The State of Things, and Next Steps
almost 3 years ago – Sun, May 30, 2021 at 02:33:19 AM

Hello Team Shinobigami! Andy here. It's been a long time since our last update: A bit too long, and we apologize for the delay in keeping in touch here.

It's been... rough. For all of us. Over in the US where Matt is, it's been a year since Trump's "Bleach and Light will cure COVID" speech, followed by a year of riots, sedition, QAnon insanity and most recently racist violence against Asians. The USPS still can't ship books to some of our backers. Some stores that carried our works closed. Many of our contributors and partners in the US are just in a world of stress, getting along any way they can. At the very least: The vaccine rollout is happening quickly, and most of our friends and contributors in the US have either completed their vaccinations or are days away.

Over here in Japan, the new India strain of Covid just made landfall, and vaccinations aren't planned to reach the "everyone can get jabbed" stage for several more months (as of a few days ago, only the high risk/elderly have access in major cities). Thanks to IOC greed and general mismanagement we're on a tired, muddled march towards the Olympics "at any cost (to the people of Japan)" (some citizens here have been using the word "Kamikaze Olympics"; which is tasteless but not actually entirely inaccurate). Yesterday the total lockdown of Tokyo and surrounding prefectures was extended nearly another month, friends are closing up businesses and the games industry is somewhere between "treading water" and "spiraling". The Japan post is still unable to send large packages by tracking (EMS) and the alternatives are prohibitively expensive (Kuroneko 150% and thorough search/accounting of every item sent; UPS approx 200%; FedEx/DHL around 300-400%). Stress is high here due to all the uncertainty, plus the lockdown/working from home, which seems standard until you consider the average living space of a family in Japan vs Western countries.

Despite all this? We're still alive, and hanging in there. But it has been a rough ride, filled with stress and general exhaustion, depression. I'm relatively lucky here in Japan: Despite the COVID numbers rising it's been relatively low risk here. Matt's had it rougher in the US, his entire family caught COVID and were sick/quarantined for weeks, just one family member after another getting sick. Luckily that was a few months back and they're totally fine and healthy now, but basically lives in ground zero for the rise of Anti-Asian violence in the US, so there's some nwq stress there.

All this is to say, excuses aside (as all of us are in some kind of not ideal situation due to COVID), please be patient; please bear with us. We apologize for not updating regularly, and going forward we're going to get back to a quarterly cadence (of something/anything) until the books are out.

The Slowdown

Even into the first few months of COVID/2020 general US political insanity, we were being as productive as possible. But it was wearing us out, and our contributors as well. We had friends and partners planning to put together resources, scenarios, etc for the game... but ultimately they were burning out because of their own personal Covid-fueled situations. Instead of expanding the "Kotodama Industries influence machine" on the net and push full steam ahead, we decided to go more into a maintenance mode: Even if we ourselves could just dig deep, "suck it up" and muster ahead, we didn't want to do that to our friends and contributors. So we had to slow our pace down a bit. We had planned to have the second book done by now, but ultimately we needed more time due to (waves hands around) all of this. Again, please bear with us.

The New Schedule

The new plan is this:

The second Shinobigami book text (and the Limited Edition text) is deep in progress (despite all the stumbling and stress, Matt and I have been dribbling that ball forward) will be complete for review by the end of July.

After final editing review, we will go into layout on both the second Shinobigami book and the Limited Edition books. We expect this to take about 6-8 weeks, so September for this piece, the final release of the Second Book and Limited Edition.

After that we plan to go to print: The cycle of Starting the Print Job, Printing Complete, Books Arriving to Warehouse for Shipping, and Shipping Starting seems to have been 3 months from the last run. If this continues, things don't get worse (fingers crossed), the books should be arriving to people at the end of 2021/early 2022 internationally. This step is currently the most volatile, depending on the situation with our printer (the warehouse folks, aka IndiePressRevolution, are absolute monsters out there in Burning Man Land, and seem to be weathering this storm in high spirits and productivity; so I don't forsee a problem at all there). If things get weird, we'll have an update then.

After that, we will turn back to the other materials we're working on (the various stretch goals and scenarios). Some of it just has to be redone: For example, the setting of my "Ghost in the Shell-like" setting hack for Shinobigami had a few paragraphs where the setting was basically lynchpinned on "the massive financial success of the 2020 Olympics", which was written tongue-in-cheek long before COVID was a rumor: At this point it's just so off-balance with how reality played out it's almost profane, and needs a rewrite.

And in between: More regular updates, progress reports, etc. Timing them every 3 months or upon completion of major milestones.

The New World

Finally: Yeah, the big elephant in the room for everyone in every country is COVID. Gaming has moved largely online in the last year (even my own local Yokohama game group are now using ZOOM and various apps like MIRO and RollForYour.Party to facilitate play. Things might somewhat go back to normal once everyone is vaccinated (once we see how it holds up against all these new strains) but we forsee a large amount of gaming continuing to be online. To that end we're putting together packages of resources for folks to play online (the Velocity System chart plus character koma), and will put together a page of resources later for recommended systems to use to play Shinobigami online (in short, we found the most success with Your Video App of Choice in conjunction with RollForYour.Party ; maybe even a free Miro.com board for tracking PCs/NPCs/events/etc).

Financial Situations/Refunds

Just a reminder (as we regularly do) that many people's personal/financial situation changed after supporting this project. It will be seen through, despite the delays and world situation, just longer than hoped. The money received for the second supplement/limited edition books is still there, and even if the shipping situation gets worse we will not have a problem contributing our own personal funds to make up the balance and see it through, so there are no risks there. 

However, for folks who are in a bind, please do contact us and we will provide a full refund for whatever we have not provided them. Reach out through the www.kotohi.com website or contact the Project Owner directly in Kickstarter.

Finally, Be Safe, Be Well, and Take Care

I talked about our own situation above just to remind folks we're as affected by all this as others are. But we genuinely care about the fans of these games as well. We want you to be healthy. We want you to be safe. We want you to do what you can to healthily deal with the stress and confusion of everything going on. Our primary goal with these projects was never Money or Empire-Building, our primary goal has always been to create fans of original Japanese RPGs. Healthy fans that will be here and well when this is all in the rear view mirror. 

Thank you. Be well.

-Andy and Matt

Second Book Progress, the Nightmare of post-Covid Shipping, and some Great News!
over 3 years ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 03:48:21 AM

Hey Team Shinobigami! 

It's been a while since our last update, and I wanted to reach out because we've been very "Periscope Down" for the last few months as we continued to work on the Shinobigami Supplement Book as well as fulfilling shipping for the first book, released over half a year ago.

Here's what's going on:

 Supplement Book and Limited Edition Book - 

As you remember, we're basically working on the development and layout of both the supplement book and the limited edition book at the same time: The reason being that the Limited Edition book will be containing the content of both books together. 

Our target for this, which we set when we finished and started shipping the first book, was "book will be out by the end of the year".

Unfortunately, that may slip a little: Right after the release of the first book COVID-19 really blew up globally. Aside from the basic general "survive mode" creative stress that all of us were suffering from, the real impact to our production has been in the total unexpected derailment in business and shipping that has been happening country to country (see Shipping update below). To make a long story short, we're think we can finalize the electronic versions/PDFs of both the second book and limited edition book by around the end of the year or the first month of the next year. What would normally happen then is to get the book to the printer, and ship them shortly thereafter, but that element is going to absolutely depend on the global shipping situation. We plan to get the books printed and shipped approximately 4-6 weeks after the finalized PDF drops (to give us time to correct any final mistakes), but that's where a lot of unknown factors come up.

For example: Currently, due to COVID, it is impossible to ship ANYTHING from Japan to the USA using Japan's postal service, including express mail: The USA is on a blocked list. Only untracked sea mail (3-4 months) is available as an option to ship anything larger than a letter/envelope. It's expected that this situation may get better soon (untracked air mail may be coming back soon). But this may delay shipping/confirmation of book prototypes. Further, the postal situation inside the US has been extremely chaotic (see below), which is affecting not only getting the book from the printer to your hands, but affects our printer in getting the materials they need to print the books.

Ultimately, when we're ready to print, we're going to be able to update everyone (hopefully with better news if the US gets its COVID situation under control) with a more accurate estimate of delivery impact. Before COVID, it was about 2 months between sending the finalized proof to the printer, and getting the first round of books in people's hands. For the first Shinobigami book which started shipping right as COVID broke, that gap was anywhere from 2 months to 10 months depending on where you lived (and some still haven't received their books!). Things are still "bad", but at least they're a little more "predictable", so we're hoping that this gap will close a bit more when we're ready to ship.

In particular, we're really feeling for the folks who backed the Limited Edition copy of Shinobigami. Unlike most RPG projects where the limited edition of a game is a nicer/cooler cover, the Shinobigami limited edition ultimately has the content of both books in one cover, so it will be printing and going out at the same time as the commercial edition supplement (second) book, which meant a longer delay than the people who just ordered the core book. We believe that the quality of the book will make it worth the wait... plus we have some new content that we'll be delivering as a bonus next year to make up for it! (see News, below)

Shipping Nightmares, Core Book Delivery

If you ordered the standard/commercial edition of Shinobigami (not Limited) and it has not arrived yet, please reach out and contact me: ziggurat ATMARK gmail DOT com (please put "Shinobigami" somewhere in the subject line). You can also reach out through the Kickstarter message service too. Please do NOT just leave a comment to this post or the project comments saying you didn't receive the book, instead reach out directly. Please also do this even if you reached out to us before but you still have not received the book. We've been looking into over 120 cases of shipping/tracking issues since we shipped (most resolved), so we want to make sure we didn't miss anyone.

As mentioned above, the Shinobigami core book got into the shipping system just as COVID-19 was breaking. The level of derailment in the shipment/delivery of the book was absolutely breathtaking to watch. I saw reports of people in Belgium receiving their book one week after it was shipped; but someone who lived approximately 4 hours away from the shipping warehouse in the US didn't see their copy delivered until almost two months later. Two people in the same city who were practically neighbors, whose books shipped the same day, received them weeks apart; that sort of thing.

It's been really chaotic: The regions that were affected the most were the US and France. We spent a lot of hours helping folks track (and in some cases reship) their core books. In many instances, by the time we opened an investigation into tracking the package with the shipping service, the package would show up a few days later. Even now, 7 months later, I received a few updates from people saying their book arrived (and in great condition even), just unbelievably late.

It's been a nightmare, and even now we have issues with international mail: Shipping from Japan to other countries deep in a COVID mire (including the USA, which is pretty shocking) has been completely blocked and the alternatives (DHL/UPS) have rates that are 300-600% higher. The US mail has been even slower and more unpredictable (rumors say it's due in part to removal of mail sorters from huge USPS mail hubs), with even another shipping surcharge increase... we're hoping that when the PDF is ready to go to print that, even if these issues still persist to some degree, that they'll be at least a little more predictable. At the very least, we're hoping that the path from printer to warehouse will be the least impacted. When we're ready to go to print, we'll be delivering a clearer picture of expected delivery, hotspots, unresolved factors etc.

Finally, Some Great News!

A lot of things have happened in the last 6 months behind the scenes; one of the most interesting developments has been the friendship/partnership between us and Ben G from the new Silver Vine Publishing imprint: www.silvervinepublishing.com . Ben's lined up a lot of exciting Japanese independent Role-Playing Games for official translation and publishing (definitely check them out, some great stuff announced there and even more awesome stuff on the radar). Ben is also one hell of a translator, and is in that small weird circle of people like Kotodama and Star Line Publishing (Ewen C/Golden Sky Stories) who love tabletop RPGs and want to bring them into English Just Because.

What has developed from meeting Ben is this: Shinobigami has several supplements in Japan, supplements that are really cool in their own right, but not really essential to the core Shinobigami experience. There was one in particular, where both Matt and I were saying, "Maybe one day, once we've fulfilled the various goals of this project, we can work on translating and releasing this one". Kind of a "long term dream goal", where the real limit to us was time.

To cut to the chase, while we finish the second book and the extra scenarios and stretch goal materials, we are also going to publish the Shinobigami sengoku-era supplement: Shinobigami War: The Castle of No Return.

Of all the supplemental material, this one borders on being the most fringe, yet the most interesting to us personally: It's basically another of the "Replay in front, rules in back" format Shinobigami books; but the clan structure is totally different from the core book, the abilities are different, and there rules for developing your own unique Ohgi, as well as a special kind of "Ceremonial Ninpo", which have extremely powerful effects but have several steps and actions to activate (usually over a number of scenes). In any case, if you wanted to take a diversion from the contemporary setting of ninjas and skyscrapers and get back to some 1500s era drama, you will get a kick out of this. We'll be delivering it in electronic format (it will be for sale), and giving it free to all backers at the "+ All Expansion Material" and higher levels.

Thanks again for your patience as we push to the goal finish line in the middle of this global crap-show of a pandemic: We're going to go "Periscope Down" again for another 6-8 weeks as we rush to finish up the second book and limited edition book (while working out the remaining core book shipping issues) unless something major comes up, but once we are ready to go we'll go back to more regular updates and shipping statuses, as well as planning for what comes next in the lineup of expansion materials and other goodies!

Shinobigami core rulebook delivery to begin shortly!
about 4 years ago – Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 01:14:10 AM

Hey team Shinobigami! 

It's been a long, exhausting wait. But the first of the three physical books has been printed, and delivery to the warehouse is set for the next 48 hours or so. From there, they will begin sending the books to all the backers around the world. Hopefully everyone should get theirs within the next 2-3 weeks.

Note, there are still a small number of folks who haven't logged into Backerkit or confirmed their shipping address in Backerkit yet; please follow up on those Backerkit emails so we can get your book to you when we can.

I had a set of the books shipped here to Japan, they arrived a few minutes ago:

One down. Now that our most major hurdle is cleared, we'll get into the completion and delivery of the Shinobigami extras, and putting together the contents for the supplement book and limited edition books (still aiming for 2020 printing!). Folks who ordered the limited edition book only will have to wait a few more months (it will be printed and sent at the same time as the supplement book), but we promise the quality will be worth the wait.

Thanks again everyone!

Printing/Shipping Status, Sudden Ninja Book Upgrade, and PDF Changes!
about 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 11:25:21 PM

Hi Team Shinobigami!

I wanted to drop some quick updates before the end of January, as a lot is in motion.

Shinobigami Printing Happening Now: Shipping in March!

Unfortunately, we hit a snag in December: After getting all the paperwork together for the print run, we got caught in the printing factory's end-of-the-year 3-week (!) shutdown. Everyone from the factory floor to the admin/billing were out, though the CEO of the print shop helped us with a few questions at that time.

As soon as they opened back up in January, we ramped up with them. Long story short: The print files are with the printers, and they're being readied for the final print run right now. We should be receiving the final proofs in just a few days. Once we confirm that the cover/art/etc all looks right, they press the "NO TURNING BACK NOW" button, sending thousands of copies to print sometime next week.

Good news is that our most recent estimate for shipping is still on target despite the December shutdown: If everything goes as expected, the print run will be done around the second week of March; the books will be at our distributor about a week or so later, and they should begin shipping shortly thereafter. While it might be into April before many folks receive their copies (we're expecting global delivery to be around end of March to mid-April), the first should be arriving to folks' homes in March.

Suddenly: A Book Upgrade Appears!

So the printer we are using now is the trusted printer that produced Ryuutama for us (and are doing the second print run of Ryuutama now, at the same time as Shinobigami). Our previous projects with them have all been hardcover. The Shinobigami rulebook was meant to be softcover. 

Meant to be.

In December, we had some communications issues over the cover design: The templates we received were not quite lining up with our expectations of the cover. We found out it was a simple mistake on the printer's end: They wrote up the project as a hardcover game project (like our previous ones with them were, despite us telling them earlier it was softcover), and that's why the cover design template didn't match our expectations for a softcover book. 

Thing is, after that shock, and looking at the overall cost for hardcover, it wasn't all that bad. The price was a bit higher for us than softcover of course, but not outside of the limits of what we expected the cost to be per book (with budget, basically). After a bit of discussion, we made a move to upgrade the print run to hardcover. In short, everyone who backed Shinobigami, or anyone who buys a book from the first print run, will be receiving a hardcover upgrade to the Shinobigami book at no extra cost. 

This means that the first print run of the supplement book will also be hardcover.

Once this first print run sells out (not soon, but eventually, likely in a year or two), we will likely be reverting to softcover for all future printings of the book to keep costs reasonable. In short, this upgrade is something special we're doing for the folks who supported us all these years. We hope you'll find it worthwhile.

PDF Changes

Now that the print run is underway, and everyone has received their copy of the final Shinobigami rule book PDF through www.drivethrurpg.com, we are turning our attention to the supplement as well as fixing up the website and tightening up the final PDF we sent out.

In short, there were a few graphics in the PDF that should have been compressed a little better. Between that, a better TOC, and adding some PDF bookmarks, the PDF size should go down from about 60MB currently to 15MB or so. We're also providing the cover art (front and back) as a separate file for folks who want to print/bind their own copies. These changes should be finished within two weeks from now. When it is updated, you'll receive a notice through drivethrurpg.com announcing the PDF update status. Keep an eye out for that.

Scenarios and Hubris!

Finally, something embarrassing: In the last update, we planned to put together a few new scenarios and release them at the end of the year to celebrate the PDF release.

I came up with two really solid ones, fully written up and ready. One was really clever in my opinion, basically an introductory scenario where there was very very very light PVP, but more of a cooperative focus. Then, I playtested it here in Yokohama at the end of the year, with 3 players: 2 who had played Shinobigami before, 1 who was trying tabletop RPGs for the first time ever (she did awesome, and is now locked into the hobby!). Unfortunately, it failed in a spectacularly interesting and uniquely "Shinobigami-esque" way.

In short, since there was a new player (not only to Shinobigami... but to RPGs!) I wanted to make sure it wasn't a total PVP bloodbath from the start. The other players were friends I trusted, but still I made the Secrets all VERY light: All of them mostly "be friends with each other" kinds of Secrets instead of "Stab this person" secrets. At the same time, there was a - in my opinion at the time - pretty powerful, perhaps over-powerful, NPC antagonist. Kind of a cross between a 50 year old Japanese ikebana-artist obasan, Gemma from Ninja Scroll, and The Terminator. I gave her a LOT of health boxes.

Result: Since the PCs Secrets kept them relatively friendly despite trying to grab the Prize from each other, when the Climax Phase/Final Battle began, everyone pretty much teamed up 100% to curb stomp my Ikebana Terminator antagonist. She was down in two rounds, even after I "debug mode" cheated and added even MORE health boxes to her sheet (GM cheat, which I normally hate to do, but chock it up to playtest). In short, I realized that I needed to make a few more PVP-ish Secrets, as well as give the Antagonist some opportunities (through GM Scenes each Round/Cycle), to target and harass the PCs, like through Mob Combat scenes and the like. Hindsight 20/20 and all that. We had fun, Roles were Played, and there were memorable moments... but I felt dumb for Snoke'ing the antagonist, alas.

Ultimately I redesigned both of the scenarios I had, making sure to test them again to ensure they wouldn't crack at the table. Just writing the last bits up now, they should be ready by Valentine's Day.

Free New Scenario!

But not all is lost! Around the same time we were designing/redesigning the scenario above, Richard Allred, a Shinobigami fan on our Discord put together his own scenario, and it's really good! I'll be posting it on the official website shortly. It's called "A Lamb to the Slaughter", a standard versus scenario for 5 players, and for now you can download it directly from this Google Drive link.

Next update: We'll be providing the rest of the scenarios we've been working on, giving a status update on printing process/ship dates (if anything changes), and will start to put together samples of the supplement rules and limited edition design.

Shinobigami final PDF delivery, 2019 backer presents, itch.io, and Printing Status!
over 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 09:21:32 PM

Hi team Shinobigami: As always, we appreciate your patience as we clear the hurdles to the final (first) goal: The delivery of the core Shinobigami rulebook. It's been a while since there's been a solid update, but things have settled a little and we wanted to provide a quick status and next steps.

Shinobigami Final PDF has delivered

Again, that is: You all received it in a private update a little while ago, but I went ahead and just sent everyone a download code to your email registered with the Shinobigami Backerkit fulfillment handling, to a download link of Shinobigami at DriveThruRPG. It *just* went out a few minutes ago, so if you didn't receive the email within one hour of this note, please:

1) Confirm the email you have registered with Kickstarter/Backerkit

2) Check your spam folder/filter (DriveThruRPG download codes often get flagged as Spam)

3) If you still don't see it, please reach out to me through Kickstarter messenger with your email address, and I'll verify and resend.

ITCH.IO Webstore Live 

We are currently taking down our old BigCartel webstore, and moving all of our products to itch.io for direct digital fulfillment (as well as linking to DriveThruRPG and IndiePressRevolution). To that end, if you are an avid itch.io user and you want a download code sent through itch, please reach out through Kickstarter messenger with your email address and I'll send you a copy there.

You can follow us on itch.io here: https://kotodama.itch.io/

Buying the Shinobigami PDF

In case you have friends that are interested, they can purchase it directly through our Kotodama Heavy Industries store on itch.io: https://kotodama.itch.io/shinobigami

Or at DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/297976/Shinobigami--Modern-Ninja-Battle-RPG

Or at IndiePressRevolution (coming soon; we will eventually have a PDF-and-physical-book set available there once the printed book is ready).

Printing Blues...

Good news is Shinobigami is at the printers. The bad news is that I underestimated the time on both sides of the globe that the holiday shutdowns (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, etc) would take. I don't have a current completion estimate, but I'm going to get one this week and report back in another update once I have one. I'm expecting a few weeks from now, plus an extra week or so for the books to ship from the printer and arrive at our partner warehouse; from there they should all be going out to everyone around the globe at the same time, within about a few-day window (our partner warehouse at IndiePressRevolution was able to get out something like 1500+ copies of Ryuutama to all the backers in just about a single weekend, which is mind-blowing). 

With that in mind, it looks like, depending on the Christmas shutdown/startup process, the books will be finished and shipping in January. Again, though, I'm going to:

1) See if I can get a cleaner estimate that isn't my guess (even if it takes longer than I assumed above, I at least want to try to get some accuracy here) and report it back this week...

2) ...and once I have confirmation that the printing is wrapping up, I'll be able to give more solid updates on things like book transit times to warehouse, shipping run fulfillment, and so on. 

Rest assured, though: The book will not be going for sale in stores or conventions before you get your hands on your own long-awaited copies.

More Backer/Preorder Holiday Presents 

So, we're currently processing the order with the printer, which means we're taking that idle time to dig into our fulfillments/extras for Shinobigami (and Ryuutama and Tenra Bansho as well). To that end, we're hoping that we can take a bit of the sting off of missing O-Shogatsu/Christmas by providing some extras for the holiday season (likely after Christmas but before the new years):

* Three new, complete Shinobigami scenarios for you to try with your friends and family.

* A sample of the contents of the Shinobigami expansion book (a bit of a teaser of the rules and contents that it contains)

These above goods will be going to all Kickstarter backers and pre-orderers for free, regardless of backer/purchase level. It's just a "Thank You" for sticking with us through the pain, as we close in on the first of the big three goals (Core book printing; expansion book printing; and limited edition book printing).

* Finally: A Shinobigami "Director's Cut/Background Guide". We added advice to the English version of Shinobigami, but there's more we want to do to make the game easy to understand and play: Mostly things like essays and stories about how the various mechanics and structures of Shinobigami work together; and how to manipulate them to produce different gameplay effects (as a GM/facilitator mostly, but as a player as well). The contents of this guide will be included in the Limited Edition version of the Shinobigami book (it will serve as an "intermission" between the first book and the second book contents of the limited edition single-book). However, we also wanted to make it available for others as well. It's not complete yet, because we are in a cycle of looking for Shinobigami play questions/concerns/problems, answering them, and then turning those answers into essays and breakdowns (we've already written a handful of essay-length answers on the KotoHI forums, Reddit, Discord, etc; we're just going to gather them in one place) to make the game even that much more accessible. 

Everyone who backed at any of the "PDF Expansion Material" levels or Limited Edition levels will have access to this "Director's Cut" book once it's ready; and others will be able to purchase it if they want. The interesting thing about this is that it will be available first only on itchi.io: Long story short, itch.io allows and plans for "Early Access/In Process" games and game material. So we can start with a handful of text essays in a simple white-page/no-layout document, and build it out from there over a few months until it is complete; while still giving people access to it to see/buy. We're going to see how this experiment works, but it will be complete/finalized (and then added to our DriveThruRPG library once complete) before the Expansion Book is complete.

Next Update

I'll have another update this week after we have a chance to consult our printer and shipper, with a better estimate of what to expect; and then an update before the end of the year with the above holiday extras.

Thanks again, everyone. It's been a much bloodier, brutal road than we imagined when we started few years ago, but we're nearing the end, and the printer ink is in the air: In 2020 we will see the Tokyo Olympics, another superhero movie or two, and the fulfillment of ALL of the rest of the Shinobigami core game material!