Helllooo Everyone,

We had a fantastic first week and we're happily swimming through our second. As I keep saying, I'm so chuffed you all want The Wanderer's Bookshop in your lives.

We've unlocked our guest writers for the BackerKit Exclusive Ephemera and are well on our way to unlocking a beautiful layout by Nala J Wu. So let's talk more about Nala's work which you can peek at here .

I've worked with Nala on two of my previous games, The Tower and Universe At Your Door: The Traveller. Two completely different styles and both turned out amazingly. With The Tower we were working with 2 colour Risograph printing for the puzzle dungeon and each spread was designed to highlight the puzzle with art and layout. 

One of my favourite things about Nala's work is that every spread is different, designed to best highlight what's going on at that point with the text. 

They also brought their incredible style to Universe at Your Door: The Traveller. Creating new heads up display styles for every spread to best feature and provide good flow for the game text, which aids the understanding of heirachy and how to move through as you play.

Even though Nala knocked these out of the park with their amazing flexibility of style, they actually specialise in digital collage and I'm finally with The Wanderer's Bookshop giving them a project that yearns for that style.

The Brief: An old weathered journal, interwoven with watercolour, pen and ink wash illustrations, literary quotes, fragments of book pages, maps and more.

Of course we'll only get this kind of levelled up, varied and beautiful layout if we surpass our stretch goal at £9500.

So If you're still thinking about it get backing!

Another Zine Month Project to check out! 

I would be completely remiss if I didn't spotlight a Zinetopia game I've already backed, one featuring Nala's work as well. Nala has worked in their signature linocut style to make a cover design that feels rustic and folky at its core. The cover art is so good that they're offering a tier where Nala is doing a linocut print by hand for the covers with additional unique ink drawings.

How I Heard It is campfire storytelling game, GM- less and designed to be playable against the crackle of campfire, as 3 - 6 of you gather round and weave a tale of a folk hero; from their humble origins, to their great deeds and finally their somber end.  

Hello Wanderers! 

I’m ecstatic that we’re doing so well! Thank you so much for getting us to this point in the first week of being live!

We’ve added The Curators Notebook to our Add Ons, so you can pick it up to add to your pledge. It will have gorgeous cover art by Ramona of Alderdoodle, artist behind the Stygian Library and Gardens on Ynn, who is going to bring that same beautiful work to The Curator’s Notebook.
 
Coming up soon is our next Stretch Goal with only a few pledges left to get there!

At £7000 we get specially created ephemera from our fabulous guest writers, their bios are featured on the main campaign page under meet the team. Here’s a quick intro to them all.

Austin Taylor, Valiant Dorian, Michelle Kelly, Nala J. Wu, Yanahn, Vee Hendro, Noordin Ali Kadir, Nada / Amir Alami, Jessie Lo, Joe Kim, Dusty and Darby Pak.


They will be writing and making pieces of ephemera designed to give you hooks and sources for your mystery solving. Some of their work will be digitised for all backers, whilst a few physical pieces will make their way into A Bookshop Patron boxes, to be incorporated into journals and stories. 
 
We’re so close to this goal, can we get there by next week?

Speaking of goals, we’ve sped through two more! The additional illustrations goal from our lovely artists, Joshua Clarke & Alex Coggon and we’ve surpassed a community goal. 200 backers has helped us unlock a supplemental task for the Bookshop “Events”. Now you’ll also be able to build and tell stories around the events your bookshop runs. Do you play host to authors, clandestine book gatherings, auctions or sunny book clubs, the skys the limit! Didn’t I mention that the bookshop was bigger on the inside? 
 

Y'all are amazing! 

I went to sleep and woke up to us not only being funded but also having smashed through the first Stretch Goal!

Thank you for your support, I'm so excited to bring this game to you and even more hyped for how far we can go!

The Wanderer's Tome Pin Badge has been unlocked and can now be added to your pledges via add ons. It is also automatically included in the Keys to The Bookshop and A Bookshop Patron Tier.

Which would be the same with The Curator's Notebook, which is so close to being unlocked!
I'll share more about The Curator's Notebook after we unlock that goal.

In the meantime lets talk about our Community Goals!

We've got 5 community goals under our community bookshelves section which all contribute to increasing the community and adding more interactive digital content for every backer.  

They include adding digital community copies and library copies but also joining in the discussions and sharing recommendations for books currently in your collection and your favourite indie bookstore. 

With these recommendations we can create:

• Digital printable map fragments featuring the bookshops to include in your journals. 

• A starter list of books you might like to explore based on the cards you've drawn when playing.

The trackable achievements are included below so if you'd like to contribute to the discussion click through.

For each week of the Campaign I will draw cards from my decks and offer prompts for book recommendations based on their imagery and meaning similar to how the book prompts will appear in the game (these are new prompts).

Prompts and information about the decks are available in the discussion.

Thanks again for your support, talk to you again soon!