I have the original Kickstarter. It just arrived a couple months ago after years of delay. Haven’t cracked it open yet.
I believe this is a more retail friendly version of that original game.
Storm Hollow (nee Story Realms) is one of my favorite Kickstarter experiences…it so wonderfully highlights the highs and lows.
A couple (few?) creatives have a really wonderful idea and their passion and love for what they’re trying to accomplish is infectious and attracts an eager following. Really a “help us realize our dreams” situation.
But alas, Kickstarter was younger then, and the perils and pitfalls of overly ambitious stretch goals not as thoroughly documented. And so what started as an exciting and novel, but attainable project, spiralled into a Stretch Goal Extravaganza!
Imagine for comparison if Ascension had been released on Kickstarter, and been so wildly successful they decided to release all of their future Ascension expansions at once in the same box…I know, right?
But back then novice creators had fewer resources guiding them in understanding what they were getting into and novice backers had less skepticism around “just how big an outfit are these folks anyway, can they really handle this?”
Answer? No they could not. Massive delays and desperate pleas later there was a rescue.
I don’t remember the details without going back in the update history, but I have a vague recollection of the dark time and anxiety induced health issues of the sort that happen when your dreams implode and you realize the enormity of what you’ve done.
And then a White Knight…and I can’t recall now if they were a backer or a company or what, but they took over project management to bring the project to completion only to realize, that like deer in the headlights frozen in fear, almost nothing had actually been done and of what was done almost nothing was useable.
And so already over a year (2?) overdue, this person (these people? Details are fuzzy) virtually started from scratch…not the design, but all the actual logistics of making an ENORMOUS physical thing.
And at last…my copy arrived…intimidating in it’s size and beauty.
A hard won success, but success none-the-less.
And this is why I frequently tell project haters to blow it out their arse. If you want to buy a product, got to a store. If you want to fund a dream…strap yourself in for the ride.
And so we journey back to the heady days of 2012, when the world was young and dreams were fresh and new.