Beyond the Western Deep

There’s at least one definite upside to being hunted by a pack of canid soldiers in the middle of a sunny day: the sun glinting off their armor lets you know exactly how long you have left to…well, not be dead, I suppose.

Hey, I said it was an upside, I didn’t say it was awesome or anything like that.

Things just keep going from bad to worse for our poor heroes–canid at the front, canid at the back! North and south! They’re surrounded! Bracketed! Cornered! It’d be quite the feat for them to get out of this jam. If it were me, this is about where I’d start trying to convince the DM that I can either turn invisible, or my persuasion feats are way better than the DM thinks they are.

While we do have some new guest art to share, I’m actually thinking I’ll save the first bit of the drop for next week, since I wanted to take some time this week to share some Kickstarter-related updates.

First and foremost, I’m happy to share the very first print-final versions of our new Volume 1 hardcover and the brand new Volume 2! The Limited Edition of V2 is still about a week from production final, but until then, check these puppies out:

I’m planning to get some better pictures together for the Kickstarter post I’ll be penning tomorrow, but yeah! Hard to believe how much work went into making these things happen.

Holding the finished hardcover for Volume 2 was actually a pretty powerful moment for me. In a lot of ways, it’s been over three years in the making, going back to our split from our publisher. The original paperback of Volume 2 was released in 2016, and the rather anemic, bare-bones release was one of the inciting incidents in us deciding to go our own way to produce a more robust hardcover independently.

But splitting from the publisher and running our own Kickstarter campaigns also meant being able to produce independent merchandise, and we just got in final versions of the V2 enamel pins and iron-on patches, too! Check ’em out:

The enamel pins for Hardin and Kenosh turned out perfectly, looking stylistically identical to the Quinlan/Dakkan set we produced for Volume 1.

And here’s the final set of flag patches (with an upside-down Aisling patch, but don’t worry, you can spin that around when you get your own :)

The whole set turned out so beautifully–I can’t wait to see all the cool things that our readers stick ’em on!

And remember, if you want to get any of this stuff and haven’t yet, you can still order ALL OF THESE THINGS AND MORE on our BackerKit pre-order store right here: https://beyond-the-western-deep-volume-two.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

And of course, don’t forget that you can follow along with us via our Twitter account at https://twitter.com/thewesterndeep!