Fulfillment Update!

Nice transition, eh? But let me tell you, this update is even cooler than that sweet segue! We will be sending out fulfillment surveys in the near future. Like later this week near future. And for those of you who get shirts and playmats (or who chose them as add-ons), you have quite the selection:

If you're regretting not ordering a playmat or shirt, you can head to cyberwizardgames.com and choose one (or a dozen) for yourself. And your friends. And family. Maybe that random stranger you met the other day...

And now that we've got you all kinds of hot and bothered about getting everything, let's slide right into a

Shipping Update!

Getting antsy for your game copy given all of this? Well, we've been in contact with the factory all of this time, and more good news: Those seeking air delivery will get their games around October 25, while those going for regular mail will get them at the end of November! Sweet! But it's even better because we have a 

PAX Unplugged Update!

OK, last time, I swear. Art, Jane, and I will all be at PAX Unplugged from December 2-4. If you're going to be in the area (as in, at PAX Unplugged) and would like to pick up your copy in person, let us know and we can thank you for being an awesome person in person! You can find us by the way cool signs Art made:

But more than that, we have a board game we might want you to help test out. It's going to be our second game—right now the working title is Incarnate, or maybe Manifested. It's a cooperative or competitive deck building game (you choose!) with a twist—you have to carefully manage the types of energy your cards generate to make them the most effective possible without killing you.

And I may even have a preview of the game after that, too... (Yes, we're planning for the long run!) I've mentioned before a campaign game where you are mercenaries trapped in a town. When I got to play the game with three of my friends in Florida over the summer, one of them described it as "D&D, but without all the unfun parts." Considering he's a master DM, that is high praise indeed! (Thanks Nick!)

Oh, and at PAX Unplugged, we'll also have copies of our artbook. Well, actually, art and lore book. I really want to hit on that "lore" part because I spent a whole week working on that content on top of the grading and teaching for that week—30+ pages of lore with plenty of pages of beautiful artwork. Here, let me show you:

For the lore, every race and character gets their own full page of flavor. Art and I are huge lore guys, so we both agreed that the races of our world will have different cultures than the "classic" fantasy ones. So, while I worked on the duo powers, Art delved deep into the elven races of Catharsis. Each one is unique, made more so by the fact that the men and women of each race have distinct powers, abilities they adapted based on their environments. (I got to contribute some ideas, too!) And if we gave that much attention to the elves, we needed to do the same for the dwarves, and ogres, and orcs, and gnomes, and... And that's not counting the full-page backstories for our 12 awesome characters! We had to cut the bosses down to just one page because we've added in a beautifully designed comic at the end, and we were restricted to 100 pages. I'm incredibly proud of the work we did, and I think you'll love incorporating all of this into your game worlds, too. (Maybe we'll create a tabletop RPG off this...) Below is a sample—the dwarves. These are probably the closest to their "traditional" race. And as you'll see, there are more than a few differences from the mining-loving, living under the mountains Tolkienesque dwarves of classic D&D. I mean, I'd actually be intrigued to play these dwarves in a campaign; they have internal politics from their unique ability to craft (the tie-in to "normal" dwarves), but the storytelling possibilities are way cooler.

If this has got you excited about the artbook and you'd like to get a copy, might I suggest meandering over to cyberwizardgames.com to preorder a book...?

One Last Thing...

Looking back through the updates, I realize that I promised a discussion about how I changed Tenzin and Séalaithe. And while I'd love to jump fully into that, I'm going to postpone that for the next time because it's almost 2 am here, and I still need to get through about 15 papers to stay on track with my grading. (I intended to get that all done earlier today, but my open door policy meant that I actually only had 30 minutes for grading instead of the 4 hours I had planned. Oops.)

In the meantime, I hope your tokens stay in place when you bump your board!