This Blighted Isle: Darkened Hill & Dale

October Update: Mostly Art, Partially Handouts
23 days ago – Tue, Oct 29, 2024 at 10:21:39 AM

Hello Friends,

I hope you're all having a suitably spooky month! 

It's a quick update this month, as I've mostly been doing 'more of the same' and want to get back to it, but I do have some art for you!

Jazmin is nearly finished with the fabulous NPC illustrations, while RainbowPhilosopher continues to produce some great scenic art.

While they've been creating those, I've been doing some more work on the handouts. These have needed revising and polishing as I've tweaked the scenarios following playtesting, but they're slowly coming together.

Playtesting has been quietly going on in the background—thanks to those who've been running the games! Depicted below is my lovely friend Joel, running Death Knell in Things From The Flood for other lovely folks at Trick or Retreat last week.

Aurora Temporalis didn't get as far as the playtesters before I decided it needed an overhaul due to its overly-complex internal mechanics, so I've been focused on sorting that out. Playtesters can expect to see that on Discord in the next few days.

Deadline-wise, I'm still aspiring to ship before the end of the year, though that does depend on the artwork (and the scenario revisions) being complete by the end of November, which may be slightly optimistic. But, we'll see! As ever, I'll let you know if the target changes.

If the PDF is complete before Christmas but the print copies aren't, would folks like to receive that as a seasonal treat? Let me know in the comments.

There should be another update between now and then but, as an aside, I'm expecting to be at Dragonmeet in London on Sat 30th November, where my partner is running Moonlit Shadow (which is already sold out—sorry). If anyone wants to say hi while there, give me a shout on BlueSky! 

Yours extra spookily,
– Sarah 

September Update: General Progress, A New Artist, & Estimated Shipping Update
about 2 months ago – Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 11:58:29 AM

Hello Friends! 

I hope you're all keeping warm as we enter spooky season. Progress has been rather spread out across all the different elements this month, so here are the key bits:

• The last two scenarios have required more research and reworking than expected, but Death Knell, the penultimate scenario, will be shared with playtesters tomorrow. The final scenario, Aurora Temporalis, is quite a different format to the others and consequently a little shorter, so shouldn't be too far behind. 
• Whilst working on those I've also been reviewing and tweaking the other scenarios based on the feedback I've received. 
• I've also been chipping away at the handout ephemera, but you won't see too many of those items shared online as they often contain key clues and spoilers!
• Jazmin is nearly finished with the NPC artwork, which is exciting!
• I listened to everyone's feedback on the topic of interior artwork—thanks for your help!—and subsequently decided to look for a second artist to tackle the scene/landscape illustrations to take the pressure off Jazmin. 
  I lucked out a bit, as RainbowPhilosopher/Sarah opened their commissions only a few minutes before I messaged her! Happily, she was keen to work on the project and could start immediately. You can follow her Instagram account here, but here's a sneak peak in the form of her illustration for Moonlit Shadow... 

I think it looks pretty great! RP is working very quickly and has already produced 3/7 pieces, so we may have all the interior artwork finished by the end of October, or else early November, which is also very exciting!

In terms of production timeline, this clearly means that the book won't be printed in October as hoped. So...

When will this be shipping? 

I've managed to set aside several days to crack on with Darkened Hill & Dale in October myself, and I'm hoping to make the most of them. If I can get on with finishing the scenarios and ephemera, and if all the artwork is finished in the next 4–6 weeks as predicted, then I should be able to order the proof copies by mid November. With a little time to review those for typos and other problems, that means printing everything at the end of November, which in turn brings us to shipping in December. 

Shipping is December isn't ideal for two reasons—everything will be slowed down by the usual Christmas postal chaos, and I'll be trying to cram all my contracted day job hours into the first fortnight, so I'll personally be quite busy until the week before Christmas and may not be able to actually put things in the post until then.

So, in conclusion, I suspect I will be enlisting my beloved (and unsuspecting) family members to help me put your books/prints/etc in envelopes either side of Christmas, and shipping them all out by the end of December. 

Thank you all for your patience with the project. 
Darkened Hill & Dale has become a rather bigger and more involved project than I originally imagined—it's not exactly scope creep because the essentials haven't changed, but all the individual elements have become more than anticipated. Expecting to have it all finished in six months was ambitious, to put it mildly, despite me working on it almost every day for the last six months. That both myself and the artists have been ill a lot hasn't helped and neither, to be upfront, has the UK's chronic and ongoing shortage of ADHD medication, which has noticeably and negatively impacted the speed of my own work in a deeply frustrating manner.

Anyway, thanks again. It feels like we're approaching the home stretch now, and I'm really looking forward to getting this out to you all.  

A New Website

This month I set up a website for Darkened Hill & Dale over at https://www.patchworkfez.games/. This is essentially a summary of the project that's a bit more legible and up to date than the Kickstarter one, and contains a link to the BackerKit pre-order page. If you have any friends who might be interested in pre-ordering, that's the best link to share.

(And it's my birthday next week, so it would be very nice if folks did share it!)

I haven't been anywhere new to take location reference photos this month because I simply haven't had time, but I have pulled out some older photos of interesting places that have inspired Darkened Hill & Dale, and I'll be adding them to the online reference collection when that goes live. That said, I am hoping to visit a cattle market for Fatstock while briefly in the Midlands this month and, more excitingly, wrangle my way into a church bell tower that is genuinely full of bats. Fingers crossed for that one.

I'll be seeing some of you at Trick or Retreat soon, and I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the proposed playtest session of Darkened Hill & Dale goes in person while there! I shall doubtless be hovering in the corner, working on the remaining hand-outs and trying not to influence proceedings...

That's it for this month. If you'd like sporadic interim updates, follow me on BlueSky* or Instagram. Otherwise, until next month, stay spooky. 

Yours in seasonal horror,
– Sarah

*I've just set up a BlueSky account specifically for Patchwork Fez Games stuff here, but I'm not going to remember to update it as regularly as my personal account yet. 

August Update: Bits & Pieces, Artwork, etc.
3 months ago – Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 01:51:14 PM

Hello Friends, I hope you're all well! 

This month has flown by, and progress has been a bit slower than hoped, to be honest. That's largely down to a combination of me being busy (with things like my sister's wedding* and WorldCon) and being under the weather again, the latter of which has been particularly frustrating.

Anyway, here's a summary of what's been happening in the last month:

• Writing and editing has continued! Five of the seven scenarios have been shared with playtesters, and the last two shouldn't be too far away now. 
• The BackerKit survey went out and 93% of you have completed it, which is great! Thanks! If you haven't completed yours yet, consider this you cue to go rummage in your inbox for the email about it. 
• Jazmin continues to work on the NPC illustrations, and they're all great.

Speaking of Jazmin, here's her excellent new portrait of Alistair Fjord, from Fools' Fire.

Are we still on schedule to ship in October? I think it's possible, but I really want to give Jazmin enough time to finish the NPC portraits (as we're playing catch-up following her illness), so there's a chance we may end up shipping in early November to make that happen. I'll keep you posted on how that's looking next month. 

On that note, I'm currently deciding what to do about the scenario artwork for Darkened Hill & Dale (that is—the artwork that goes at the beginning of each scenario); although I love her atmospheric painting for Fools' Fire (which featured in the May update), we're sadly just not going to have enough time for Jazmin to produce similar pieces for the other scenarios. 

I have a few options to choose from: find a new artist for these pieces (which may be tricky, for a whole variety of reasons), utilise public domain artworks (like those used in the Kickstarter campaign), use my own artwork (which people have been complimentary about but stylistically isn't right), or use some of the photographs I've been taking of reference locations. I'm still undecided but need to decide very soon, so let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts! 

A few weeks ago, in my quest to acquire reference photos for the project, I managed to very briefly drop into the village of Ryhall in Rutland, which was hosting the most charming village fête I can ever recall visiting. There were archaic games, such as Bowling For a Pig (though the prize was sadly not an actual pig), bric-à-brac and local produce stalls, a cream tea tent, and a 1940s-style band performing very jaunty covers of traditionally tragic songs. There's nothing quite like the tonal dissonance of an upbeat swing rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" to set the mood for an event. 

Ryhall village also had some great bits of strangeness including a large, half buried clock face in the graveyard (which didn't seem to be a sundial), a very bent solitary lamppost by the church door, and the delightful 'NO 2 HOPE COTTAGE', whose modified signage made me do a double take and fall off the pavement. 

That's it for this month! I've kept my diary for September as free as possible, so I'm expecting faster progress for the next few weeks. I shall also try to post more regularly on Instagram for those of you over there—I just tend to forget about it in favour of actually working on the project itself...

Oh, as an aside, there are still some tickets left for that other thing of mine, Trick Or Retreat! No promises, but attendees may be able to pick up their copies of Darkened Hill & Dale while there, as well as having a chance to play a scenario or two... 

Yours in perpetual horror,
– Sarah

(*My sister sadly wouldn't let me trash her wedding setup just to take reference photos for Roses are Red, which was very disappointing but understandable, I suppose. I did ask, though.)

July Update: Project Timeline Update, BackerKit, Pre-Orders, etc.
4 months ago – Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 06:40:10 AM

Hello Friends,

I hope you're all well! This month has been a little slower than hoped due to yet another round of illness, but both Jazmin and I are on the mend and still pushing the project along. 
Speaking of Jazmin, here's her latest fabulous illustration...

This is Sandra, a key character from It Takes a Village, a scenario which one of our playtesters kindly ran over in the U.S. last week. The feedback has been very useful already; one of the primary reasons for asking others to run the test games is that the scenarios are so fully envisaged in my head that it's sometimes tricky to spot things that I've accidentally forgotten to put on the page, and this really helps to catch those errors. If I run the games I don't need to refer to the text, so I'm much less likely to notice! 

So, key things for this update:

Project Timeline - Likely shipping in October

I had hoped to ship Darkened Hill & Dale by October, but I think it's now more realistic that physical copies will be shipping out to you in October. Sorry about that. 

I'm a little behind with writing/editing/etc. due to illness, and Jazmin's in the same position with the illustrations. We're not very behind—4 of 7 scenarios are in the hands of playtesters, with the others to follow soon—because I built a buffer into the original project timeline, but it wasn't quite large enough. I don't want to rush the project just to get it out two weeks earlier, so I hope you'll bear with us! 

BackerKit

Given that much of my 'day job' consultancy work involves designing and populating complex databases, I really didn't expect to find BackerKit's backend to be quite as convoluted as it is. But, it's finally set up and you can expect to receive emails about your pledges very soon! There will be a 'smoke test' where about 5% of you receive the email to check it's working ok, and then the rest will go out—hopefully within the next couple of days. 

When you receive your email you should be able to upgrade your pledge (if you like), pick up some add-ons (such as prints and postcards), and order extra copies. The prices for upgrades should be the same as if you ordered the higher tier during the campaign, but these may incur some extra shipping costs. Postage is being charged at cost; unfortunately, shipping things overseas can be very expensive these days, but if you add things to your BackerKit basket and find the shipping cost is coming out as prohibitively high, please do let me know so that I can check it's not an error. 

For that matter, if you notice anything odd or have any questions, please do get in touch!

Your surveys won't lock in before September (when things go to print), and I'll give you all a heads up just before that happens. 

Pre-Orders

As well as allowing you to manage your pledges, BackerKit also has a pre-order function, which is now live over here. If you have any friends who missed the Kickstarter, or if you generally want to share Darkened Hill & Dale with folks, please do share it with them! 

Pre-orders currently cost the same as the Kickstarter editions, but the retail prices will be higher once those are all shipped.

As a break from looking at screens all day, I took myself down to Romney Marsh a couple of weeks ago to visit St Thomas Becket church. It's a remarkable 12th century building that sits by itself out in the middle of marshland, with an unusual wooden interior. I was briefly marooned in the church when the heavens opened, and it was impressively atmospheric. 

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this church inspired the setting for Fools' Fire, but you'd be wrong. The church in that scenario was originally inspired by the one at Snave, which is open for only one service per year. I thought that was quite cool, but that it'd be more interesting if the church was in the middle of a marsh. 

I didn't realise that Snave church actually is on the edge of marshland, or that my 'fictional' church was real and only 3.5 miles to the west of Snave. 

Honestly, you can't invent anything weird in this country. 
It's all real and, apparently, just down the road. 

Yours in ongoing horror,
— Sarah

June Update: Progress, Handouts, etc.
5 months ago – Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 08:12:33 AM

Hi Friends,

I hope you're all well! Apologies for the late update this month—I've had a chaotic few weeks. Between sinusitis, a death in the family, the UK Games Expo, and a(nother) round of Covid, progress has been a little slower than hoped. Sadly there's no new interior art for you this month, either, as Jazmin has also been unwell, but I do have some handouts in progress to show you. But first, a quick review of progress:

• The editing and tweaking of scenarios continues! You may have seen pages of handwritten notes appearing sporadically on my BlueSky and Instagram pages—that's all material for Darkened Hill & Dale. I've also received some really useful feedback in the last couple of weeks, which is being incorporated. 
• Off the back of said feedback, I've drafted out the content warnings page for Darkened Hill & Dale. Horror games, by their nature, come with an expectation of unpleasant and shocking content, but there are specific horrors that some people wish to avoid in their gaming experiences, and I'd rather folks weren't actually traumatised by their hobbies. The book will contain a page specifying the warnings for each scenario, but I'm also going to host a comprehensive, combined list of all the warnings online; the idea being that GMs can ask players to read it and flag any potential issues without the players knowing which scenarios each warning applies to, and thus avoiding spoilers. 
• Thanks to those of you who signed up to help out with playtesting last update! I'm delighted that so many of you are interested, and the folks who've joined the Discord server for playtesting have been discussing RPG systems and sharing some great examples of horror to set the mood. For those of you who missed the bit about playtesting last update, you can fill out the short form (and join the Discord server) here. 
  This playtesting hasn't commenced yet (due to the recent happenings) but I'll be sharing three of the scenarios with GMs by the end of this week, with more to follow soon!
• I've just mentioned a Darkened Hill & Dale Discord server; this is currently meant to be focused on playtesting, but once we're a bit nearer to everyone receiving their copies I'll open it up so that anyone who wants to chat about the scenarios (or other related stuff) can hang out. 
• I've nearly finished setting up BackerKit for add-ons, upgrades, and general pre-orders, but it's not quite ready yet. I'm now expecting for that to go live in early July, so you may receive an email about that in a couple of weeks.
• Is this project going to ship later that planned due to this month's delays? That depends on how a couple of things shape up over the next month, but I was fairly generous with the 'unforeseen delays' when I was scheduling Darkened Hill & Dale's production, so we're not actually behind schedule yet. It may be that we slip to shipping in October rather than by October, but I'm optimistic about staying on track, and I'll keep you posted on how that's looking.
• Ephemera handouts are coming along nicely. Many of them will be completed post-playtesting to ensure they contain correct information or clues, but some of them will be available for playtesting. There will be 1–3 pieces per scenario all in all, but here's a small selection for now:

Yes, I did buy a facsimile 13th century King John silver hammered penny purely to make a rubbing of it. Yes, I did draw and colour a Voynich manuscript-style plant illustration with niche German inks on paper I made. Yes, I wrote a whole blog post about a place that doesn't exist. Arts and crafts are fun, as is verisimilitude!

As an aside, I've been acquiring yet more photos of places for the 'reference materials' pack. Hopefully it'll be less windy next time I'm lumping across some fields for more scenic shots. 

That's about it for this month, but I'll aim to post the next update in early (rather than late) July. Thanks for reading! 

Yours in perpetual horror,
Sarah