The Pins Are Here!
4 days ago – Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 03:01:45 PM

Quick update!

The enamel pins are here and they are better than I could have hoped for! My expectations were high but... wow. You're going to love them. They are on par with the highest quality enamel pins I own, and I own quite a few.

Printing!

With the help of a very gracious fellow TRPG creator (please give their wonderful stuff a look at https://www.lonecolossusgames.com ) a printer has been secured! Today I sent off all the documents needed to print a sample copy. I am jittery with excitement. I'll share pictures as soon as I can.

Hope you all have a wonderful month and many game-nights with lovely people.

With ever-increasing luminosity,
Eiko <3

4 rewards down (+bonus Enamel Pin), 1 to go!
2 months ago – Wed, May 22, 2024 at 03:05:16 PM

Hello everyone! I won't waste another update with another apology for another delay. I'll keep it short and say exactly what there is, and exactly what, at the moment. isn't.

Finished and just need to be sorted are:
1. Art prints
2. Character Sheet Bundles
3. Masked Sticker Pack

Enamel Pins

Finished, shipped, but haven't arrived yet:

1. Masked Crown Enamel Pin

2. Masked Bard Enamel Pin

Bonus Pin

I took some extra money from my own pocket and made a third pin design. This one is not for sale, at least not at the moment. I'll put it in along with the package anyone who got a pin/s in their order already. It's not gonna cost you anything extra, it's just something to show how much I appreciate you all and your patience. It features the Tsum-Mothers, one of my favorite critters from the core book, holding its precious egg. I present to you...

EGG! I'm very excited for EGG. That's what I called it in the emails with the printers too so under the official transaction the banknote they put was "for EGG." Which. I mean. That sparks joy.

Switching printers

For reasons that are honestly beyond me, I can't wait for the printer anymore. They have been slow, unresponsive, and inflexible. The clincher, though, is their refusal to print a sample copy before doing the main batch. A thing so obviously necessary, I didn't ask the other publishers about. It's the standard practice. And for good reason, too. The risk of printing 500 copies of a hardcover, full color book only to discover some technical error is simply panic-inducing. 

At this point, holding out hope is not an option. I'm sorry I didn't do this sooner.

Spirit Water

Because of all this waiting, and it being slightly easier to illustrate than write (for me, at least), Spirit Water is going to have so much art! Here are some of the pieces out of context to not ruin it. Also, interestingly enough, it's turning out much more system-agnostic than HUSH was. So depending on how far I can stretch that, I may include a small section about playing Spirit Water with other systems. Anyway, here's art!

Health

The last update was optimistic. I was just about to get on a different treatment and wanted to get you all as excited as I was. But things have not improved... In some ways, they've gotten worse. Day-to-day stuff is harder now than it was then. For a few weeks I was completely out of commission. At least I'm better than that at the moment. I'm fighting hard to not let it effect writing and illustrating. 

And one last point I wanted to bring up. There's always the fear with crowdfunding projects that the creators can't pull through. Then there's the worse fear, that they ran off with the money. Now, I know you don't think that if you've lasted this long with me, but I still feel the need to say this, to make everything; I don't have a job. For the past 2 years, ZND has been my job, and the money from the Kickstarter campaign is all the money I have. I've rationed it really carefully. I wanted to be sure I'm never letting the cost of living chip at production cost. My worst nightmare would be getting to the finish line, reaching to pay the printers, and finding out that I took too long, and there just isn't enough money left. Now is the time when one by one, I'm sending out the final payments to all these different manufacturers, and I can breath out in relief; I didn't waste it. It's enough. 

That's it. Just wanted to say it once. Thank you for letting this be my job. You're the best. And also technically my boss. So yeah, thanks boss!

Eiko

Good news! (Hush, character sheets, art-prints)
5 months ago – Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 08:13:06 AM

Hush is now out!

40 pages of delicious adventuring potential, shot right into your email. Make sure to check the email address associated with your BackerKit account. If you ordered Hush and haven't received it, reach out on the Discord Server, please. I'll check behind the scenes and see what's up. 

Thank you all for bearing with the delays. Also, thank you everyone for the well-wishes. I've been improving slowly. Hopefully, I can ride this trend back to full function <3

Physical rewards

The time has come! Physical rewards are beginning to arrive. The art prints are the first physical reward to arrive and they came out so good! Look at them!

We did the second physical reward half manually, so we didn't have to wait for shipping. Pictured here are the almost ONE THOUSAND character sheets, NPC sheets, and spirit sheets for those who got that lovely little add-on. I never knew paper gan get so heavy.

What's left?

We are waiting for price quotas on the enamel pins, and the deluxe edition hardcovers. Then we'll print out a prototype, just to be safe (wouldn't want to print a few hundred badly formatted books). If the Great Sandworm isn't too angry at us, we'll have a physical copy of both by the time the next update rolls around.

I hope you had a wonderful February and a good first week of March. Take care of yourselves.

Eiko Nemo Dowme <3

I'm sick... (update +preview of HUSH)
6 months ago – Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 03:21:42 PM

I'm sick...

It's true, I've been under the weather this month. As you can tell from this real-life picture of me (yes, that's what I look like). I hope the worst is behind me. I'm sorry for failing to meet the deadlines I set. To be honest with you, I feel awful about it and in general. Not having a very good winter here in Berlin. Each task on its own is doable, but as a pile of interdisciplinary work, it's overwhelming. But I'm going to pull through! I'm also cutting down on my expenses, because with all these delays and set backs, I don't want to ever cut into the money set aside for the printing and manufacturing rewards. Not on my watch!

Hush (adventure)

While lying in bed, I couldn't do much but illustrate, so at least the adventures will have lots of visual fun! Here are some updates regarding the contents of Hush:

• 40 pages long, though most runs will only require the GM to look through ~15 of them.
• 9 locations
• 11 events (not including the intro & inciting incident)
• 10 characters
• 1 spirit
• 13 art pieces (not including diagrams, graphics, and visualizations of information)
• 1 area map
• 1 building layout map
• 4 narrative sections (optional reading)
• A "Quick Facts" spread about all the characters and entities in the adventure, to be used as handy reference (and to keep track of everyone's names)

All of which means this has a TON of replay value. I'm very happy with how this one came out. I've run through it 3 times now with different groups and each group saw different locations, encountered different events, and came to completely different (and opposite) conclusions on the morals of important characters. I also included something I WISH every adventure had, which is this: 

A graphic that shows how characters are connected! I'm sure it's been done before, but in the adventures I've read, something like this would have helped so much. I'm a very visual learner, and with ADHD on top of that, a big square block of text is not fun. I hope you enjoy the adventure! Here's a sneak peak at Satsat, the Spirit ruling over the Domain of Hush. As you can probably tell, it likes rabbits.

Hush will be downloadable in 2-3 days. Right now I am lying in bed and going over the PDF again to make corrections, rearrange spreads & pages, and looking for typos.

  Thank you to everyone for continuing to be interested in this world. It helps to know that I'm not sending content into the void. That real people will get and play and read and enjoy the art I make. It's after midnight so I'll sign off for now.

Eiko Nemo Dowme

Happy Beansmass!
7 months ago – Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 06:46:46 PM

Happy Beansmass!

Just like everyone else on the planet, tomorrow I'll be celebrating Beansmass, the universal holiday of good beans. I hope you all have a merry happy Beansmass with the best beans by your side. 

2023

...has been a very challenging year, but we made it through together! Thank you for bearing with me through the delays and the setbacks. Just this past month I got to release the final edit of the book in digital form, the starter kit, the reference sheets, and the very first adventure! To everyone who is surprised by this, if your pledge tier includes the PDF of the core rule book, check your BackerKit account. That download is waiting for you right there. If it isn't and you believe it should, please message me here or on Discord and I'll check how things look on my end.

Weekly game

I'm starting a weekly ZND game over on the server. The time & other info are in the #game-ads channel. If you want to be a player, hop on over and add the time that works for you!

A note about free downloads

The quick start guide, character sheets, and reference sheets are all free to download through Gumroad links on ZinNeverDies.com. Whereas other websites have a free download button and a donate button, Gumroad just asks you to input a fair price. To download for free, just put zero. Now and again someone drops in a few dollars through there and that's always appreciated, but please don't feel bad for downloading as many free assets as you want as many times as you want!

The next releases

I still hope to get Hush out by the end of this month. It's proving especially difficult because, in addition to being the first big Adventure, it involves setting lots of precedence about how a ZND adventure is structured. Mask-A-Raid is as close to a standard adventure ZND will have, with its relatively straightforward 1-2-3 structure. Hush and Spirit Water involve larger areas with more powerful spirits, more serious threats, and a darker tone. Hush will be the darker of the two, with the potential for some nasty outcomes for the player characters and their companions. Spirit Water will be more focused on the spirit world and less on grim-dirty realism. Both feature spirits heavily. If all goes well, you'll have Hush by the 30th and Spirit Water on the second week of January.

Links

Here are the updated links to the latest versions of all the free ZND downloads:

Quickstart Guide

Character Sheets Bundle

Reference Sheets

Reminder: just put "0" as the price to download for free.

Final reminder

Almost everyone has confirmed all the details over on BackerKit, all except 22 people. If you're not sure, double-check that you did.

Feedback

If you got Mask-A-Raid I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's the first adventure so feedback is invaluable! Whether you skimmed it, read it, played it, or ran it, it's all valuable to me. The most effective way to do this is, as usual, on Discord.

Thank you for a remarkable year. 

Eiko Nemo Dowme