It's real! Product Photos of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Here are some product shots of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. An advance copy arrived on my doorstep. It looks gorgeous. (The game, not the doorstep.) Click any of the images to embiggen. We're on schedule to debut at GenCon!

Doh: Something of the Something Something

A gift from John Harper

Cel Shading the Cover of Do: The Book of Letters

I recorded my cel shading process for the cover of Do: The Book of Letters. As you can probably tell, it takes a LONG time to do each character. This figure alone is about three and a half hours.

Music:
Troublemakers - Matt Wilson
As sete mulheres do Minho - De Outra Margem - CC-BY
Departures - Mattias Westlund - CC-BY

"Cydonia or Bust" Letter Contest [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple]

Grant Chen of gaming blog MiniEnt is holding a letter-writing contest to get the pilgrims to Mars! He says:

"I want to see letters from Mars. That’s why MiniEnt is going to hold its very first contest: CyDonia or Bust! We want to see letters from Mars addressed to the Pilgrims of the Flying Temple asking for help.

"If you write the best letter, you’ll be getting a PDF of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple when it becomes available for sale.

"If you already have a copy, we can offer Happy Birthday Robot or some other non-Dresden Files PDF from the Evil Hat store."

Deadline: Saturday, June 18, 2011

» See more at Cydonia or Bust!

Liz Radtke's Vector Trace for the Cover of Do: The Book of Letters

Liz just finished the vector trace for the cover of Do: The Book of Letters. I'll cel shade and color this like I did for the corebook's cover. W00t!

» See the process.
» Liz Radtke's Blog

PDF of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple Now Available to Backers

Hello, Backers! You should now have access to the electronic edition of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. This includes a full-color PDF and a barebones printer-friendly PDF, too. Hope you enjoy! Please share your experiences on forums, Facebook and Twitter. Ping me at gobi81 at gmail dot com when you do so. I'd love to share your stories, too.

Here are some more updates:

* The PDF will be for sale on evilhat.com in a few days! Or right now!

* The book is at the printer. It is on schedule for distribution with plenty of time for GenCon. (I'll be a GenCon signing books at the Indie Press Revolution booth. Schedule TBD.)

* The book will be on sale for pre-order in July at evilhat.com.

* Do: The Book of Letters is being edited and illustrated right now. (All of your letters have been accepted!) You can see Liz Radtke's sketches for the cover here.

* We plan on wrapping up BoL in late July, so look for more announcements then.

Dan Cetorelli Completes Hand-Bound Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Dan Cetorelli just put the finishing touches on the custom, hand-bound copy of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. This lovely artifact is going to our highest Kickstarter backer, along with a bunch of other Evil Hat goodies. If you've enjoyed watching Dan's process, leave a comment on his blog!

Lyndsay Peters' Dragon Chow Bags for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

One of the exciting things about the exclusive rewards we offered for the Kickstarter is when they actually become real! Lyndsay Peters of Dragon Chow Dice Bags made these pouches with custom fabric combination for Do's high-end backers. I'll bundle them up with the green and white stones and send them along with the game as soon as it's printed. Thanks so much, Lyndsay!

» Dragon Chow Dice Bags

#DoCrossover [Twitter]

I have really fun brainstorming sessions with twitterfolk. I'd like to save those conversations for posterity, so I'm experimenting with Storify and starting a new "Twitter" tag.

Storify lets you embed a whole stream of related social media units into a single widget. Each tweet has live links so you can reply and retweet straight from the widget, too. Saves me the work of directly linking to each tweet.

Really enjoying it so far. Hope you dig it, too!

Liz Radtke's Cover Sketches for Do: The Book of Letters

Sketch process between Liz Radtke and I as she illustrates the cover of Do: The Book of Letters. This is just one way an art director and artist can work together and certainly not the only way. We've been friends for years, so that certainly influences how well we work together.

My first direction to Liz was something like this: "Let's continue using the same trio of pilgrims for the covers, with dreadlock kid taking the spotlight. This time, they're being chased by some kind of crazy monster on the back cover. I dunno. Something crazy, though. Go wild."

She came back with the first sketch you see up top. She says: "The monster on the back is kind of a mix of a Kirin and Lamassu (a Sumerian god.) He is being teased by that awful rabbit jerk. With eggs. Get it? Rabbit eggs. :P Hopefully no one will read into this too much as a battle between Christians and Pagans, but I do love me some weird mythology."

I compiled some art references as notes to change some of the expressions on the lead pilgrim's face. Also slapdashedly collaged in other pilgrims for posture and composition reference. (These references are all pulled from Bannister's blog, by the way.)

Liz just sent the revised sketch you see at the bottom. Fantastic! Approved, with only a couple minor tweaks.

This cover will be executed much like the cover for Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. She'll create some nice clean black line vectors and I'll fill them in with cel shaded colors.

» Liz Radtke's Blog

Dan Cetorelli's Custom Book Binding for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Watch a master at work. Check out Dan Cetorelli's process as he hand-binds a custom edition of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple!

» Dan Cetorelli: Custom RPG Book Binding

Page Samples from Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

The cover's done, the inside layout is done, and over one hundred proof readers have scoured the text for typos and errors. Above, you can see some page samples from the book. The team is giving the print files one last pass before we go to press tomorrow morning!

Last Day of the Typo Hunt [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple]

Many, many thanks to those who generously spent time scouring the PDF this week to find typos and grammatical errors. The overall sentiment has been "This book looks great! It was lots of fun to read! Now, here are twenty typos I found." Hey, at least you had enough fun reading the book to bother finding those typos!

I have a hardcopy printout of the document, with handwritten notes for consolidating all the edits in one place and each typo-hunter's name written on the front page. Not a super high-tech process, but it works. There was surprisingly little overlap between people's edits, so I'm very confident that the final book will be mostly error-free.

Tonight is the last night to submit any typos and claim a star next to your donor credit. My apologies if I don't reply to you, but a LOT are coming in really fast. I'll do my best to make sure all typo-hunters are accounted for and credited.

Butterfly Logo T-Shirts inspired by Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Butterfly shirts inspired by Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple are now available in a wide range of colors and sizes for men and women. Choose the light butterfly for a temple destiny. Choose the dark butterfly for a worldly destiny.

» Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple - Butterfly Logo Shirts

Thinking about T-Shirts for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

(UPDATE: Shirts now available on Cafepress!)

Thinking about a t-shirt for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I feel weird about straight up putting a logo on a shirt. The cover art, maybe. (I may talk to Liz about that in the future.)

But I really like shirts with crisp, enigmatic logos. DC's recent line of Lantern Corps shirts are what I'm imagining here. I'm also feeling inspired by the Apolis logo t-shirts. Even Magic: the Gathering is in on the act.

I'm shooting for something symbolic, recognizable to those in-the-know, but not explicit. So, the butterfly symbol used throughout the game seems like a good fit. It could be printed in black or white, depending on your preferred color of stone. See the above mockups for examples.

Would you be interested in a shirt with this design?

Thanks from the Development Team! [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple]

Click to embiggen! Our final tally was $24,383 from 552 backers! That's over 600% funding! The video above is a special thanks from the whole development team: Lillian Cohen-Moore, Ryan Macklin, Fred Hicks, Liz Radtke, and yours truly. We'll have more thorough data and analysis as soon as we finish last-minute edits and send the core book to print. Thank you, thank you!

Week 6 [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple | New Prize | Hunt for Typos!]

Only three days left in this record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Thanks to your enthusiastic response, we've been able to offer some very lofty prizes. The loftiest was book artist Dan Cetorelli hand-binding a copy of the game. He's already getting started! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

And I'm happy to announce one last set of prizes! I've made three handmade passport-style character sheets. These are made from vellum, kraft paper and Neenah brand parchment. The opening spread is the character sheet and remaining pages are blank to keep as a journal. These will be randomly awarded to any backers $10 and over. A PDF of this passport will be included in the PDF bundle, too.

Ah, but the big news is that we're ready for you to hunt down any remaining typos or grammatical errors in the book before we go to print. Backers $10 and over, look for a private message with a PDF link shortly. You have until midnight Saturday, May 28th to find a typo. Any backer who finds a typo will get star next to their description. Star get!

Pledge now to join the hunt!

Week 5 [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple]