Home again, and Dungeon Saga.

'Well, I'm back,' he said.

No prizes for spotting the quote, as it's the last line of a book I'd be surprised to discover any of my followers haven't read (although not necessarily in English, I guess!)

A much needed week-and-a-bit off, to be honest. My prediction wasn't that inaccurate - not much German beer, but about ten hours over three days playing the Firefly board game, as well as excursions into Dominion and Legends of Andor. Other highspots were definitely a trip to see one of the world's largest model railways in Hamburg, which was inspiring in so many ways (and probably means some time off figure painting to build James' model railway!), and finally getting to meet someone I've known online for 17 years (which is remarkably weird).

Friday saw a 16 hour car journey home (with breaks, but still), which would have been even longer had we not been sensible enough to break the journey on Thursday night in Bielefeld (even though it doesn't exist), so I'm only just now about recovered enough to start catching up on the world.

Just in time really, as Mantic's Dungeon Saga Kickstarter, to which I am pledged, is about to finish today. It's gone off like the usual rocket, and is past $800k as I speak, and looks, to be honest, like a really fun investment if you want a sub-D&D dungeon crawl with RPG-lite elements (and I use that entire phrase in the nicest possible way - it does look to be perfect at what it aims to be, and I am, if nothing else, looking forward to using it to introduce my son to the genre). Closing date is tonight, midnight UK time.

Today sees one last stretch goal - they're aiming for about another $100k today, which is for another add-on scenario pack including a freakin' cool dragon, more doors, tiles, etc... That's an insane reach, in my book - I'll be very interested to see if they reach it - me, I'm pledged out, since I've added enough for all the scenario packs to date and enough, fortuitously for this one as well.

I've been watching online while on holiday, and it's very interesting, in an abstract way, to watch how Mantic run a Kickstarter. As I've said before, you don't have to like it, and you can argue that it's not, per se, in the spirit of how Kickstarters were meant to happen when the concept was invented. They could, I'm sure, produce all the stuff that they've had lined up (I'm equally sure that there's not a LOT of 'spontaneous' addition of stretch goals) without a Kickstarter, but by doing it with a Kickstarter a) they get funding up front, b) they generate masses of online advertising (look, here!), and c) they get to gauge demand and production run size ahead of having to make risky investments, and they can much better leverage economies of scale. Barring some dispatch and CS issues (mainly due to being short-staffed on responding to email, from what I gather) on previous Kickstarters, they have, at least, always delivered.

And sorry, Mantic - you're lovely people, but I don't buy "we had no idea where this campaign was going to finish." :D Certainly I bet you had it planned this far, just in case :D And do remember to take on enough people to handle the support load. :D :D