Tomorrow is May 6th—Bruce Cordell’s birthday! With so much going on with The Strange, it might be his busiest birthday ever. But in celebration, we’re officially unveiling The Strange to the gaming world. Kickstarter backers, of course, have been in the know for months, but tomorrow we’ll make the official announcement of the game’s release in August.
Kickstarter Backers: There’s an important update about BackerKit below—please be sure to read it. But first, a little news on how The Strange is coming along!
Design Update: Things are progressing at a frenetic pace here at MCG as we keep The Strange on track for its intended August release. The corebook is just over two weeks from heading to press, and we’re busy dotting Is and crossing Ts. (Metaphorically, of course: In the age of digital typesetting our Is come pre-dotted and Ts pre-crossed. But we ARE neck-deep in the process of giving the book its final proofing and review.)
The Player’s Guide follows the corebook by a few weeks (it doesn’t require as much press time), so it’s also nearing completion. And despite all that work, we’re keeping up the pace on other releases around the time of the game’s launch: Tales from the Strange fiction is written and headed for editing, The Dark Spiral is written and in internal playtesting, and we’re starting into the conversion guide, among other things.
And then there are all the cool bits and pieces in the Fan Kit and Player’s Kit. Most of the Fan Kit components are complete, and Bruce and Monte begin autographing them next week. (The cover art prints have already been printed and signed by Matt Stawicki.) The Player’s Kit bookbags are in production, as are the dice and the folder, with other components such as the XP Deck just about finished with the design cycle. Wherever possible, we’ve worked to ensure that components are not just top quality, but really unique (dare we say strange?) in design. To give you a taste, here’s a mockup of the Player’s Kit folder, perfect for storing your character sheet, recursion sheets, and notes along with any XP or cypher cards you’ve picked up along the way.
One particularly fun component has been the unique character cards. Over 1800 of our backers are receiving these, and each one will be different. The card design is underway, and the data set–the descriptors, types, foci, pools, and so on–for each faction has been fleshed out. These are going to be really cool!
BackerKit—This Is Important!: We are locking down BackerKit on 16 May—a week from Friday! From that point forward, Kickstarter backers won’t be able to make any changes to your data (well, sort of—more on that in a minute). If you’ve had a change of address or email address (especially email address), please take a moment to log into BackerKit and get everything up to date.
96% of our backers have completed BackerKit, and that’s great! (Thanks to those of you who answered the call in the last update.) However, that means there are still 4% of you who haven’t. If that’s you (or if it might be you), please drop everything (the rest of this update will wait!) and complete BackerKit now!
And don’t forget that once BackerKit locks down, so do orders of many of our Kickstarter items. Actual products will be available in the future via the MCG web store (among other places), but Kickstarter-specifics such as the deluxe corebook or Player’s Kit will not be available. If there’s anything you’ve been thinking about adding to your The Strange collection, now’s the time to get it!
Facing a possible address change after 16 May? Don’t fret—when it’s time to ship your order, you’ll have one last change to confirm your address. We’ll have full details on how the fulfillment process will work in next month’s update.
The Pitch Room: If you backed at a level that gives you access to the Pitch Room, you should have received your invitation already—the Pitch Room is up and running. If you haven’t received your invite, contact Tammie at tammie@montecookgames.com.
The Strange. Explore. Defend. Create.
