Flott's Miscellany, Volume Three

The Surveys Doth Cometh!
9 months ago – Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 09:44:33 PM

Hello everyone! 

Survey time, folks!

When Are Surveys Coming?

Soon! But, before the full blast of surveys, there will be a smoke test, whereby Backerkit will only send a small percentage of the surveys out to make sure there aren't any problems or issues. I'll be turning on the smoke test on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. Assuming the smoke test goes ok, the remaining surveys will roll out after that in batches until all are in the wild!

Where Is The Survey Coming From?

Our backend fulfillment partner is Backerkit, so your survey email will come from them, not from Kickstarter.

If you used your Facebook credentials to log in to your Kickstarter account, the BackerKit survey is sent to the email address you use for your Facebook account. If you have another email address that you prefer to use, please contact support at: 

How Do You Complete the Survey?

You don’t need to create a BackerKit account to fill out your survey. When you receive the email with the survey, click the survey link to respond. Answer the questions about your reward preferences, provide shipping information, and purchase add-on items if you like.

How Long Do You Have to Complete the Survey?

Surveys will be live until Friday, August 15, 2025, after which we will close surveys to begin ramping up to fulfillment. Also, after you respond to your survey initially, you can go back later and change your responses at any time before we close the surveys.

When Will Your Credit Card Be Charged?

Surveys that require payment of shipping fees or add-ons will be charged on Monday, August 18, 2025 after surveys are closed. Any digital rewards will become available to you on DriveThruRPG after then as well (as in the emails with the codes will go out then). 

How Do You Access Your Survey After Completion?

If you need to review your information or pledge status, you can return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at: 

Enjoy the rest of firelight, folks, and stay tuned for survey emails.

Firelight Update: Surveys are Coming Soon! No Really!
9 months ago – Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 10:53:53 AM

Hello all, 

We've returned to you now in this the season of firelight. The Rainy City is alive with the smell of grilled meats and baked bread, of stoked fires in the Molten Men's forges, and of the ubiquitous discharge of gunpowder weapons. Gull aerofactors, their dirks and flintlocks at the ready, hang defensively off balloons now able to traverse the Murk. Craft guilds needing good fires to complete their work rush to finish as much as they can before the season's end. And those who enjoy the relaxing odeur of a good smoke sit on covered stoops or in public houses smoking leaf at both ends. Welcome back to the Rainy City.

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Ok, long time no update. How are things? :-) 

Despite our silence, we have been moving forward on tasks, albeit at a much slower pace. The FLOTTS 3 draft is about 95% complete. We very literally need only two pages completed to have a full draft. The delays on this are entirely on me, as my day job at Central Michigan University Press has consumed so much time lately (more on that below). My apologies for that. Once I finish the last couple of pages and Bill is able to finish the art associated with those pages, we'll get the preprint draft to you for your perusal. I'm hoping to have my end of things locked down this week. *fingers crossed*

Also, we have activated the preorder store for this campaign on Backerkit. You can check that out here: 

Please note: if you are already a backer, you can ignore the preorder store. That is for new backers only. If you know someone who might want to get their hands on some Rainy City zines, pass them the link. 

We've also got the backend of the pledge manager squared away, and Backerkit has given their ok to everything, so that means surveys will be on the way in the near future. We'll send a more focused update on the survey process by Thursday, July 10th this week, and assuming everything is copacetic, we'll trigger the smoke test on Monday, July 14th. The full survey blast will come a few days after that. 

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(I'm going to indulge myself a little to show you what I have been working on, because, well, shilling is part of job on all fronts; some of you might find some of this interesting or appealing; and it is the very reason why FLOTTS 3 has slipped from its schedule, so rather pertinent.) 

Today we (CMich Press) launched our next crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit for two history-themed card games: Witch Hunt 1649 and Making History. Here's the link to learn more about these games: 

If that cover art looks familiar to you, that's because out very own Bill Spytma, artist on all our Rainy City zines, is doing the art for Witch Hunt 1649!

The other CMich Press related thing I've been working on is also something many of you might be interested in. We (CMich Press) have teamed up with Tim Hutchings, creator of Thousand Year Old Vampire, to launch a new tabletop RPG series with the press. Entitled Art and System: Games for Expanded Play, the new series launches its first crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit this fall with a lineup of three indie RPGs getting physical editions, some for the first time: Dog Eat Dog (2012) by Liam Liwanag Burke, Princess with a Cursed Sword (2025) by Anna Anthropy, and The Mountain Witch (2005) by Tim Kleinert.

You can read more about this here: https://cmichpress.com/2025/06/10/new-game-series-art-system-games-for-expanded-play/

And you can follow the Backerkit Campaign Page here: 

We're all very excited about these two campaigns, but man has it been a lot of work the last while. 

Okay, this is long enough. Back in a few days with the survey details. 

Deep in the Quiet, a Time of Growth and Progress
12 months ago – Tue, Apr 08, 2025 at 05:03:49 PM

In the Rainy City, we're knee-deep in the quiet, a season of birth, growth, and renewal. Refugee ships flow with greater frequency into Vagabond Bay after the boisterous windy season had tempered the flow. The tar and clay pits and the iron ore mines in Levee Town are alive with wealth. The Silver Cliffs give forth more ore, enriching further the wizards of Tower Cliffs. Molds, mildews, and puddings ooze out of cracks and crevasses in basements, water closets, and ruined hovels across Old Town, Levee Town, and the Mids. In the Sump, the quiet is a time of planting, of cultivation, of harvest.

Things progress, good friends, despite reality trying very hard to make everything hot garbage. So what are we looking at right now?

• Work on Flott's Miscellany Volume Three proceeds apace, despite day jobs mucking things up here or there. In looking at the stats, over 50% of the Miscellany's projected thirty-six pages are in complete draft form, having all text and art laid down (that's nineteen pages for those that wish to ignore the baser mathematics). The remaining pages are partially finished, meaning they have some text and art laid down, but are waiting for more content to be refined and added. So really, the remaining seventeen pages are half done, and, using a little Steiner math, that means we're probably over 75% finished. Go with it!    
• The current tariff disaster looms for the tabletop gaming industry, but at the moment, it should have only a minimal effect on our operations at Superhero Necromancer Press. We print all our Rainy City zines locally, and our local printer has not jacked paper prices any more than they have already in the last few years. In fact, they're running a print job for us right now while we wait for the Miscellany to finish up: second printings of A Puppethand's Guide to the Rainy City and The Restless Dead: True Tales of Gasts and Geists in the Rainy City.
• For now, we don't have the Backerkit pledge manager opened up yet. There largely hasn't been any need. We decided to partake of Kickstarter's Late Pledge feature, so for anyone who missed the campaign last February, they can still pledge from the campaign's main Kickstarter page. We'll open the pledge manager in May as we get closer to fulfillment, and then I'll turn off the Late Pledge feature.

I think that's it, folks. Here's a few sample pages and art pieces to tide you over as we finish this up.

  Weird, why is the "Tales of the Rainy City" section in the middle of the zine instead of toward the end? Well, we needed the centerfold for this: 

Stay dry and tariff-free, everyone!
 

Phillip Reed's Interview with Me about the Rainy City - Check it out!
about 1 year ago – Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 11:34:31 AM

It's interview time, folks!

Over at Phillip Reed's Quest for Zines: A Zine Quest Zine About Zines Kickstarter project going on right now, he's interviewing a bunch of creators about zines they are offering during this year's Zine Quest, which will be collected after the campaign in a zine or book (you should back it, if you are interested in that sort of thing). And interview #19, which dropped last night, is with me! 

We had a nice convo about the Rainy City, campaign stretch goals, and the logistics of how we here at Superhero Necromancer Press make our zines. Go check it out: 

Interview #19: Andrew Devenney has got a Downpour of Information

For some of you Rainy City diehards, you've probably heard about some of this before, but there's some new process nuggets in there you might find interesting, as well as some teases at the end of things we'd like to get done this year after the Flotts campaign is done.

Stay dry, everyone!

Like a Deluge...We Funded!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 11:31:08 AM

Thanks everyone who jumped on this early days and got us over the hump right away (within a little over an hour and a half from launch). It's always a nice thing to get the stress of funding one of these campaigns out of the way. As always we're super grateful for your interest in our little Rainy City zines. 

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Here's a treat for y'all: a closer look at one of the finished (for the most part) pages in FLOTT'S VOL.3 discussing other examples of mutual aid in the city. This is on the campaign page as part of the example spreads, but the size might not make those pages very readable, so here you go:

We'll drop some other previews as the campaign goes along. 

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While we're here, I thought I would highlight some other campaigns that are going right now, as part of ZineQuest or otherwise, just stuff that's caught my eye and so should catch yours too. 

One campaign I backed recently was R. Rook Studio's Silver Age, a Mark of the Odd TTRPG about werewolves and the towns they protect. Anything that connects itself back to 90s-era Mage: The Ascension and Werewolf: The Apocalypse in feel tickles my nostalgia bone. Check it out here.

Also recently backed Galen Pejeau's Solarcrawl, a system-neutral, orbital hexcrawl TTRPG that has some killer design style, and the stretch goal planetary expeditions by a great group of designers is also a plus. You can check it out here. 

And now, for the most shameless of all plugs I could possibly do here, a campaign I am involved in with my day job at Central Michigan University Press isKeep the Faith, a storytelling game about a religion in transition from designer Greg Loring-Albright that is crowdfunding on Backerkit right now. Players work together to shape the practices and trappings of a fictional faith in a game that mixes role-playing and board gaming mechanics in a really cool way. I remember when this came came into the press, and my first thoughts were that it reminded me of Avery Alder's The Quiet Year but for a religion (check out Avery's current crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit forGoing for Broke). So if you like storytelling games like The Quiet Year, For the Queen, or Dialect, you should check this out.

Okay, that's good for now. Stay rainy, everyone!