“A system-agnostic illustrated guide to real-world magical plants.”
We have almost finished writing and illustrating the book, and we’re looking forward to releasing it into the wild! However, we’re trying to take proper care of our baby book, and are raising the money to get it lovingly edited and printed.
The funding goal of $10,000 will allow us to pay the editors and print 500 copies of this 360-page, full-color book in a sturdy hardcover.
Looks like their Kickstarter needed about 250 backers, and they have 9,100 and counting?
(Oh… right, it’s not shooting up quite that quickly – I was only looking at the numbers for the hardback edition, but there are hundreds of digital-copy backers.)
Oh, I pledged for that. Even the physical version despite shipping. My first longterm character of many years—named Yashima in fact—was a wizard with a penchant for collecting herbs and making potions and salves and… how could I resist. (She now resides in her very own Wizard‘s Tower just outside the town where her friends run the tavern „Kerker mit Erker“—and the town—and she sometimes gets to advise the heroes that followed in the footsteps—uh wreckage—of the „Feurigen Fünf“)
It made me think of Maelstrom, published in Puffin’s “Adventure Gamebooks” line back in the day (alongside the Fighting Fantasy series), and set in the 16th Century, which included a 19 page appendix for Herbalist characters with ~70 entries. I always thought it seemed like a really neat little system, and was very out of the ordinary compared to things I’d seen at that time.
Das Schwarze Auge … has an extensive collection of herbs and systems for finding them, preserving them and using them… this may partially stem from an early set of computer games that used this as a game system and way to have a tradeable resource for the player.
Was it Maelstrom which had the herb that caused your eyelids to become hairy, and another herb which cured hairy eyelids? We thought that sounded like a conman’s dream…
It’s more complex than that, though – you get twice as many doses from the cheaper herb, so the cure is actually four times as expensive*… but the cure is also 80% effective, whereas you only have a 30% chance of causing the problem. Of course, if one grows one’s own herbs…
Some of your unwitting marks may simply choose to live with hairy eyelids, mind : )
That all said… are we including eyelashes in “hair growing on a character’s eyelids” ?!
(*) If you wondered why there are two prices listed for each, the second is the cost for pre-prepared herbs. Of course, that’s the cost to the Herbalist… they can gouge their customers for whatever they can get away with ; )
