Welcome to the Island, the First Adventure Anthology for Over the Edge 3rd Edition, Is Available Now
about 4 years ago
– Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:44:40 PM
Welcome to the Island, the first adventure anthology for the third edition of Over the Edge, is available now. It features four original storylines by award-winning authors Jonathan Tweet, Justin Alexander, Nick Bate, Jonathan Killstring, and Jeremy Tuohy, and serves as a great resource for new GMs and seasoned Over the Edge players alike.
Welcome to the Island includes four all-new scenarios designed to help you launch brand-new story arcs, add intriguing complications to your existing campaign, or explode across your gaming table as exciting one-shots. Your itinerary includes:
- "Battle of the Bands," where you’ll head out on the ultimate Al Amarjan road trip. There’s only way to beat this Mover conspiracy. It’s time to get the band back together!
- "A Conclave of Chikutorpls," or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence. Place your bets now.
- "Seversen’s Mysterious Estate," where you’ll find the most important party on the entire Island. You got an invitation. Unfortunately, so did Dr. Morpheus, an astral vampire, a team of totem champions, and a Presidentials wetworks team.
- "Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes," during which citizens all across the Edge receive a parcel containing a lifelike rubber mask of one of the D’Aubainnes. Once you put it on, you’ll find you can’t take it off. That’s when the killings start.
We wanted to make an adventure anthology where every scenario works for every play group, and we think we’ve accomplished it. Every scenario can be used to either launch a campaign or slot seamlessly into any existing Over the Edge campaign. Each adventure is almost infinitely reusable, providing a springboard for hundreds of future campaigns.
If you’re struggling to figure out what to do next with Over the Edge, grab Welcome to the Island. By the time you play through all five of its awesome scenarios, you’ll have figured out how best to run the game — and had a great time along the way.
Welcome to the Island was produced with a grant from the Al Amarja Tourism Taskforce. Visit the Island today! Once you’ve come, you’ll never leave.
New Shipping Options
Since we fulfilled the Kickstarter last May, we have been researching, negotiating, and implementing better international rates with a variety of new shipping companies. These new options mean we’ll be able to give you faster, cheaper delivery to nearly anywhere in the world. Your book will be lovingly packed and shipped from our Proctor, MN warehouse using the best carrier for your address.
If you prefer immediate digital delivery (with no shipping charges), Welcome to the Island is available in PDF too.
Thank You
Thank you for your support of the Over the Edge Kickstarter. We hope you've been enjoying your time on Al Amarja, and wish you a pleasant rest of your stay.
Love,
Atlas Games
P.S. This update is a promotion for a game we think you’ll be interested in. If you’re not, and you’d rather not get these kinds of updates in the future, here’s how to unsubscribe from further updates. The Over the Edge campaign is totally fulfilled, so you won’t miss out on crowdfunding updates going forward.
The Update About the International Customs Debacle
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 10:53:46 PM
Hi, this is John Nephew, President and co-owner of Atlas Games. This morning at 5:30 AM I got up and drove straight to our office to work more on this international shipping and customs situation. Here’s the latest.
This is a long post which you can ignore unless you are a non-US backer receiving physical books. For affected backers, I wanted to follow up yesterday’s update with much more detail about what’s happening and what we are doing about it.
While we are looking to get any and all assistance from Floship to resolve this, please know that Atlas Games is committed to fixing it one way or another. Exactly how we will take care of it (through corrections-in-transit, refunds, replacement shipments) is unclear at this moment, and it may take some time, but we will do it.
Fulfillment Company Response
Floship, our Hong Kong-based fulfillment company, has responded overnight with this information.
1) We have already reached out and are continuing to reach out to our couriers to explain to them the situation and provided them with the correct customs values with the affected orders. With our experience, there is not much they can do about this but potentially they can pull strings on their end to be able to change the shipping labels and documents.
2) You should be able to contact your backers and before they pay for the customs let them know that they should be able to talk to customs directly and have them explain that the declared amount is incorrect.
3) When your orders are sent back to us we can quickly collect them all for you and send back with your discretion.
We are following up to get more information and develop a plan of action.
For now, as Floship suggests, we encourage folks to talk to customs and tell them about this mistake. In at least one case we have heard of someone receiving their dice without being charged VAT+fees, in spite of the erroneous customs form. In the best scenarios a combination of communication from the courier and from the recipient (possibly combined with looking in a box to see, “Oh, clearly this customs declaration is wrong”) will let goods already nearly to your doorstep get the rest of the way there without erroneous fees.
Who Is Affected?
This problem affects a subset of the large batch of approximately 500 shipments sent from Hong Kong, consisting of dice sets and books, whether sent together or in two separate parcels.
Backers in this batch fall into these four categories:
1. People who get everything easily and with no customs/VAT charges.
2. People who got VAT charges & fees, but it was based on what was actually in the box at MSRP. (This is to be expected and nothing is wrong with these orders.)
3. People who got two boxes (one with book and one with dice) with each package being declared as the full pledge amount. (This means that the package with the dice is being declared at a massively inflated value, but the package with the book is likely only being declared with a value $10 higher than its actual value.)
4. People who got one box (with both book and dice) who got VAT charges based on the entire pledge amount being applied as the declared value of each individual item in the box (e.g., a $135 backer who received book + dice would have a declared value of $135 for the book and $135 for the dice, for a total declared value of $270).
We are working order by order to identify which of these 500 shipments fall into which category.
What Should You Do?
Category 1: The “no problems!” first category should include anyone in the UK or Ireland who received only books, which are exempt from VAT in those nations. It may also include shipments to other countries if the declared value is under the threshold for VAT collection, but I’m not certain what those are in all the different countries around the world. You should enjoy your books and start exploring Al Amarja.
Category 2: We recognize that some folks in category two may be unhappy about VAT and fees charged by their national customs, but these fees are basically what we expected when we wrote “Prices do not include any duties or tariffs that may be applied to your rewards and collected before delivery” on the project page. If you were charged in error (for example, if customs charged you your country’s general VAT rate rather than a lower rate that should apply to books), we hope you can appeal and fix it but it’s out of our power. Thank you for your consent. You should also enjoy your books and, as you stew in irritation toward the implacable forces of bureaucracy, be thankful at least that you’re not still stuck at the Terminal in C&I yourself. We hope.
Category 3: What this means varies by country and depends on VAT thresholds and whether books are subject to VAT at all.
For example, if you are in the UK, you should receive your books OK and without a fee+VAT, even if the value is misstated. Your dice are likely to show up with a wildly inaccurate value and customs will want you to pay a fee greater than their cost. Unless you can persuade them of the mistake, it is best to refuse delivery -- even if the dice are thrown away by the courier or customs, the combined charges of VAT+fee that they will want you to pay is greater than the cost of us sending you a brand new set of dice from Hong Kong. (If the correct value were on the customs form, it would be under the VAT threshold and so no fee/VAT should be charged.)
If you are in a country with VAT on books and your books and dice are in separate packages, then the book package may not be far off from what it should be (e.g., if you have 6% VAT on books and the book should be $40 but is listed as $50, then you are only being overcharged 60 cents in erroneous VAT, which we can easily refund to your credit card). If you can’t tell what are the contents of a package, please hold off on paying fees and accepting.
Category 4: These are the big mess, and will likely need case-by-case resolution. Again if you receive any portion of your order without getting slapped with VAT and fees, that’s really great. For the rest of this, we’re going to be working to take care of things one way or another.
If you are in Category 3 or 4, we encourage you to reach out with any information or notices that you’ve received (including if you have received any items, paid any fees/taxes, and copies of any documents/bills/receipts associated). Thank you to everyone who has done this already.
What is Atlas Games Doing?
Today I am sitting down with that list of 500 shipments to identify which fall into Category 3 or 4, so that we can focus on fixing those. We need to track who has received their games and dice, what erroneous fees have been paid, what shipments have been refused, and what we’ve done to repair each customer’s situation. This is going to take some time and attention.
For folks in Category 3, our current plan is to tell you which tracking number corresponds to books and which to dice, so you can choose to accept the book package and refuse the dice.
Jenae Pedersen, our Administrative Coordinator, will coordinate. This blew up right after she left for a couple of days’ midweek vacation, so I’m working on it until she’s back in the office on Friday.
How Did This Happen?
Backerkit exported a list of our backers for fulfillment by Floship (they have a pre-set export with Floship’s specifications), with each product on separate line. It filled in a "value" field that included whatever was your total pledge.
We set up the three SKUs (two book variants, one set of dice) at Floship and entered customs values for the individual items, expecting that those values would be put on the customs forms attached to each package reflecting the item inside it. (In most cases one item per package; in some cases, dice and books both).
We uploaded the spreadsheet of backers for Floship to fulfill, specifying which items were going to which address.
Instead of using the itemized values for each package based on the SKUs as we’d entered in their system, Floship used the total pledge amount (as automatically populated in Backerkit’s export) as the per-item value for each item in a package. That means, for example, that someone might get a package of $10 custom dice with a declaration saying it was worth $165. VAT and fees, when charged, are then greater than the cost of the dice.
We Hope For Your Consent
While this has been a stressful week for us at Atlas Games, we’re buoyed by the continuing support and patience of you, our fans, even in the face of these mishaps. We’re very sorry for all the inconvenience, and we’re going to keep at it to make things right.
-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games
The Update About Everybody Getting Their Books
almost 5 years ago
– Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 08:51:53 PM
Success!
The tracking app for our fulfillment company has informed us that every single international order has been fulfilled except for less than half a dozen orders for which there are problems with the delivery address. (Please check your inboxes, as we've already reached out to you to clarify your address if this affects you!)
All backers should now have tracking information for their packages, if they don't already have their books in hand.
Some backers will, as previously noted, have received MULTIPLE tracking numbers: This is because, in some cases, we have shipped dice, maps, and/or books separately in order to minimize or eliminate VAT. (This was described in previous updates, but the short version for most countries is: Books don't get hit by VAT. We add a separate poster or dice to the package and it's no longer a "book" and you get hit with VAT for the value of the whole package. We ship the dice and posters separately and, IN MOST CASES, the total for that second package falls below the VAT threshold and you don't have to pay VAT on it. Since this involves governments and taxes, the specifics get much, much more complicated than that.)
I would like to take a moment to personally thank everybody for making this Kickstarter such an awesome success. I know many of you have already started playing and even more of you are eagerly planning your first story arcs. Whether you're a GM or a player, we'd love to hear those stories as they unfold! Please share them here in the campaign comments or with us on Twitter @atlasgames.
(We can assure you this is not a Mover conspiracy to gather information on dimensional variance between local multiverse instantiations of Al Amarja. What would we even do with that information? It's not as if we could build a dimensional-amalgamation device in order to selectively edit reality by forcing spatially local quantum-collapse.)
