October 04, 2012

Hillfolk Kickstarter 200%+ in 16 hrs; New Stretch Goals Announced

Response to the Hillfolk Kickstarter has been so overwhelming I haven’t had time to tell you how overwhelming it’s been. Things are moving faster than I can type this update. As of this writing, we’re at the 16 hour mark and are already 201% funded. The first two—no, make that three—stretch goals have been surpassed before I could even hype them. I thought I had a good store of stretches in my back pocket, but, no, you’re going to send me out on an immediate game guru harvest, aren’t you? Good thing I have a fat contacts list.

In the meantime, funding levels have surpassed the thresholds needed to commission Jason Morningstar’s Hollywoodland series pitch, Michelle Nephew’s Mad Scientists Anonymous, and Kenneth Hite’s Moscow Station. And we’re a tad more than less than $500 from Matt Forbeck’s World War 2.1.

Now that you’ve shown me that you’ve come to throw down, I’m going to make it a little tougher on you (and buy myself a little recruiting time) by widening the distance between stretches a little.

$8500 gets us another Series Pitch: TS Luikart’s Malice Tarn, which he describes as King Lear meets Watership Down.

Then comes the $12,500 stretch goal: open licensing. If we reach this goal, I’ll release DramaSystem under a permissive open license. I’m open to input on the exact parameters of the license but want to err on the side of availability. The reference document will be a stripped-down affair, without the Hillfolk setting, examples, or Series Pitches, so those of you purchasing the PDF of the finished book will still be getting excellent value for your ten smackeroos.

Finally, there’s the all-important battle between the clans. When last our judges calculated the tallies, the Wolves pushed past a late night Lion offensive to once again grab the high badlands ground, howling in the glee of their victory.

Clan Battle 04

Are the clans, in addition to being a thinly veiled contention between cat and dog people, a proxy for a certain political struggle? Maybe so—the lions are fewer, but are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of high-ranking pledgers: your Chieftains and your Nabobs of the Northlands.

Fight the power, or be the power, by pledging to the Hillfolk Kickstarter today, and declaring your allegiance to Clan Lion or Clan Wolf.