I adore Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Writing She is the Ancient is part of Beth the Bard’s inspiration for Bardhouse Media.
“Like, ‘Yeah, we’ll pay you six cents a word.’
It’s a popular site in the community filled with incredible supplements from a multitude of writers.
Heck, I use it.
But, as pointed out by Beth the Bard, it is an imperfect solution to the publishing problem.
And then it’s like, ‘Cool.
That’s wonderful.'”
Brazilian illustrator Fernando Salvaterra is making Daughter of Frankenstein’s in-universe map.
“And so we walked them through all the steps.
And now they’re getting published in their first project.”
You’re going to be getting paid for proposal words, for everything.
When you submit the first draft, you will get half of the entire payment.
On the final draft, you get the other half.
We’re going to double-check that people are actually able to do shit with this."
Unlike She is the Ancient, Daughter of Frankenstein isn’t a reimagining of another tabletop adventure.
Everything is so scary.
Aren’t you scared?’
And it’s like, ‘No, what?’
We can be so much more creative about this."
And then at the end, it’s like, ‘But we solved it!’
And it’s like, ‘Who are you trying to make feel good about this?
This experience felt crappy the whole time.
‘Yay, we overcame adversity, but also what the fuck?’
“There is a huge secret about it, but there’s also the blatant one.
Victoria Frankenstein is literally his biological daughter.
And I won’t mention the third one–that one’s super secret.
“That’s what I’ve done 40-plus hours a week for years now.
But when the whole debacle happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll try another one.’
And I was like, ‘Oh, these other ones are really fun too.’
We definitely want to be branching out and working with other stuff.”
“[5e] is so complicated,” Beth the Bard said.
“And these other ones are so simple and wonderful.
There are huge pros and cons either way.”
“Oh my God–I vibed so hard,” she said.
Vaesen reimagines 19th-century northern Europe into a place twisted by Nordic folklore, Scandinavian myth, and gothic horror.
It uses Free League’s Year Zero system.
“I loved their archetypes.
You got the doctor, the occultist, the investigator–things like that.
How do we do that?’
And [King] was like, ‘Okay, I got you.'”
“There’s definitely going to be some sort of artificer-inspired bard subclass,” Beth the Bard said.
“I’m like, ‘What feels good to me?
Okay, cool.’
I can’t explain what I did, but now it feels right.
And so I’ve just been making things for me and how I can understand things with rampant ADHD.
That’s just part of blogging–making things accessible to read on the internet.
And it’s the same thing in books, but nobody does that.
And I understand because it’s more expensive–it’s so much more expensive.”
“But honestly, I don’t care,” Beth the Bard said.
“I will spend what I got to spend.
We need these resources.
So I have to do things [in a multisensory style].
So lots of visuals, lots of text breakups.
No going on more than necessary–that’s another blogging thing.
“We want to do audio versions as well,” Beth the Bard added.
Daughter of Frankenstein’s Kickstarter campaignwill conclude on March 23.
The book is scheduled to launch prior to the end of 2023.
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