July update! Setting and progress report
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 10:06:37 AM

July Update

Hey everyone, we've got a monthly progress report for you! 

First, please enjoy this final draft of our setting map: 

As the adventure takes you from one province to another in Danguk, we thought a handy map would be useful to keep track of where you are relative to them. We've designed it in the style of the inkbrush-drawn maps of Joseon. 

Progress Report

Work is solidly in progress with two chapter illustrations and three dungeon maps remaining on the art side, not counting the ones that are already WIP. I'm taking the opportunity to go back and do further proofreading to head off any potential need for fixes in the errata stage. 5e playtests are reaching their final phases with the adventure looking solid, holding up in high level plays. We are going to want to fix up the Monster Slayer subclass for Tactician since we've noted some issues common for a potential "jack of all trades, master of none" build (a bit like Ranger 1.0). Our changes, we hope, will bring it more toward its historical inspiration of tiger hunters hired by the Joseon government and military.

Conversions from 5e to Pathfinder 2e are going well too. I've done my best to convert a chapter a day and that will mark my first pass. After, I'm going to go back and give it a closer examination, then have some extra eyes look at it while we begin playtesting for the encounters.

Korean translation is also going very well. All monster stat blocks are being converted after which, we'll begin work on the story. Rest assured, we're using this time to bring this book to its maximum potential, so once again, we appreciate your patience!

AnimeExpo Artist Alley

Oh yes! And if you're going to be at AnimeExpo, please, please visit some of our artists' booths!

Alex Ahad will be at L3!

dune5and will be at i33!

Jenny Park will be at C21!

Judge will be at A8!

That's that for July, we'll have more news on how we're doing and where we're at coming up next month! If you have any comments or questions, you can drop a message here on Kickstarter or send us an email at [email protected]. Otherwise, you can join our Discord server!

June update! Progress report, Treasures of Daehan Minguk, Goblets and Gays episode
almost 3 years ago – Wed, May 31, 2023 at 02:33:09 PM

Hello all and happy summer! We hope you've all been doing well.

So quick update: Pathfinder 2e conversion has started in earnest and we're 98% finished translating all monsters into Korean. All that leaves is the main bulk of the adventure. Again, we're primarily waiting on art, but I predict we will need a little more time than estimated. I think I mentioned this already in the last update, but we'll do our best to shoot for the end of the year. On that note, we would like to introduce a new addition to our team! 

New Team Member

Please welcome Refrynn or weirdundead who has graciously offered her assistance with helping us finish up the last of our chapter illustrations. She has previously worked for other teams such as Ghostfire Gaming! Please check out her work!

We're on our way to finishing our maps, and then we'll do our best to wrap up layout. 

We'll try our best to have the PDFs out within the year, but I can assure you that we're doing our best with life and such as they are. We've also playtested up to Arc 4 out of 6. As predicted, the numbers are trickier during earlier levels since PCs are more, ah, fragile then. We feel like Arcs 3-6, levels 11-20, will largely be... well, not a breeze lol, but of sufficient challenge.

Speaking of, we have some monsters we've designed that we'd like to showcase!

Monster Previews

First is the Guchinyuh (거치녀), Demon of Bloodlust (designed by MLarty). The Guchinyuh appears as an emaciated woman in battlefields when war breaks out. The heat from her fiery claws drives soldiers into a mad frenzy, no longer able to distinguish friend from foe. She embodies the concept of violence perpetuating violence and exists to stoke the flames of war so that mortals will never escape from its vicious cycle. Ironically, she herself was created from the souls of traumatized victims that war creates.

Next is the Juksekilgeh (적색일괴), the Galaxy Dragon (also designed by MLarty). The Juksekilgeh's egg is incubated in space by the thoughts of intelligent life across the galaxy. It developed powerful psionic abilities that they use to warp people's minds. They feed off of thoughts and vibes and being natural empaths, the emotions of people around them can radically alter their disposition. Juksekilgeh are nomadic beings and travel great distances inside of their umbrella-shaped shell which stargazers mistaken for flying saucers or the like. 

Like most dragons, Juksekilgeh are drawn to treasure, yes, but anything with sentimental value. For treasure hunters, their hoard can sometimes be hit or miss as they'd collect items like wooden lockets or charms for the psychic energies imbued into them emotionally. Still, they're often believed to be responsible for kidnappings as well of people whose mental frequencies they're drawn to. Though not aggressive innately, they release toxins that make intelligent creatures more susceptible to enchantments and mental influence. 

These creatures were voted on to be previewed by our friends at The Mithral Canvas in celebration of Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. 

As promised in our last update, we've distributed the homebrew items from Mithral Canvas's Treasures of Daehan Minguk set to everyone's email through BackerKit! We also threw in the statblocks for the Juksekilgeh and Guchinyuh. Please check them out and let us know what you think! 

My personal favorite is their Striped Guardian armor: 

Clad in fur and iron, let the power of the tiger course through you and unleash terror on your foes! Fantastic stuff.

The two part episode series of our one-shot, Dirge for My Bygone Days, is out by the Goblets and Gays podcast! They play the Pathfinder 2e version and if I can toot my own horn, this was a bit of a playtest by fire situation. The adventure was a delight and my GM brain is shaking its fist a little with how ever so slightly they broke through the scenario a little haha! Still, it's a blast, please check it out by clicking on the preview pic.

That's it for this month! We have more being prepared to come down the pipeline. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments about the game, you're free to reach us at [email protected] or hit us up on our Discord page!

May Update: Progress Report, The Mythril Canvas Collaboration, and other news
almost 3 years ago – Sat, May 06, 2023 at 04:08:38 PM

 Progress Report

Hey, all! Thanks so much for your patience, but we have a progress update for all of you.

We've fine-tuned the mechanics for the book based on on-going playtesting and my personal review. Our proofreaders looked over Arc 6 and we are at about draft 3 on the writing side. All that's left now are both completing illustrations for the book and the its layout. We have a handful of maps and about as many chapter illustrations to complete, but we're hoping we can see them completed by the end of Q3 or the start of Q4. Our highest priorities are those maps and illustrations and doing our best to juggle them with life calling in unexpected ways.

We've completed translating into Korean ancestry/races, classes, divinities, lore info, and we're working on converting monsters now. By the time they're completed, we'll have a solid draft of the book also ready to begin translating.

Pathfinder 2e Playtest Doc

We're almost finished! We'll have the document sent next week through BackerKit to reach everyone's email addresses. Right now, the draft we have is being fixed up and we're making sure to anchor everything properly in layout. The vast difference between 5e and PF2e's layout styles presented some challenges we had to adapt to, hence some delays, but we've gotten a good hang of it. Which bodes well for future projects relating to PF2e coming up.

Goblets and Gays Partnership

You heard it here first, but please do look forward to a narrative play streamed episode of Goblets and Gays based on our one-shot, Dirge for My Bygone Days! The cast will be playing the Pathfinder 2e version that we sent them along with rules and mechanics featured in our upcoming playtest document. Until then, do check them out! They're at their 4th season of their ongoing Blood of Kings campaign! 

The Mithral Canvas

I'm proud to announce in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month a collaboration with our friends at The Mithral Canvas! They're Patreon group helmed by Andrew Kim and Andrew Macaruso and they specialize in launching sets of magical items and occasionally monsters. For this year's AAPI Month, they're putting out an item set titled Treasures of Daehan Minguk which we're pleased to share samples of with all of you!

The Knives of Divine Will are a pair of bronze ritual daggers used in divining ceremonies that enable their wielders to perform a ritual to beseech the beyond for their wisdom. This is just a sample of items that we'll be sending backers in card format with descriptions through BackerKit. Do stay tuned for that and please check out Mithral Canvas' Patreon page for their entire collection of homebrew content!

That's all for now, but if you have any questions or comments, you can send us a message here through Kickstarter, email us at [email protected], or join us in our Discord server! 

April Update: Progress Report
about 3 years ago – Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 02:13:58 PM

April Update

Hey, folks! As we're entering April, I wanted to get this message out early. We're making excellent progress with the book. In fact, we have a full rough draft of it finished, including Arc 6 which was unlocked as a stretch goal! It's pending proofreading and by the end of April, I'm hoping to have the 5e hardcover book in its entirety finally fleshed out. This will put us on schedule to completing it within our promised time frame. 

The start of the year has also been very busy for our team and we've had some members take a leave due to other responsibilities. This shouldn't affect our schedule too much, but I just wanted to be forthcoming about some unexpected challenges. 

We worked a bit more on the one-shot adventure to send it off to Games Unbound so they could run it at PAX East, so there is a bit of a delay with the Pathfinder 2e playtest document. However, this gave us a chance to tighten and proofread material. 

Jeremy Blum (who, as it was announced, is writing for Paizo's upcoming Tian Xia setting books and Seasons of Ghosts!) did an excellent job enhancing what we've already put together through his editing. I think everyone will be very impressed with it.

This Month's To-Do

Aside from proofreading, I'm going to look into seeing if we can't get the stickers and enamel pins at least printed and sent out early. If I can handle the small deliveries myself without it really adding to folks' financial burden, I'd like to give that a try. We'll have more on that in a future update. The art team will continue work on battle maps and some final illustrations for the unlocked bonus arc. Speaking of which!

This is the Yagwang, an undeath-themed fiend whose design was made possible through your continuing support! She's a fiend whose existence represents the decay of all matter and life. In a cacophony, she preaches of peace through oblivion and that life's true value is found only in its end. A sworn adversary of druids, the famished luminescence she emits drains water in it touches. 

We'll continue our hard work going into the next month and hopefully will have more to share then!

March Update: Free 5e One-Shot Release, Pathfinder 2e playtest in progress
about 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 11:20:20 AM

Good day, everyone!

It's been about a month, so we thought it's time to fill you in on what we've been working on. Aside from the following, the final arc of Undying Corruption is about, say, 2/3 finished in its rough draft form. There has been a long way to go, but we thank you for your patience. We should have a more complete draft of the book in its entirety come April minus progress in the graphics side. Some unexpected delays aside (largely since I hadn't factored in how long preparing the playtest material might take), we're still about on schedule.

Dirge for My Bygone Days

We've completed Dirge for My Bygone Days, a setting-compatible one-shot adventure, for early preview and playtesting. A downloadable copy has been sent to all backers and everyone who preordered from us through BackerKit (just like the 5e playtest). It incorporates a lot of ideas and themes touched on in the playtest document. We'll also be releasing the one-shot for free through drivethrurpg and itch.io, but all backers/preorder customers will receive an early preview. 

I just ran the adventure with some players in our group Discord server and it's been a solid success. Completed it in three hours of game time, so it would take you a solid session to run it in its entirety. 

Please check out our undead-themed adventure using some monsters we've statted up for the book! A Pathfinder 2e version will also be available following the playtest release for that system.

If you get to running it, please let me know how everything went! We're also going to release a set of premade characters in time to help more easily situate players into the world of Danguk. So look forward to them in a coming launch! 

Pathfinder 2e Playtest

Just to keep you in the loop about what's happening, all monsters we've converted have been put organized neatly into the WIP document so far. I wanted to tweak the ancestries and classes a little more while we had the time and they're being looked over by a professional editor and writer, Jeremy Blum/Pixel Grotto, familiar with game development and Pathfinder 2e. We're intent on making sure our product is as strong as it can be when ready for these soft releases, so we've taken a little bit of time to work on them. You can look forward to a release later toward the middle or end of March. 

Until then, definitely keep up with us at Nine Heavens Press on Twitter. We're posting conversions of 5e monsters that we've revealed weekly!

Shipping Update

Quick bit of shipping news, but we're looking to partner with White Squirrel for domestic deliveries in the United States. This changes the shipping fees for the States to around $8.00 or $9.00 USD depending on state to state distances. Regardless, I think these are the best rates we could secure for the moment. We'll begin collecting shipping costs later down the line once we're able to solidify a delivery date. For now, no need to worry, but this has been our progress so far.