You can pledge without a reward, then select the History book as an add-on for $49. See the second FAQ in the Kickstarter.
Thanks a bunch!
I was hoping for the History book in PDF form. It's not worth $50 to me.
There’s still time for that to happen and you aren’t the only one I’ve seen comment about a PDF version.
I'm slightly confused since I don't have the starter kit. My question, is the core rulebook a superset of the starter kit? If I support the Kickstarter to get the core rulebook, what am I missing from the starter kit?
Thanks.
I think what you’d mostly missing is the 6 part adventure in the Starter Kit and a Finest Legacy character sheet.
There’s also the six character booklets as well. The Freedom Five and Unity will have gone through some character changes since then(since a decent amount of time has passed in-universe), so the Starter kit is a good way to get a look at the characters in their ‘prime’ fully active super team forms. Not to mention all the other characters and villains you come across in the adventure itself.
These booklets and the six-part adventure make up a very good portion of the value of the Starter kit, so I’d say it’s definitly worth picking up even if you already plan on getting the core book.
Except for Unity and Finest Legacy (though Heritage will be here) the other hero character sheets are supposed to be part of the Core Rulebook as well.
We’ve broken 150k!!! :-o Woohoo!
Due to passing of time (both in-game and in game development time), Finest Legacy and Heritage will probably have different details. 
I agree if Heritage isn’t changed from Legacy in the Starter Kit I’ll be surprised.
I'm 99% sure they'll all be changed. Trying to follow the character creation process from the two livestreamed games, most of not all of the Starter Kit sheets cannot be created using the current version of the rules. In some cases it looks like their HP totals might be the only thing to change a little bit--it's hard to tell without seeing the full rules--but they should all be getting at least some small tweaks.
The big thing in the starter kit is the 6 adventures. And if you're going with the print versions, the character sheets, even if incorrect, come in shiny booklets.
So, as a non-RPer, I'm still a bit shocked about the price of all of this. People seem more than willing to plop down $59+ for what, in my mind, is just a book. Are all RP systems similarly priced? Why does this book cost more than most board games, which have boards, cards, minis, dice, cubes, tokens, etc.? My questions are out of geniune curiosity, since it's just such a foreign idea to me. I can buy novels that have plenty of thought, time, effort, rewrites, world-building, and more put in to them for $10.
Yep, pretty much. For one, oversize books like these are expensive to print, and for another, whole teams of people are involved in the writing, development, art, and publication of RPG rules books. The D&D core rulebooks are $50 each MSRP (though they go on sale for much less) and you need 3 of them at minimum. Other games' core rulebooks are usually in the $50-$60 range, although some slim ones go down to about $30. $20 for the PDF is actually quite reasonable.
I'm not a backer yet but hope to be. But what about char creation? I mean some abilities on pregens sound like from a list and others sound made up for that hero yet we can only randomly generate em?
I've always gotten the feeling that character generation ends you with a series of generic abilities -- deal damage at range, hinder with your min die, etc. -- that you can then use as a framework to design the specific effects that are unique to your hero. So if you had, say, an "Energy Blast" power (I don't know what's in the actual rules, mind), you could make it an Ice Blast for a cold hero, or a Fire Blast for a fire hero. Hinders could range anywhere from sudden blasts of supersonic sound to tangling vines sprouting up from below. It really sounds like there's a lot of room for creativity in terms of power set; all you roll for is mechanics.
I think they will be going more in depth on Character Creation on Monday with their scheduled update.
I hope I can get something akin to defend and transform to a form on auxiliary sheet that sounds like a very Tokusatsu translated into mechanics ability to me.
I can verify that this price is pretty standard. I have a few different core books for different game systems, and those in the same size(8.5" x 11" with 400+ pages, hardcover w/ presumably full color pages) normally go for $60. Some companies can go lower, like MindWanderer pointed out, but you normally need a set of books to ‘propperly’ play the game.
For example, Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition is a game system that has one ‘core’ book that’s contains all the base rules and systems to play a game BUT has no info for any of their specialty settings like Deadlands Reloaded, Rippers, The Last Parsec, etc. It normally runs for just about $10. To get all the tasty setting info, powers and edges and whatnot, you need to purchase settings books. Depending on their importance they can run around a standard $15-$20. And most of those books run pretty slim/small in comparison, and almost none of them have hardcovers or anywhere near a 400+ page count.
I really hope we get to 200k I really wanna buy a Lovecraft themed adventure it'll be very light-hearted and less "It's not will you win it's how far can you go before dying horribly." Grim.
To be clearer, Pinnacle Entertainment (the creators of Savage Worlds) are actively going away from that model, as they’ve lost money on their corebooks for literally years. And, thanks to the proliferation of third-party settings (and free fan settings for many major IPs), sales for their individual settings aren’t as strong as they could or should be.
The newest edition of SW (called Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, or SWADE) will be around that $40 price point, Which, for a full-color, hardbound rulebook, is damned cheap.