Crowdfunding: Witch-War to the Vale of Forbiddiction and Beyond

PLEASE NOTE: This is a crowdfunding campaign for an upcoming book which we plan to deliver no earlier than January 2026. The crowdfunding will run for 30 days. Please see the bottom of this description for more details on how crowdfunding works. 

FRIENDS OF MELSONIA: If you are a member of the Friends of Melsonia you will be getting this book as part of your subscription, any purchase of this campaign will get you a second copy with the retail release cover design along with your Friends edition cover.

From Ezra Claverie (Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs, Crypts of Indormancy, A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633) and Andrew Walter (Fronds of Benevolence, Stay Frosty, Troika), we bring you a new HUGE box-set of tropical island themed old-school D&D adventures and setting material from the same game setting as our first ever publication: Crypts of Indormancy. With years of development behind it, over 80,000 words, and more than 80 paintings, it'd give the old TSR settings a run for their money when it comes to pure HEFT. Prepare to enter the Vale of Forbiddiction AND BEYOND! 

If we meet our target of 1000 people in 30 days we will not only make a wicked-huge box-set we will ALSO re-print the long-unavailable Crypts of Indormancy and include it for free to all the supporters who help it happen. If we don't meet our target we're still making the book, it'll just not come with a whole new free hardback book!

Witch-War to the Vale of Forbiddiction and Beyond comprises a bestiary of over sixty new monsters; a sourcebook for the tropical West Island setting; rules for NPC witches, witch-hunts, and criminal trials; and three adventure scenarios, which you can play in sequence or separately. These will be compatible with old-school D&D and presented as a box set or a slipcase of three books, made to our usual high quality, and will be large: with over 80 pieces of art and 80,000 words, this is by far our largest project to date!

“Witch-War for Koa’s Promise”: The remote highland village of Koa’s Promise has a witch-problem, possibly connected to a nearby ruin. This scenario offers occasions to use the rules for witch-hunts and criminal trials. Pursued witches may flee to the Vale of Forbiddiciton.

“The Vale of Forbiddiction”: An accursed valley holds the underground ruins of an Elven military base, home to competing factions of intelligent monsters. The village of Koa’s Promise may function as a base for the adventurers.

“To the Fastness of the Witch-Cult”: Clues and artifacts point the way over the mountains to a lost ruin in the jungle, where witches hide above den of living dead and freaks of Elven warmongery. Because of the distance from Koa’s Promise, this scenario offers a different kind of base for the adventurers: Farmarket, an Elven trading post deep in the jungle.

This box-set treats Islanders (i.e. humans) as the default player-character race, with colonialist Elves in the background. “To the Fastness of the Witch-Cult” introduces a third NPC race, the Woodlanders.

On Compatibility

 You can use this set with various editions of traditional sword-and-sorcery role-playing games. For conversion to the rule set of your choice, statistic blocks list armor types (e.g. “leather armor”) or equivalents (e.g. “as chain mail”), and they list both ascending Base Attack Bonus and descending THAC0.

Saving Throws appear with three options: the 1970s five-save type, the 2000s three-save type, and a riff on the primordial one-save type. In this last method, the player rolls d20, adding character level and the relevant ability-score modifier, and a result of fifteen or better indicates success. For example, if text calls for a Saving Throw of “(Poison/Fortitude/CON),” then Black Leaf the Third-Level Navigator rolls an eleven, plus her level of three, plus her Constitution modifier of zero, for a total of fourteen, and Black Leaf fails the Save.

On Difficulty 

Each of the three scenarios assumes a group of four to six low-level adventurers and their hirelings. Overall, the scenarios build in difficulty, but within each, danger does not build steadily. Player skill, guile, caution, and teamwork will therefore decide more outcomes than character power.

Neither witches nor wild beasts want a fair fight, so most will attack only when they believe they have the advantage. Because one unlucky encounter might kill multiple adventurers, the Referee should encourage the adventurers to hire guides, guards, and porters. Not only do hirelings help with logistics, but they also serve as potential targets for enemies. And when adventurers in remote locations become crippled or worse, players can promote hirelings into player characters.

If a scenario seems underpowered, adjust upward the Hit Dice of select foes. If it seems over-powered, consider adjusting nothing, and let the players learn from experience: this fictional world does not treat the health of fortune-seekers as its goal. Watch player strategies change.

Why Not Earth? 

The complexity of real history would get underfoot, and sadly, no real island has both shape-changing witches and anthropophagous land-owls.

LORE: The West Island

The West Island measures more than a thousand kilometers across, and a semicircular cordillera of mountains dominates its landscape. Except in the interior rainforest, one can always see peaks; the highest, draped with glaciers, rise more than eight thousand meters.

The narrowness of the coastal lowlands led the Twelve Clans to master gardening on terraces. The ruggedness of highland terrain means that even the well-traveled have seen only a small fraction of the interior; a trip to a village within drumming distance may require half a day’s climb along switchbacks.

More than two thousand years ago, the ageless Elves came from overseas and incorporated the West Island into their Empire, but fourteen hundred years ago, the Islanders rebelled and forced them out. Now the Elves maintain a limited presence on the island, primarily as traders.

In a bay on the western coast sits Queensport, the island’s largest settlement. Founded by Elves during the colonial era, Queensport still houses offices of the Principal Trading Company, the joint-stock venture authorized by the Crown. Queensport’s walled and gated Metropolitan Quarter preserves much Elven architecture. Here dwell Elven traders, their families, and their Elven and Islander servants, as well as garrison of Elven soldiers, and even stables of horses—a wonder and a terror to most Islanders.

Queensport also houses sites important to Islanders: shrines to all twelve of the Totem Spirits, and the headquarters of the Navigators’, Priests’, and Warriors’ Lodges. Up the sluggish River Two-Fish sprawls the stilt-house settlement known even by residents as Mosquitoville.

Thanks for reading about (and hopefully supporting) our upcoming book. We have been making books like this for over 10 years, and across 18 crowdfunding campaigns we have never failed to deliver. This one is unique, however, in not being hosted on Kickstarter or Backerkit. What does this mean? Well for starters we can spend less time and money on looking and sounding fancy and more on doing what you and me are here for: make more games! In a way this is the natural evolution of crowdfunding, breaking the kayfabe, no longer entertaining the illusion of them being plucky dreams being made possible by generous strangers and returning to the cold reality of the pre-order. In the modern crowdfunding landscape no one turns up with anything short of a mostly finished idea that is well beyond being abandoned if it doesn't make funding, so we thought "hey, let's not waste people's time and just come out and say it!". So here it is. We will absolutely still make this book if we don't hit out finding goal, we're a publisher, that's what we do, however we do have some incentives because it's fun.

Three reasons.

1. Pre-ordered books are cheaper! See the crossed out price? It goes up when it comes out.
2. If we hit our funding goal in time we will also reprint the long unavailable prequel adventure Crypts of Indormancy, which will be included for free to all supporters who support us in the first 30 days.
3. I said we won't cancel the book if it fails to fund, and that's true, but a crazy niche publishing house like us runs on good vibes. If the project does well we can get down to making more books without wasting time worrying about the bills.

You buy this book like any other book on our shop (you can buy other books with it if you like), pay for it up front, and we ship it to you once it's done. If for whatever reason the book doesn't get made we will refund you, because that would be stealing if we didn't, right? Unlike on crowdfunding platforms where we have layers of plausible deniability and you have no guarantee or protections, on here we're a shop and we are implicitly (and explicitly) promising you a book or a refund.

So when do I get the book?

We think the book will be ready to ship out around January 2026. This could be wrong! It could be longer, it could be sooner, but this is our educated guess.

How do I stay updated on progress?

We talk about what we're doing in our newsletter (scroll down to the bottom of the page to sign up). Feel free to reply to it by the way, we are happy to chat.

On box-sets and tariffs

As you might know, the US regime has gone feral and wants people to pay $d100% tax on all imports. Currently books are mostly spared and can move relatively normally. Boxes, however, risk confusing the border guards and getting treated as boardgames which are very NOT ok. So here's the plan, if reality re-establishes itself before the book is released, we'll make it into a really nice box set. If we continue in alternative reality we'll make it into a nice slipcase, or a very fat book, or several fat books. We'll keep it loosey goosey with the goal of making the lives of our US fans a bit less chaotic.

Is that it?

Yup. Things don't have to be so complicated.