Ready-to-play individual personalities for The Fantasy Trip.
I want to say it explicitly. Since I'll be ordering books today, that means I will be locking shipping addresses on Friday.
If you need to make any changes to your shipping address...please do so immediately.
Yesterday I processed all the errors submitted to me; this morning I got two more on Wizards (misspellings of names), and I corrected those. The files go out shortly.
Today I shall ensure that the ISBNs, barcodes, and print covers are all as they should be, and place the orders for domestic print books.
Once that's done, I can start work on the cards for Five Perilous Journeys and Character Collections, all of which are more or less ready to spool out, all the information either on-hand but in need of rearranging, or easily assembled. In fact, I just thought of a great way of re-doing the 5PJ deck for the new printer, so "yay."
But basically, "this is manufacturing week," where my "to-dos" include
Once I have the card and counter printing underway and all of the testing lined up with a notion of when all of the not-the-US materials will arrive in the UK, I'll fire off the very small order for the roughly 36 books each of the new stuff for not-the-USA customers.
The orders for the counters are complicated by a Chinese holiday schedule, but we should be past that this week.
I'll keep you posted.
Well, happy Friday! Next week I'm going to enter in all of the submitted errors in the four books. There have only been perhaps a dozen submitted. Now, it's possible that the proofing team and I did that good a job. I mean, we tried.
But nonetheless, if you see anything this weekend, please use
to submit it.
I'm going to start spooling off final files to print early next week. As soon as that's done, I'll make cards and have them begin manufacturing as well. Turns out this week is a national holiday in China so the counters are delayed a week. I've got nine of fourteen sheets ready to go, and will be working on the last five over the next few days as well.
With luck, all physical elements will be in to manufacturing by the end of next week.
We're down to 17 people who have yet to fill out surveys; a partial handful of those are "No Reward" or "Follow the Campaign" backers who will never do so, as well. So we're about 97 practical completion here. PDF rewards have gone out, and I've received about a dozen errata reports that I'll be looking into in a few days.
I've also been working on templates for the counters. I was really worried that this would be a problem...but Affinity Publisher to the rescue. I think I'll be finishing the CC4 sheet today, just having to put more labels on the counters, and ensure that I understand how things get printed so that they work. Even so, I feel I have a solid way of organizing these for relatively easy output...and the labels that I need should be able to be printed right on the cardboard.
Today I expect to hear from my testing lab about what additional labels are required.
But basically, today will be a "replication day." Go through CC2 and CC3, then the five sheets of counters for each of 5PJ and MPJ.
Once labeling and layout are done, I'll kick off manufacturing. I think I'll be ordering 125 sets of these things each.
The first thing is a right-away thing: How many copies of old volumes do I need, and do I have them on hand? If I've got them, that's that. If not, I can bring them in from storage, and I'll kick that off now. The only one I might NOT have seems to be Vampire Hunter Belladonna...but I only need 40-42 of the highest volume older books. I know I've got most of that. I also need a new on-hand report from my UK fulfillment company. As long as I have 2 books of the older stuff...I'm safe.
Once the counters are done, I'll process errata on the books. Then output new versions for both PDF and output finals for print, and get the three new books printing (I've got more than sufficient stock on hand for CC1).
The last step is cards. Taking the information from the More Perilous Journeys books and turning them into decks will be the longest part of that. The books I planned ahead. But I can kick off what I need there, and grouping things properly simplifies the process.
Somewhere in all this I pull out samples for testing. I should find out more about that soon.
A good question. I hope to have the counters into manufacturing by the end of the week, the books ordered by the beginning of next week, and the cards finalized and ordered by the end of the following week. Hopefully that means - even with delays - all manufacturing will be underway by mid-April, and everything will be in-hand and staged for fulfillment by mid-May. Then pack and ship. So mid-June is the target "all done" date at this point. That's rather better than October (original "PDF in hand" date was June).
As was foretold in the days of yore, 2,880 long minutes ago, orders for those with completed surveys have been locked, and cards charged.
I also sent out PDFs for everything ordered to date.
If you're one of the fewer than three dozen people who have yet to complete your survey, you'll get your PDFs more or less as soon as you do (I might have to manually send them, but I'll be checking regularly so there won't be much of a delay there).
Now that the files have gone out, there are something like 550 more pairs of eyes (give or take) on the books. This gives all sorts of possibilities for finding errors I and the preview team missed.
Find one? Great. Submit them here. ONLY submit them here. If you do not submit them here, they will not get the attention they deserve. PLEASE.
However, not everything qualifies as an error.
What does?
PLEASE note that "I would have done this differently" is not errata.
Now that order quantities have been more or less settled, it's time for me to begin the manufacturing process.
Once the cards and counters start to roll off the production line, samples will be diverted for EN71 testing in various places. I expect that to take a few weeks. Hopefully no problems, but if there are, I'll let you know. It only impacts not-the-USA distribution.
As I understand precise fulfillment dates, I'll let you know!
I'm only viable if my customer base believes in me. If you like the books, I would take it as a kindness if you say nice things about them in places people will see. Facebook. Twitter. Various RPG sites and forums. It all helps.
Thanks! We're not done yet...but this is (as a guy in an Alliance-Friendly bar on U-Day once said) "an aspicious day."