This Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras 2 Kickstarter, even though it is nominally a Kickstarter for a book that’s a sequel, is still a chance to experiment with the way we do Kickstarters. Particularly since we have the first Dark Eras KS to work from.

To start with, each Era features two game lines. This isn’t just a play on Dark Eras Two, but is also us knowing we needed to keep the page count down compared to the out-size DE1, yet wanting folks to get plenty of Eras for their favorite lines. So: two game lines per Era.

We also have divided the book up between three developers rather than our structure for the first one. One uber-developer and all devs on deck for their respective lines was just way too unwieldy a process for a single book. It was a testament to Black Hat Matt McFarland’s long experience as a developer that the original Dark Eras book came together as fantastically as it did!

Then there is the fact, which I’ve written about before, that we haven’t started the actual writing of the Eras yet, although each of the three Devs has earmarked certain of the announced Eras as theirs, and no doubt are already thinking of how to approach them. We didn’t get them pre-written, even though we knew that approach might turn off some potential backers, because trying to shoe-horn in the added material from the KS rewards into already written text was just awkward and added a fair bit of extra time to the creation of DE1.

By waiting to start writing Dark Eras 2 until after the KS has run, we get to incorporate the material added by backers, who took the rewards that gave them the chance to alter and add to the Dark Eras earmarked for the book, organically into the writing process at its start. Not like before when it had to happen after the writers had already finished their sections.

Even the voting process has gone through some tweaking based on DE1. Our first vote, for which game lines to add to the Golden Age of Piracy, was one we made very similar to the voting in DE1. Even going so far as to pull back from the security set-up on the polling page to see if folks would “play nice”.

Now, we have added the tougher security measures (although we’re sure they mean little to folks who know how to bypass such things), a flipped around what we are voting for with the three Eras listed above, but not giving them game lines for the vote.

Basically, we want folks to keep having fun with these, to continue to get engaged with both the project and the KS process. And we want to explore how involved with actually determining the content our backers want to be. Kickstarter as a platform is actually continuing to evolve, and I know that a fair number of folks are getting tired of the KS “grind”.

So we keep looking at different kinds of projects and the different kinds of KSs that could go with them.

But don’t worry. Not every one of our KSs are going to be so experimental. In fact, as I look over the huge event horizon of Gen Con next month, the next three Kickstarters are slated to be Cavaliers of Mars, Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition, and The Trinity Continuum (Core plus Aeon Core books).

And those all should be much more the sort of straightforward sort of KSs, even if we figure on having a few tweaks and surprises for you once we get to them!