Hey gang!

I'm breaking our typical update convention just to share some fun/exciting personal stuff. Gonna talk about medical stuff below, so if that squicks you out, this is your sign to stay away! There will be no Murka stuff in this update, so you won't be missing anything about the books.




This is your last chance!




Get on out of here!




You sticking around? Alright, rad!

Tomorrow morning they're gonna wake me up at like 6 AM and take me down to the operating room and I won't wake up until like 10 hours later, haha. I'm really excited! This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I've been actively working towards this procedure for about a year and a half. And now the time is finally here!

I'm VERY fortunate to have people in my life like my two Murka design partners, Brad and CJ, and my partner Cheyenne (who is also doing Murka's layout!) to support me through it. The recovery is about 10-12 weeks, and I wouldn't be able to do it if it weren't for them being so willing to support me through it all. So, special thanks to them, they're the best. Absolutely love them.

I'm mostly posting here because you all have been such wonderful supporters of our work, and I could use your thoughts, luck, prayers, anything you're willing to share! I'm not really nervous about it, mostly just excited and antsy. Feels like a LOT of time and effort—not just my own—went into making this moment a reality. And now I'm on the precipice of the big jump! 

Thanks for being such an amazing community. Really cannot appreciate you enough. Very thankful to all the folks I've met, chatted with, for the folks who shared their ideas, for everything. You give what we do meaning. You give ME meaning. I'm one of those lucky few people on this earth who know for certain, without a shadow of a doubt, what they want to do with their lives. I want to make games. That's my purpose. And thanks to you and people like you, I have gotten to fulfill that purpose for years, and if I'm lucky, I'll get to do it for many more years to come.

Thanks for everything. I promise we'll get an update out next week with some fun and exciting new Murka stuff for you all, we've really been cooking with these final edits and additions. I am blown away at the new content we're generating, and can't wait to share more about it. It may not be me personally writing the next update (I'll be in the hospital for a little while), but I'll be there in spirit.

Yours truly and truly yours,

Jaron R. M. Johnson
jrmj

I wonder if the 2021 movie Don't Look Up had any effect on dictionary sales.

Also, please enjoy this image of our new "Falling Squirrel" beast native to Senekal Park in Magnamalus (featured in Chromatic Gamut). They're nuts. Druids rejoice, as we'll be including a number of new wild shape options like this!

Cheyenne has been hard at work for a while now laying out the bits of the Murka books which have exited the editing stages, and we decided to pull out all the subclasses from Arcana Americana and submit them for your review! 

The PDF is currently currently a work-in-progress; we're still finalizing a lot of the art and layout elements. But the text is in a pre-release state ready for public playtest. Feel free to theory craft, run a one-shot, or start your Murka campaign outright! Then, collect your feedback and submit it in our handy dandy feedback form!

You can find the Feedback Form here, or in the Playtest PDF.

We're primarily looking for any wonky mechanical interactions or obvious balancing issues, so if you catch any, please please submit them! As a show of our appreciation, there's a section in the feedback form to submit your name which will be credited separately in the book as a playtester. This section is optional, so if you'd rather not have your name in the book, that's fine too!

We interrupt your scheduled Backerkit update to inform you that I will be doing a free webinar with Grant (from Vala Marketing) and Backerkit! If you've ever thought about writing and publishing your own D&D content, you should come hang out, ask questions, and let us help you make your own games!

Grant and I will be sharing the tips we've picked up over years of doing it ourselves, plus there will be a Q&A. It's all free! Please consider checking it out, we want to see you guys make your own stuff!

The results of the polls are in! Congratulations to the below winners, and thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions over on our Discord!

I'm happy to announce we also have space to include the Quacken, submitted by Dewey! We have our eyes set on doing something fun with a few other submissions as well, so stay tuned :)

Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions to the Discord, I laughed so heartily at so many of these. This was so much fun, and I cannot wait to bring these ideas to live (spoiler alert, we've already made early drafts of the Slasher subclass and the quacken).

 

We'll keep plugging away in the editing room, and we hope you'll consider checking out the Playtest PDF and leaving us some feedback!

We hope you have fun and that you're as excited to get your hands on some of this stuff as we were to make it.

Yours across the plains of Midwesteros,

Jaron R. M. Johnson

And the Action Fiction Faction

Whew, we haven't talked to you guys since last year. Which would be funny if we had reached out at the end of December, but it's actually been since November. TIME FLIES.

We appreciate your patience as we've been really putting our nose to the grindstone, and I'm happy to inform you all that we're in the final stretches of the final book, and we'll have a fun preview for you soon!

We have received some AMAZING suggestions so far, and now it's time for YOU to decide (come on jaron don't make the epic rap battles of history voice)! Community Addition Polls are open until 11:59 PM EST on January 23rd. You've got roughly two weeks for your voice to be heard and to steer which ideas will for sure be going into the book!

We received over a hundred suggestions, and we loved every single one. Some of them we couldn't do because they didn't fit into our current books, and some ideas we had already done! We took anything that we felt feasible and compiled them into three polls:

The number 1 suggestion from each poll will 100% go in the book, and if we have time, we'll start looking at other suggestions on the list and squeezing them in, because we wanna pack these books chock full of whatever we can fit in. We want them EXPLODING with new content!

You might also notice that many of the video game themed suggestions don't appear in the polls. Our Discord fans might already know this, but we've had a lot of ideas for a full-on video game themed Murka book for a few years. So, if your suggestion was in that thematic area, don't fret—it very well may still wind up in a Murka book. ;)

We're finalizing Chromatic Gamut, which is our last book in the list! This book has definitely doubled in size, perhaps more. We've got new tycoons, tons of new boss monsters, and we can confidently state that this book has the most player options out of anything we've ever published. It's straight-up massive, and massively not straight!

Here's a quick preview of some of the stuff we've been working on just in the last two week (some for Chromatic Gamut, some last-minute additions to other books):

All I can say is, I've never been so proud of the people I'm working with and the things we've accomplished. We went hard in the editing paint throughout all of December (hell, I even edited on my birthday last week!) not because we're some kind of gross crunch-fueled grindset mindset team, but because we just have so much fun creating this stuff for you. Every time we sit down to write or edit, we make each other laugh, we're awestricken by the serendipity of some of the ideas that come together, and we end most nights telling one another that we love each other, and that we love working together, and that we love these books. 

We think you will, too.
 

We're in the final stretch. Thanks for sticking with us and for being patient—we're confident you won't regret it, and that when you get your hands on these books, you're gonna laugh your ass off. If you do, please seek medical help immediately.

Don't forget to vote in those polls, okay? Backerkit only lets me attach one at a time, so we've attached the monster poll, but you gotta go vote in the other polls too. Links below.

Yours across the plains of Midwesteros,

Jaron R. M. Johnson

And the Action Fiction Faction

One of my favorite things about writing Murka is how I incidentally wind up learning a lot as part of the research we do. For example, you might know that the Statue of Liberty was a gift; but did you know that the U.S. had to pay for the platform she stands on?

You might know the Empire State Building is, uhhh... a big-ass building. But did you know that during its inception, architects had planned for the upper floors to be a tiny blimp airport?

The More You Know...

I know, I know, that isn't the order I wrote the post title in. But what are you gonna do about? Come to my house and throw a rock at me? Please don't do that, bludgeoning damage hurts.

ANYWAY, this morning, I have just sent out the surveys to everyone! So be sure to check your inbox or inquire with your local writwit to find yours and fill it out. The test surveys that we sent out seemed to be without issue, but I'm sure I goofed something somewhere, so if you run into any issues, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Okay this is the MEAT and POTATOES of the update (what is this, some kind of Restaurants and/or Retail?). We unlocked the Community Suggested Additions stretch goal, so things that YOU ALL suggest are going INTO THE BOOKS!  That means, if you head over to our Discord RIGHT NOW, you'll be able to make a post in #Murka-Community-Suggestions and give us your best (or worst) ideas. We are collecting community suggestions until November 30th, so be sure to get your ideas in!

This suggestion process will happen in two phases: The first takes place on our Discord server, where you can make your suggestion as well as vote on others. At the beginning of December, we'll organize them into a series of Backerkit polls for everyone to vote on, so only the cream of the crop rises to the top! Will it be your cream? Our lawyers told me I still can't ask that question.

They also said "stop calling me, I'm not a lawyer, this is a Wendy's" but what tf do they know about Wendy's? They're lawyers!

Also, as a neat little reminder, we've added Community Copies to our add-ons! A Community Copy is a limited number of freely available copies that anyone could claim - that way, folks who maybe can't afford the game but still want to play it have a chance to. When you fill out your survey and it takes you to the add-ons section, you'll find them at the bottom. Community Copies will be available through Itch.io once PDFs are available!

As mentioned in this week's earlier update, editing is going well, and we're working to get playtest material ready for you ASAP! Hopefully for the holidays. Things are taking a bit longer than expected, but that's because we're nearly doubling the amount of content that these books have, so our hands are quite full between redesigning and editing existing stuff and designing new stuff. We appreciate your patience, y'all RAWK.

Yours across the plains of Midwesteros,

Jaron R. M. Johnson

And the Action Fiction Faction