TLDR: Shipping happening this month, small Journey Rule update

Hi backers! You'll be happy to hear that later this month I'll be shipping all your Downcrawl goodies to you (and releasing the final digital version as well). Read on for some details about the process and when you can expect your items.



Multiple shipments. Note that most orders at the $45 pledge level and above will arrive in two separate shipments. If you are receiving a Downcrawl core rulebook plus an item from either of these categories-- 1) Card Decks, or 2) Any Other Item-- you'll get your core rulebook in a separate shipment from all your other items.

You'll receive a tracking number via email for both shipments. The non-rulebook shipment will be synced to your BackerKit order (so you can see the status of your shipment on your survey page, for instance). The rulebook shipment will just be a notification via email, as BackerKit only allows associating one tracking number with your order.

Regardless, please keep an eye on those tracking tracking numbers once you get them. If something goes wrong with your shipment, the sooner you can let me know about it, the sooner I can figure out what happened and/or get you a replacement. If you don't notice until sometime next year that your shipment never arrived, my options to make things right will be more limited. I'll send out another backer update once all items have shipped, at which point everyone should have gotten all tracking numbers; if you haven't received one by then, feel free to reach out.

Shipping schedule. I just found out this week I'm a bit under the gun to get shipments out: on April 1st, my book printer is raising prices significantly in response to the uncertainty over the US tariff and trade situation, by up to 70% in some cases. 😱 This hopefully won't affect this project since I'm planning to have all orders placed with the printer before April 1st, but it does mean there's a fairly ominous ticking time bomb I'm extremely aware of...

My current plan is to submit book and card orders to the printer the week of March 17th. (I'm currently waiting on one last sanity-check proof to arrive, just to make sure my final PDF didn't get corrupted during upload or anything.) These orders generally take around 7-12 business days to print, and another week to ship (for US orders; other regions can vary), so you should expect to start seeing books or standalone card orders arriving in the first week of April. (A few folks might see their orders earlier since I'll be processing about 10% of orders this week as a trial run.)

If your order includes bonus items from higher pledge tiers, those will ship along with your card decks the week of March 24th. You should expect to also see those orders start arriving the week of April 1st (or possibly later, if outside the US).

Digital Rewards. These will be released on or before April 1st via BackerKit, along with player aids and any other free digital materials. (I think I've figured out the issue that caused access problems before, so hopefully this time will go more smoothly.) A few of you playing the prerelease game have asked about the bonus materials already; I just haven't had time to get them ready to post yet, but look for them soon.

Preorders will remain open until April 1st when the game officially goes on sale. After that date the price will go up (because of the aforementioned cost increases), so reserve your copy now if you want to lock in 2024 prices.

Unresponsive Backers. Please note that if you haven't filled out your survey to give me your shipping address, or never paid for shipping, you've now unfortunately missed the cut-off for receiving your order in the initial shipment. Get in touch as soon as you can and I can hopefully (depending on how much later you're reading this) arrange a late shipment for you. Note that I can only hold unclaimed pledges or offer refunds for a limited amount of time (see the bottom of the Project FAQ for full details) so reach out ASAP if this is you.

Journey Rule Change

Finally, a design note about the actual game of Downcrawl, which I do vaguely remember exists somewhere underneath the piles of bubble wrap, mailers, packing tape, and shipping labels I'm currently drowning in.

For those of you who've already started playing Downcrawl 2E with the prerelease PDF, I wanted to highlight a last-minute update to the Journey Rules, to patch an exploit that effectively made it possible to farm Tack during journeys if you adopted a certain mildly obtuse play style. The change makes a couple tweaks across the set of Journey Moves, including:

I've made a few other small tweaks to Journey moves to avoid similar exploits (for instance, it's now a bit less appealing to overuse Encamp as a way of avoiding journey penalties). In general, I think these exploits weren't super likely to come up in earnest play-- Downcrawl is not really a game designed for munchkins-- but these tweaks definitely make the system less obviously exploitable, and help keep journeys properly stressful at all times, as they were intended to be.

(And on the topic: if Journeys in your campaign are consistently feeling too hard or too easy, it's easy to tweak the amount of Tack rewards to account for the dynamics at your table. For example: try increasing the Tack awarded for reaching a new place in "In a Volume" from 1 to 2 if journeys feel too hard, or removing that reward entirely if they seem too easy.)

That's it for now! Look for another update once all orders have shipped, hopefully before the end of the month. Can't wait to hear your stories of adventuring in the Deep, Deep Down!

--Aaron

Hi backers--

An update on the issue with erroneous shipping charges which I described in my previous post. All refunds for affected backers have now been processed through Stripe, the credit card processing service, although it may take another 24-48 hours for transactions to finalize depending on your card or bank.

If you would like to double-check your amounts, you can log into your BackerKit page for the project, and click "Edit My Address" in the upper right. This will take you to a page that shows you your whole order. In the "Balance" section on the right hand side, the amount under "Shipping Total" shows the correct charge for shipping your order. Under that, you should see a line item "Paid with Credit Card" with your first charge (which includes any add-ons and the mistaken overcharge). There should be a second second line item showing "Refunded via Credit Card" if you were affected by this error, showing the amount that was returned to you. You should see a final "Credit Remaining" amount of $0.00.

Here's an example of a backer with a shipping charge of $9.50 and no add-ons. They pledged at the $45 tier last fall, were charged $19.50 for shipping erroneously last week, then refunded $10.00.



Note that it's possible on your credit card portal that refunds may look similar to additional charges while the transaction is still pending. If you are in this boat, ideally the thing to do is wait one to two more days before pinging me just to make sure the transaction has settled and you are in fact seeing the correct final amounts.

If you have any issues or questions about your situation, the best thing to do is to contact me via email at aareed at gmail, from the email address associated with your pledge. This makes sure I get promptly notified, can easily look up your account, and we don't have to worry about keeping things vague in a public forum for privacy reasons (i.e. the comments page), and I'll do my best to get you sorted!

Apologies again for the error! Hopefully things should be smooth sailing from here.

A reminder that I'll be locking shipping addresses in just under a week (2/26) as I continue preparing to ship final orders. If you've recently moved or are planning to in the next 30 days, or otherwise need to change your shipping address, now is the time to do so! If you have an urgent address change situation after this deadline, please reach out and let me know directly-- I cannot guarantee the ability to update a shipping address after this date, but I'll do my best to reroute your order if it's at all possible.

Take care,

--Aaron

Hi backers--

TLDR: Many folks were overcharged for shipping when cards ran this morning, due to a dumb mistake on my part. The amount is between $10-15 for most US backers, more for backers with several add-ons or international backers.

I've talked with BackerKit support who are working with me to get refunds to those affected. They are working to set up a bulk operation to credit back all affected cards for the overcharged amount. However, since we are heading into a holiday weekend in the US, this will probably will not be ready to go until mid to late next week, depending on support team backlog. I apologize for the mistake and also for the delay!

In the meantime, if you're curious, you can log into your BackerKit page for the project, and click "Edit My Address" in the upper right. This will take you to a page that shows you your whole order. In the "Balance" section on the right hand side, the line "Shipping Total" shows the correct charge for shipping, with the amount you were charged today below (which also includes the cost of any add-ons). If you are affected by this issue, you will see a line that says "Credit Remaining" and a positive amount, showing the amount you were overcharged. This is the value that will be refunded to your card next week. Here's an example:



I sincerely apologize for this error and hope it hasn't caused anyone any trouble. Refunds should be processed at the absolute latest by next Friday, and I'll send out another update once I hear that all refunds have been processed. Feel free to reply to this message if you have any questions or concerns in the meantime. 

I believe in everything about crowdfunding being a transparent process, so if you're curious about what happened, feel free to read on...

When I went to click the "charge cards" button this morning, I did not realize that a second "shipping profile" had mistakenly got added to a bunch of the items in your orders. I would have realized this if I had opened up a few random orders to check the shipping charges before clicking the button, but I had just done this a few days before: all was well then, and didn't think anything would have happened since to change the amounts. Well, dear readers, I was wrong.

So what is a shipping profile? It's a way for project creators using BackerKit to set a method for calculating the shipping charge for each order. For instance, a simple project might have a shipping profile that's just a flat rate per pledge level. A more complex project might have a shipping profile that is based on the total weight of an order, or its packaging dimensions. The shipping profile also takes into account different costs to ship to different parts of the world and other fiddly details.

Downcrawl has a fairly complicated shipping profile, because of the multiple kinds of items being made and shipped from different locations (I mentioned this a bit in my last regular update). Having closed off "late pledge" orders, I did want to keep a pre-order store open for items that are not limited in quantity-- the books and card decks, which I'll continue to be able to fulfill going forward and don't have to "lock quantities" on. So I created a new shipping profile a few days ago for those late pre-order items, which was purely based on weight of shipment.

However, I made it using the wrong category of shipping profile, which meant that rather than being applied only in the places I explicitly assigned it, it got assigned to every existing order. And since every non-digital order weighs something... that shipping profile kicked in and added a second, erroneous shipping charge to a ton of existing orders.

Oops.

Fortunately BackerKit support got right back to me when I contacted them. I just want to give a shout-out in general to BackerKit's support staff, by the way: they're quick to answer questions, and answer them in depth, not just with stock responses. They listen to you, and understand what your concerns and issues are. It's sad that this has become so rare in customer support that it's worth calling out, but it really has. Anyway, they've been great.

So what have I learned from this snafu? Always, always, always double check before clicking the button. Even if you just double-checked last week.

I think something else I'd do differently if I could rewind time would be to wait to set up the pre-order store until after charging existing cards. That would have minimized the risk of any unexpected side effects and cleanly segmented backers into two groups: those backing at a pledge level, and those pre-ordering individual items. I didn't do it this way because I didn't want there to be a gap between closing late pledges and charging cards where you couldn't order the book-- but in the grand scheme of things, a couple days of that would have certainly been preferable to a big mistake like this one.

Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it this far! And thanks for bearing with me on this project even through the unexpected detours.

--Aaron

Quick update for backers about an issue with today's shipping charge.

I've been made aware of an issue with the shipping charges that were processed this morning where some backers have been overcharged for shipping.

The issue appears to relate to a new shipping profile I created for future pre-orders which was mistakenly applied to some backers who pledged in the crowdfunding campaign (including late pledges). I'm working with Backerkit support right now to figure out what went wrong and the best way to fix it.

I'll send out another update once we've worked out the best way to get refunds to anyone affected. In the meantime, my apologies for the error and sit tight-- I'll get it sorted just as soon as I can!

--Aaron