. And she laughed at them all, for none of that was how she’d done it.

They didn’t know her name, so after the third heist the broadsheets gave her one, saying that the Cat had struck again. She saw the headlines, and approved of the title they bestowed. For the Cat she was, stealing for the game of it, working alone and never seen. She was the best there was.

The best, of course, always attracts attention. It took a while for the one in the shadows to find her, but when they did the offer they made was generous indeed. More targets, more intelligence, smarter plans and support: it was something that she could see herself getting used to. She didn’t like to work with others, of course, but they promised to keep their other minions out of her way, and let the genius do her work. All they wanted was for her to keep doing what she’d been doing, but moving in the direction that they asked, and opening the way for others to come through and steal everything else.

She didn’t have to consider it long before she said yes. The Cat had a crew now, and though the leader of that crew knew she was a difficult and temperamental sort, they also knew that tomorrow the broadsheets would be screaming a new headline, and all the wealth that was once out of reach would be brought within their grasp.

 $32,000 brings us the Intrigue Pack, a collection of three new Hidden Agendas.

• The Conspirator: You work in the shadows, fighting secret wars beyond the sight of most. Gain extra coins when other players fail to complete their Hidden Agendas.
• The Provocateur: You want this city to riot, but you know that the one who starts it is the one that gets taken out first. Gain extra coins if the thieves' code of honor was broken during the game, but only if it was done by someone other than you.
• The Braggart: You're the best, and everyone needs to know it. Reveal this Agenda and gain extra coins whenever you complete a heist by yourself.

 $33,000 introduces the third Legendary Thief promo card.

There is a rhyme that the children sing in the broken quarter, laughing as they skip over the fractures in cobblestone roads long-since abandoned by anything resembling a repair crew. It’s a song they were taught by other children, and they by others, with no one knowing where it came from or what it means.

"Look in every shadow, peer through every crack, and if your eyes are quick, you will see him looking back. "

The old man in the ruined mansion smiles when he hears it drifting through his window. He knows what the rhyme is about. The children do not. All they know is that the man will pay black pennies in exchange for rumors, and bright copper for solid facts. Bring him a story from the upper city, and he will pay in silver, and you’ll eat well for an entire week.

The man does not give out gold, but if you bring him a coin of that precious metal he will take it from your hand and tell you what you want to know. What windows are left unlocked, and what guards have a love of drink. What secrets have been hidden, and why. What doors can never be opened, and where their lost keys may be found. He knows a lot of things, does old man Shackleton. Things that can be yours if the price is right.

The one in the shadows came to Shackleton one day with an offer. The old man refused. He wasn’t part of a crew, he said. He was his own operation, and needed no other. The one in the shadows negotiated, and Shackleton argued, and eventually they came to a compromise.

Shackleton would pass along what he knew. About the nobles and the merchants, about the temples and the wizards, and about the other thieves of the city. But in exchange, he got a cut. Of everything.

The one in the shadows didn’t like this deal as much as the ones that had been made with Highway John and the Cat. But a deal is a deal, and though they know that the old man won’t be willing to work with them for long, they also know that while they’ve got him on their side they have the heart of the city in their grasp, so for the moment they are pleased with the deal. For now. There’s always time to renegotiate later, after the knives come out.

With the campaign at $34,000, we've got enough funding to make the coin tokens out of plastic instead of chipboard. This one isn't a Kickstarter exclusive or promo: every copy of the game has now been upgraded to plastic tokens.

Up next: the final Legendary Thief card on the stretch goals track, a man who's very name is a thing of terror, a creature out of nightmares that walks the streets on nights when the moon is dark and the hearthfire gutters out. They call him the Poisoner, the Dollmaker, and the Bloody Eye, and despite our most fervent prayers he is coming to pay a visit to the old city. Don't step outside when the mist is tinged red.

I'll see you on the other side.

Cheers,

Adam

Second Stretch Goal: Skill Tokens
over 7 years ago – Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:10:32 AM

Our second stretch goal has been knocked out, just hours after the first! The pace of things is accelerating, it seems.

The skill tokens have two sides to them, one with the skill icon and one with the skill icon overlaid with a minus sign. They serve a very practical purpose: keeping track of what boosts and penalties have been applied over the course of a complicated heist. With this stretch goal reached, we have enough money to add a set of these to each copy of the game produced. That's including the retail version--this one isn't a Kickstarter promo like the Legendary Thieves are. The skill tokens are in the game for good now.

Our next stretch goal is the second Legendary Thief: a lone genius who doesn't work well with others. The most daring heists are dared alone.

Thanks again for backing.

Cheers,

Adam

This Is Your Crew (Also: A Note on Hats)
over 7 years ago – Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:08:59 AM

We funded this morning! The campaign is over the line! This game is getting made!

Thank you again for backing. I've been working on this thing for so long, and now to finally have the ability to publish it, well...that's just fantastic, right there. You're allowing me to do that, with your support. This city of crooked alleys has been built with your hands, and I cannot thank you enough for that.

A Note on Hats

I'd said a couple of times throughout the campaign (in comments and by private message, mostly) that I was planning on adding the NoHAT hat that I've been seen wearing in many pictures and videos to the campaign when it funded. Now that I'm planning on using a pledge manager, though, I think I'm going to hold off on that further and only sell them after the campaign.

The reason for this is one of basic finances: I'd be selling them for $29, and due to the high manufacturing and shipping costs would only be able to use $5 of that on the game (and that $29 would include shipping to the United States only, so any international backers who want one would be paying even more). So any hats that were pledged for during the campaign would end up artificially inflating the funding goal by at least five times the amount I could actually use for anything, which would be great for hitting stretch goals but not great for actually being able to produce those stretch goals afterward. That's a poor way of doing business.

So you can buy them afterward, if you want. If any stretch goals are hit by hat money after the campaign (the $5 I can actually use, not the $29 that they cost), I'll let you know, and add them to what everyone's getting.

If you don't know what hats I'm talking about, they're these ones:

 And that's the word on hats, and funding.

Thank you again, so very much, for backing the campaign.

Cheers,

Adam

This is the payoff.

First Legendary Thief: Highway John
over 7 years ago – Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 07:49:12 PM

Now, this is cool. Funded and through the first stretch goal in the same day.

I think I might have trouble keeping up with this. We're already halfway to the next one.

That'll be a problem for later, though. For now, let's meet the first card added to the box.

There was a man who sat at the table in the corner, holding court like he was king of the tavern floor. The poor folk came to him there, and laid their troubles before him, and he gave them his smile and all the words they wanted to hear. For most he offered simple advice, honestly given, and for most that was enough. For some, he put a coin into hands that had never before touched true gold, and told them who to take it to so that their problems could be solved. And for those carrying weights too great for one person to bear alone he stood from his table and donned his cloak, and lent a helping hand.

It wasn’t often that the corner table was empty. On the rare occasions that it was, the folk of the narrow quarter would regale each other with stories of the man’s daring feats. Tales of coach robberies in the rain, of offended gentlemen stripped of their purses and ladies robbed of their rings. Of a rich carriage taking a wrong turn on the highway and a man in a cloak and broad-brimmed hat stepping into the road with a smile. He was always charming in these stories, always brave, never really the heavy of the piece. They loved their rogue at the corner table, and would hear no ill said of him. Even the City Watch spoke of him with respect, and stepped carefully about his court, for they knew that his generosity had kept their families fed when times were hard. It was easy for them to look the other way. After all, it’s not like he ever took anything of theirs, and though he got into plenty of scraps it’s not like he ever killed anyone. Or at least not anyone they knew.

He was a rogue, yes. A villain and a thief. But it was the city that had made him that way, not his own nature. And so for the same reasons that the nobles and bankers cursed the name of Highway John, those below praised him, and thanked him, and told stories about him during long nights at the bar or tired days sitting on the stoop at the corner. And for John, that was enough, because for him it was never really about the money.

The one who watched from the shadows didn’t like his generosity. They didn’t like that the lion’s share of every job John pulled went to the poor and desperate, instead of the pockets of someone who’d worked to steal that gold. But they knew that Highway John was good at what he did--better than anyone else they’d ever seen, in fact--and they knew they needed those skills. And the love of the common folk could be a handy thing sometimes, when the Watch closed in and it looked like there was no way out. A useful man, was Highway John, despite his flaws of charity.

They stepped out of the shadows one night and made him an offer. They had a plan, and they needed someone to put it into play for them. It was a good plan, and the only ones who would be hurt would be those who had enough to lose that it wouldn’t matter; or at least, that was what they told John. The one in the shadows pitched it to the highwayman as a venture to get more money for his people, far more than there ever would be in a single carriage on the highway. The narrow quarter would feast, they said, and what was broken could be mended properly, rather than repaired with patch and glue. Lured by that prospect, it did not take long for the man at the corner table to agree.

They walked out side-by-side, two cloaked figures dark against the night, and before the door had even closed the folk in the bar began adding another verse to the legend of Highway John.

Some Backer-Requested Add-Ons, and A Couple More Masterminds
over 7 years ago – Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 12:03:44 AM

Hello, friend. An update for you.

If you're interested in the meat of the thing, skip down to the images, but the basic gist of it is that I've added some new add-ons to the campaign based on suggestions from backers, as well as a couple more MASTERMIND slots, in order to boost us over the edge and out into the broken city beyond the funding goal. For details, read on.

To my everlasting surprise, while running this campaign people keep asking me if there are any extras they can pledge for. Backers have at various points asked me about expansions (which I have planned, but don't have playtested and don't have the art budget for), about play mats (which would be too big to fit in the box), about game boards (ditto), about special tokens and badges (which actually made it into the campaign, in the form of the Guilder) and a whole host of others that I had never thought people would be interested in.

Here's the thing: I'm not intrinsically opposed to add-ons. However, I am very much committed to having the core $45 pledge contain all of the content that the game has. I don't want to do mini-expansions as bonus pledges or anything like that, it all has to be in one box. Similarly, I don't want another box to have significantly better components than the base game, preferring instead to upgrade the base game as much as possible for every backer. So any add-ons that I add to the campaign now, to help us get over the funding goal as the campaign enters its final four days, would have to A) Not be something that will make people feel like they don't have the full game if they don't buy it, and B) Still be something that people would be interested in.

After discussing it with backers in the comments, by private message, and in person, I think I've come up with some more stuff you might be interested in. If you're not, that's cool too! None of it is necessary to play the game. They are, as add-ons should be, somewhat extraneous.

Except for the action coin, that one's actually useful.

 AND THAT'S NOT ALL!

Related Note: Pledge Management

To handle these new add-ons, as well as the older Guilder add-on (which is way, way more popular than I thought it would be--seriously, I'm going to be mailing out 70 of those things, and that's only thus far) I'm likely going to use a pledge manager after the campaign instead of relying on my own skills with a spreadsheet and notepad. What this means for you is...basically nothing. You'll get an email after the campaign with a link to a survey run by the pledge manager software, you'll enter in what you pledged for and your shipping information, and I'll get a nice spreadsheet with everything filled out already instead of having to fill out everything in the backer report by hand, like I've been doing up until now.

I didn't think the campaign would get big enough to require a pledge manager, to be honest, but people keep giving me good ideas, and it'd be a shame to not put them in.

Before I leave you tonight, one more thing...

New Masterminds

I have 126 unique cards in the game that need art, and 10 MASTERMIND pledge slots to get backers' faces on those cards. The only real limit to the number of those that I put up is the time I'm willing to spend on them after the campaign, and if it helps us fund this thing then I will make time to handle it. So I'm opening up some new MASTERMIND slots.

That said, when I say "New Masterminds" I only mean two. Grab 'em while they're hot, because I won't be adding any more of the limited pledge levels after this.

That's all for now. You're probably going to hear from me again soon, as we close in on the funding goal and the end of the campaign.

Coming next:

• The Funding Goal!
• The Word on the NoHAT Hat
• Probably Another Plea to Share the Campaign With Your Friends, or Something Like That

Cheers,

Adam