Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple Kickstarter

I’m super excited to share this.

PRESS RELEASE
Monday, April 11, 2011

Evil Hat Taking Pledges to Publish Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
New storytelling game for YA and family gamers, set in new fantasy universe

Evil Hat Productions is excited to announce the start of a new fundraising campaign via Kickstarter to publish Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is a storytelling game about helping people and getting into trouble, for 3-5 players, ages 12 and up. Players tell the story of young travelers who help people, but spend most of their time getting into trouble. They use creativity and strategy to create a humorous coming-of-age adventure in a universe of endless skies and tiny planets.

Do is the latest release by game designer Daniel Solis, creator of Happy Birthday, Robot!, a storytelling game designed for children and families. In Do, he continues blurring the lines between Euro-style board games and role-playing games to create fun, light-hearted games that easily build stories. This time, the game is designed for a young adult audience.

“I was inspired by Nickelodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender, The Little Prince, and the Kino’s Journey anime series.” Solis says. “I combined those influences into a new storytelling game set in a weird new universe. I’m happy to say Do consistently produces a funny, creatively engaging and strategically interesting experience.”

Evil Hat Productions, publishers of the Dresden Files Role-Playing Game, has a long history of fostering independent game design. Now, Evil Hat is partnering with Daniel Solis to help bring Do into production by raising funds on Kickstarter, a crowdsource fundraising site commonly used to fund artistic endeavors like film production, novel publication and game development.

The goal is to raise $4,000 in 45 days.  Kickstarter allows people to pledge whatever amount they wish, but no money is deducted until the $4,000 goal is reached, so it’s a no-risk way to help small-press games enter the market.

Relevant Links:
Fundraising Page: http://kck.st/fwk4DD
Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com
Evil Hat: http://www.evilhat.com
Daniel Solis: http://www.danielsolis.com
More about Do: http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/do-pilgrims-of-flying-temple.html

The economics of this project are interesting. Right now we’re running this kickstarter in order to fund a print run of 500 copies of the limited edition hardcover. If we hit that target (and indications suggest we will), we’ll be able to funnel any surplus money into either expanding the print run’s size — the price per unit drops significantly enough that for every additional $500 or so we can spend, we can probably print another 200-250 copies, at least up to the 1000-ish mark — or into getting some standard edition black and white softcovers out there, too. We’ll have to wait and see how well-funded we get, but since we first tweeted about the kickstarter Saturday afternoon, we’ve seen some really impressive turnout; my hopes are that we’ll see both an expanded hardcover print run for the limited edition and an early pursuit of the softcover too.