Delvers to Grow: Now LIVE on Kickstarter!

[DouglasCole]

Delvers to Grow is now LIVE on Kickstarter!!

Zero-to-Hero with the Dungeon Fantasy RPG

Even the mightiest delver started somewhere. An apprentice, a squire or man-at-arms, a backup singer with The Backstreet Bards.

Delvers to Grow allows you to take the part of those starting characters, supporting starting play as low as 62 points. Delvers to Grow provides pre-built modules and packages enabling a player to create a capable, playable character in minutes.

Get gaming. Fast. Early playtesting (blind-testing, really) showed that you could get from "blank sheet of paper" to "playing" in less than 20 minutes.

Fully compatible with the professional template system in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG Adventurers book, Delvers to Grow lets you start much earlier in the hero’s journey, letting both players and GMs ease into the full breadth of capability that the professional delvers of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG bring to the table.

Explore different challenges or use the modules to effortlessly assemble henchmen…or create a starting character to replace the dearly departed.

Roll and Shout with Delvers to Grow


The Delvers to Grow project supports these goals:

• Play at point levels lower than the 250-point professional templates in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG boxed set for those who prefer lower tier adventuring.
  
• Enable getting new players (and old ones!) to the table in minutes by helping minimize “decision lag” during character generation.

Pledge levels allow you to get the books (and the new adventure by Peter Dell’Orto and Marshall LaPira, The Crypt of Krysuvik), or go bigger and catch up on any Norðlond you may have missed.

Don’t have the boxed set? Steve Jackson Games has graciously allowed me to offer a “Starter Package” pledge that includes the Dungeon Fantasy RPG boxed set and Monsters 2.

Delvers to Grow is LIVE on Kickstarter, and will run through May 25.

Please come by and pledge, and remember: all stretch goals are by backer count, not funding level! So tell your friends!

[Celjabba]

Awesome !

one detail :the timeline have the project ending on the 18, but KS say 26 (18 days)

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Awesome !

one detail :the timeline have the project ending on the 18, but KS say 26 (18 days)

Thanks. I wound up delaying things by a week, but had already gotten a head start on the project. Let me edit where needed.

[Michael Thayne]

Question: the Kickstarter page says Fast Delvers, Smart Delvers, and Strong Delvers are 16 pages each. But no page count is listed for the main volume—how long is it?

[whswhs]

That seems like a good idea. I ran a campaign in Worminghall shortly after the book came out, with the PCs being student mages, and we had a lot of fun with it. Of course that wasn't dungeon crawling, but I think the idea could transfer over.

[Blind Mapmaker]

Wow, that's a sleek Kickstarter campaign - all those options and add-ons. Nice selected of stretch goasl too. Backed the Print & PDF bundle and might add-on some stuff later after I talked to my friends.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Question: the Kickstarter page says Fast Delvers, Smart Delvers, and Strong Delvers are 16 pages each. But no page count is listed for the main volume—how long is it?

It seems to be shaping up at 32 or 36 pages. It's vague at the moment because I don't want to pin it down until I know.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Wow, that's a sleek Kickstarter campaign - all those options and add-ons. Nice selected of stretch goasl too. Backed the Print & PDF bundle and might add-on some stuff later after I talked to my friends.

Kickstarter has been trying out 'add-ons during the campaign' and opened it up to mine this time, so you can actually SELECT what you want, not just plus-up your pledge and figure it out later, in Backerkit.

For the fire-and-forget crowd (and if like some backers, you've got hundreds under your belt) this is ideal. For those who want to take their time or want every penny possible going to creators instead of Kickstarter/Backerkit, waiting until the Backerkit phase to do add-ons is a few percent more funds to the publisher (about 7%).

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That seems like a good idea. I ran a campaign in Worminghall shortly after the book came out, with the PCs being student mages, and we had a lot of fun with it. Of course that wasn't dungeon crawling, but I think the idea could transfer over.

This is a strategy that I wanted to pursue for my forthcoming Mission X RPG, but I saw an opportunity to do a test-drive and really bring some easy entry to the "hardest" part of Powered by GURPS to get newbies over: point-based character generation and the rules familiarity that it tends to encourage. By sticking with the nice genre-defined niches and providing well-crafted options, you can be playing in as little as five minutes (though it's frequently more like 10-20) from sitting down.

Long-time rules experts can do this sometimes without help. But perusing the newcomers section of (say) the GURPS Discord or some other forums perpetually finds folks who try and eat the whole GURPS Cow at once...and Delvers to Grow really helps this.

[kreios]

As one of those people in Exxar's meatgrinder playtesting game (you can find my writeup here or in DouglasCole's initial post[*]), I can attest to the simplicity of the WiP rules for DtG.

I made my first character (at 125pts) for that game in ten minutes - and that includes inputting everything into GCS. I was slightly advantaged beforehand because I had read the book already and looked into the templates. It was still the first DtG character I built for a DFRPG game. It was fast, it was convenient, and it the resulting characters felt powerful enough.

I hope to convert my current group to GURPS - but I'm actually waiting on that for DtG because that should make it far easier.

[*] And I'll probably put up the next session report within a few days, once we've actually played tomorrow.