Update on Product Delivery Time
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 08:27:35 PM

Hello backers!

We have a received another update from the production company on when the product will arrive to our warehouse. I want to note a couple important details first:

1.  Due to the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19, there were unforeseen slow downs with production shipping our product to us. We were not made aware of this until it was finally on the ship.

2. Since it is finally on the ship, this timeline will be very accurate.

The ship is scheduled to make it to Oakland, California on July 1st. At that point, it takes 1-2 days to make it to our warehouse. This means that we will begin shipping the product to you on July 3rd at the earliest.

Please keep in mind that we are still working at minimal capacity and we will be fulfilling 3 Kickstarter projects at once, so it may take 5 days to 2 weeks for your package to get to you.

Thank you everyone for being so patient and understanding. Please send us a direct message if you need to change your address or any other specific concerns you may need addressed.

-Greg P.

Books are Printed!
almost 4 years ago – Thu, May 07, 2020 at 08:42:38 PM

Greetings accursed ones!

Hope those who have them are enjoying their PDFs, and finding plenty of horrible gribbliness to face your players in your (remote) games! What's everyone's favourite bits of the book so far? 

If you pledged for a PDF copy of Dreaded Accursed and haven't received anything from Backerkit (it seems like Backerkit wasn't really playing ball this time), please set up an account on the Nord Games website (https://nordgamesllc.com/my-account/), and send us a direct message on Kickstarter, and we can get the PDF added to your Nord account. 

Other than that, this is just a quick update to say that the physical copies of The Dreaded Accursed have been printed and are on their way to us. We're expecting them to arrive in our warehouse in around 6 weeks or so, and once we've got them all sorted out there, we'll start shipping them out. As you might imagine, using a Netherlands-based printer, the books should be arriving at our UK distribution centre quite a bit earlier than that, so hopefully those of you based in Europe will be seeing your books soon!

As you may know, we also sent Spectacular Settlements and Treacherous Traps along in the same batch as Dreaded Accursed, so if any of you are backers on those projects, your other books are also in transit to us!

The reference decks are in the process of being printed, but the process of sending out all the book-only pledges is going to be quite a long one anyway (especially considering we have multiple projects being fulfilled at once!), so we are hoping this will not delay things too much. 

Thanks for bearing with us, nearly there now!

Stay safe everyone,

Lou and Ralph

They're Here...
about 4 years ago – Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 03:12:07 AM

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whined. Harpier cries, "'Tis time, 'tis time!"

'Tis time, that is, to gaze ye with dawning horror upon The Dreaded Accursed! 

Yes indeed, final internal checks took a little longer than expected due to gestures broadly at everything, but we got there in the end! 

If you backed for a Dreaded Accursed PDF, you should have an email from Backerkit with download instructions to claim your PDF - please check your inbox (and if you don't see anything, check your spam - they have been known to be waylaid in the past). If you're having issues, please send us a message on here, and we'll be able to help you out. 

Now that that excitement is out of the way, a little bit of an update on our previously-detailed printing woes. After our last update, we communicated nonstop with our printers in China to determine how the printing delays would affect both us and their company financially. 

Unfortunately, as talks progressed, we were informed that printing with them would simply not be possible. Estimate delay times continued to be pushed back, and even they are unsure when they will be able to return to regular workflow again. While we are saddened to move away from this company, we wish them all the best as they continue to heal and move forward.

After many interviews and sample viewings for multiple other printing companies, we have decided upon a printing facility in The Netherlands to handle the hardcover prints for this book. After seeing their example books, we were extremely impressed by their quality: sturdy binding, wonderful page feel, bright colors, and high printing capacity. They were the best samples we saw, and we are thrilled to be moving forward with them on this project!

We aim to provide them the files after you lot have had your grubby mits on them for a week or so. If you do happen to spot anything that doesn't look right, please do post it in the bestiary-errata channel on Discord (invite link), or send us a direct message here if you are not the Discord-using kind! And, of course, if you wish to stroke our egos and let us know what you're enjoying in the book, let us know in the main ultimate-bestiary channel (and/or leave a review on the website - you'll help others know if the book is right for them and earn some Nord Points which can be used to discount future purchases - win win)! 

We're really excited to have this book in your (digital) hands. It's been a labour of love, and we really do hope you get a lot of use out of it. 

Thank you all very much for making it possible,

Everyone at Nord Games 

The Horizon Darkens
about 4 years ago – Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 01:58:58 AM

The grim hordes of death are on the move and will soon be upon us. They blacken the horizon like ants milling about a rotting corpse, and ever on they march. 

So before they get here, I'm just jumping in to give you all a quick update on the state of affairs for all things Accursed, and give you some visual goodies along the way.

Starting off with the biggie - the manuscript is officially done! We finished up the last of the monster hunter journals last week, and all the player options and lair maps are also finished. As I've said a few times, it's turned into something a little bigger than we were initially expecting (to give you an idea, Revenge of the Horde was 196 pages - Dreaded Accursed is currently 270) but, to be fair, that's no bad thing as far as the final product is concerned.

Artwork-wise, we're just waiting on the last few pieces. Specifically, a few revisions need to be done to the mongrelfolk creature artwork (as we unlocked them as an exciting stretch goal chapter), and we're short 2 monster hunter journal sketches, and the Table of Contents artwork (which is currently in a rough sketch stage). That last one is a biggie, and will probably take a few weeks to polish up properly.

I'm expecting to get layout finalised by the end of the week (barring the addition of those outstanding pieces of artwork, all of which have space allocated for them), and I'm currently working out a couple of tweaks (previewed in the October update), none of which are really all that exciting or massive but which, taken together, should make everything look just a little bit better. 

Onto the production side of things. Frequent Nord Fliers will know that both Spectacular Settlements and Treacherous Traps have been experiencing a bit of a printing delay due to the Coronavirus Outbreak, seeing as our regular production facility is based in China. We are looking at various options on how to handle this, but by the time Dreaded Accursed is ready to send to production, we will have made a decision as to how to move forward. I'll keep you informed as to what that decision is and if that will impact production dates as soon as we have more information. Even if production does face delays, PDF-level backers should still expect to get their copies soon (as with Settlements and Traps, we will be offering the option for hardcover-only backers to pick up the PDF at the Kickstarter-exclusive price, if they want to also get in on the early undead action).

The take-home message is - with any luck, this should be the last update you see from us before the PDFs are distributed in a couple of weeks!

Anyone excited? We're excited...

-Ralph and Lou 

Important Updates on New Kickstarter!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 12:29:40 AM

Hello, everyone!

This is Marketing Manager Megan again -- long time no see! I'm back today with some exciting updates and necessary clarifications on our upcoming Kickstarter. Let’s jump right into it:

As some have already seen, Nord will be launching our new Kickstarter for The Ultimate Guide to Alchemy, Crafting & Enchanting next week on February 4th. While we are very excited about this Kickstarter, there are some understandably needed explanations to you, our current backers, as to why we are launching another Kickstarter at this time.

Why Another Kickstarter?

In July 2019, Nord Games posted on our current Kickstarters explaining that we were behind on multiple projects. There were communication and project management issues that ran unfixed for long enough to greatly affect our backers, and those mistakes were unprofessional and humbling. Many meetings and investments in new software/employees later, we made a promise to not start another Kickstarter until all of our other Kickstarters were successfully fulfilled or in production. Here is the status of those other projects:

• Objects of Intrigue: Completely fulfilled; decks in hands.
• Spectacular Settlements: Hardcovers in production & PDFs delivered.
• Treacherous Traps: Hardcovers in production on Monday, February 3rd & PDFs to be delivered on Monday, February 3rd.
• Ultimate Bestiary: The Dreaded Accursed: Delayed due to bereavement leave from lead artist; ready to go into production as soon as art is in.

As you can see here, all projects (aside from this one, which will be ready very soon) will be in production before this new Kickstarter launch. Because of this, we are thrilled to be moving forward with this new project, and can’t wait to deliver Dreaded Accursed and these other fantastic supplements to you ASAP :)

Production vs. Fulfillment

We have also received quite a few messages asking why we’ve chosen to start a new Kickstarter when books aren’t in hands yet. This is the reason why Nord aimed for getting all projects to production vs. in fulfillment. Here’s some behind-the-scenes insight as to why small companies like us have to make these kinds of decisions:

When a product like a book PDF is sent overseas for production and printing, the process completely leaves our hands. We are still involved in occasionally proofing prints and colors to make sure the books look right, but overall, there is nothing we can do in the few months that those books are in production. All of our previous Kickstarters before 2019 were run on this same schedule: products getting fulfilled, products in production, and projects getting created for Kickstarter or release simultaneously.

If we did not run on this schedule of creating, producing, and fulfilling simultaneously, Nord Games wouldn’t be able to exist as it does. We would at most produce one new product a year, and though this may be a viable business model for some larger companies with huge catalogs that get regular hefty sales, it’s simply not viable for a small, creative-intensive tabletop company. We definitely wish this wasn’t the case, and hope to continue growing and eventually get to a place where there is more wiggle room in these tight schedules. But for now, in order for our creators, artists, and managers to pay their bills, we need to keep ourselves on a consistent creation schedule, which is why this new Kickstarter is beginning next week.

How Ready is the Next Book?

In July 2019, Nord also promised that our next project would be 80% complete by the time we began a new Kickstarter. Our lead writers on this new book (myself, Andrew of Spectacular Settlements & Treacherous Traps fame, and JVC Parry of DM’s Guild fame) have been hard at work on it since December. In all honesty, while we’ve been working extremely hard on its creation and there are loads of things already done (magic items, base crafting systems, recipes, art, and more) we are ultimately shy of this 80% completion mark.

Starting the Kickstarter next week in spite of this was a very difficult decision to make, but it was again done to get our company back on a stable schedule. Here are the changes we have set in place in order to ensure that the book still delivers on-time:

• We have employed three full-time writers to work on this project. While Spectacular Settlements was mainly written by one person, and Treacherous Traps was primarily written by two, The Ultimate Guide to Alchemy, Crafting & Enchanting will be written regularly by all three of us. With 4x/week meetings and some very bright and excited brains giving their all on this project, we are confident that this will be a well-refined book bursting with useful stuff that will be completed well on time.
• We have set our delivery date for this project for April 2021. While this may feel like a very far ways out (much further than our previous projects), we are taking no chances with assuming what will and won’t go wrong during this creation process. Especially with events like the recent coronavirus outbreak halting printing across China, we are all too aware of the unpredictability of both life and the creative process. Thus, we have given ourselves very ample time to work on this project, and hope very much to deliver early and further demonstrate our dedication to change with all upcoming projects.

Though I know this news may be concerning to some of you (justifiably so), I do hope that you understand our reasoning behind these decisions, and that you can continue to support our company, products, and passion for this community. I will be here to respond to any questions and concerns you may have, so please know that I am here to listen!

We do it all for you — our fans, customers & backers — so I hope that these coming months will be evidence of our commitment to communication, delivery, quality, and love for this community :)

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding, and happy (spooky) gaming! 

Megan