Books are on their way to the warehouse!
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 05:24:05 AM

A few quick project updates. As always, we want to encourage you to join us on the Gauntlet Discord server. It's a great place for discussion, as well as to find other folks playing Brindlewood Bay, The Between, and all our other games. You can find the server here.

BackerKit 

Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril are on their way to the various fulfillment warehouses. We will be locking down BackerKit orders and processing BackerKit payments on October 15th. Please make sure your shipping address and payment info is up-to-date so there is no delay in sending you your books. Also: if you want to add something to your order, such as the Suspect Cards & Dice, please do so before October 15th. 

If you are having trouble logging into BackerKit, or if you can't find your backer survey, please let us know ASAP. Send a message using the KS messaging system or DM Jason on Discord. Please include your Kickstarter email address when you message us. 

Cookbook

The Community Cookbook is still being worked on and will ship separately from Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril. Some people have asked if they will have to pay separate shipping for the cookbook since it is shipping separately, and the answer is no—the shipping fees you pay on BackerKit right now are the only ones we will collect. 

Suspect Cards & Dice

Suspect Cards & Dice are still being worked on with the manufacturer. We expect they will ship early next year. 

That's all for now—we'll have some updates on the remaining digital rewards soon. As always, thanks so much for your support! 

We have books!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 02:12:44 PM

An exciting update today: books! 

We have received our advance copies of Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril. They are extremely beautiful—great color, great paper texture and weight, spot UV, bookmarks, and all the rest. We're particularly happy with the paper, which is a very nice cream color you don't often see in books using this format, but that makes Cecilia's artwork really sing. You'll find some pics below. 

The printer is currently printing the books en masse. After that, they'll load them onto a boat and ship them to the warehouse. If you need to make changes to your BackerKit shipping info, now is the time to do it! Please let us know if you can't find your survey or access your profile (message us on Discord or KS messages—do not leave a comment on this post). 

Proofs! Plus: ENnies voting and The Ninth Step
about 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 10:14:28 PM

We have a few quick updates for you, but first, as always, we would like to invite you to join us on The Gauntlet's Discord server.

ENnies voting is now open!

We're so excited to let you know that we were nominated for ENnies in several categories this year. Our game Trophy was nominated for Best Rules, Best Game, and Product of the Year. Brindlewood Bay was nominated for Best Electronic Book. The voting is now open, and we would really appreciate it if you would give Trophy and Brindlewood Bay your votes (top-ranked choice is best, of course). The Gauntlet is also eligible to be selected in the Best Publisher category. You can find the voting here: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2023/

Proofs

We have our first round of proofs for Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril. These are laser printer pages that give us one last chance to check for typos, make sure the fonts are correct, and to make sure the page numbers are accounted for and in order. This is a very important step of the process; we'll spend this weekend going over the pages so that we can give the printer the thumbs up to move forward with offset and binding. 

We have included a few pictures. These are not representative of what the final pages will look like in terms of color or paper quality. 

 The Ninth Step

Brindlewood Bay creator Jason Cordova and his playgroup have recently completed a full campaign of the game using the Kickstarter edition of the rules. It's an excellent actual play—very funny and very scary—and a great example of how to run and play this game. We think you'll enjoy watching it. The campaign can be found on his YouTube channel. The first video is below.  

As always, thanks so much for your support. We'll have more updates very soon!

-The Brindlewood Bay team

June 2023 Update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 06:19:41 AM

Hi everyone! Just a quick update on Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril. We're still at the printer—the process of getting the books ready for offset is extremely tedious, and we're very much on the printer's timetable. There's a lot of back and forth between us and them (quite literally dozens of emails) to make sure even the smallest details are correct, sometimes down to a specific word on a page or a certain shade of yellow in one corner of a specific illustration not appearing correctly. It's just a slow process, made slower by the fact that many businesses have not yet recovered from the pandemic in terms of their staffing. 

All that said, things are still moving along. We should have proofs  soon, at which point everything starts to move much quicker. We will update you as soon as we have proofs in hand, mostly so we can show off the pages, but also to give you an exact timeline for shipping books. 

We'll also be doing an update soon regarding other aspects of the project. In the meantime, we encourage you to join our recently revamped Discord server so you can chat with us directly. 

As always, thanks so much for your support! 

-The Brindlewood Bay team

BackerKit Surveys and Preorder Store
over 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 01:01:37 PM

Hello! Some important updates on the project, so please read carefully…

The Gauntlet Discord server

As always, we want to start by inviting you to The Gauntlet Discord server. Our Discord server is the absolute best place to get in touch with us, get involved with the community, and to play some games! You can find the server here.

BackerKit surveys are going live

BackerKit surveys are going out starting today (some of you will have already received yours as part of the smoke test). If you don’t receive your email in the next day or two, please check your spam folder before getting in touch with us. If you still can’t find it, please send us a message on Kickstarter, or contact Jason Cordova directly on Discord (please do not let us know in a comment here, as we may not see it). Please get your survey filled out and pay your shipping at your earliest convenience so there is no delay in getting your rewards to you. Please note that credit cards aren't charged right away; your shipping and add-ons will not be charged until we are ready to ship rewards. 

International backers

International (non-domestic U.S.) backers may have to pay VAT or other customs charges when their rewards get to their country; we will not be collecting VAT as part of BackerKit. It was prohibitively expensive to work with a warehouse that handled the VAT on their end (meaning you would pre-pay it via BackerKit)—there was just no way of doing it while keeping the actual shipping costs relatively low. On the plus side, international orders will be sent from the same country the books are being printed in, so international backers won’t have to wait for their books to slow boat to the United States. 

Preorder store is live!

The preorder store is now live! If you didn’t get a chance to back the project on Kickstarter, you can now preorder Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril via our preorder store on BackerKit. When you do, you get immediate access to the PDFs for both Brindlewood Bay and Nephews in Peril, so you can start playing right away! That store can be found here.

Physical book printing

We’re presently in the printer’s queue. We don’t have a precise timeline for when the books will be printed, but hopefully they will be printed and on a boat by some time in April. We will update you as we learn more. 

Suspect Cards & Needlepoint Dice

We’re thrilled to be offering something brand-new for BackerKit: The Suspect Cards & Needlepoint Dice! This boxed set comes with 160+ Suspect cards—one for each Suspect in the game—and 6 custom dice. The box has a plastic insert to keep everything organized, and the lid interior features a map of historic Brindlewood Bay.  You can add it to your order for just $40 USD ($5 less than the eventual retail price). We expect it to ship in the fall.

Below are some pictures of the boxed set. Please note that this is a mock-up using RGB—the final product will be CMYK and have a slightly warmer hue. The card art will also be different (scroll down for examples of the final card art). 

Cecilia has finished all the Suspect portraits, which will be featured on the Suspect cards (the reverse of the cards will be the artwork from the respective mystery the Suspect comes from). We’ll also be releasing these portraits as a PDF via DTRPG, as well as integrating them into Roll20. To give you an idea of what the portraits look like, below are the Suspect portraits for Dad Overboard and The Great Brindlewood Bay Bake-Off.

The Darkened Threshold

Our new podcast, The Darkened Threshold, is going strong! If you haven’t checked it out, you should definitely do so, especially if you have any interest in Carved from Brindlewood games. Hosts Jason and Alex are bringing you really fantastic discussions related to running and creating these games. They’re very smart and fun to listen to, and we think you’ll love the show. You can find it here (or wherever you get podcasts). 

What Am I Rolling? 

Brindlewood Bay creator Jason Cordova was recently interviewed on the What Am I Rolling? podcast. It’s a fantastic discussion about his design process, with an emphasis on Brindlewood Bay, The Between, and his new game, Public Access. You can listen to it here.

Public Access is now available!

Speaking of Public Access, it is now available to purchase on DriveThruRPG! Public Access is an analog horror game about a group of young people investigating the (literal) disappearance of a notorious public access TV station in their hometown of Deep Lake, New Mexico. It’s a terrific (and scary as hell) implementation of the Brindlewood Bay mystery system. Check it out!

We’re also currently running a writing contest for the game. Details are here.

Trophy RPG books now available to purchase!

The Trophy RPG is now available to purchase via Studio 2 Publishing. Trophy is actually two games—Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold—plus a setting book, Trophy Loom. Trophy Dark is a fantasy horror game that uses innovative mechanics to tell a story about a group of doomed treasure-hunters going into a place that doesn’t want them there. Trophy Gold is an adventure game about a group of desperate treasure-hunters exploring the lost and forgotten places of the world. Purchase the books at these links: Dark,  Gold, Loom.

The Gauntlet on YouTube!

Jason Cordova runs all of our games on his YouTube channel. His actual plays are designed to show what it’s like to run and play these games, and are a great place to start if you want some extra insight. His current campaigns can be found below.

As always, we want to thank you so much for your support! The next time you hear from us will be when we have print proofs in our hands. 

-The Brindlewood Bay team