A fantasy adventure about food, community, and spaghetti wizards for 5th edition.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
FAT MAGIC MEGA UPDATE
about 2 years ago
– Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 10:35:10 PM
Hey folks,
Another year has passed, and the giant hot dog serpent that encircles the world keeps on turning. We’re officially in the year of Fat Magic’s release, provided the global shipping industry doesn’t get sucked into a new black hole.
It may seem like it’s been a little quiet on our end, but the past couple of months have been anything but. I’m extremely excited to share all of our progress with you fine folks.
But before I do, I have a huge announcement from a member of the Fat Magic family. Amber Seger, layout and graphic designer for Fat Magic, has illustrated a new roleplaying game that’s available to purchase right now!
Adorablins is a super cute and easy-to-learn storytelling game. You play as dimension-hopping Goblins going on wild adventures and causing adorable mayhem in fantastical locations like the Fairy Forest, Mushroom Mountain, and a Shopping Mall.
The game is inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse system used by tabletop RPGs like Apocalypse World, Monster Hearts, and Avatar Legends. It plays like a conversation where everyone at the table works together to tell a story. Everything you need to play is in a portable mint tin box that fits right in your pocket.
Adorablins is coming off the back of a super successful Kickstarter, but don’t worry if you missed it. The game is already available to buy through regular, non-Kickstarty means.
Like the divine union between PB and J, we’ve struck a harmony between writing and playtesting, and made some big improvements to the book in the process!
ACT II has expanded to include new NPCs, magic items, a cooking challenge, and a full dungeon crawl. It’s about twice the size of the original Caketown from playtest one and it’s really come into its own in playtests two & three.
All of this is in service of making ACT II a linchpin moment in the Fat Magic story to draw your players into the central mystery and give them the time and incentive to become invested in the plight of the people of Caketown.
Hollandaise, Deep-Fried Cockatrice, and Pavlov Volauvent by Carlos Sánchez Polo (@CSPstuff).
Both active playtests are now coming to the end of their time in Caketown. They’ve rebelled against vampire overlords, encountered horror-themed food monsters, fell in love, got wrapped up in an interdimensional conspiracy, and made a bunch of weird friends.
Soon, our adventurers will strike out towards Leftonburner through the treacherous Sopressata Desert.
“You Gave the Barbarian Caffeine!?”
Introducing our latest custom subclass, the Path of the Cold Brute Barbarian: an anxious brawler with an arsenal of caffeinated weaponry.
The Cold Brute doesn’t sleep, uses dexterity for attacks when raging, and can slow the battlefield around them by channeling frozen cold brew through their veins. And they’ll make you mean cup of coffee if you tip well!
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how this excellent pun would translate into a subclass, but it came together beautifully in the design stage. As always, the mechanics were formulated by Fat Magic subclass designer Lex Kim Bobrow (@titanomachyRPG). And the class includes some stunning, anime edgelord-inspired art by Fat Magic artist Carlos Sánchez Polo (@CSPstuff).
Fat Magic superstar artist Kinley Raftery (@Kinley_R_Art) has been hard at work creating four beautiful pieces of art for our epic DM screen that follows the journey of an embattled Fat Magic party going on the adventure of their lives.
There’s still work to be done on panels 2 & 3, but you can really see how this baby is coming together. After a brief sojourn in the sun, Kinley is going right back into the art mines to finish it up.
Coming Soon
That’s it for today, but we’ve got a bunch of free content scheduled to drop soon! The Toastmaster Bard is going through some final edits and then heading straight to design. We have a one-shot written by Unseelie Aurora (@unseelieaurora) almost ready for release. And, as a special surprise, we are working on a subclass crossover event with a New York Times bestseller comic book series.
All Released Content to Date
over 2 years ago
– Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 01:18:12 AM
Hey folks!
This is just a quick update to remind you to fill in your surveys and make sure you have access to all the released Fat Magic content.
84% of backers have filled out their surveys, so far. That’s great! But we want to get that number as close to 100% as possible so everyone gets their books.
Don’t forget! Those of you near Baltimore can save on shipping by selecting “local pickup” and picking up your loot in person.
With that out of the way, here’s every cool thing we’ve released so far, including the all-new Habgoblin Player Ancestry designed in collaboration with @PFizzlebang.
Phew. That’s a lot of wacky short URLs. We’ll have more to come very soon.
All the best,
SC
Backerkit, BBQ, and CHEW
over 2 years ago
– Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 11:03:35 PM
Strap in folks.
We’ve a lot on the agenda today, so this is gonna be a chonky slice of correspondence.
Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve got going on in case you want to skip around:
BackerKit & Surveys
Shipping
BBQ Paladin Subclass
Subclasses Update
Spooky Season Free Content
CHEW: The Roleplaying Game
Backerkit
After defeating the eldritch beast known as “Math,” we’ve officially opened the Fat Magic BackerKit store.
For a limited time, folks who missed the Kickstarter can head to FatMagicRPG.com and grab themselves a copy of the book and some of our tasty add-ons.
That also means your pledge surveys are ready to go out! We’ll be running a smoke test today, which sends out a survey to a small percentage of the backers to make sure everything is running smoothly.
A small number of you will receive your survey today. And as long as nothing explodes, the rest of you will be getting your survey shortly after.
Shipping
We’ve had to lock in our shipping rates and international rates are still high due to a pandemic grinding the entire industry to a halt.
We had hoped to see some relief by now, but it looks like this isn’t going away soon and we can’t hold off any longer.
It breaks our hearts that the costs of international shipping demand we charge this much just to ship folks their book, and we are so sorry that these uncommonly crappy circumstances are disproportionately affecting our supporters outside of the US.
Shipping is calculated by the weight and size of the package. Based on these factors, all pledge levels fall into one of two pricing categories: the Meal Deal and all other pledges that include physical rewards.
Some countries, like Australia and Ireland, are experiencing additional strain and are listed separately.
Meal Deal
Local Pickup $0
United States $11
Canada $20
Europe $41
Ireland $45
Australia $48
Everywhere Else $42.50
All Other Pledges
Local Pickup $0
United States $13
Canada $23
Europe $49
Ireland $49
Australia $61
Everywhere Else $50
If anyone wants to take advantage of local pickup, we are based in Baltimore, Maryland!
BBQ Paladin
This month we released our biggest subclass yet, the Oath of the BBQ Paladin. This was a huge team effort and I could not be more proud of the folks who worked on this.
Elijah Forbes (@paintedturtleco) wrote the beautiful flavor text. Lex Kim Bobrow (@titanomachyrpg) designed the massive suite of mechanics. Stefan Huddlestone (@StefanHuddlest1) provided sensitivity reading. The BBQ Knight and spirit were illustrated by Carlos Sánchez Polo (@cspstuff), and the campfire illustration is by Elijah.
The Oath of the BBQ Paladin pays tribute to the contributions of Black and Indigenous chefs to the art of BBQ. A lot of love and care went into its creation and I think it shows.
With the BBQ Paladin finished, we’re moving swiftly on to the Way of the Fermented Grain Monk subclass.
This boozy subclass is hardy, boisterous, and reckless to a fault. The Way of the Fermented Grain Monk lives by a code of simplicity, hospitality, and self-sustainability. They believe that brewing beer should be for sustaining life and supporting the community, never for the profit of the brewer.
As a special treat, here’s an exclusive look at the joyful art created by Diansakhu (@diansakhuart) for the subclass.
The Way of the Fermented Grain Monk will include mechanics for monks who choose the path of sobriety.
In the next few weeks, we’ll also be polishing up the copy and design of the released subclasses and re-releasing them.
Spooky Season Free Content
In celebration of the birthday of the Great Skeleton in the Sky, we’ll be releasing some seasonally appropriate spoooooky content.
First up is a magic item designed by the legendary Matthew and Fernando of Abyssal Brews (@abyssalbrews), dropping like a hot cup of [SPOILER] this Tuesday.
This one’s for my basic b-words.
Towards the end of the week, we’ll be releasing a full Halloween one-shot, written by game designer El Haney. This is one of the weirdest little one-shots I’ve ever read and I can’t wait to share it with y’all.
Nobody is ready for The Night of the Living Bread.
CHEW: The Roleplaying Game
Before I go, I’d like to do a special shout-out to fellow food RPG CHEW: The Roleplaying Game, a Forged in the Dark crime drama based on the hit comic book.
The head writer, Mitch Wallace, helped us newbies navigate the doldrums of our first Kickstarter and asked for nothing in return.
He’s put a lot of love and sweat into this game and you absolutely need to check it out:
Based on the award-winning Image comic books and Forged in the Dark rules, play quirky FDA agents as they police egg dealers, chicken traffickers, and food-powered criminals in a clucked up world! You know you need Bucket of Chicken Dice...
It's zany, it's dark, and it's all kinds of fun! Remember, Chicken is DOOM!
Sweet Moments by the Firelight
over 2 years ago
– Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 10:49:35 PM
Hey there, folks!
It’s been a busy few weeks in the world of Fat Magic.
We’ve been commissioning piles of new art, working on collabs with new designers and writers, and cooking up a fat stack of free content for y’all.
There’s more on that below. But let’s get the housekeeping out of the way first.
The BackerKit pre-order store is almost ready to go. We just need to lock down the weight of one final item later this week and then we’re cutting the ribbon. Once it’s up, you will all be receiving your backer surveys, where you can tell us all about the size of your t-shirts and your permanent addresses
Once we have the weight and size of all our add-ons, we’ll also have more clarity on shipping costs, which I’ll share with you in the traditional clarity-sharing ritual (wear shoes that can get wet).
In bad news with good consequences, we received a prototype of the dice tower earlier this month and, unfortunately, I was not happy with the quality. Our production manager, the mysterious shadow who asked not to be named, is exploring better quality materials for the dice tower.
The new dice tower will probably be more expensive to make, so we may adjust the price in the preorder store, but backers of the Kickstarter won’t pay any additional costs.
The last itty bitty production update is that we have confirmed the Rad Vibes t-shirts will be available up to 6XL!
Fun Stuff
Ok, I’m taking off my business tank top and putting on my fun crop top.
We have two playtest subclasses in the works, the BBQ paladin and the Toastmaster bard. Both are designed by the wonderful @titanomachyRPG.
We’ll be releasing these very soon. I’m just waiting on the art for one and we’re consulting with a sensitivity reader on the other. (Editor’s note: If you think the FM subclasses are wild, you should check out the parade of cursed, bizarre, and buck-wild subclasses on Titanomachy’s Twitter.)
We’ll be spicing things up this month with a new player race and boss encounter designed in collaboration with @PFizzlebang. Pip specializes in spicier monsters with smarter strategies, so make sure your players are ready for some heat.
I haven’t revealed this on Twitter yet, but the new player race will be the Habgoblin, a spicy variety of the hobgoblin from the Habanero Spice Flats.
The Habgoblin’s digestive system has evolved to include a series of interlocking chambers filled with smoke and spice. The tendrils of smoke you often see coiling from their nostrils are a tool for subtle communication. The first thing Habgoblin parents teach their children are the signals for “love,” “joy,” and “danger.” The spice in their belly is the weapon used to protect themselves from that danger.
Habgoblin culture is steeped in a rich history of storytelling and community spirit. Traditions emphasize love and passion above all. While their literature tells tales of heroes with “bellies of spice” and “hearts of fire.” Heroes in Habgoblin stories love deeply and honestly, fight for those who can’t fight for themselves, and die on their feet puffing defiant clouds of black smoke.
Here’s a sneak peek at an early sketch by @CSPstuff.
Folks who can’t wait to play the game will be glad to know that we’ve got two one-shots in the late stage of development!
The Hamburger Heist by @100thingsilove will task your party to infiltrate the Duke's candlelight supper and steal his secret burger recipe. In our spooky Halloween One-Shot, you and your party will… Well, maybe I’ll tell you about that soon.
For now, I’ll leave you with a sweet moment shared between two of the food truck folk of the Sopressata, illustrated by @paintedturtleco.
Cheers,
SC Ormond
BackerKit & Beyond
over 2 years ago
– Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 12:23:51 AM
Hello old friends!
It feels like an age since we’ve been able to sit around the fire and chew the fat. One particular piece of fat in much need of chewing is the hunk of gristle that landed in our bank accounts this morning.
As of 11:26 am, we have officially secured the funds from Kickstarter! And as soon as I hit send on this email, I’m pulling the trigger on a whole bunch of new & shiny art for our book. (Keep your eyes on your email for sneak previews.)
The next step for us is setting up a BackerKit store, where you’ll be able to track your pledges and folks who missed out on the Kickstarter can get in on the action. We’re in the final stages of setting up shop, so expect an email from me saying Fat Mart is open for business any day now.
EAT FRESH SUBCLASSES
Finally, I’ve got some piping hot playtest material fresh out of the Lex Kim Bobrow for you. You didn’t think I’s show up in your inbox without some tasty content for you, didja?
Introducing the iconic, very marketable, and always fun to say: Spaghetti Wizard!
The pastamancers of the Order of the Salted Pot do not lack for confidence. They believe that all problems great and small can be rectified by the one true carb, AKA the al dente gift from the Great Grandma. It’s simply a matter of finding the right pasta for the job.
