Less than a day after listing them, we have run out of Fair Gold coins. If you can't see them anymore, that's because there are none. They have gone. Wow. Thank you. Pleasingly, this means all yesterday’s Fair Gold disappeared by the following morning: our crowdfunder is DIE lore-accurate.

As a result, we've hit Em Friedman's stretch goal! She's trapped in here with us now, and there is no escape. Oddly, she's quite happy about that. Good for her. 

Next up is adding more art by Stephanie Hans to the book. She's already doing the cover - has done, in fact, and you've seen it! The next stretch goal allows us to add a big, gorgeous, full page Stephanie illustration to open every level of the Metadungeon (so six in all). More Stephanie is always better, in my opinion. 

Now: we've got a secret plan for getting to that stretch goal in record time, and IT NEEDS YOU. Depending on what bits of the internet you frequent, you may or may not know that the Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG launches on Backerkit today. That means there will be approximately 65,000 people who have at least a passing interest in dungeons hitting the front page of this website. 

That, in turn, means two things for Metadungeon:

1. We want you all to make a LOT of noise so that Metadungeon stays on the front page and people can find it.

2. We want to steal a minuscule part of Dungeon Crawler Carl's lunch (dangerous, probably; I understand he's pretty tough?). 

If a tiny percentage of those Carl fans see Metadungeon, and a microscopic number back it... we all get extra Stephanie art by the end of the week. Deal? 

Great. Come to Backerkit, like this update, and vote in the poll attached: what's your favourite dungeoneering trope? Comments help too, I believe (algorithms and all that). 

The future of the Metadungeon is in your hands. If Grant was writing this update he’d probably leave it there, but I’m not as brave as he is, so: helping our crowdfunder make even more money is not your responsibility and we’re doing pretty bloody well already. It would just be… nice. And you’re nice.

- Producer Chant

Hello.

What a weekend. We're under £1,000 from adding Dr. Emily Friedman to the Metadungeon, which I am feeling very normal about (I am definitely not vibrating in front of my PC, refreshing the Backerkit page repeatedly).

Also - we've found some more DIE! We thought we were fully out of Fair Gold coins - one of the most satisfying and covetable accesssories we made for the original Kickstarter - but we've uncovered a little trove of them, as well as some of the art cards we made. The art cards are petite, foiled, and they depict every one of our iconic Paragon characters. They're so shiny.



It has also been gently pointed out to me that as well as the softback DIE graphic novels, we have a very limited quantity of the collected hardback edition. This is, I believe, rare - so rare that I'm not allowed to steal one for myself, unless there are any left over after the Metadungeon. So if a maximum of 99 of you want to snap up a copy - great, I encourage you to do so. Any more than that and there will be none left for Chant.

All three of these are now available as add ons in Backerkit and if just a few of you happened to go and add them to your pledge, I reckon I could give Em Friedman some really good news tonight. 

Right. I'll leave you in peace until there's another stretch goal to unveil! 

- Chant

Happy Friday, Metadungeoneers! 

There’s a very real chance that by the time you read this, we’ll have cracked the £100,000 threshold which is, uh, pretty cool. It also means we’ll be under £10k away from our next stretch goal, and this one’s a doozie.

We’ll be making enough money to lure a genuine academic down into the Metadungeon with us. Oh yeah. Dr. Emily Friedman, of the University of Auburn and many of your favourite actual plays, is going to write us a chapter about play culture over the decades. Emily is both smart and brilliant, and while I’ve never been lucky enough to be in one of the rooms where both she and Kieron are present, I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall there. 

This isn’t going to be adventure material: Dr. Friedman’s chapter is an essay about how play, and players, make the hobby. This is fascinating to me personally, and I hope also to you. It also means that, as well as being one of the greatest adventures Rowan, Rook, and Decard has ever published, we’re going to be able to double down on this book actually teaching us all about the story, and history, of TTRPGs. 

Prepare yourself by checking out some of Emily’s TTRPG-related work here. And if the study of TTRPGs is one of your interests, I heartily recommend Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age, which Emily contributed to.

While Metadungeon is the most important TTRPG crowdfunder currently running, it’s not the only one. If you haven’t checked out the rest of Backerkit’s Megadungeon Month yet, you should take a peek. There’s a dungeon in there where you can beat up the Beatles, and that’s the kind of wordplay I appreciate.

Out in the wider world, Mythworks are running their Kickstarter for Breathless: Frightmare Edition. Survival horror, with memory loss and attendant identity crises, heavy consequences, and transient, diminishing power. And the box looks like a VHS tape.

Meanwhile, also on Kickstarter, Poorna M. and Valiant Dorian are raising funds for a really ambitious webseries called A Whole New World. The plan is to snare talented designers, make them live-build a TTRPG, and then playtest it. Grant Howitt and co-founder of RRD Chris Taylor have already recorded what I believe might be the pilot episode, and Poorna is valiantly attempting to corral some of the RRD team to finish the playtest. As a result, I have inside info that this series is a great insight into the design process, and also very entertaining. 

They’re very close to funding, and it’s worth getting them over the line just to enjoy Grant and Chris affectionately bullying each other for an hour or two.

Gareth and Kieron have been kicking around ideas for the ‘80s level of the Metadungeon, and the best (and funniest) way to not get sued into the ground by all the TTRPGs we can’t name for licensing and copyright reasons. Kieron’s also had a look at your suggestions for his stretch goal dungeon, and is having ideas. 

Oh, and this happened.

This is an extremely British reference, so please enjoy the source material (if you're reading this email, it just looks like a weird image; if you're looking at this on Backerkit it's a video): 

Anyway - enjoy your weekends, play some games if you can, and I’ll see you next week.

- Producer Chant

24 (OK sure, 25) hours in, and you have made us all very, very happy.

There are very few feelings like watching 750+ people show up and tell us that, actually, they believe in a book as much as we do. So whether you're coming back to DIE or joining us for the first time - thank you, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Now: we are funded, and it's time to start talking about stretch goals. First up...

What's a DIE book without Kieron Gillen? Still bloody good, because Gareth's writing it, and we are hereby doubling down on our claim that he's the best scenario writer in the business. But with Kieron? Even better. When we reach £80,000 in funding, we're officially giving Kieron permission to dig into his favourite corners of TTRPG history and turn the deep lore he excavates into a sub-level of the Metadungeon.

We've batted around a few ideas already, but not settled on one. But if you've played any DIE, you already know that Kieron's scenarios - from the dead-eyed zombie fans of Con Quest to the running gunfight in an IKEA (thank you, Love Is A Battlefield) - are a treat. If you've got any suggestions for something you'd particularly like Kieron to explore, let us know in the comments. 

- Chant

Well hello there.

We're six days out from the campaign launch, and the doors of the Metadungeon are beginning to yawn invitingly open. Which means we can catch our first glimpse of what's within... or just in front of it I suppose, technically.

Stephanie Hans has given us the cover artwork, which we're affectionately calling "edition war": a clash between an impressive, classic barbarian and a joyfully vicious, thoroughly modern assassin, in the moody depths of the Metadungeon.

Bloody hell, it's good.