Bestiary Crowdfunding Delayed till Fall 2022

We’re hard at work on our first full-length Magonomia® supplement, A Bestiary of Enchanted England. Writing and illustration is going well; in fact, a few of the authors and illustrations have completed all their assignments. You can see our progress in our last few months’ blog posts about product development. This is shaping up to be a truly unique bestiary, firmly grounded in sixteenth-century lore and enriched with role-playing advice and plot hooks for each creature.

We’ve decided to delay the crowdfunding launch of this project until Fall 2022. We want to get at least some playtesting done before we launch, and we didn’t account for that up front.

The overall production and release schedule isn’t affected much. We’ve just decided to get the product further along in development before the crowdfunding launch.

The silver lining is that there will be some playtesting events and you can sign up to be invited to participate.

Magonomia® Core Rules crowdfunding fulfilment complete!

We’ve tracked down the last few backers and sent out their rewards for the Magonomia® Core Rules project. If you’re a backer and haven’t received your rewards, please email service@shewstone.com.

Backers, you may be tired of hearing this, but thank you once again for believing in a big project from a first-time publisher. Your support kept us going through the ups and downs. You made magic happen!

The Magonomia® logo

Here are the milestone dates:

1. Crowdfunding launch: March 15, 2020

2. 100% funded: April 27, 2020

3. Original estimated delivery date: November 30, 2020

4. PDF delivery: August 2, 2021 (8 months behind schedule)

5. Print delivery: December 4, 2021 (12 months behind schedule)

Corrections in the works for Map of Enchanted England

We need to make some corrections to the Map of Enchanted England on p. 284 of Magonomia® Core Rules.

It has come to management’s attention that the “Norfolk Hills,” while technically existing, are not prominent enough to be featured on the map. (Norfolk is famously flat.) We’ve spotted a few other errors, which will no doubt be easily spotted by native Britons.

We regard these as routine errata. We’re going to make a correction to the digital edition. This will take a few weeks, because everything in the publishing business takes a few weeks. The print-on-demand version will also be updated. If you’ve purchased a copy already and the map errors bother you, please contact service@shewstone.com. We can’t afford to replace your copy for free, but we can give it to you for the cost of printing & shipping.

Shewstone will not be using NFTs

Shewstone Publishing will not sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or buy them from our contractors or suppliers.

That’s our position.

My day job is in cybersecurity, so I understand the technology and I can imagine some possible evolution paths and hypothetical future applications that wouldn’t be horrible. Those hypothetical possibilities are so different from the reality of the NFT boom today that if they ever materialize, “NFT” won’t even be the right term to describe them.

NFTs as used and understood in 2022 are a non-starter for Shewstone Publishing.

Statement on Kickstarter and Blockchain

by Andrew Gronosky, Founder

We’ve decided to continue using Kickstarter for the time being. We’re aware of the concerns around Kickstarter’s migration to blockchain technology. We’ll continue to monitor the situation.

If you are boycotting Kickstarter, we sympathize. Please consider backing our crowdfunding campaigns as a late backer. Kickstarter won’t get a nickel of your money, but the creators will.

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Many gamers have raised strong objections to Kickstarter’s announcement of Dec. 8, 2021 that they’ll be adopting blockchain technology. Shewstone Publishing disapproves of this move as much as anyone else does. We see nothing but downside for us, our backers, and the tabletop gaming community overall.

We’ve quit Kickstarter on principle before and we’ll do so again if necessary. For now, we’ll believe Kickstarter’s claim that they’ll use carbon offsets. We still object to the blockchain move, but our objection isn’t quite enough to make us walk away.

Bluntly, Kickstarter remains the most cost effective marketing tool for tabletop roleplaying games that we know of. The “follow” feature makes Kickstarter into a social network. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, whose algorithms limit the number of followers who see a post, Kickstarter has a financial incentive to amplify the creator’s message. That’s why it’s so hard for a small, young company like us to turn away from them.

We had a good experience crowdfunding with Game on Tabletop in 2020. If you already have a solid audience, that would be an excellent alternative.