BIG NEWS as of October 19th! Thanks to a big show of support from our friends at the UK-based Mongoose Publishing, we are now able to offer shipping outside the USA for this Kickstarter. Right now we have the Smitten (all flavors) and Nice tiers set up to offer shipping for $15 to destinations in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. We would be happy to add your location as well!

Please contact us at [email protected] if it looks like your destination is not yet covered, and we’ll add it as an option as soon as we confirm the shipping rate for that country/region.

If you end up ordering multiple books for international shipment, we will bill an additional $5 per additional item in BackerKit well after the campaign is done.

Last updated: October 27, 2020 06:24

It probably isn’t. (Yeah, “probably” is about as certain as we can dial this in.)

Mongoose Publishing, who will be handling our international shipping for this campaign, is UK-based, and the shipping date will be post-Brexit. (As a show of support for the campaign, they’ve offered to keep our own shipping costs through them managed to a point where we don’t have to charge two to three times as much on shipping, which is what any prior scenario looked like and is another reason why we weren’t offering international shipping at all at launch-time.)

While it’s not like the UK/EU have any concrete answers about what post-Brexit shipping UK->EU will look like (it’s a real damn mess), any time you order something from outside the EU, you run the risk of having to pay additional VAT and customs fees in order to bring it in. If you’re having us ship something from the UK to your location in the EU, you are the importer, and the EU likes to make that cost significant money near as we can tell.

Bottom line, the economic/import setup of the EU is directly positioned to pass costs on to the individual, which in turn means it is an engine for customer dissatisfaction. That is one of the many reasons why we originally launched the Kickstarter with no international shipping at all. At that time, we indicated that the best option was to back the project at $15 for all the digital goodies (over 30 stretch goals are funded; we’re pretty confident they’ll be worth the $15 even if you weren’t getting the core book’s PDF, except, you will also be getting the core book’s PDF at that level), and pick up the physical book from a local in-EU retailer after they do the work of importing the books to be sold in your market, following the general distribution release of the book after we’ve shipped out backer copies.

Last updated: October 26, 2020 10:10

The game design and playtesting portion of this project is already complete. We’ve put $11,000 of our own money and many, many hours into getting Thirsty Sword Lesbians to this point. With your help we’ll cross the remaining distance and get this off to press as soon as possible.

We already have the preliminary layout done (backers can take a look at that right now—check out the linked graphic on the campaign page right underneath the video, up top), which includes some of the art. We’ll need a few months to finish up the rest of the art, proofreading, indexing, and make any adjustments based on feedback as folks start playing this latest edition. All of this will start once the campaign concludes in November, if not sooner.

Then it’s off to the presses for manufacture. One advantage of Kickstarting is that it allows us to size our print run just right. Our printer usually takes 2-3 months to turn around a book, although that timeline’s dependent on their availability. We’ve added some cushion to our delivery estimates, and we’re confident that we will ship this on time. We hope to beat that estimate, of course, but when it comes to book production it’s best to put a buffer into your schedule.

You can be confident that we’ll ship on or before our estimated delivery date, because that’s been our consistent track record across a dozen other campaigns in the last seven years. Just ask our backers; we keep our promises. Of our two most recent campaigns, Fate of Cthulhu shipped ahead of schedule, and while AGON was delayed by COVID-19 shutdowns, we still shipped it in less than a year from the campaign conclusion.

We’ve got a bit more to do here on the artwork front, but we’re still very far along in the process, and we’re confident we have all the remaining time-factors well in hand. For Evil Hat, it’s not so much Kickstarter, as Kickfinisher.

Stretch goals from contributing authors have a separate production timeline. We consider them truly extra content, and that means we don’t start production on the stretch goals until after they fund. We may adjust the planned goal order behind the scenes as we learn what the backers are most interested in.

We’re excited to see what you unlock! Once the campaign concludes we’ll put together a plan for getting the funded goals done. There are a lot of moving parts to coordinate (writing, system development, editing, layout, art direction, and artwork), but since these are digital-only they’re not vulnerable to any manufacturing hiccups.

Last updated: October 26, 2020 10:09

The cart is very far ahead of its horse there. Some stretches may not be funded yet at the time you’re reading this, let alone no writing has started. Could take a while to get all those made, and when they are they won’t necessarily all be ready at the same time. Then there’s questions about how the economy and our own business could shift around costs and availability changes with printers. So, we’re not going to commit one way or the other on that, but if we did do a physical copy, it’d come after ALL funded stretches are written, vetted, edited, laid out, art directed, finalized, and digitally published. That’s likely to be a year or more out from the end of the Kickstarter. So, if (and that’s definitely an if) we end up with a physical book, it’ll happen past the time we’re shipping rewards for the campaign.

Last updated: October 26, 2020 10:09

After they’re written, which they currently aren’t.

That’s the nature of stretch goals: until they’re funded, work on them doesn’t start. This is very different from the mostly-finished-except-for-art book that we had in hand on launch. You can expect stretch goals to take easily a year (with wide variance depending on schedules and life events for the authors) before the first of them start to be available.

Last updated: October 26, 2020 10:09

As they are completed, the stretch goals will go out to Kickstarter backers who pledged at the Flirt ($15) and above level (this does not include pre-orders). Once we have all of the stretch goal pdfs finalized, we’ll make them available to the public through our normal distribution methods (Evil Hat webstore, DriveThruRPG, itch.io)

Last updated: February 16, 2021 09:55