January Update
over 1 year ago – Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 06:13:51 AM

Hello! Some news:

You know that Coronavirus that was going around back in 2020? Turns out it’s still having some knock-on effects, and one of those effects is the way it’s currently ruining the international transport industry thanks to the way that China stopped functioning. This has caused some pretty sizeable delays in the paper being shipped to our printer, which means we have an updated delivery schedule:

UK: March

US: Late March/Early April

ROW: April

Dreadfully sorry about this. It’s going to be an absolute stunner when you get your hands on it, though.

Addresses for non-DIE products (that is: any other books or merchandise you ordered as part of the Backerkit) will lock down on or shortly after Jan 31st. Please tell us if you’re moving via email ([email protected]) so we can make sure our records are up to date.

The fancy dice and fair gold coins are both in America. Our distributors are checking over them and making sure everything’s up to scratch before parcelling them out.

Everything - except, crucially, the book - is finished! And ready to be moved around the world. But there’s that problem with the whole international logistics thing, so we’ll keep you updated as to how things are going as and when they happen.

Yours,

- Grant (and everyone at RRD)

Die December Update: Printing, Making and Freighting, Oh Boy
over 1 year ago – Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 11:53:59 AM

Hello! Eagle-eyed observers will notice that I am not Grant; this is because Grant is currently coughing a lot and in no fit state to do anything strenuous like typing. I’m Maz, and I’m here to talk about fulfilment.

But First: Preorders Closing In January

We’re expecting that we’ll be locking down addresses and closing to new pre-orders in about four weeks, in January, so please make sure your address is up to date. This is the sort of boring task that you can definitely do during the holidays once you’ve run out of internet to read, and it’ll save time, energy and heartache later. If you think you’re moving house between January and April, please drop us a line ([email protected]) so we can make arrangements accordingly.

More Information Than You Really Want To Know About Fulfilment

So, with the PDF out, we’ve got seven main items to get to you (DIE RPG hardback; DIE RPG deluxe edition; Fair Gold coins; art cards; GM screen; resin dice; Grandmaster dice). Most of you will likely be mainly interested in the books, so I’ll tackle those first.

Both the hardcover and the deluxe edition of DIE RPG are in the process of being printed. What this currently means is a lot of back and forth between our designer Lone and our project manager at Livonia about the precise nature of the colour black; once they’ve resolved that, we’ll get proofs sent to us and we’ll be able to go to print. Rian Hughes, who’s designing the deluxe cover and slipcase, has also been hard at work and we’ll be liaising with him and with the slipcase makers to ensure those are as gorgeous as possible.

The slipcases need to be made after the books are printed, so those will be worked up in the new year. For print production nerds: we're doing with a Brillianta black bookcloth covering with foiling and a silkscreen print, so there'll be some intricacies to ensure the foil and silkscreen are properly aligned. We worked with Livonia on a similar process for the Heart special edition cover, so we know they're good at this.

Assuming things go to plan from here, we think the books will be shipping out from the printer at the end of January/start of February. From there we’re depending on the vagaries of global freight and international customs, but we hope to be able to start book fulfilment to the UK and EU in February, to the US and Canada shortly afterwards, and to APAC in March. We’ll keep you updated, obviously.

Because of the complexities of the book production process, these are actually the last items to be produced. As far as everything else goes:

• The art cards exist, and they’re currently with our warehouse; the next stage is getting them to the last-mile partners we’re using for UK/EU shipping, and getting a stack sent over to the US.
• The coins exist, and are in nice bags, and have been sent from Campaign Coins to our dice partners, who are sending them over to the US for onward shipping, along with…
• The Grandmaster and resin dice, which also exist and have been packed into boxes. The resin dice are due to land in America between Christmas and the New Year, and the GM dice will follow in early Jan.
• The GM screens nearly exist, and will hopefully be finished next week - we made the card thicker for these after seeing samples, and now they're nice and robust as well as being beautiful. Those are being split by the producers, FE Tootmine, and a batch will go to the UK and to the US in early Jan.

Once the dice and coins are in the US, a stack of those will be split for UK & EU backers and sent over to our UK/EU partners. We hope they’ll be able to wave at the books as they go past in the opposite direction. Then when everything is with our US partners, they’ll send a batch over to Australia for the folks in Asia Pacific.

I have drawn a helpful diagram to illustrate this, which you can see below.

That Is Too Much Information, When Will My Stuff Be Sent To Me?

UK and EU backers: hopefully February.

US and CA backers: hopefully late February/early March.

APAC backers: hopefully mid-late March.

Everyone else: your parcels tend to take a lot longer to clear customs and arrive, but we’re aiming to send them in March and you’ll hopefully get them within 3 weeks of sending.

Everything is being sent out duties paid, so you shouldn't have any additional customs fees to pay.

What About Retailers?

As per previous updates, if you’re a retail backer, please send us over an order form and we’ll make sure you get everything at the correct price sent at the same time as Kickstarter backers get their items. If you’ve not received an order form, email [email protected] and I’ll sort you out.

What About Stuff That Isn’t DIE RPG That I Ordered In The Backerkit?

We’re going to be working on shipping these parcels separately, starting in January. If you’ve ordered non-DIE things, please make extra sure your address is up to date.

Thanks And Happy Holidays!

If you’re celebrating, I hope you have a good one! If you’re on strike or strike planning, solidarity! If you’ve not yet watched Muppets Christmas Carol, please do so, they’ve finally put the best song back in the film! Speak in the new year,

- Maz, Kieron, Stephanie, Grant, Zach, and everyone at or near RR&D

November update
over 1 year ago – Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 12:12:18 AM

Hello!

Firstly, thank you all for your corrections on the PDF. We have implemented those, along with a wide variety of other last-minute corrections, to make sure the printed book (and the updated digital version) are as smooth a read as possible.

If you go to your Digital Downloads folder in Backerkit, you should be able to download the updated PDF. There’s no structural changes, but everything is spelled correctly now, or at least we hope it’s everything. You should also receive a handy email with a link, but if you haven’t, go root around on Backerkit and track it down.

If you find any errors with this edition of the manuscript, and I’m sure some of you will, please keep them to yourself. Don’t tell anyone. It’s too late to do anything about them. If you feel they’re really egregious, wait until you get your physical copy and correct them yourself in pen.

STUFF!

We have some sample stuff to show you!

Firstly, here are the art cards. Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that we’ve already shown you the art card proof prints once before, and this is because the company that was printing them for us stopped printing them before our order was fulfilled. Bit of fun, eh? However we’re teaming up with our old friends Belmont Printing down in Northampton to cover us, and they’ve done a lovely job.

Secondly, the GM screen is here! It looks nice. We’re going to implement a couple of tweaks and then we’re good to start printing in bulk.

Thirdly! We’ve had notification that the Fair Gold coins have finished production, and they’re making their way over to join the dice for shipping to the USA.

RESOURCE UPDATE

RRD’s in-house designer Minerva McJanda is hard at work updating the player and GM resources to make them a) in line with any corrections you spotted b) form fillable and c) printer-friendly. We’ll let you know when they’re all done.

HARD COPY DISTRIBUTION UPDATE

We’ve run into some complications regarding our paper choices, which mean we’re now re-planning our printing process. The good news here is that we can be extra doubly certain that the paper we’re using will show off Stephanie’s amazing art to its best effect, and this also gives us some extra time to work on getting the best possible combination of materials for Rian’s slipcase and special custom cover. The bad news is that it’s getting less likely we will manage to print and ship the books to the UK before Christmas, which tends to be a fairly busy time for retailers regardless..

Given the number of books involved we’ll be working in pallets, which makes the whole process significantly cheaper (and we pass those savings on to you!) but also significantly slower (and we pass that waiting on to you!).

This is still an evolving situation, but we’ll do our best to speed things along while also making sure you get the best book possible at the end of the process. Transparency and communication are our middle names here at Rowan, Rook and Decard (you should see the birth certificate) so we’ll do our damndest to keep you informed about everything you need to know RE the timeline and production of your books.

That's all for now.

- Grant (and everyone else at RRD)

PDFs are in distribution
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 04:37:16 AM

Hello!

If you backed us during this campaign or pre-ordered DIE, you should now have access to the PDF of the game through Backerkit. Here's how to get it.

STEP ONE. Check your email. Backerkit emails you when you get access to new digital downloads. It may well be in your junk mail inbox because it looks generic enough to be spam. But it's not! It's got a link to a game in it. Click on that link, download it and have fun.

OPTIONAL STEP TWO. If you can't find the email, you can go directly to https://die-rpg.backerkit.com/, log in, and access your downloads from there.

EVEN MORE OPTIONAL STEP THREE. If you can't find the email and you can't download the game by logging into Backerkit, ask yourself: did I actually back this game on Kickstarter or pre-order it? If the answer is no, that's your problem right there. If the answer is yes, send an email to [email protected] listing the email address you used on Kickstarter/Backerkit and we'll look into the problem.

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RETAILERS

If you're a retail backer for DIE, you should already have had an email with a link to a retail order form. If not, you can make your own - click here to make a copy of our retail order form, fill it in and email it back to [email protected], and we'll take care of it from there.

IF YOU FIND ANY ERRORS, issues, typos, misprints or other aberrations in the text then you can go to the official DIE Discord (not the RRD Discord as I said on Sunday, apologies) and list them in the specific channel. Please do this before Friday October 28th! We have a tight print schedule on this.

That's all for now. We hope you like what we've done with it!

- Grant, Kieron, Maz, Stephanie, Zach and all of us at RRD

DIE RPG PDF on Tuesday!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 02:56:20 AM

It's happening! It's been a challenge getting here but: we'll be releasing the PDF for the DIE RPG on Tuesday afternoon UK time!

WHAT HAPPENS NOW? 

You should receive an email from Backerkit shortly warning you that your order will lock in 48 hours time. Check you've got everything you want and that you've got the right payment info attached. Then, on Tuesday, your card will be charged and you'll get an email with your download details for the DIE RPG PDF (and a bunch of player resources to go with it, and anything else you've ordered from us). This gives us time to make sure that everyone's payments have gone through and we aren't accidentally giving away the PDF for free.

Once you've got the PDF, enjoy it! Read it! Look at the pictures! And if you spot any typos or errors in the text, you can post them in our DIE RPG CORRECTIONS Discord channel. (Thankfully, our extensive passes from multiple editors means that we've managed to pull down the number of errors. But nobody's perfect, eh.) 

Print deadline is imminent so there's only a limited time for backer preview. Get your corrections in quickly. (And: thank you for your service.)

PHYSICAL BOOK SCHEDULE

We're planning to print in November/December which means fulfillment will likely begin in February to allow enough time for us to move a bunch of books around the world. (Getting that many books into the States is especially difficult and time-consuming.) Fulfillment is likely to happen in stages as UK, US & AU based partners will potentially receive items at different times and we will get parcels out as soon as is practical in each place. We'll keep you updated as we go.

Now for some specific updates:

RETAILERS 

If you backed Die as a retailer, you should receive an email shortly with an order form for you to fill in. This includes space for you to order directly all DIE products as well as any RR&D and UFO Press items you'd like to add to your order. Please fill this in and return it to us on email, and we will invoice you accordingly and get your books prepped to ship at the same time as non-retail backers, which will be ahead of general release. Speaking of general release: we're hoping that from March the DIE RPG book and some of the campaign add-ons will be available from both Diamond and Alliance. We'll be sending out sales info sheets along with order confirmations so you have some materials to help you sell the game to your customers.

PEOPLE WHO HAVE ORDERED BOTH DIE AND NON-DIE ITEMS 

Firstly, thanks! Secondly - we're planning to split your orders so that you'll receive the non-DIE parts sooner. All being well, you'll get items you've ordered from RR&D's back catalogue in the course of the next few weeks. That means we will need to lock the address tied to your order shortly, so please check your address is correct now. Once this part of your order is complete, we will unlock the address for editing so you can change it before your second parcel ships.

That's all for now. Keep an eye on your inboxes come Tuesday!

- Grant, Kieron, Stephanie, Zach, Maz and everyone at RRD