The Ampliterra Process So Far

So often when a project reaches the public it can seem like it’s coming out of thin air. I wanted to write this post to give a sense of the years of work that have gone into getting Ampliterra: Echoes of the Rift to its current stage! Strap in, this is a long one.

March 23, 2020: This was the date of the very first game that was ever played in Ampliterra. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down just about everything in the US, I threw myself into crafting a world that my friends and I could escape to. I probably put about a week or two of sporadic work into creating the initial session and the bare bones of the Vindurheim region.

Originally, this was just meant to be a one-shot session (after all, the quarantine period was only supposed to last two weeks), but we all had such a good time that we decided to keep it going!

May 2020: Around this time, I had another group of friends who were interested in playing a game in Ampliterra, but wanted a different feel to it. This pushed me to create the continent of Solandria to explore more classic high fantasy themes. Moving to an entirely new continent felt like such a fresh start and a fun way to get to create something new and learn how it would interact with the existing locations in the world.

December 2020: For the first year of the campaign, I would write up extensive notes on our weekly sessions in preparation for the game. At the end of the year, I collected those session notes into a sort of scrapbook for my players. It had some bare-bones atlas-style worldbuilding with histories of cities and descriptions of religion and the full session notes for the first 40-50 sessions. This was a big undertaking, but was a good dry-run for creating a much bigger project the next year!

The scrapbook-style book I created for the players in the first Ampliterra campaign collecting the first year of sessions. Cover art by Lauren Meyers

November 2021: After 1.5 years of exploring Ampliterra with various groups (and with the original home game still going strong), I first had the idea of building Ampliterra into a campaign setting sourcebook. Since the very best parts of our home game were the story moments, exploration, and player-character-driven stories, I decided to build it out as system neutral to better focus on the story elements of this world. Essentially, this meant putting the story elements (history, quest threads, characters, locations, etc.) at the forefront in lieu of on-rails adventures or stat blocks that could limit the world to certain styles of gameplay.

November 2021 - January 2022: The actual process of writing Ampliterra was a bit of a fugue state. I wrote the full 115,000 word manuscript over the course of something like 45-60 days and wrote about 2,000 words/day on average. While exhausting, it was such a rewarding experience to engage with this world in a different way than I had before. I got to explore locations we hadn’t gotten to yet in games, to tell whatever stories most interested me, and to think about how other GMs and players might engage with the material.

I used Scrivener to write the book, which let me jump around from place-to-place almost encyclopedia-style. Writing this way gave me the ability to follow the ideas I found most interesting at any given time. In very early January 2022, I had a full manuscript on my hands.

January - February 2022: Once I had the manuscript, I knew it needed refining and to be cut down for length. The first person to edit the book was my wife, Caleigh Wells. She’s a fantastic journalist and expert editor who engaged with the material the way she would any other kind of draft - finding inconsistencies, tightening up the writing, and contributing her own ideas. Over a month, she cut the book down to 85,000 words and really improved the overall quality.

March - April 2022: After Caleigh’s extensive developmental edit was finished, I found our other editor, Matt Click. Over a few weeks, Matt completed an extensive proofread of the material to make sure that the text was readable, clear, and consistent.

May - June 2022: An important part of this project was bringing in a cultural consultant to make sure that the book was diverse and inclusive. I was super lucky to find and work with James Mendez Hodes who did a wonderful job digging through the book and flagging anything that needed to be fixed. After some light edits, we were ready to move onto art!

June 2022: After 2+ years of games and over 90 sessions, the original Ampliterra home game finished with an in-person game in Cleveland, OH. I’d say more about how it ended, but I don’t want to influence your ideas on how the questions in the book should be answered!

Players at the final Ampliterra home game.

July 2022 - September 2022: Mendez was kind enough to introduce me to our Art Director, Sadia Bies. Sadia dove right into the project and over the course of a few meetings we started to build out the visual identity of the project. While I absolutely love art, my artistic vocabulary isn’t extensive. Sadia was incredible in helping hone in on the art styles that made the most sense for the book.

After getting a general sense of what we were looking for, they started putting together lists of artists for us to go over together. We looked at artists for the cover, character illustrations, landscape illustrations, layouts, and more. At the same time, Sadia put together our style guide, which included visual references for each region in Ampliterra, color palettes, and instructions on style for artists.

Once we had artists chosen, Sadia reached out, we got contracts rolling, and we got to work on art. We prioritized a selection of art types (character, full page illustrations, cover, map, etc.) to have a broad selection available for marketing the book.

September 2022 - December 2022: During this time, our artists were hard at work bringing Ampliterra to life. We worked with Serena Malyon on the cover, Thomas Rey on the map, Franzilla on four character illustrations, Jabari Weathers on two full-page illustrations, Kayla Marquez on one full-page illustration, and Julie-Anne Muñoz (Jam) on some sample layouts. This was a very iterative process and we’re hoping to detail the development of some of the illustrations in a later post! By December, we had enough to get marketing rolling.

December 2022 - February 2023: This was the business-iest part of the process so far. In December, we began marketing to build an email list for our Kickstarter launch. We did this primarily through social ads, but also did organic social media work and a handful of interviews and in-person events.

At the same time, we designed the Kickstarter page, figured out shipping partners and rates, and worked through trademark and copyright for the book. We announced the launch date of the Kickstarter in early February and then the clock had really started!

Now: That brings us to right now! While the Kickstarter was unfortunately unsuccessful, we’re exploring what comes next for Ampliterra. We’re deeply committed to making sure that the hard work of our team makes its way to you soon!

It’s interesting looking back on this process and thinking about what I might have done parts of it differently. Since this is our first undertaking, I spent a lot of time searching for contributors and working through introductions. Not having to do that next time should help us approach things a bit more quickly!

Either way, I feel like I’ve learned so much about so many random things during this process (ask me about sweepstakes laws or international shipping sometime)! Hopefully, this post can help people understand a bit more about what it’s like to build a project like this - especially if you’re thinking about building your own project!

Austin