The Devoured Halls Are Open!
over 2 years ago – Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 09:22:08 AM

Greetings backers! It's time to redeem The Devoured Halls!

To redeem your reward, please go to the MCG Shop and log in to your account. From the account page, click Coupons (in the left hand menu) and you will see all of your available redemption coupons.

Click on a coupon to redeem it, or click on the Add All Product Coupons to Cart to redeem all of your coupons.

Clicking on a coupon adds the product and discount to your cart. You can also add items you wish to purchase to your cart. Once you've added all the coupons you wish to redeem, and any items you wish to purchase, click on the cart symbol to get to the checkout page to complete your redemption.

Alternatively, log into DriveThruRPG using the email address you provided in BackerKit. Click on Account, then check your library. You'll find both the Mac and Windows versions of The Darkest House for download there.

If you have any trouble with these instructions, or installing The Devoured Halls, reach out to us using our Contact Us form. Remember we're a small team, so please be patient if we're not able to respond right away.

Thank you very much for making The Darkest House with The Devoured Halls a reality. We appreciate your support.

Meanwhile . . .

Our campaign to bring Stealing Stories for the Devil ended successfully today . . . huzzah! If you missed the Kickstarter, we'll be opening BackerKit in a couple of weeks, which will give you a chance to join in.

In Stealing Stories for the Devil, the GM and the players build elaborate heist adventures via the game’s unique structure, creating the scenario and the plan at the same time. It results in fun, fast-paced adventures filled with twists, turns, and the unexpected, that come together into beautifully orchestrated heists with literally no prep work ahead of time.

The Devoured Halls Will Soon Open Their Doors
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 08:34:21 PM

The Devoured Halls are coming soon! This new section of the house has been under construction for some time, and now we’re down to plaster, paint, and furnishings, so to speak. If The Devoured Halls are among your rewards, look for it in just a few weeks!

As we mentioned in our last update, The Devoured Halls will be a separate product. The Devoured Halls can replace your copy of The Darkest House, because it contains the entirety of the house—all the original content, plus the new content.

(If you’ve already started using The Darkest House, don’t fret! The Halls are designed to be encountered after your PCs have unlocked many of the secrets of the house itself. Unless your group has been extremely industrious, you probably haven’t reached any point where the PCs would find their way into the Halls yet. You can simply transition to using The Devoured Halls when you get it.)

Other Items from the House

Once we’ve delivered The Devoured Halls, the remaining rewards won’t be long. For backers getting The Devoured Halls, that includes:

• The “Director’s Commentary” tour of the house with Monte
• The digital art book

For all backers of The Darkest House, look forward to:

• The GMing seminar with Monte
• The online graphics package

Staggered delivery of these items will begin within a few weeks after delivery of The Devoured Halls.

The House Hates You—But the Devil Does Not!

With work on The Darkest House and related items nearing completion, we’re looking ahead to our next big thing. Ever the innovator, Monte has been working on a game that takes a cool new approach to narrative control and player agency. The result is Stealing Stories for the Devil, a heist game with a sci-fi edge that is truly zero-prep and delivers cool heists that come together beautifully—despite astonishing twists and turns!

Download a complete 43-page primer for a look at Monte’s innovative new game. Or find loads more details at The Devil Made Us Do It Kickstarter.

The House Is Ready to Enter Your World—and It’s Hungry!
almost 3 years ago – Mon, May 31, 2021 at 11:16:37 AM

It has happened! This evening we fulfilled The Darkest House to you, our Kickstarter backers. If you haven’t already, check your email—you’ll find instructions for downloading your copy from the MCG Shop or DriveThruRPG.

Most of you backed for The Devoured Halls as well. We’re working hard on this extension to the house, and we’ll deliver it to you this summer. It will be a separate product containing the entirety of The Darkest House plus the additional content of The Devoured Halls.

Don’t wait for The Devoured Halls to get started, though! The Halls are designed to be encountered later, after your PCs have unlocked many of the secrets of the house itself. You absolutely can (and should!) start using The Darkest House now—your PCs won’t find their way into The Devoured Halls until later, almost certainly after that product is in your hands.

Add-ons will be fulfilled in the next few days. Look for an additional email from us to let you know your add-ons are available.

If you missed our email and don’t know how to download your reward, here are some quick instructions:

• Log into the MCG Shop using the email address you provided for us in BackerKit.
• Go to My Account (in the Store menu) and click on Coupons.
• Click on the coupon for The Darkest House. Then click on your shopping cart (in the upper right) and check out. (If you have coupons for other Kickstarter rewards, or want to do some shopping for other MCG products, you can do so before checking out.)
• You can then go to My Account > Downloads, where you’ll find both the Mac and Windows versions of The Darkest House for download.
• Alternatively, you should have received an email from DriveThruRPG (if you provided a DriveThru account email address in BackerKit). Click the link in the email, check out through their system, and you'll find The Darkest House in your DriveThru library!

If you have any trouble with these instructions, or installing The Darkest House, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. Please remember that we're a small team, so please be patient if we're not able to respond right away.

Thank you so much for making The Darkest House a reality, and for funding the many stretch goals that allowed it to grow into such a forbidding presence!

Are You Ready to Enter the House?
almost 3 years ago – Mon, May 24, 2021 at 11:33:53 PM

With all the upgrades you unlocked and rooms you added to The Darkest House, we’ve really had to burn the midnight oil to get it all made. In the short time since the Kickstarter, Monte has worked slavishly writing all the extra content, while Bear, our Art Director, wrangled the dozens and dozens of illustrations and maps. In the past few weeks, our layout and editing team has been nose-to-the-grindstone bringing it all together.

But keeping our May commitment has been super important to us, so it’s all been worth it. We’re excited that the long hours are about to pay off. Assuming the house doesn’t act and all goes to plan, we will fulfill The Darkest House this week!

What to Expect

Look for an email from us later this week. It will contain instructions for redeeming your copy of The Darkest House. (The Devoured Halls come later—see below.) You’ll be able to download it from the MCG Shop or, if you provided us with your account email via BackerKit, from DriveThruRPG—or both, if for some reason you feel so inclined. You’ll get all the necessary instructions from the email.

If you’re due any add-ons, in print or PDF, we’ll fulfill them this week as well.

If You’re also Getting The Devoured Halls

As planned, The Devoured Halls will follow—expect it later this summer. The Devoured Halls will be a separate product, but it will include the entirety of The Darkest House. In other words, once you have The Devoured Halls you won’t need your copy of The Darkest House anymore.

So if you backed for The Devoured Halls, you'll get The Darkest House now. Feel free to download and enjoy it. You’ll be able to replace it with The Devoured Halls when you get that product, and you’ll have everything you need.

It’s Not Too Late to Upgrade—But Hurry!

BackerKit is still open, but only through tomorrow (Tuesday, May 25th). If you didn’t back for The Devoured Halls, you can still upgrade your pledge until we take down the BackerKit late pledges. (Lost your survey link? You can recover it here.) This is the last-ever chance to make your way into The Devoured Halls—after tomorrow, the doors will be closed forever. So upgrade now, and if you know anyone who missed the Kickstarter, let them know about BackerKit before it closes tomorrow!

The Campaign Is Over, and the House Is Appeased … for Now
about 3 years ago – Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 03:55:48 AM

The house invited you in … and you entered.

The house hungered … and you fed it.

The house was alone … and you joined it.

The house still hates you.

Thanks to your incredible support, this campaign hit every stretch goal we considered for it. The exciting conclusion of the Kickstarter today unlocked the twelfth stretch goal, making The Darkest House as big, as horrifying, and as feature-rich as we could, while still hitting our commitment to delivery in May. What a fantastic ending to this campaign!

I have some critical info for you, but first I’d like to thank the members of team MCG, who all helped make this campaign a success:

Monte conceived of and created The Darkest House, and has worked slavishly within it, drafting new rooms and bringing his ideas into fruition to ensure we stay on track for our May target. Bear (and the many great illustrators he works with) wrangled the artwork we’ve unveiled over the course of this Kickstarter, and was instrumental in creating of the prototypes for our new product format. (He also did the graphics for this campaign.) Jeremy Tolbert developed the app and the back end. Teri and Shanna, along with Tammie, have been keeping this high-speed project on track and editing the huge volume of text that Monte has created for it. Jen and LaTia interfaced with you, our wonderful community, here and everywhere gamers congregate online. And throughout it Sean and Bruce, along with the rest of the team and our academic intern Seamus Ly, kept our other projects humming along, particularly as we sent Ptolus: Monte Cook’s City by the Spire, a huge project in its own right, to press.

But that’s hardly all. All of us here at Monte Cook Games extend our thanks to you: our long-time fans, and those of you new to our work, who made The Darkest House not just a possibility, but as big and as dark as it could be. You make all of this possible!

Here’s what to expect as we move forward from here.

This Evening and the Next Few Days

Running Kickstarter campaigns is rewarding in many ways, and it’s been great hearing from you and interacting in the comments here, on social media, and elsewhere. But it’s also a brutally hectic challenge to administer it all. And most of the MCG staff has been keeping up with our regular duties throughout—shipping your orders, preparing for the Ptolus fulfillment, getting the Ptolus GM Screen and Ptolus NPC Deck off to press, and writing forthcoming titles like Claim the Sky and Doctrine of Ghul, among many other projects.

So, as we often do after a Kickstarter campaign winds down, we’re taking a short break.

Don’t expect to hear much from us this weekend, or in the week or two to come. If you have questions, feel free to send a Kickstarter message, but don’t be concerned if you don’t get a response right away. We’ll be hard at work on The Darkest House—you’ve given us a lot of house to build!

The Next Few Weeks

Kickstarter began collecting pledges the moment the campaign closed. But it takes Kickstarter a full two weeks to release those funds, along with the final data on our backers.

In the meantime, we will get BackerKit fully set up so we can open it when we have that data. BackerKit is a third-party platform that lets you confirm all the information we need to fulfill your pledge. If there are add-ons you’ve missed, or if you decide to increase your reward level, you can do that through BackerKit as well. You’ll be notified when we open BackerKit, which should be in about two weeks.

NOTE: Signing into BackerKit is vital to getting your rewards. Kickstarter does NOT provide us with the information we need to fulfill your rewards; we MUST gather it from you after the campaign. If you don’t respond to your BackerKit survey, we can’t send you any rewards!

Once you’ve done your BackerKit survey, we won’t need anything else from you until it’s time to start fulfilling rewards. We’ll be busy getting The Darkest House, and your other rewards, ready.

We may be fairly quiet during that period, but please pay attention when you do get communications from us. Our emails and Kickstarter updates include critical information about your rewards.

When Your Rewards Are Ready

When The Darkest House is ready for you, we’ll contact you again by email to begin the fulfillment process. You’ll be able to download your copy from the MCG Shop or DriveThruRPG—whichever is most convenient for you. (In fact, you’ll have access to it at both sites.) We’ll include complete instructions for downloading your copy in our email.

We’ll fulfill The Devoured Halls the same way, a couple of months later. And we’ll notify you of other rewards via email as well.

If you have any add-ons, you’ll receive an email with instructions for redeeming those rewards shortly after BackerKit closes. Physical add-ons (such as the print version of Your Best Game Ever) will require you to log into the MCG Shop, where you’ll “buy” the product (for free with a coupon, because you’ve already paid for it through Kickstarter), and check out.

This is an important part of the process because it ensures we have accurate delivery information for every item we send out. (With thousands of backers getting rewards from our many campaigns, it's amazing how many people will change their address over the fulfillment period.) You'll pay for shipping at that time.

Make sure you're paying attention to communications from us—don't let our updates or emails go to your spam folder, or otherwise ignore them, because if you do you could miss out on some of your rewards.

This was a wonderful Kickstarter campaign, and we are very happy you chose to be a part of it. Thank you all for your support, and for helping us bring The Darkest House into our world, your world, and thousands of other worlds!