Yesterday, on a special installment of Primecast, we broke our long silence on our next big project: Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika. As the segment was just a preview and an announcement that we’d be offering Warcaster through Kickstarter first, there were quite a few questions about the game and our future plans. I noted as many as I could and hope to compile answers for the most frequent questions here. So, let’s dive right in and see how many of those burning questions I can shed light on…

WHY KICKSTARTER?

Let me start with an excerpt from our Kickstarter campaign page, currently under construction. This is directly from the obligatory “Why Kickstarter?” section:

We here at Privateer Press are committed to getting the best games possible into the hands of our customers. But like retail throughout the world, the landscape of the hobby game industry is changing, and one of the issues continually brought to us by players and retailers is the difficulty in obtaining our product, despite the availability of the product in our warehouse. While we will still use traditional distribution for our current game lines and future products, Kickstarter provides a tried and proven platform for getting our games directly into the hands of the players and retailers who want them. It also allows us to get in front of players who may not be familiar with our products or may not have even heard of Privateer Press, and it allows us to gauge demand so we can better manage our production pipeline to be as efficient as possible.

While brevity on a Kickstarter scroll is good practice, I have the luxury of going into more depth here.

One of the biggest challenges in releasing a new product in our current market is gaining visibility among the literally hundreds of new products that come out every month. Many products are here today and gone tomorrow, and by the time players and even retailers learn of them, they’re no longer available through the standard distribution channels. Kickstarter provides a means for greater visibility. It’s a crowded space in its own way, but the medium lends itself to sharing while providing a solid mechanism for potential customers to lock in an order on something they don’t want to miss out on. Kickstarter’s greatest strength is that it provides as true a measure as you can get to gauging the actual demand for a product.

This is important information for us. While we make the miniatures in our own factory right here in Woodinville, Washington, we outsource many other components like packaging, bases, dice, and cards. Knowing ahead of time how many of any one component we may need helps keep us from having to speculate too wildly and making costly mistakes, both by over-ordering as well as undersupplying.

And in the best-case scenario, we hope what a successful Kickstarter launch can do for Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika is show retailers, distributors, and the world at large that there is a significant demand for the game and that the game is going to be around for a while, so it’s worth adding to their catalog of offerings with a plan to keep it in stock in the future.

The Kickstarter is the launch of the game, but this isn’t a one-and-done product run. We are creating a new miniatures game, and we have years of content planned for it. A year from now, when someone discovers Warcaster for the first time, they’re not going to be able to go to Kickstarter to get a starter set, they’re going to have to find it in a store. By launching through Kickstarter, we hope to raise a community around the game that will sustain it and grow in the months and years to come so that retailers and distributors will be confident it is an evergreen product line worth their time and money to stock.

WILL WARCASTER: NEO-MECHANIKA BE OFFERED THROUGH RETAIL STORES?

Our Kickstarter campaign will include a retailer pledge tier for any retailers who want to get in on the cutting edge and take advantage of the benefits of pledging during the campaign. We will also offer the products through standard distribution and retail channels with ship dates set shortly after the product rewards are delivered to backers of the campaign. This means retailers who back the campaign will, in fact, receive the products ahead of orders placed through other channels later.

WHEN IS THE KICKSTARTER GOING TO LAUNCH?

In our 20 years of being in business, one lesson we’ve learned is to be very cautious about announcing exact dates. Anything could happen tomorrow or the next day that might cause us to have to delay a day or two, which then looks like we’ve missed a deadline at the risk of disappointing all of you. So, what we’re willing to commit to right now is that our plan is for it to launch within the next month or so, and sooner rather than later. We’re within striking distance of that launch, which is why we have emerged from our design cave to start talking about it, and we’ll announce the go-date about 48 hours before we’re ready to push the button.

MORE IMPORTANT, WHEN WILL WARCASTER: NEO-MECHANIKA DELIVER?

Many projects that use Kickstarter have long development and production timelines and require a great deal of patience from backers. We know how this goes, both on the backer side as well as the project creator side. But we’re not fans of waiting or making people wait, so our target for the release of Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika has always been to do so prior to Lock & Load this year. Thus, June 2020 is our target delivery window. So, let’s say you back the Kickstarter in March. You’ll then be waiting approximately three months for delivery of the first rewards. Hopefully that doesn’t seem too long! It’s about the same amount of time between new products being advertised in catalogs and when they hit shelves for the first time. Producing the miniatures in our own factory gives us a great advantage, as we don’t have to spend months creating tools overseas before the minis start getting made.

WHAT MATERIALS WILL THE MINIATURES BE MADE OF?

Everything we produce in our Woodinville facility is made in tin-based metal or resin. We choose the material based on what will be the most economical for our customers. Metal is fast for us to make, but the material is expensive, so big, chunky things can get costly quickly. Resin, on the other hand, is painfully slow to make, but the material is much less expensive, so we can produce larger pieces while still keeping the prices reasonable. With metal, you’re paying for the material; with resin, you’re paying for the significant labor that goes into crafting the models. We try to balance it out as best we can.

Right now, most of the models we’ve previewed so far will be made in metal, even the warjacks. That could change between now and when the models start getting molded, as they undergo a significant analysis that includes not only evaluating mass but also shape and detail before the material is selected. And most certainly, as we tackle larger pieces for Warcaster—like bigger warjacks or vehicles—we’ll be utilizing resin with more frequency.

HOW MANY FACTIONS ARE THERE?

We will be featuring three Factions in our Kickstarter campaign. The starter boxes for the two that you have seen so far—the Marcher Worlds and the Iron Star Alliance—will ship in our first wave of rewards. The third Faction, which we are going to reserve showing until the Kickstarter launches, will ship about a month later in our second wave of reward deliveries. There will be more, but that’s all we are willing to divulge right now—a company has to have some secrets, right? Otherwise, how do we get you to come back tomorrow?

IS THIS THE IRON KINGDOMS IN SPACE? ARE THERE ALIENS?

This is not the Iron Kingdoms in space, but the settings are inexorably linked, and if you happen to have followed the Henge Hold Scroll storyline, then you already know how. But saying Warcaster is the IK in space is like saying a giant redwood tree is just a tall seed. We planted seeds in the Iron Kingdoms, and we brought some of the DNA of warcasters and warjacks into the new setting, and you might even see the occasional nod to an Iron Kingdoms character, but it’s a new setting with new stories and characters and worlds to explore. You don’t need to know anything about the Iron Kingdoms to dive into Warcaster, but if you’re a lore expert on the Iron Kingdoms, you’ll likely enjoy some of the Easter eggs that have found their way into the game and setting.

Aliens are a different subject altogether. In a sense, humanity is the alien invader of the Cyriss galaxy. And at one point, the galaxy was populated with all manner of intelligent life. But when humanity shows up, the only intelligent life they encounter are the architects responsible for the network that connects all the worlds in the galaxy. Suffice it to say, that meeting doesn’t go so well, but that’s a story for later.

The current focus is on the human factions, but as we go forward, we’re pushing further and further out from what defines something as human, and we have some pretty far-out ideas we intend to explore.

IS WARMAHORDES ENDING?

Good Lord, no! We have 20 years of world building invested in the Iron Kingdoms, not to mention a vast library of models. And hopefully, Will Hungerford’s peek into the future releases of WARMACHINE and HORDES gives you something to look forward to.

The narrative event planned for Lock & Load this year will cap off the Oblivion storyline, and to be sure, the Iron Kingdoms is never going to be the same, but then it never has been one year to another. It’s been a living, ongoing saga since it was birthed in the first book of the Witchfire Trilogy.

We have much more planned for WARMACHINE, HORDES, the Iron Kingdoms, and Immoren itself. We have great stuff planned around the Strangelight Workshop in the future, and we have new stories to tell in the Iron Kingdoms that we very much hope will keep you as invested in its future as we are.

I’m sure there are many more questions to come—answer one and two more take its place—so we’ll try to keep up in the days and week ahead with answers and more info as we continue to draw back the curtain on Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika. If you haven’t already, please sign up for our mailing list so you’re among the first to know of all-new news and developments. We’ve got lots to come and couldn’t be more excited to finally be sharing it with you.

Matthew D. Wilson

Chief Creative Officer