That’s it, I’m officially DONE! Well, the stretch goals for Herbalist’s Primer are done. Look how they shine!
It took a couple of months since our Kickstarter campaign, but I have finally finished everything I had to do! The book is finished and with the printers, all stretch goals written, illustrated, and laid out, and I can breathe easier!
I can also focus on the second book and all the Patreon goodies.
If you read my post about the fate of our Kickstarter campaign, you know that we had a blast with stretch goals. While we have tried to keep everything manageable, we ended up with quite a bit of stuff in the end anyway.
Herbalist’s Primer in .epub and .mobi
Next time I decide to write a book in InDesign, please remind me how much of a pain in the ass it is to reverse-engineer the layout to XHTML.
(Yes, I’m doing the exact same thing with Geologist’s Primer, I learn nothing from my mistakes. But it’s a future-me problem.)
And yet! I believe that EPUB versions of the books are the future. I love reading books on my reader, I despise reading them on my PC. Hence, it was not a question of whether but of how to make an ebook version of Herbalist’s Primer. I haven’t played around with HTML in ages (since uni, I think? Over a decade, then), so this was a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, I’ve found Sigil – open-source software that allowed me to edit the EPUB exported from InDesign, fix all broken links (index got completely mangled), and turn this:
Much less fancy, but that much easier to read on a tablet or an ebook reader.
Poster!
I’m really liking mine. The first thing to actually appear on the wall in our house, because we’ve been too busy for a year and a half to decorate at all.
The other side of the poster has the plant generation tables!
Herbalist’s Notebooks
Notebooks are looking pretty nice, too – we had proofs delivered, but weren’t impressed with Mixam’s quality, so we ended up switching the supplier.
To make everybody’s life easier, I’ve made not only the PDF version of the notebook as it is printed, but also a special ‘home-printing’ version, with unnumbered pages, so you can print them separately and put in a binder, never running out of pages in your herbarium. Hope people like it!
Flash Cards
Oh my, this one was a doozy. Seeing as this is literally just a bunch of 100 cards with art that was already made and text that was based on the book that was already written, I expected this to be a quick and painless thing to do. A couple days of work.
Boi, was I wrong.
Well, I actually wasn’t, but only on technicality. It did took me just a couple of days of work to make the cards – spread over good two months, because the process of making the cards was so mind-numbingly boring, I couldn’t get myself to do them.
Don’t get me wrong: they are cool, they look great, and I expect them to be very useful. However, making them was just an exercise in copy-pasting with zero creative process behind it, then maybe 5% creative summarizing the properties of the plants.
I’d say ‘never again,’ but if we manage to properly fund Geologist’s Primer, I’d like there to be cards soo.
Adventure Seeds!
Oh, this one WAS fun! Well, I expect it to be, and I was right. Jakub and I have split the workload on this, with him providing most of the writing, and me adding some of my quest ideas and doing the layout. All 100 adventure seeds are almost ready (currently in proofreading), and I think they’re delightful. Folks on Twitter seem to agree 🙂
Just look at these fun cards!
Adventure!
Oh, this one is my favourite – by far! I’m positive I’ll be writing about Song of the Hedge more on the blog. Jakub has written an amazing adventure – completely system-agnostic, ready to be run in any game and on any mechanics…
Or just read as a story.
For now, let me just drop a summary here:
Farmer Baldwin forced Hedgie the Hedgehog to search for razkovniche: a magical herb only small critters can find. Hedgie finds himself homeless and in need of helping paws.
The PCs—turned into mice—will assist Hedgie in his quest to procure the leaves of the magical plant. They will sneak past a sleeping snake, bargain with bees, fool a monstrously curious puppy, bother a cat, climb a sky-high tree, and search for sage’s wisdom before they can approach the legendary invisible plant.
This adventure has a set starting point and a single finale, but the path leading from point A to B is up to the PCs. They can approach the quest as they see fit, fighting or chatting their way through it.
While designed as a light and fun fairytale-like adventure, Song of the Hedge may be played as a mystery, a deadly survival game, a heist, or a horror game, with enemies outclassing the poor mice by orders of magnitude. Pick your poison.
What now?
We’ll be delivering the digital goodies to the Kickstarter backers as soon as the last pieces are out of proofreading (Monday?). The physical rewards are currently in production; we are somewhat affected by the global supply crisis, but we’re doing our best. I’ll be informing you about the progress as we make it! To stay on top of the topic, why not sign up for our newsletter? Link just below!
Creative and clever. 🙂
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