Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! While I’m not in Indianapolis this month, I’m still working to sift through all the cash-in board games and sexy elf minis to bring you the best in RPG crowdfunding from Kickstarter, Crowdfundr, Backerkit, and Gamefound. It’s Kickstarter and Backerkit that are really carrying the month this month, and I have ten campaigns that I’m excited to talk about.

Major Campaigns

Several large campaigns are going on this month, from companies with big product lines that can capitalize on GenCon hype. First, Onyx Path is continuing to build up the Trinity Continuum line with Aegis. Taking place in Ancient Greece, Aegis shifts the power sets from all three of the existing Trinity games (Adventure, Aberrant, Aeon) into the past and lets you play mythic characters centuries before the setting of the existing Trinity Continuum. Next, ENWorld Publishing is ready to release a What’s Old Is New (WOIN) Starter Set. WOIN was released as three genre rulebooks over the last seven years, but the starter set brings everything together to help sell WOIN to a new audience. Grab the new box, or bid at a level to grab all of the core rulebooks as well.

Finally, a project that’s near and dear to my heart. When I was an early teen, grabbing whatever Third Edition books my pocket money would allow, XCrawl caught my attention. XCrawl was a d20 game where dungeon crawling was a game show, and the contrivances of D&D dungeon design were exaggerated for effect in front of a live studio audience. While the original game didn’t really move far enough away from D&D to really sing, a lot of people loved the concept. Now, XCrawl is back. Goodman Games, best known for Dungeon Crawl Classics (both the standalone game and the adventure line) are releasing XCrawl Classics, a full revision of the classic d20 game. Goodman Games definitely has the track record for making things weird with DCC, and I can’t wait to see what they do with XCrawl.

Indies of Note

In the small press segment, things are a bit all over the place this month. Going to be honest, I skipped over a fair number of projects; phrases like “unique fantasy world” (unequivocally false) and “teamwork-driven mechanics” (as opposed to what?) are hints that the game design is about as bad as the ad copy. That said! Just like most months, there are still gems. First off, Perils and Princesses. Perils and Princesses is an OSR-driven fairy tale RPG, which does mean that the mechanics constrain themselves primarily to the D&D idiom. Still, the campaign shows the right treatment of ‘princess’ as a character concept, and the preview layout looks like a nice glass of rose to Mork Borg’s shot of black absinthe. It’s certainly worth checking out.

Garbage and Glory takes a very different tack though one that, surprisingly, has gotten an RPG treatment before. Raccoons rooting through bins was the subject of Dog Powered Vehicle’s Trash Pandas (not to be confused with Grant Howitt’s Crash Pandas, which is about raccoons street racing), but Garbage and Glory is not a heist game, it’s a fantasy dungeon crawler. It’s got robust and evocative classes, a novel inventory system, and downtime mechanics, all things we want out of our fantasy games. Except, you know, you’re all playing raccoons digging through the trash.

Switching to cyberpunk, we’ve got Terminal. Terminal is a storytelling game about pirate crews trying to free humanity from an oppressive robot simulation. Jack Sparrow does the Matrix, if you will. The description of the mechanics, a hack of Inevitable by Soulmuppet Publishing, actually sound like they’re of a similar ilk to the recently reviewed Cowboy Bebop RPG: You build a dice pool based on your Reputations, describing what actions you take based on what those Reputations are. At the final showdown, instead of building on your Reputations you gain larger bonuses if you’re willing to make larger sacrifices to win the day. This definitely looks like a stylish game with an intriguing setting, though I hope someone tells them not to use white-on-black before it goes to the printer.

Carved by the Garden is a solo game, and the only thing it really has in common with Terminal is being a hack of a lauded indie game, this time Chris Bisette’s The Wretched. Like most Wretched and Alone games, you’re trying to see if you make it out the other end alive. In Carved by the Garden, though, you are drawn deeper and deeper into the woods. Figure out what’s drawing you in, and if there comes a night you don’t return.

Wind Wraith is technically not a game, and it’s kind of a supplement, being described as compatible with Old School Essentials. You and I both know that means it plugs into virtually any old-school dungeon-esque, dragon-adjacent mechanics, though, so I’m covering it because I think the idea is really cool. Wind Wraith is a hexcrawl generator, which I’m already here for immediately. More specifically, though, it generates a ‘wavecrawl’, a range of ocean covered with dangers, monsters, and settlements. The generator works through nested random generation, starting broad and getting more specific as you go. In addition to the setting material, the book includes plot hooks, ocean-relevant monsters, and ship-based mechanics to really set your dark piracy adventure off in the right direction.

Next we’ve got an interesting hack of an already interesting game. Tim Hutching’s Thousand Year Old Vampire is one of the weightier games in the solo RPG realm, so it stands to reason that someone would try to make a hack at one point or another. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was that the hack that was made would turn the game multiplayer. Five Hundred Year Old Vampire redesigns the original game into a ‘keepsake game’ for 3-5 players, where artifacts created during the game are meant to be kept at the end. In another cool twist, the prompt-driven mechanics of the original game are divided into five ‘eras’ with different prompts and mechanics.

Finally for this month, we have an honorable mention. Back in April of 2022 I covered The Real Thing, a PbtA RPG based on the music of Faith No More. Well, The Real Thing apparently did well enough to inspire a new campaign for two supplements. Angel Dust and King for a Day are both named after Faith No More albums and are supplements to The Real Thing, adding new mechanics and playbooks as well as adventure material. The books all build on each other, though as they’re based on three genre-bending albums, the designers admit the “juxtaposition is pretty jarring”. I was excited when I first saw The Real Thing, and I’m even more excited now knowing that such an off-the-wall idea as a Faith No More RPG got off the ground and inspired continued support.

Five Year Retrospective

August of 2018 was a wild mix of a month, combining some heavy hitters and some big misses. There were a lot of big games; The Fantasy Trip, The Expanse, and Over The Edge were significant campaigns from major designers, while Zombie World was a significant success for Magpie, which was at the time still transitioning from rising star to heavy hitter. Other big successes from the month included Gallant Knight’s Tiny Supers and Esoterica, a game of modern occult fantasy. There were some struggles in there too, both John Silence and Oddity High are technically only partially fulfilled some five years later. I’ve also lumped in Power Outage, which Seamus reviewed earlier in the year; the kids’ superheroes game mounted a successful campaign in August and is still selling today.

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This August has brought another intriguing batch of games, even while the energy and focus is all over in Indianapolis. Check these campaigns out, and throw some money at any that really grab your attention. By the time all the dust has settled on the con and your wallet, it’ll be time for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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