The Heart of Fire: A D&D 5E Campaign and Dungeon Crawl

Launching An Experiment
over 1 year ago – Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 05:45:48 AM

We have decided to try a little experiment over on itch.io... The Coming Dark has been a campaign we've been developing for over twelve years. It's an arguably massive undertaking, and as such it's kinda been languishing due to other immediate priorities (such as this project and, well, life).

The first chapter, The Coming Dark, Chapter One: Into the Light was our first successful Kickstarter and has already been released. Chapters two and three have been kicked around for a very long time, and it's time people start seeing what we're trying to accomplish.

So we have decided to launch it as an "Itch funded" project, where proceeds from itch.io will go towards actually completing the thing. We honestly don't know if this will work, but we figure we have to do something with the project or else it will simply be incomplete forever.

So we would appreciate you heading over to itch.io and supporting The Coming Dark: Complete Edition, where you can download the incomplete product currently in development. Maybe someday we can complete that project and show it to the world.

Thank you again for your continued support.

September Update
over 1 year ago – Sat, Sep 03, 2022 at 08:11:27 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Slight Inconvenience
over 1 year ago – Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 12:19:42 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

August Status Update
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 04, 2022 at 05:32:33 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

July Status Update
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Jul 03, 2022 at 04:26:51 PM

Start of a new month, so I thought I'd post something to make sure you don't think I forgot.

First off, the BackerKit response was pretty good; only 9 people have yet to respond, and given my history of using BackerKit in the past those are pretty much the usual suspects. I question whether I did BackerKit too early, and am still a bit confused about BackerKit's process about having to "lock" orders and addresses, even for a product that doesn't ship until months from now, but it seems like a necessary thing to do in order for the funds from the add-ons to be actually released.

For those that might not have the link, here's where you can either put your email address or - if you weren't a backer in the first place - pre-order the adventure and all the add-ons:

https://dli4.backerkit.com/

That being said, y'all should already have access to your digital add-ons through BackerKit. If you don't, please let me know.

All that being said, I admit I have been dealing with a little bit of personal adversity as of late but work is progressing. I'd say about 80% of the monster stat blocks have been converted, which presents an interesting problem: some of my monsters are too low level. In 4th Edition it was easy to justify a basic orc or cultist being 6th level because the math balances out, but in 5E they're a lowly CR 1/2... so in order to make a balanced encounters I have to throw in a lot of them.

In addition to that, this adventure was designed to have an encounter in each room, which becomes quite a major resource concern in 5E since the party will have little chance to rest. So I can either redesign it entirely by taking some encounters out or purposely make some encounters much easier than the typical encounter that would match the party's APL.

As it stands now, I think we're still looking good for a September release. There's a lot to do, but things are moving along to some degree. I will hopefully be out of my current adversity in a few weeks, then the intense work can actually begin.

Thank you for your continued support!