Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! There are a lot of games on Kickstarter this month; the post-GenCon recalibration has happened just as expected. Beyond that, there’s a large number of big campaigns; beyond the ones we cover here there’s a big Free League campaign for a supplement to The One Ring as well as a new collection of Game Master Advice.

There’s something else going on here, though. Is it getting…spooky? It’s not just vampire commandos and weird wizards, it really does seem like Halloween is starting earlier every year. Check out what’s on offer this month, and see if you agree.

Major Campaigns

There are several big-name campaigns this month, including at least one hotly anticipated new game. First off, Rowan, Rook and Decard is running a $300k+ campaign for Eat the Reich, a game about vampire commandos trying to drink Hitler’s blood. It’s very specific, but that’s often what makes games that Grant, Chris, and the other RRD folks design so successful. Speaking of specific, Robert Schwalb is campaigning Shadow of the Weird Wizard, the hotly anticipated sequel to Shadow of the Demon Lord. It’s worth noting that Weird Wizard is a sequel, not a new edition, and as such the game has a bit of a different vibe to Demon Lord though it’s mechanically related. I got this one in just under the wire; the campaign ends almost exactly 24 hours after this article goes live (9/6/2023). Get in there quick if you’re interested.

Monte Cook Games is campaigning a new title over on Backerkit, The Magnus Archives. Based on the podcast of the same name, The Magnus Archives centers around what creepy and weird things exist in the Magnus Institute, an organization dedicated to supernatural research. Unsurprisingly The Magnus Archives is a Cypher System game, so take from that what you will.

Finally, the biggest campaign of this bunch by far, Exalted Funeral is campaigning Dolmenwood. Dolmenwood is an OSR game, using (as the campaign describes it) the “six classic stats” and everything else that makes Dungeons and Dragons familiar. The aim, though, is to create a fairy tale setting based on folklore of the British Isles and all that implies. This could be the traditional fae fantasy game we’re all looking for, but with a minimum price of $50 (due to the unnecessary three-book core rules standard) and $1.2 million already pledged, I wouldn’t blame you if you waited until it was on sale the normal way. If you have d20 FOMO, though, the campaign is live until Friday.

Indies of Note

September marks the unofficial start of ‘spooky season’, the retribution that Halloween fans visit upon Christmas for daring to extend all the way back into November. Our indies of note this month are full of spookiness! Two throwback horror entrants this month: Greasers and Ghouls uses the engine behind Survive This to create a high schoolers versus B-Movie monsters retro good time. Similarly retro though a bit weirder is Pod People, an RPG zine where you play as the alien pod people coming to invade Earth. Continuing along the ‘horror movie tropes’ path is Slaughterville, an RPG based on a series of board games and using the Year Zero Engine. This appears to use the same location-based investigation mechanics as Blade Runner or Vaesen, though with a bit more horror movie camp to it. Could certainly be interesting, I’m personally waiting to see if there’s a good third party Year Zero game that will pop up in (er) popularity.

There are some projects which are a bit more interesting than aping old horror movies, luckily. Bilge is both fascinating and gross; it’s a mapping game about making your way through the ‘flesh caverns’ and internal organs of a giant space leviathan. Definitely weird, but it kept me intrigued. On the other side of weird (though still definitely horror) is The Yellow Curtain. The Yellow Curtain casts you as theater students putting on a production of The King in Yellow, that mind- and reality-bending play from Robert Chambers’ stories. The trick here is that as the production continues, each student has the potential to use the power of the play to bend reality in the way they choose, and the wills of the players are set against each other in the process. Definitely on the experimental side, but some really cool ideas at play here.

Somewhat less experimental (though still interesting) is Demon Ascendants. Demon Ascendants is basically the antithesis of experimental, being a D&D-alike with d20s, classes, and all that fifty year old business. However, it does fit in with the spooky theme by attaching every character to a demonic bloodline. Might not be doing anything new, but at least there’s some solid production values and interesting ideas in there. Finally, speaking of nothing new, we have Ecryme. I don’t mean to sound snarky, Ecryme is a campaign for an English translation of the French RPG of the same name, a post-apocalyptic steampunk game which was originally campaigned back in 2016 to success and critical praise. The setting is an interesting one, where most of the world has been flooded by an acidic substance. I’d say one part Blades in the Dark, one part Wildsea, and I’m pretty interested to see how that looks in English.

Finally, an honorable mention. FIST made waves as a ‘paranormal mercenary’ RPG that mixed PbtA and OSR, and conspiracy fiction with gun porn. It’s been available for a while now, but the designer known only as Claymore is campaigning a box set to capitalize on the game’s current success. The box set includes an expanded version of the game, a “B-Side” supplement called Supply Drop of previously cut content, a few pamphlets, character sheets, and dice. Campaigns and a quickstart guide are also being unlocked as stretch goals.

Five Year Retrospective

Lots of interesting games back in September of 2018; I counted the campaign for Troika as an honorable mention as it was technically a second edition. That said, it is that edition that catapulted Troika into relevance and recognition, so it deserves note as likely the most successful campaign from the September 2018 article. That said, there were a few other bright spots! Entromancy, an attempt at marrying Shadowrun with D&D 5e, has seen modestly successful sales and some pretty good reviews. Less surprisingly, Onyx Path’s tabletop version of the Apocalyptic LARP Dystopia Rising did just fine, though it hasn’t made as much of an impact as some of OPP’s other relatively new (read: not White Wolf) games. The Jack Hack, a small hack of The Black Hack with Jack (the Ripper), has seen some success and some supplements, so there were definitely a couple of these campaigns that found their footing. Others, like Prism, Free Spacer, and Era: The Chosen (I now see it was done by the same company as Era: The Empowered and I question if I really needed to cover both) were delivered to backers and made it to market fine, but never really went anywhere. It could be worse. Triskelion Space and Event did not fund; Event failed to hit its goal while Triskelion Space was canceled, though in reading the updates that were sent out the campaign was also not going to hit its goal as opposed to some other issue coming up. However, as much as failed campaigns are frustrating for their creators, they aren’t the worst outcome; the designer of Domina Magica ghosted the campaign after posting a first draft and the backers will likely never get any compensation. That’s how the cookie crumbles, sometimes…but at least in this case there hasn’t been another campaign created by the same designer’s account. I don’t always get it right, and it’s hard to tell if a campaign is going to fail (or worse, ghost) just by reading the description in the campaign. So far 75% of the games I’ve covered in 2018 were successfully delivered; if you only count those which funded that number rises to 87%. Not bad for my first year at covering crowdfunding; we’ll look more closely at those numbers in December when the full year has been analyzed.

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Demons and wizards and pod people, oh my! Halloween gifts aren’t exactly a thing, but if they were, this month’s crop of campaigns would help ensure that you get all your shopping done before September ends. There were many campaigns out there this month, though not all of them caught my eye (or were original or well-executed) like the ones I’ve linked here. Still, think I’ve done a game wrong? Feel free to let me know in the comments or over on our Discord. There will always be more games to check out, though, and we’re going to continue checking them out when we come back next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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