Okay, the title of this post highlights the free samples as a reason why the Fantastic Lairs Kickstarter has gotten off to such a good start. In truth, the team-up of Scott Gray, James Introcaso and Mike Shea will have caught people’s attention too. All three are designers and developers who have worked on official D&D titles as well as popular third-party books.
Fantastic Lairs offers drop-in lairs and the associated BBEG for twenty dramatic 5e encounters. The team are asking for $15,000 to fund the book. Within an hour of launch, nearly $3,500 had been pledged from over 180 backers. You can see the progress over at the campaign page.
Mike Shea looks after the blog Sly Flourish, which is often cited in Geek Native’s weekly Routinely Itemised RPG round-ups and you’ll be able to see from the URL that it’s Sly Flourish’s Amazon space that is being used to host the 2-lair preview you can download.
You can check out a full 16 pages (PDF Link) for free before you pledge to the project.
A pledge of $15 will get you the digital version of the book. It’s a thorough offering as you get the PDF as well as an ePub. You also get virtual tabletop ready digital maps and artwork plus any stretch goals.
If all goes to plan; you’ll get Fantastic Lairs by the end of the year as the project as an estimated delivery of December.
If you step up to $20, then you’ll get all of the digital goodies plus a coupon code that lets you order the print-on-demand version of the lairs at cost.
That’s it. No other choices. At the time of writing, the print-on-demand option is outselling the digital-only at a rate of 2-1.
There are stretch goals planned, but we’re not given the details. I imagine they’ll be released once the team can see the tempo of the campaign and know what might actually be a stretch! There are art books and addition lairs planned.
The art, I think, is noteworthy. It’s top-quality, and DMs like me often need impactful pictures to help bring across the true menace of the final encounter. Fantastic Lairs has been kind enough to share some previews with Geek Native.
Cockatrice
By Allie Briggs
Hydra
by Jack Kaiser
Kaiser also does the front cover.
Druid
By Xavier Beaudlet
Half-Dragon Knight
By Enmanuel Martinez
Centipede Cultist
By Jack Kaiser
While we’re talking about art and credits, I’d like to point out that the likes of Alex VanDerAa and Derek Ruiz have worked on the cartography and Marc Radle did the page graphic and cover design.
Tempted? You can discover more about Fantastic Lairs at Kickstarter.
Update (1st June): The Knight is a Half-Dragon, not a Dragonborn as first said.
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