HAPPY DAY! 
 
 *****We've reached our initial goal of $25,000 which means everyone who pledges at the $35 level or higher receives DOUBLE the number of listed limited edition signed and numbered hardcover copies of the Quantum Roleplaying Game! So right now if you pledge $42 for U.S. addresses or $47 for International addresses (which now includes shipping) you will receive TWO COPIES of the game! What a deal!***** 
 
 HAPPY DAY AGAIN! 
 
 *****We've reached our final goal of $36,000 which means (1) one 24" x 36" full color folded poster world map of Quantum will be shipped with every single pledge order $35 and above. While there will be a map of the world inside the Quantum RPG hardcover, it will be a black & white map and obviously won't be bigger than a single page. This 24" x 36" poster world map will not only give you the world in amazing full color, but it will be large enough to include a wide variety of extra map tags to add both a little mystery to the world and ensuring that all locations generated during design show up on the poster map.***** 
 
 ABOUT THIS PROJECT 
 
 The Quantum Roleplaying Game™ is Infinite X Studio™'s first game. The game is a reflection of more than 30 years of RPG gaming and nearly 10 years of writing and game design on the part of Infinite X Studio's founder and President, Joshua J. Frost. Josh's passion for gaming and RPGs in particular is hard to explain in words (and much easier to explain by watching his hyper exuberance during a game session) but know that he wants Infinite X Studio to produce only the highest quality, best-designed, and most enjoyable RPGs possible. It is our dream that we can reach out to both seasoned and new gamers with this project and help us raise enough money to bring the Quantum Roleplaying Game to hundreds of game tables around the globe. 
 
 Our Kickstarter goal is only set at $13,000 and this covers the barest minimum of costs to write, design, layout, produce art, edit, develop, print, and ship the game. The total funding goal is comprised of 10% Kickstarter fees and Amazon fees, 50% artist, layout, design, editing, and development costs, 10% promotional costs, and 30% printing costs. Should we raise money beyond the $13,000 target, several things will happen: 
 
 At $15,000, we give most of the freelancers a nice raise (Infinite X Studio President Joshua Frost doesn't get paid at all unless the game is a success). *****GOAL ACHIEVED!***** 
 
 At $25,000, we double the number of limited, signed and numbered hardcover copies of the Quantum Roleplaying Game that are sent out to the backers at the $35 Journeyman level or higher. So if you back the QRPG project at $35 and the project raises $25,000 or more, you receive two copies instead of one. This will not increase any associated shipping costs, even for non-U.S.A. addresses. Also at $25,000, we're able to print a small quantity of regular edition hardcover books that we plan to sell into hobby distribution so the game can be available at hobby stores in the United States and beyond. *****GOAL ACHIEVED!***** 
 
 At $36,000, we will ship (1) one 24" x 36" full color folded poster world map of Quantum with every single pledge $35 and above. While there will be a map of the world inside the Quantum RPG hardcover, it will be a black & white map and obviously won't be bigger than a single page. This 24" x 36" poster world map will not only give you the world in amazing full color, but it will be large enough to include a wide variety of extra map tags to add both a little mystery to the world and ensuring that all locations generated during design show up on the poster map. 
 
 ABOUT THE GAME 
 
 An innovative, highly-technological society in Earth's distant future built a robotic Dyson Shell world where science was king, where reason was law, and where all the complexities of day-to-day living were made easy by a level of gadgets that would make modern humanity believe they were witnessing the true works of gods. Their cutting-edge world expanded rapidly and disconnected from the rest of humanity, rocketed out to the edge of the universe, and hurtled into the very fabric of space-time in order to discover new sources of untapped power to expand their knowledge of the universe itself. 
 
 Then it happened: they found an energy source so powerful they were convinced it had to be the very glue that held the universe together. They tapped it deep, plunging into the distant beating heart of this new spark, causing their robotic world to nearly burst with inscrutable power. Feats of unimaginable prowess were discovered, manifesting objects and energy with only one's thoughts became a reality—even the control over life and death became as trivial as breathing. 
 
 What they didn't know—couldn't know—was that their newly discovered source came with a dreadful price. At its heart was darkness, vast unfathomable evil from beyond the edge of reason and space-time—shadowy, slithering horrors of such sinister potency that they infested the entire society from the inside out and not only tore it to pieces, but nearly sundered the world, sending every living thing spinning into a shattered, morose millennium of bedlam and anarchy. 
 
 It's been 1,000 years since the fall of the great society known as Quantum and the civilized species of the world are finally rediscovering a semblance of what they lost. Quantum is a Dyson shell, an inside-out planet roughly the size of Mars but with a sun-like ball of fiery plasma at the center, providing both heat and light to the flora and fauna around it. Though civilization is clambering from the ruins, it still has a long way to go before achieving the greatness of the Time Before. Today's Quantum civilization is equivalent to medieval Earth with castles, walled towns, large farming communities, kings, queens, serfdom, chivalry, open warfare, political intrigue, and vast swaths of uncontrolled territory. Ancient experiments in reanimating extinct creatures from their DNA, animal and human cloning, whole-cloth invention of beasts both great and terrible, and self-replicating artificial intelligences have left the wild places of Quantum filled with terrifying monstrosities from myth, legend, and earth's extensive fossil record as well as new races of living machines and swarms of metallic insects. 
 
 Quantum is broken into twelve nations, some with loose associations, some with iron clad pacts, and some engaged in open war. At the heart of these nations is an organization called The Progenancy. They control all that remains of Quantum's lost technological knowledge, wielding their control of it in order to maintain as much of a peace as possible. The Progenancy is not a good nor charitable organization, though. They exact a terrible price from those who refuse to acknowledge their mastery of the world, going so far as to cut off one nation from every power source Quantum possesses, plunging those people into an eternal darkness from which no one has returned. Opposing the Progenancy is a loose affiliation of shamanistic tribal societies and underground resistance movements from the remaining eleven nations. This affiliation does all that it can to sabotage the Progenancy's control of technology, but it is a war they are losing very badly. 
 
 In the Quantum Roleplaying Game, you can choose to play one of four races: 
 
 Humans 
 
 Humanity is more than half the population of the civilized races of Quantum and controls nearly all of the nations. Most of the Progenancy is human and they are often associated with power and greed in the eyes of the other races. Humanity spreads quickly, decisively, and has an uncanny knack for resiliency in the face of adversity. 
 
 Azi 
 
 The azi are a race of snake people, human in appearance from the waist up, but possessing all of the qualities of a snake from the waist down. Azi are humanoid reptiles—they have no hair, hatch their young from eggs, and their genders are quite difficult to determine by non-azi. Azi are comprised of dozens of sub-species that vary by color, shape, and size and their skin is scaled, soft, and very often comprised of mesmerizing color patterns. 
 
 Mutants 
 
 Mutants are the offspring of humans who ventured too closely to the source of Quantum's power (called Prime). As such, they are often called Primespawn. Mutants come in a variety of shapes and sizes and their mutations range from the useful to the patently grotesque. When two mutants pair and have children, their children are always mutants, though they rarely possess the same mutations as their parents. Mutants are reviled in both human and azi cultures and those who choose to stay are often cast out to the fringes, scraping by as criminals or beggars. Those who flee bond together as tribes and wander the wild places of Quantum, avoiding human and azi cities. 
 
 Automatons 
 
 Automatons are genderless, hyper-intelligent, living machines. They are a remnant of the Time Before—a remnant even the Progenancy doesn't understand. Automatons awaken in hidden-away places possessing the reasoning capacity of a 15-year-old human and a wide-eyed obsession with learning everything about the world around them. Automatons have no single society and typically wander into whatever civilization is nearby where they are often accepted and put to work. Automatons are weak structurally and no single automaton has lived longer than 40 years, but during their time on Quantum they are relentless in their pursuit of scholarship and wisdom. 
 
 The first choice you make in the Quantum Roleplaying Game is your race—the second is your “paradigm.” Paradigms are the worldview of your character, not only how they perceive everything around them, but also what path they choose to follow in life. Quantum has 17 paradigms, 16 of which are rather specific in their focus and one called the Generalist that is more customizable to suit the unique desires of any player. Example paradigms include Archer, Warrior, Warlock, Progenitor, Shaman, Immortal, Reaver, Hunter, and Crusader. The rest will be revealed once play-testing of the Quantum Roleplaying Game begins! 
 
 THE INFINITE ROLEPLAYING ENGINE 
 
 The Quantum Roleplaying Game is powered by the Infinite Roleplaying Engine™, a customizable game system built on a strong mathematical foundation from which nearly any genre of RPG can be created. The game uses the same polyhedral dice that many of you are probably used to (d20, d12, d10, etc.) but dice-rolling facilitates two primary objectives: it rewards knowledge and advancement by decreasing the chance of failure as the level of skill increases and it allows for a more open system between the players and the Guide (also called the game master) so that both parties can easily work together to create a cinematic storyline filled with intrigue, conflict, combat, death, warfare, and triumph and do so without bogging down in complicated dice checks and endless rolling. The Infinite Roleplaying Engine is exactly that: a “role”-playing engine. The dice, though used and needed, are secondary to the experience of playing. 
 
 A FEW WORDS ON GENDER EQUALITY 
 
 It is the promise of Infinite X Studio that we will always strive to present a world that in many ways reflects what our world should be. Specifically, the stereotypical portrayals of women in RPGs as either barely-clothed, subservient slaves or obnoxiously under-dressed warrior queens have no place in any of our product lines. Civilizations in our games will rarely explore gender differences unless that exploration is central to the story or theme of a location. We assume, as we believe everyone should on Earth, that there is no difference between men and women other than some basic biological designs and we strongly believe that hobby gaming is for everyone regardless of gender, age, skin color, sexual preference or identity, or religious belief (including a lack thereof). We want our products and our art to reflect this promise and hope that our community of friends will keep us honest should we ever seem to stray from it. 
 
 WHO IS INFINITE X STUDIO? 
 
 Joshua J. Frost, President 
 
 Josh started writing in junior high school, majored in Creative Writing and Publishing in college, and started working in the hobby games industry in 2005. He has 38 writing and design credits for roleplaying games, co-designed one card game with Mike Selinker (Yetisburg), and designed a game for the board game Stonehenge called “Any Given Run Play” that appeared in the October 2007 issue of Games Magazine. He designed and wrote games and game supplements for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game and was nominated for two Origins Awards and won six ENnie Awards for fantasy RPG writing and design. Josh lives in a Seattle suburb with his wife, daughter, cat, dog, and iMac. 
 
 Hugo Solis, Artist & Cartographer 
 
 Hugo Solis, also known as Butterfrog, found his love of RPGs in 1990 when he miraculously stumbled upon the Dark Sun boxed set at his local game store—no mean feat in a comic shop in México. Hugo resides in Guadalajara, Mexico with his patient wife (who is his toughest art critic) and their two Schnauzers. Hugo began illustrating character artwork for Pathfinder fans on the paizo.com messageboards in 2008. Shortly thereafter, he co-created the award winning Wayfinder fanzine with Liz Courts as a way to bring the Paizo fan community to a whole new level. Hugo now does freelance illustration and cartography for many companies including 4 Winds Fantasy, Legendary Games, Paizo Publishing, Open Design, Rite Publishing, and SKR Games among others. 
 
 Blake Davis, Developer 
 
 Blake Davis is a passionate table-top gamer and has worked in several aspects of the gaming industry. Besides running various RPGs for over 9 years, including D&D and the Pathfinder RPG, Blake is the mastermind behind Archives of Nethys (www.archivesofnethys.com), an extensive reference guide for the Pathfinder RPG. He has a degree in Integrated Studies and an uncanny knack for memorizing rules and spotting rules issues and flaws. 
 
 Reid Schmadeka, Editor 
 
 Reid Schmadeka has worked in the gaming industry for more than a dozen years, starting with White Wolf Publishing as an editor and then Wizards of the Coast as a contributor and editor for the Wizards Play Network website. He was the author of Transylvania Chronicles III: Ill Omens and a contributor to Castles and Covenants, both for White Wolf. His story "Faces" was published in the Satiated Sunrise Word Speak Network anthology, and his stories "The Barn" and "Avarice" in the magazine Line Zero. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife, son, and daughter. 
 
 Colleen Hutchings, Graphic Design/Layout 
 
 Colleen Hutchings' whereabouts have been a secret for more than 400 years. It is whispered in conspiracy circles that it was she who founded the Illuminati and that any conspiracy theories about who runs the world are complete fabrications invented by Hutchings as an effort to throw everyone off the truth. It is known that she acquired a Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Design from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods sometime in the last decade, but even finding out that much cost us 13 interns. 
 
 Kyle Hepworth, Art & Design 
 
 Kyle Hepworth is a rogue Seattle artist responsible for dozens of random acts of art. He once decorated his neighbor's broken down truck as M. Truckington III complete with a windshield monocle, a bumper mustache, and an enormous top hat. In his spare time he creates miniature piñatas and Super Mario Brothers coins and hangs them in places for people to destroy and/or jump up and try to get 100 of them. Beyond that, Hepworth's life is a mystery known only to him, Joshua Frost, and 43,567 of their closest friends. 
 
 OUR PLEDGE TO YOU 
 
 Without Kickstarter Backers, it would not be possible for Infinite X Studio to design and produce quality RPGs for the hobby market. To show our undying respect for those of you taking a chance on us, we promise that all PDF and hard copies guaranteed to Backers will be mailed before copies are available for purchase at retailers, conventions, or even online at InfiniteXStudio.com. We also promise that all products declared “limited edition” will never be offered for sale in stores by Infinite X Studio and that all “bonus” materials will not be released for ONE FULL YEAR after the official release date of the game. Our gratitude for your support should come with a hug for every single one of you—given the challenge that presents both in travel fees and bird flu, please accept our pledge instead. Thank you! ||||| The public life-cycle of a Kickstarter rarely ends in tragedy. Often, if a Kickstarter manages to get covered by the media before its funding round end, or even starts, it can meet its goal within days, and superfluous funds continue to roll in over the next few weeks. By the time its crowdfunding stage closes, the creators, backers, and media alike are excited and proud to have ushered this new project so quickly to a place of prosperity, eager for it to continue to grow. 
 
 Further Reading Kickstarter project spent $3.5M to finish a working prototype—and ended in disaster A login-managing USB key won awards, was covered everywhere, never materialized. 
 
 Plenty of projects manage to deliver the goods, even if the timeline slides a bit. That was the case with Tim Schafer's Kickstarter game Broken Age. If creators miss deadlines, backers typically continue to receive updates via e-mail and the Kickstarter page. But sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn't pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised. 
 
 A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out. 
 
 Why burn out when you can fade away 
 
 MyIDkey, a password manager dongle, raised $473,333 on Kickstarter in March 2013, and $3.5 million overall from other investors. The team decided to change the design of the product and many of its features midstream. In his second-to-last update to backers, which was sent privately rather than posted publicly on the project page, creator Benjamin Chen wrote about how his company's funding situation very suddenly changed: 
 
 "A few weeks ago, on a Thursday night, we had a board meeting, and our plan called for an additional funding round. For me and the team, everything seemed on track, but on that Friday morning when we were expecting our next set of rocket fuel, I was told by our lead investor that the investor syndicate could not agree on financing terms and hence we would have no more funds coming in. This was a complete shock for me, and I have never been in a situation this dire in my professional life. We had ZERO notice, and no funds left in the bank, I had to immediately notify the entire staff that we were going to have to layoff everyone from payroll as well as myself. We also had to notify all of our contractors and manufacturing partners of our situation and to immediately put everything on hold. This was a huge emotional setback for the team." 
 
 Three months later, Chen privately updated backers again that the myIDkey website had been taken down, claiming a cease and desist over a UK trademark. A reader passed Ars the September update: 
 
 "Please know that we are in the final rounds of securing a strategic partnership. It is extremely frustrating, but we are unable, legally, to disclose any additional information at this time. Many of you may have noticed the take down of the myIDkey website. We recently received a cease and desist letter from a UK company that has the trademark rights to MYID. Because of this, we are working to rebrand the website. We would also like you to know that our team is intact, and we are working diligently to get operations back underway. Thank you for all your support, and please continue to hang in there." 
 
 
 
 A high-profile Indiegogo campaign for the Kreyos smartwatch, which raised $1.5 million on a $100,000 goal in the summer of 2013, crashed and burned over the course of the following year. In a Medium post, the founder, Steve Tan, blamed most of the failure on the Chinese manufacturer Kreyos engaged to make the product: 
 
 "What I don’t understand till now is, with the success of Kreyos, and the amount of money we paid him, why didn’t Pro [CEO of Viewcooper Corp] invest in talent or hiring the right people. The total amount of people working on Kreyos from his end was only around 4 people, some of whom we realized are just working part time. We wouldn’t have minded him pocketing so much money if he at least delivered something that we can fix for our backers and customers and continue selling for a few more months until we conceptualize a new and improved version. 
 
 He constantly bragged that we will impress our backers by shipping earlier then the promised date. But things started to look bad after numerous delays. We wanted to hire our own firmware guys, but he wouldn’t send us the firmware’s source code, and insisted we won’t be able to manage it. He said he will hire more people in his Taiwan office to help speed things up, but apparently those people are working on his other projects and not Kreyos." 
 
 In a separate section, Tan asks himself why Kreyos did not engage a different manufacturer. His answer, in four parts: ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– Just because a crowdfunded project reaches its donation goals doesn't mean the project will ever actually come to fruition. Instead, plenty of projects—including some that receive a lot of media hype—are stalled or perhaps canceled altogether. Ars Technica takes a look at cases like myIDkey, which pulled in $473,333 on Kickstarter. The project, a USB dongle that handles your passwords, was denied expected funding from additional investors; as of last month, the project was also reportedly facing a cease-and-desist letter over branding. In another Kickstarter crisis, backers of a role-playing game that far exceeded its funding goals were informed earlier this year, by email, that "this project is dead. For now. Possibly forever." The creator blamed it on an artist involved. So what happens next? In this case, Ars Technica reports, backers told Washington's attorney general, who has sued a company that allegedly didn't produce a crowdfunded playing-card project. Such legal action is, however, rare; one hurdle is that backers don't get each other's contact information. But they can communicate using Kickstarter's "comments" section, and commenters have joined forces to keep track of what creators are up to—even posting the phone number of one creator on the site.