Asian Monsters: 90+ magnificent monsters for DnD 5E!

Books have cleared customs! And a new Quickstarter coming!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 11:48:28 PM

In a supreme bit of irony, after six weeks sitting on the docks, our books are at last ready for delivery! Well, sort of. That is to say, they are now ready but I am 500 miles from home. I'll be back for a quick stopover this weekend and then off for another trip, but we are working with the printer and shipping company and planning a delivery for the week after next, hopefully on or around October 25th. Once the books arrive here, we'll break down the pallets, prep the big truck pickups to go out to distribution centers, and start packing books to ship to YOU! 

We are delighted to finally have a firm target date for receiving these books and getting them out to you, and with that in hand and our development and layout team closing in on the final PDFs for Boricubos: Latin American Monsters & Adventures, we are pleased to present our next Quickstarter monster project: Mother of Monsters! This one isn't a bestiary book; instead, it's a new adventure saga inspired by Greek mythology, set amidst the Kagari Islands and featuring new monsters, class options, and more. This passion project by Adrian Arduini has been percolating the past few years in the background, and art and layout are done! He has future installments already written with terrific guest authors like Ron Lundeen and David N. Ross, but those are a potential project for another time. This campaign setting and introductory adventure are entirely self-contained and tell a complete story on their own! 

This will be a Quickstarter like those early in the year, around 20 days with immediate PDF delivery at the conclusion of the project. Unlike the recent Boricubos Kickstarter, this project is 5E only, with no stretch goals, just an awesome adventure and campaign book ready to go (though we'll have a few relevant add-ons available for those that want them, like Sea Monsters for expanding the nautical side of this campaign).

This is our first adventure-focused Quickstarter, and we're excited to see how you like it! We are getting the Kickstarter page ready to preview soon and aim for launching around the end of October/beginning of November. Thanks for your amazing support and we are so excited to get your books up, up, and awayyy, with new projects ready for you too! 

Still Waiting on Port Delivery, but Bonus Books are Here!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 11:58:00 PM

Hi all,

I checked in with our printer and shipping company and here's the most recent update from them, which unfortunately isn't much of an update at all. 

The container is pending for devanning and they can’t provide scheduling of when the cargo will be made available at this moment. But they will arrange delivery once the cargo is available and we will keep you posted.

"Devanning" is a logistics term that means "unloading cargo from a container," and that's where our books remain for now. They're only about 5 miles away, but labor shortages and backups at the port mean they're still sitting in a container. I'll keep you posted as they keep me posted.

Meanwhile, our boxes and padded envelopes are here, as are our print-on-demand bonus books from each of our Quickstarters, like the "Eastern Journey Adventures" for Asian Monsters, Tome/Cults of Madness for Mythos Monsters, and Power Armor/Ultimate Commander for Battlemasters & Berserkers. I've got our spreadsheets combined to unify orders across multiple Kickstarters and then subdivided into letter-coded package groupings to expedite packing once we have everything in hand. In short, the warehouse (aka garage) is ready to go as soon as we get delivery. We're looking forward to getting your books to you as soon as we can! 

The Long Voyage from Asia has Ended and the Books are in Port!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 06:48:43 PM

Hi all,

Good news! The print books arrived safely across the sea and to the nearby Port of Tacoma about a week ago! We are waiting for them to be cleared by customs, and once that happens they'll be delivered by truck right here to LG headquarters. We're only about 5 miles from the port, so it'll be a quick shipment once that happens. Our new label printer is here and we're picking up our shipping boxes and envelops tomorrow. We'll be ready to launch into action shipping out books to you as soon as they get delivered to us!

We're excited to get these beautiful books headed your way. Delivering your PDFs immediately on completion of the Kickstarter is definitely part of a "Quick-starter," but getting your books to you as fast as possible is right there too. With a heroic effort by our layout team and print partners, we were able to get Asian Monsters completed just in the nick of time to hit our sailing window, and the books will be arriving two months EARLY - September rather than the originally estimated November - despite COVID slowing down worldwide freight networks. The books are right down the hill from my house and just about ready to send to you. We'll update you again with pics when the truly epic quantity of books arrives!

PS - We'd be remiss if we didn't invite you to check out the Boricubos: Latin American Monsters & Adventures Kickstarter, which ends in less than 48 hours! With nearly 300 pages of monsters, adventures, character options, campaign settings, magic items, spells, and so much more, created with a terrific team including nearly 20 Latinx authors and artists, this is our biggest Kickstarter yet, at nearly $100,000. We hope you'll check it out and climb aboard - it all ends Thursday the 16th at 7 PM PT/10 PM ET!

Shard VTT modules going out for Mythos Monsters and Sea Monsters!
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 12:22:10 AM

Hi all, 

We were excited on this project to partner with the great folks at Shard VTT, a brand-new VTT service designed specifically with 5E in mind. It's an uphill climb to make room in the marketplace when you've got bigger, more established services like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, but the features are excellent! For those backers who pledged for Shard on this project, we've just sent out the unlock keys (each is a URL; go to it and it should activate the product in your account) for Mythos Monsters and Sea Monsters! We had to get a new Shard person as the one formerly doing them was not able to carry the project through, but we we were delighted to get Mythos finished and are cranking away on Asian Monsters now and will have it ready for you soon on Shard and on our other VTT partners! 

Asian Monsters has been submitted at Fantasy Grounds and will be available as soon as it cycles through their system. Asian Monsters is likewise almost ready but Roll20 had us go back and fix a couple of technical things. Both versions should be up and live and ready to send out to you soon! 

As soon as we get those up and out the door, our guys are diving into Latin American Monsters from our current Kickstarter! If you haven't checked it out yet, we're looking at over 120 monsters if we hit our next stretch goal! We've got 10 days left and over $77,000 raised already. If you've enjoyed our 5E monster books so far, we definitely encourage you to check out Boricubos: Latin American Monsters & Adventures!

Update to the VTT update!
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 12:08:15 AM

Welllll... it turns out the Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds modules aren't quite as ready as I thought they were. :(

It looks like one of the FG modules should be ready in about 2 weeks and the other two are still grinding through the gears. I had misread the publisher back end where there was a date listed for each of them, but it turned out that date was simply a procedural marker in the module creation, not the "it's actually ready" date that I thought it meant. 

Hang onto the codes and keys you have. We'll be in closer touch with our VTT partners to verify when they are actually REALLY FOR REAL finished churning through their system, and we'll update you then, at which point the FG keys should be good to go and the modules added to your account. 

Our apologies for the over-eager mix-up and thanks for your awesome support. Charge it to our excitement to get cool stuff in your hands as soon as we can!