Wax & Wayne Update + Stormlight Archive Game Question
Hey! Brandon here. You know, I said that these were not going to be weekly probably, even though I was going to call them weekly, and now we’ve done one every week.
So here is our Weekly Update.
I am still working on Wax and Wayne 4. It’s going really well. I have just finished the first chunk of scenes, and it came together. I’m somewhere around 12%, I believe, is what my latest send-in to the team was, and it’s looking really good. Right now, if I haven’t mentioned before, I’m planning to finish this by August 1st. I’m planning the book at about 150,000 words. There is a longer update on Reddit, if you’ve kind of missed some of these updates and just want to read only about Wax and Wayne 4, which we’ll link in the liner notes.
Last time I asked you what you guys were most interested in regarding art books for the Stormlight Archive. And 66% of you prefer the guidebook style. You can look last week if you want to know. This is what I thought you would say. It’s the one that I thought would be most interesting, an in-world guidebook that features a lot of art but also is kind of like a coffee table book you can put out that you can give to a friend who hasn’t read the Stormlight Archive and they’re like, “What’s it about?” Well, here is some cool artwork with some in-world descriptions.
I kicked around some ideas with Isaac on this. We’ll probably start working on this. Again, this is probably not for four years or so. But we will start working on this. It looks like you guys are excited. We did get 20,000 responses from you, so that’s really good. And the overwhelming majority of you, 76% of you, said that we would buy all three if we put them together. And I chatted with Isaac, and right now we’re going to take the first two on this list, because we think that we can make the coffee table art book and the guidebook kind of combined into one. But what we can’t really combine in that is the encyclopedia-style book, which we’d actually want to be alphabetized, and things like that.
And so what we’re going to do is we are going to start kind of working on these two things together but as separate books that we would sell together and sell separately. But probably do a Kickstarter for the two of them together, and then later on you can just buy them individually. So like, a larger art book/guidebook as one, and then an encyclopedia-style sort of companion book, and things like that. I really think these will work well matching the first five books, because we will probably have to do separate ones after book 10 that would cover that era of Stormlight, the 6 through 10.
Thank you for your feedback. It’s been really super helpful at pointing us the way we should be working. And because this feedback was so good, my team came to me and said, “Could you ask them another question this week?” So I hope you guys are up for another poll.
Because one of the things we’ve been working on, we get a lot of requests for more games. Not necessarily video games, we get a lot of requests for video games. We can’t just—video games are hard. But we get a lot of requests for board games, RPGs, these sorts of things. And we are thinking of doing a Stormlight one. We do have Mistborn House War. And we also have the kind of deck-building card game Call to Adventure: Stormlight. We want to do something else in this realm, focused on the Stormlight Archive, more of a traditional board game sort of thing.
But we weren’t sure what you guys were interested in. And so we actually have a little poll attached to this. And this is just, we only want the one you are most interested in right now, the one we would do first. I can imagine us doing multiples of these in the future. But for right now, what do you want most?
And so our options are, a kind of lighter, faster board game. And our examples like that are something like Splendor or Ticket to Ride. Again, those are only examples. It’s not like we would go and make a Stormlight version of one of those games. We just want you to kind of see where our head is at. And some of our board game experts that we talked to said these were smart categories.
There’s a medium-length game style that would be more like Small World or Dune: Imperium, where it’s, again, medium length.
There would be the heavy, large, in-depth game, like War of the Ring is the example they gave. My brother loves these, the big, intricate, massive board games that take days to play. Would you be interested in that?
And then there’s a legacy game, like Gloomhaven. The games that play, they’re probably going to play like a medium-style game, but you’re going to change the game as you go. They’re very much the rage. I like legacy games, so I made them throw that in there as an option as well.
And then, of course, there’s the classic pen and paper RPG, which we don’t have yet for Stormlight.
I imagine we’re going to do multiples of these in the future. Which one are you most excited to get right now? What would you like us to work on next? And this is mostly targeted to you board game fans. What are you looking forward to getting from us? And we will take that advice to heart. Anything you want to mention in the comments about what you like and what you don’t like, and where we should steer clear and where we should go. We’re getting more experience in this realm. I think we’re doing a better job with each thing that we make. But those comments are really helpful to us, just to know what people are wanting. We don’t want to overload you with merchandise. We want to be targeted in creating the things that we are excited about and you’re excited about.
So those are your options. If you have time, go down and click on that poll. And we also have some links there to what some of these games are in case you need to familiarize yourself with the style of game we’re talking about with those various ones. And I will be back next week to talk more about Wax and Wayne 4. Thank you, guys, so much.