A number of our Kickstarter backers have naturally asked us about ongoing support for Primeval Thule after we publish our campaign setting book. We’ve been pretty cagey about answering that question because we’re naturally focused on our Kickstarter and creating the best damned campaign setting book anybody ever wrote. But now that we’re getting close the end of the Kickstarter, we feel like we can at least say a few a little bit about where Thule goes next.

First, let’s recap what you’re going to get in the initial offering. The Primeval Thule Campaign Setting book is going to be 256 pages (or a little more). It’s going to include a new character race; twenty or more character narratives; a modest amount of additional player-facing mechanics in the form of the feats, spells, or prestige classes/paragon paths we feel are necessary for the setting; twenty or more new monsters such as beastmen, star things, and Ice Age megafauna; the pantheon of Thule; a “geography” chapter describing the wildernesses, ruins, cities, and adventure sites of this savage continent; GM-focused advice and resources to help prep and run great pulp fantasy adventures in this setting; a detailed starting point for your Thule campaign; a number of “adventure toolkit” spreads with maps, plots, features, or key NPCs; and several short ready-to-play adventures of about 8-10 pages each.

At the PDF reward levels, backers get all three versions (Pathfinder, 4th edition D&D, and 13th Age) of the campaign setting book. In addition, we’re including a bonus PDF adventure that uses some of the excellent minis from Cthulhu Wars, our friends at Legendary Games are contributing a Thule-specific PDF adventure, highly regarded designer David Flor of Darklight Interactive is contributing another PDF adventure, and Sixtystone Press is providing a Call of Cthulhu conversion for the setting book. And you’ll get an exclusive mp3 track from Ambient Environments, too! Put that together, and you have months of sword-and-sorcery gaming action right out of the gate!

On Deck

For Sasquatch, our next move with Thule depends a little bit on how distribution and retail shapes up. We intend to offer a modest number of follow-on PDF adventures and sourcebooks (for example, monster collections, villain sourcebooks, or city setting books), probably about once every quarter or trimester to start. We’ll examine ways to make printed versions of those books available at a reasonable cost and do so at the earliest opportunity. But we’re a small shop, so we can’t jump right into a dozen-product-a-year product line. We’re going to have our hands full for the next four or five months with putting the polish on the campaign setting—among other things, we have a lot of art and maps to commission that we couldn’t commission until we knew whether we would fund and what our budget would look like. We’ll tackle follow-on products once we have the Campaign Setting book closer to publication.

An Open World, or Almost Open Anyway

There are scores of great Thule adventures and dozens of great sourcebooks waiting to be written, and we’re not going to be able to get to them just by ourselves. So here’s our Secret Plan: We’ve already agreed to let our partners create additional adventure content set in Primeval Thule, and we’re excited to see what Legendary Games, Sixtystone Press, and Darklight Interactive can do with our world. We are also interested in working with other publishers that want to convert Primeval Thule to other game systems. We think Primeval Thule is a property that can embrace a lot of different voices and support from a number of rules sets and publishers.

Eventually, we intend to make the Primeval Thule setting available for anyone who wants to use it with the simplest and most generous licensing agreement we can come up with. We’re going to vet publishers for basic quality considerations, and we’re going to retain some approval rights so that we can make sure that folks writing in Thule don’t bump into each other or introduce things into the setting that really don’t belong there, like gnomish steam-mechs or plasma rifles. (Actually, gnomish steam-mechs sound kinda cool… well, maybe in a different setting.) The overall business aim is simple: People writing great Thule material increase the value of Thule for all interested parties, including us.

So, if you’re a sharp freelancer with an eye toward going into business for yourself, or a small-press game publisher who wants to help build a meta-world a lot of people can share and enjoy, drop us a line. We’d love to talk to you! And if you’re a gamer, keep your eyes peeled: There may be a LOT of support for Thule sooner than you think!

Zirith Ne