Delvers to Grow (Dungeon Fantasy RPG, Powered by GURPS)
Created by Douglas H. Cole
Fast, modular character generation. Would-be heroes from 62 points and higher as player characters, henchmen, or supporting cast.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Morning! Welcome to Day 3
almost 3 years ago
– Sun, May 09, 2021 at 03:42:21 PM
Still having a good first weekend, and that's even before the first Tuesday of the campaign. Tuesdays seem to be "Kickstarter Day," when many campaigns launch and many folks come online. So that's a great day to mention the campaign, link a podcast, or dragoon your friends and acquaintances into coming by.
As I woke up, we'd passed $14,000 and the pledge average is holding strong. If we continue at this pace, we'll fund at about 350 backers, and after that it's all about recruiting for stretch goals.
But today is Mother's Day here in the USA, so my time in front of the computer doing Kickstarter things shall be limited. I'll be back on with more going on - including a video walkthrough of building a character, in a day or so!
For now, I write, while my wife sleeps. As she should.
Day 2 Begins Well; Attack of Opportunity Podcast
almost 3 years ago
– Sat, May 08, 2021 at 01:28:04 PM
A Fine Night
Unlike playing the Pandemic boardgame (which is fun, as opposed to playing the pandemic home game, which is horrible), where "One Quiet Night" is a good card to play...we had a very active night, and jumped up several thousand dollars. That means in the first 24 hours we crushed through 50% funding. This is outstanding.
In fact, based on a question from one of my Patreon supporters, the Delvers to Grow campaign is off to the best start of any Dungeon Fantasy RPG campaign to date, with a few more backers and 25% more funding than any prior campaign. (The record-holder for me on Day 1 is my More Perilous Journeys campaign for TFT for funding, and my Character Collections campaign for backer counts).
But in any case: we ended the first 24 hours halfway there. Given we haven't yet begun to really hit the outreach stuff, that's not bad.
Attack of Opportunity
Speaking of outreach, my first podcast of something like five or six went live in both Podcast and Video format over the last few days.
Jeff Ball of RollMongers was a gracious and engaging host. He and I covered a lot of fun ground, and we'll talk again, I'm sure. It was that kind of rapport.
With stretch goals based on backer count, and my ability to do really awesome projects (like 250-page Bestiaries and multi-book Mission X RPGs) limited by the size of my audience, I cannot stress enough how important having folks drop a kind word, a link, a review, a blog post into their social media feeds is.
Also important is contributing to some of the ongoing threads and discussions in more public forums. If I do it, it's just promotion. Folks turn that out. If YOU do it, it's endorsement, and that goes a lot farther.
Here are a few places where conversations are already ongoing:
These are good places to start...and I'm always looking for more. I intend to put some stuff up on some of the other sites that are broad RPG forums, but these tend to drown in other promo if they're launched by the publisher.
In any case: we got off to a great start, look for updates with more podcasts and video links (I did another last night that should go live over the next few days), and spread the words:
Forget all you've heard about making characters in GURPS. This gets you to the table about as fast as "roll 3d6 six times, pick a class and race, equipment, and start walking to the Keep on the Borderlands"
This new book supports play at levels from "barely competent" to "mighty-thewed hero" seamlessly. Zero to Hero or Epic Legend is all on you.
And we're off! A very strong start!
almost 3 years ago
– Sat, May 08, 2021 at 08:31:02 AM
Hello, and welcome to Gaming Ballistic's . . . wow. Eleventh Kickstarter. That's not bad.
We got off to a great start today. The funding goal is fairly high on this one, but we're over 40% of the way there on the first day. And not only is that not a bad percentage, it's also the highest first-day total for any of my prior Dungeon Fantasy RPG projects.
In the first seven hours, we've averaged a very healthy pace, and if things continue, we'll fund somewhere around 340-350 backers. That's not a bad place to be.
I'm super excited about this project. Although I've been playing GURPS since 1989, I think it's always been the case that one of the slower parts of enjoying a GURPS game has been making the character. It requires patience, some rules knowledge, and even with help from programs like GCA or GCS, can take a while.
You can speed time to table with pre-generated characters, but that takes the choices out of the players' hands completely, except "which one."
Delvers to Grow aims to change that, embracing the niche protection of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, but modularizing it so that once you make the profession choice, the number of choices you have to make is minimized.
That doesn't mean all characters are the same. Far from it. But you can get from "blank sheet" to "game on" in as little as 5 minutes, and a few rounds of testing have shown 10-20 minutes is pretty typical.
So I'm crazy-excited at what Kevin (the author, and also author of Nordlondr Folk and Hand of Asgard) is doing here. It's a lot of work up front, but it pays off with a lot of satisfying characters made very quickly.
I think Kickstarter is limiting the number of rewards I can cram into the "I Want it All" package. Suffice it to say that the text in the campaign description is correct, and YES, you get every digital and physical stretch goal, and YES, you get PDF and Print versions of everything Gaming Ballistic has done for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG to date, AND you get the Boxed Set and Monsters 2 in physical form (no PDFs).
"Sold separately" that's about $465 worth of stuff. Even with typical Print/PDF discounts that I do at Gaming Ballistic, it still is over $400 worth of goodies.
Layout Taking Shape
As you might imagine, this is a very text-heavy manuscript thus far. Lots of stat blocks and modules and upgrades, Oh My.
So as Kevin tweaks the manuscript and brings it in to final form, things move around a bit. So take the following spread (which I also added to the Kickstarter page) with a grain of salt...because it simply cries out for some art somewhere on the page, probably on the right, and that'll push some text around.
Maybe what I need is my fictionalized image of my Viking Martial Arts instructor!
Everything's better with an angry Viking
Stay tuned, though. There's all sorts of stuff coming. I'm on quite a few podcasts coming up, and I suspect we'll do a few walkthroughs as we go on using the chargen system to quickly make characters.
Backer-Count Stretch Goals
A somewhat unique feature of this campaign - which I used in my prior one for TFT to very good effect - is that all the stretch goals are based on backercounts, not dollars. Funding takes care of making the books, and making them well, which is why the level is set where it is.
But the more people that come on board, the more I can include with the pledges - all of them - because of scale. My goal here is to blaze past 1,000 backers if we can. But to do that, I need your help to reach beyond the usual pool of folks.
The project of all the ones I've done to date except maybe one other is particular apt to recruit new gamers. If they have been curious about Powered by GURPS, but felt daunted, this book is the quick-start way to get playing. If they like the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, but wanted to start lower on the power scale, this book has you covered. It's a great opportunity to expand the pool of great people who play our game.
Well. Enough! Thanks for joining the campaign, and getting it off to a banner start. More later!
