A Personal Milestone – Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade is now off to the printers!

Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade Cover

For all the latest news on Tianxia, check out today’s Kickstarter Update 34!

Or just click “Continue Reading” here and I’ll fill you in on the details right now:

Summary: An update on where we are with Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade and the other PDF rewards, Vigilance Press Podcast plug, and update about our Example of Play!

Greetings, Wuxia heroes!

Today is a personal milestone for me. For the first time, I have sent off a set of electronic files for an actual press to make multiple copies of a book I helped publish. I have made many print-on-demand books, but this is the first time for me putting out over a thousand copies of a book. This is all thanks to your support! My heart is all a-flutter with excitement!

The next steps require some patience, but I wanted to let you know where we go from here. First, I wait for the printer to send me a physical mock-up of the book, a laser-printed “proof” copy. I’ll go over that with a fine-toothed comb… okay, probably not a comb. A magnifying glass would be more useful. But the point is, I’m going to give that proof one last editing pass to make sure all of our margins and artwork is correctly placed, and any final text errors can be caught.

Once that is done, then the books will be printed and shipped to our distributors! That part is probably about a month out (give or take a couple of weeks), and then the distributors will start shipping books to our backers. It’s my estimation that the US backers in the continental US will more than likely get their books before the UK/Europe/International distributor gets their books. I apologize for the wait, but it’s a reality of shipping that it takes time to get stuff overseas. I’ll keep you all posted as we hit each of those upcoming milestones.

What have we accomplished so far? Well, for one thing, we’ve put out the digital version ofTianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade. In fact, I’ll be updating the digital version with a new update later today that will include the final cover design for the book! I hope you enjoy it. There are also a few little edits we found since the first edition was published, and we updated the PDF to include those. Most of them are minor corrections to the text, but there are a few additional words on “Initiative” on page 61 Jack wanted me to call your attention to. Look for the heading “It’s all in the reflexes…”

For those of you who haven’t been keeping pace with our backer messages, there has also been the playtest release of the Lifepath Generator. If you’re in the “Wandering Knight” reward category or higher, check your Kickstarter message center to find instructions on how to download the text file and links for offering feedback.

Jack Norris is finishing up the Accelerated Addendum which will go out for playtest soon. Once that’s out, I’ll crack the whip and get him started on The 12 Golden Butchersadventure. He has it outlined and plotted out, so it’s just a matter of cranking out all the words and getting the adventure ready for playtesting. My personal goal is to have that ready to run some demo games come convention season.

Ryan Macklin is poised to begin work on Spirits, Beasts & Spells in Mid-May. He’s a very busy man (his work with Paizo alone is a huge chunk of his time), so that’s the earliest I expect him to be able to sit down and start working on it. Jack and Mike Olson will start working on Tianxia: War, Iron & Stone after the playtest draft for The 12 Golden Butchersadventure goes out to playtesters. I’ll keep you posted with news as they start working on it!

In the meantime, I have (finally!) resumed recording and posting Podcasts for ourVigilance Press fans. These don’t come out on any particular schedule, but I’ve tackled two so far this year and I hope to get some more out in April. The Podcasts are a great way to hear what we’re up to at Vigilance Press, and we sometimes (often?) “leak” things there in conversation that we don’t get to promote elsewhere.

Fate fans may find the recent episode with Fate Core System powerhouse designerBrian Engard of interest. He spent time talking with me in detail about the Venture City Stories supplement from Evil Hat (of which I am a huge fan) and his other professional work in the RPG Industry. Check it out here!

If you like our Mutants and Masterminds podcasts, check out this interview with Jon Leitheusser and Steve Kenson about their new and upcoming releases from Green Ronin and Ad Ifinitum Entertainment by clicking here!

In the coming days, I plan to publish a blog post previewing the “Example of Play” fromTianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade so that those of you who have asked for it can easily point to the link and share it with friends and Fate-curious players. We’ve had a lot of requests for it, and we’ve decided to make that section of the book accessible so people can get a feel for how to play Tianxia and Fate. I’ll have that link in an update in the next week or so!

Thank you all again for your enthusiasm and support. I’ve had many emails praising us for getting Tianxia: Blood, Silk & Jade out on time, and I am humbled by the compliments. I certainly could not have done it without the hard work of Daniel Solis, Jack Norris, Nathan Kahler, and Denise Jones.

The other products will clearly not be as quick to release, mainly because they haven’t been written yet, but rest assured that I will put as much effort into them as I did into Blood, Silk & Jade to make sure that they are not only great-looking, but well-written and full to bursting with great new ideas for your Tianxia games.

Until next update…

Stay Vigilant!

-James Dawsey

www.vigilancepress.com