Mistgate Kickstarter Prelaunch Announcement

Hi! Sean Quinn here, creator of Mistgate and author of the Mistgate Campaign Setting. At the end of January this year we announced the upcoming Kickstarter for Mistgate, I was overly optimistic that I would be able to launch the Kickstart in the Spring, not only did I misjudge the amount of time that it would take to gather the necessary image resources for the Kickstarter, I also was dragging my feet on critical decisions like what we were going to do for the promotional trailer.

On top of this my day job, the job that I work to take care of myself and my family, had become very busy and we had a bout of illness that ran through the household. I can cite any number of reasons for the delay but at the end of the day we still missed our target for go live.

Ultimately though, I think it is for the best! We've had a few more months to prepare, the 2024 rules revision for Dungeons & Dragons released the first core rules book a few weeks ago, and we are in a much better position to deliver on the promise of Mistgate.

Mistgate Kickstarter will go live in November, 2024!

Keep reading to learn how you can be notified and engage with the project to help make it a success!

Mistgate Kickstarter Pre-launch Page!

You can view the pre-launch page for the Kickstarter here: kickstarter.com/projects/seanwquinn/mistgate-campaign-setting where you'll be able to elect to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live.

If you're thinking about backing early and getting access to discounted earlybird reward tiers, THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO DO IT!

Rules Compatibility

We'll go over this in more detail in a follow-up blog post, but let's cover compatibility really quickly: Mistgate will be updated to the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 rules revision and it will remain fully compatible with 5E.

Mistgate was originally developed and written against the 2014 revision of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules. We recommitted to developing Mistgate for the Dungeons & Dragons ecosystem when Wizards of the Coast released the SRD 5.1 rules under CC-BY 4.0 licensing terms. For over a year we've been anticipating "what comes next" for Dungeons & Dragons, and Wizards just recently released the first of the three core rule books for the updated 2024 rules revisions.

Wizards announced earlier in the year that they would update the SRD in 2025 and based on this announcement we are confident that there will be a CC-BY 4.0 release of the SRD 5.2. This will allow us to continue building the content for Mistgate without having to worry about licensing.

As stated, our goal is for Mistgate to be compatible with the current edition of D&D, as such we're pivoting some of the language in the books to accommodate changes that have happened with the 2024 rules revision release. With that said, we are still fully committed to making Mistgate as close to 100% compatible with existing 5th Edition content for groups that elect to continue playing with earlier editions of the rules. From an initial look at the 2024 Player's Handbook, we believe it should be possible for us achieve this but we'll be completely transparent if we think there's a situation where we need to choose the 2024 rules revision over the original 5E rules.

Social Game: The Ruins of Dalmura

The Kickstarter campaign will feature a social game: the Ruins of Dalmura. As a community the more likes, subscribes, reposts, etc. the further the adventurers exploring the Ruins of Dalmura will advance. As you share Mistgate on social media you'll help the adventurers overcome dangerous challenges and as a result unlock additional content for Mistgate.

How will it work? We'll be posting on different social media sites (Bluesky, Threads, Twitter/X, etc.) and asking our supporters to repost, asking for people to like, subscribe, and follow. Basically all of the standard social media engagement that accounts look for.

With increased engagement, we'll unlock and reveal content for the books. The Ruins of Dalmura is a fun way of representing that progress. As social media engagement trends upwards the community "playing" the game will earn aethryte crystals (a sort of magical currency in the Mistgate setting), and when enough aethryte is collected new content will be unlocked.

The social game will be running before and during the Kickstarter campaign, so the community can get a head start on unlocking content!

We have to learn marketing!

For Mistgate to be successful, we need to get good at marketing and to market to the right audience. We've had some brief exposure to Meta's marketing platform and the default targeting groups aren't great. There are some really aggressive Facebook users out there, yeesh!

I'm not a marketer and I sort of have a bad habit of falling off of social media after I try to stay on it. Still making Mistgate successful is important to me. Building communities for Lorecall and Mistgate are equally important so we'll be looking to network with other creators in the TTRPG space.

Also, if you're a journalist or game reviewer and are interested in learning more about Mistgate, and would like an advance copy of the latest draft of the campaign setting book, we can supply it for your review. More details about Mistgate can be found on our press release page from earlier in the year: Mistgate Kickstarter Launch and Release Presskit.

If you have any questions about Mistgate, the upcoming crowdfunding campaign, or Alkaemic, please reach out to us at press@alkaemic.com.