Sands of Doom - A 5e Campaign

END OF APRIL UPDATE - CALM BEFORE THE STORM
over 1 year ago – Sat, May 06, 2023 at 03:58:28 PM

Hey fellas! Here back again for another Sands of Doom update :D

Like I warned last update, the month of April was going to be devoid of activity considering that I needed to do some work on my channel and progress further on the Monster Classes addons. However we do have a few things to go over:

Musical News! I am incredibly excited to announce that we have signed in Travis Savoie to craft the music for the Sands of Doom adventure! You can find his work right here on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RPGMusicMaker/videos 

Travis will be making for us 15 loop-able tracks to bring atmosphere and epicness to your combats, environments, and dungeons. And then an additional 5 full featured themes for some of the most important moments and characters in the campaign. Our current plan is for many of the tracks to have alternate versions that will involve specific sound effects specific to the area or events in which the music will likely be used on. For example, some of our alternate combat songs will feature gnoll cackles within the soundtrack! 

Dungeon Maps News! We now have a few samples to show you for the current art direction for dungeons. Like I explained in a previous update, I decided it was worth it to attempt to get all of the dungeons be hand drawn rather than use programs or apps, such as Inkarnate, to do them. 

The thought process is that hand drawing every single map should add extra flavor and personality to the dungeons, while also creating something more unique and personal. It is of course a lot more expensive (about x5 times more expensive) and takes much longer to do, but I am hoping the love and care that Dominika is giving to each room translates into a more immersive experience for you guys. 

Because of how long they take to make, it is very likely that I will have to sign in at least another artist to draw maps alongside Dominika, if not three; but I will do my best to synchronize the styles as much as I can so as to not have too many divergent looks for the maps. Do know however that it is not that unlikely that I will end up hiring an inkarnate (or some other program) artist to make me some maps for random encounters locations. It has been far too annoying for me to find that most 5e adventures don't have battle maps for fights that are not "important" enough to deserve them. So hopefully I can have a fair number of maps for city fighting, dunes fighting, etc. I will likely have these maps be on an appendix at the end of the book, something like "extra maps", where I will have as many as I can fit in there. These of course will be added and sent in as digital files for everyone. 

Monster Classes News...? Honestly no news yet on the playtest material - simply put...I am still working on it. Its been really busy lately with a lot of other stuff so I haven't been able to put as much time as I'd like. I have however noticed that mentioning a delivery date, and then not pulling through, has been incredibly stressful to me. So at least on this front, my new mantra is going to be "it will be done when it will be done" and that's that. I work a lot better when I am inspired to work on stuff, and right now I am burning with fiery passion to get back to designing the Sands of Doom campaign. If I pushed that aside in order to do Monster Classes right now, it would result in a tragic loss of efficiency and quality. I know this will be disappointing to some, but know that I will being you playtest material as soon as I can. 

Tasks for May. I have been waiting for this month for a looong time, cause this is the month I get to go back to designing the adventure. I love my Youtube channel, and I love working on addons, but it has been a dream come true to create and write a full 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I have to do some editing for the channel, but a large chunk of my time will be spent developing Sands of Doom so expect a lot of design progress for the next update! Also, Kim has officially started work in crafting the characters for the adventure which means we will have a lot more art to show you guys next update as well!

Conclusion. Things have been quite slow for the past 2 months, but do remember that I am the sole writer for this campaign. This thing is my baby, and I am not hiring anyone else to write with me or for me. The buck starts and ends with me, so when I have to do Youtube work then design fully stalls. Now I have finally time to get back into it, so expect great things soon!

END OF MARCH UPDATE - ART / MONSTER CLASSES
over 1 year ago – Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 10:06:02 AM

Hello fellas! 

I am here for another update on Sands of Doom, though unlike last month which was filled with action and progress, the month of March was fairly slow. Because I needed to prioritize the YouTube channel (which i had neglected for the entirety of February), I only got about a week's worth of work on Sands of Doom and all of that went into the Sands of Doom Monster Classes. 

Sands of Doom Monster Classes.  The classes are not ready for playtest yet, however I have recorded a 30 minute audio log of me talking about the process, thoughts, mechanics, and more that you can listen to. I figured this would be a way better idea than writing an entire novel, so here it is: 

Sands of Doom Art. Things have also been a bit slow on the art side of things for March, since things were not scheduled to pick up until after mid of April. Basically, Dominika needed to finish the art for Monster Classes 4 (which is unrelated to this Kickstarter) before fully commiting to this project. She finished last Friday with the last piece, and so starting from Monday (2 days ago as of this post) she has been working hard on the maps for Sands of Doom. Kim is scheduled to start working on characters starting from April 15th, so nothing there yet either. The only one who has been hard at work on the project is Elena who finished up creating some gorgeous art for the Anubian Relics that players are gonna be hunting down in the adventure. She is also sketching and designing some important locations and moments within the adventure, such as the introduction of Lilith, the wielder of the brass mask and a Lamia Noble. 

Conclusion. So yeah otherwise not much to show or talk about really, since I didn't do any design on the adventure during March, and unfortunately I won't do any either through April. April will be spent finishing up the Sands of Doom Monster Classes for playtesting, and then I will hopefully have some polls for you guys to decide on a few things for the classes. This is because I am going to try and make as many videos as I can for the YouTube channel this month, so that I can be fully free for May. Then May is going to be when I will finally be able to get back on the horse and start going crazy on the design process once more, so I am hoping to have some juicy details for you all then, hopefully with some polls as well to see if you guys can help me make some tough decisions for the adventure. 

Thank you all for support! 

-Fermin (MrRhexx)

End of February Update! - Sands of Doom
over 1 year ago – Sat, Mar 04, 2023 at 05:27:45 PM

Hello everyone! I believe it is about time for an update. 

I apologize for being 4 days late on this one. To be quite honest, the fact that February only has 28 days sorta crept up on me and ruined my entire schedule...but that's neither here nor there! This last month has been incredibly productive for me though unfortunately we are still so early in the production process that there isn't much yet that I can show you. However there is lots we can talk about!

Completed Tasks for February.  As I mentioned on our last update, February for me was going to be a design-heavy month. Because art takes so long to make, and there is so much of it that is needed, it was required of me to spend this first month literally just finishing and perfecting the designs for many of the characters and locations within the campaign. That way I could send those finished concepts to my artists as soon as possible and have them begin their work of making Sands of Doom a beautiful reality.

Lets break down what is required for Sands of Doom and where we are in the design process:

• Sands of Doom has about 7 major adventuring locations. These are places that players can travel to which are big enough to have their own chapter within the book. Each of these locations will have a full map (or maps) dedicated for them. Out of the 7 locations - 4 have been fully designed and I have finalized the drafting of their maps. This was the main focus during February, because I am planning on having the dungeon maps be hand-drawn which means they will take a very long time to make. 
• Sands of Doom features 1 major and 3 minor hubs. These are areas with a large map, with multiple locations described within the map, where players can obtain quests and otherwise interact and roleplay with many NPCs. In our case we have a city, two towns, and a settlement. My time this month was spent on the city which is about 60% designed at this point. 
• There are many many many small locations in the campaign that players can travel to or randomly encounter during their travels. Locations that are less than 4 pages long, many which are meant to have maps and many who do not; but that have important story elements that will be relevant to the players. Think many of the cool random locations players find on their way to ommu in Tomb of Annihilation, or the featured encounters from Out of the Abyss like the Silken Paths, Madam Eva's camp in Curse of Strahd, etc. It's hard to update you much on the design for these since there are so many, and the extent of their completion varies dramatically from place to place. This happens because I like to work by inspiration, so when I feel particularly driven to work on a locale - I will do all I can for it before the inspiration wanes and I move to another one. I also need to tie many of these places to other locations, quests, or NPCs which requires me to leave them unfinished until the time when I have all the needed pieces to finish it. Remember that in this adventure, arriving in a location 20 days into the campaign is different than if you arrive 5 or 40 days into the adventure. Many characters have timelines and schedules that they follow. All in all, i probably won't be updating you too explicitly about everything I do for these places. 
• I took a lot of time to get a comprehensive idea of the scale of the project and what I will be needing in order to complete it. We are going to require around 30 full character pictures, 10-15 character portraits, 15-20 magical items, and 15 half-page art pieces. I am still uncertain exactly how many battle maps / region maps I will need since that seems to fluctuate and radically change as I design the locations, so this is information I will get later on down the line as I finish designing more places. But this is my current working estimate. This is also an estimate, but I am confident that about 1/3 of these required art pieces are now fully designed in such a way that I can have my artists start work on them. Only a fraction of these have been completed as of this time, but we are ahead of schedule for finishing them by the end of the year. So our deadline for shipping the adventure is still looking very solid. 

This is actually a good time to introduce my artists for the project! 

• Elena Nozdrina is going to be helping me with the art direction for Sands of Doom, and will be the one to make the full page and half page art pieces for the campaign, as well as the magic items. You might recognized her from her work on the full page arts for the Treant, Vampire, and Familiar on my Monster Classes 3. You should definitely recognize her from the fact that she is the one who made the limited edition cover art for Sands of Doom!

• Kim Van Deun (@sketch_ferret) is going to be helping me with the full character and portrait arts for the campaign. They probably have the most work out of all of my artists considering that 45 character pieces is an insane number to do! A lot of what you saw from the kickstarter was from Kim so you should definitely recognize the work! She will start hard at work on Sands of Doom starting from mid-april, so expect to start seeing new character sneak-peaks after that. 

• Dominika Denes has one of the toughest jobs, which is to beautifully illustrate the dungeon maps using hand-drawn art! I could have used software such as Inkarnate in order to create dungeon maps in a cost effective and expedient way, but I wanted the maps to have tons of personality and to look unique and special. Dominika agreed and decided to help me make that come true! 

Tasks for March. I am already almost a full week behind on march, since I needed to do some extra work on that 4th big location I mentioned before (I kind of went a bit too ham by making it two locations instead of one, which meant I needed to design an extra map). I also will not have as much time to work full time on Sands of Doom this month since I have neglected my Youtube channel for too long now.  

Since I desperately require at least two weeks to bring my channel back from the dead, I foresee that I will only have about a week's of full time work on the campaign; with a ton of extra hours sprinkled in here and there whenever I can. I want to spend this time finishing off my concepts for the Sands of Doom Monster Classes (the earth elemental, gnoll, and troll classes). I know that many of you are excited to see what these are all about, and I have read many comments asking for play-test material, so I want to start work on these as well. Thankfully I have enough content designed that I can keep my artists busy for a while before I have to quit my entire life in order to design for the campaign, so I can dedicate myself to some other things. My goals are to have some play-test materials for you guys by the end of march!

Backerkit Survey. I have not yet sent the Backerkit Survey, you should expect it roughly by the end of the year. The reason I am sending the survey late into the production process is because it is through the survey where I will be able to start collecting the shipping info, and subsequently the shipping fees, for the project. However I need to know the full dimensions and the weight of all the products before I can work out the shipping fees. I have seen some of you ask about this, and yes, through the survey you should be able to add any addons you like from the kickstarter and possibly even upgrade your pledge tier if you like. 

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That's about it for this update! Looking forward to getting some work done on the monster classes for Sands of Doom :D Exciting times ahead!

End of January Update / OGL News
over 1 year ago – Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 09:55:54 AM

The end of an era, but the beginning of a dynasty. 

For those of you unaware (who I imagine are probably few), Wizards of the Coast has relented on their attempt to de-authorize the OGL 1.0a. Further more, they have decided to instead liberate the entirety of the SRD by releasing it onto the Creative Commons. I will spare you the details since I can only imagine you have heard the news quite plenty. But how does this affect us? 

Impact of the OGL change. With the SRD under the Creative Commons, we can once again use the word "Tiefling" in Sands of Doom. Which of course is really good news considering they are the majority of the residents of Al'Kirat. In addition a very interesting opportunity has opened to us since the words "Beholder" "Mind Flayer" and "Yuan-Ti", among others, appear on the SRD which is now licensed under the Creative Commons. And without having to attach the OGL 1.0a onto Sands of Doom, we are not longer prohibited from specifically using those words. This means that theoretically we can add those monsters onto the adventure provided that we don't really describe them or use their Monster Manual stat block (among other things). In particular I am quite interested in potentially adding some Yuan-Ti as they would fit rather nicely with some of the desert themes (think Conan the barbarian). 

All in all. This is great news and should make the writing process continue smoothly. Thank you all who fought on the trenches for all of us third party creators. With the SRD free from chains - you should expect better content now from all of us. 

Preorder Store. Sadly there were many who lost the chance to either back the kickstarter in its entirety, or missed out on a particular addon. For those of you who did I have now worked behind the scenes with Backerkit in order to open a Pre-Order Store for you. The store should be accessible through the link presented at the top of the main Sands of Doom kickstarter page. Otherwise you can use this link: https://2009000129.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

You will notice some of the products on the store are a bit more expensive than their versions on Kickstarter. These prices more accurately reflect the retail price of the product, rather than the discounted versions that were exclusive for the fundraise Kickstarter event. By popular demand, I have also added a way for you to purchase the Composed Music & Voice Acting as an individual product. Further I have added a lot of clarifying descriptions for some of the Monster Classes so that you know what each of the products will give you. 

Purchased Digital Product. For those of you who purchased the Magic Items, Armor Redesigned, and Monster Classes PDFs; I am really close to being able to send those to you. I will send all of these together in a batch so I am just waiting for the Monster Classes PDFs to be done, which hopefully should be in a few more days. I finished up the rebalancing process, redesigned the layout, and finished up some new artistic choices for them. Currently my proofreader is finishing on Monster Classes 2 while my editor is doing some final touches on Monster Classes 3 to make sure that it follows the same new artistic direction. 

Tasks for February. Since I am writing this book myself, I have to be careful with balancing the work load and I have to be efficient in what I focus on. I was hoping to do some Monster Classes work this month so that I could give you play test material as soon as possible, but it appears I will have to change plans a bit. I need to invest this month almost fully on writing in order for me to be able to give my artists as much information as I can on as many characters as possible. 

Art takes a lot of time and so I need to get that going asap. My current plans involves around 30 full character pieces, and the thing about full character pieces is that they need a lot of input and descriptive detail! I also need to finalize many of the dungeons which is another matter entirely. Dungeon Maps are very precise and so I need to be certain that all the alleys, rooms, and details are 100% decided and done before I can have my artists work on them. 

Overall I am hoping for 10-15 half page art pieces. 30 full characters. Around 10-15 portraits. Around 20-25 different battle/exploration maps. About 15 miscellaneous small pieces. A big map of the Al'Kirat region, a map of the city of Kirat, and potentially 2 full page pieces. The faster I can confidently tell my artists exactly how each thing will be, the smoother this whole process is going to be. In fact - whether we managed to release Sands of Doom on time will be entirely depended on whether we can get the art done in time. So for this month my focus will be entirely on this. 

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Thank you all so much once again for the great support you all gave to Sands of Doom. I will kee you updated as much as I can and will be uploading some of the art we get here for you all to see as we get it :D

End of Kickstarter Update - Absolutely Incredible!!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 12:52:39 PM

I can't say I understand what happened, but the last 48 hours were incredibly kind to us in getting us here. We made it to just shy of 390k for Sands of Doom and I have no words to describe my appreciation to all of you for such a successfully funded project. 

My expectations were somewhat low considering that campaigns are typically not that popular since (most of the times) only DMs buy them, so believe you me when I say that the massive outpour of support we got these last couple of days have been nothing but shocking to me. 

I would like to spend some time here to reiterate for those of you who might be a bit scared of the OGL situation currently blowing up everywhere, that I am very confident that I will be able to finish this book without the need for an OGL. The only problem I foresee is the word "Tiefling" which (as far as I understand) can only be used with an OGL. The city of Kirat is a Tiefling city so they are quite populous in the adventure, and so I will have to figure out a different term for them. But other than that we should be smooth sailing. 

The adventure will continue to be 5th edition compatible and will be released as such. However I am VERY interested in creating converted versions for some of the new systems currently being announced, such as the MCDM's and Kobold Press' systems as well as Pathfinder. I have to see how much it will cost to do each of those convertions and whether the popular support to do them is there. I have already been quoted a 40k price for a pathfinder conversion which feels too steep for me, but I am not going to make any decisions yet until I know more about the future. I will keep you guys updated with any plans, and will most likely ask for feedback as well. 

The verdict is still out there on whether companies like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds will allow 5th edition compatible products to be released on their platform without an OGL 1.1 license, so once we know more about that I will let you all know. 

Lastly for those of you who purchased the "What They Don't Tell You About Magic Items"  "Armor Redesigned"  or the "Heaven & Hell" / "Heavy Hitters" / "Blood & Leaf" addons. Expect to obtain those PDFs by around the end of the month. 

Our first order of business is going to be to get you all to vote on what the new subclasses will be for the Extra Monster Classes Softcover Book which should be happening on the 1st of February. Through mid February I will also be sending you guys some playtest material for the Sands of Doom Monster Classes (The Gnoll, the Earth Elemental, and the Troll). So keep an eye out of those updates!

Thank you all so much for all the support. Again, I was NOT expecting for it to blow up the way it did. I will make sure you guys get the absolute best content I have to give you. And more importantly, I will make sure we pay artists well for this project. I know that's what you guys would want. 

-Fermin (MrRhexx)