Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for October! We’ve got some horror games this month, appropriate for Halloween. We also have Tarot, Cryptids, and badgers and coyotes! The magic of RPGs only gets more magical with every new and offbeat game I see. As usual, we’ll check in with those major publishers, see what the indies are bringing forth, and then finally take a look back at the Kickstarters from five years ago.

Major Campaigns

Not a lot of action from the majors this month! Only one major campaign squeaked in under the wire, Cohors Cthulhu from Modiphius. Apparently since now it’s a meme that men constantly think about the Roman Empire, Modiphius had to mix that with Cthulhu. One interesting honorable mention to note here is that Kevin Crawford is campaigning an offset print run of Worlds Without Number. A second print run of a book is hardly a new, original game, but Crawford’s Sine Nomine Publishing has very high name recognition in the RPG world, with many frequent backers treating the operation just like a major. It also doesn’t hurt that I really enjoyed reading Worlds Without Number, and compared it quite favorably to Fifth Edition D&D.

Indies of Note

The quiet from the majors doesn’t roll over to the indie space, where there were a number of projects live and ready at the beginning of this month (even more if you include the incessant flood of midpack 5e material and, still weirdly, topless elf models). If anything, it seems like this month was so packed with small projects that Sturgeon’s Law was kicking in even more than usual when looking at crowdfunding. That said, there were still a number of interesting projects that I think are worth a look.

Starting off with some solo RPG representation, Weeds in the Waste is about tending a garden in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. To me the ‘fantasy’ of the post-apocalypse has always been one about rebirth, so I’m intrigued by a game that approaches that theme so directly. There’s also a bit of gamification with a 6×6 grid, which gets filled in as you make your way through the game and its prompts. Looks to be interesting, and $10 for a digital copy is a low price of admission.

The Stars that Cross the Ancient Sky is also a solo game, though here the theme is ancient astronomy. This one sounds distinctly creative, tasking you with divining the signs and portents from the stars. One may call it ‘Choose Your Own Astrology’, which is a neat idea if you ask me. This is another compact zine-sized game, and as such the digital copy is a mere $6.

Next up we have The Hidden Isle. This game hits right at a personal interest, Tarot-driven RPGs. That said, one of the reasons Tarot-driven RPGs are so interesting to me is that the failure rate I’ve seen has been so very high. There is a fine line to walk between treating Tarot as another card-based mechanic on one hand, and falling entirely into turning the game into RPG-shaped Tarot spreads on the other. It looks like The Hidden Isle is trying to pull from both sides of this aisle, and having some firm mechanical grounding like its half-dozen classes is a good sign. How good it will be, though, is entirely based on the execution. If you want to bet on The Hidden Isle, a digital copy is €25 (about $27).

You know me, I’m a sucker for a ludicrous game concept. That’s why I’m excited about Eldritch Defenders, a game about arcane, supernatural…lawyers. This could admittedly easily go wrong, but the first game from these designers, Eldritch Care Unit, is about a supernatural hospital. Beyond that, the courtroom-style system does seem interesting and well thought-out, even if this may not be a campaign-style game for most. Still, should you want to see what evidence is in discovery, a digital copy is only $15.

Cryptid Creeks is a new PbtA game, but it’s specifically ‘Carved from Brindlewood’, meaning it’s a hack of Jason Cordova’s ‘Murder She Wrote-em-up’ Brindlewood Bay, itself a strong and creative twist on PbtA mechanics. Cryptid Creeks sees your characters tasked with stopping a curse from spreading through your town. The main twist here are the various and sundry cryptids who will become part of your mission, created at the table by the players. While this game isn’t a kids’ game per se it definitely is framed towards the goal of being for all ages, and seems to fall nicely in line with its stated inspirations, media like The Goonies and Night in the Woods (a personal favorite of mine). A digital copy of Cryptid Creeks is £15 (about $19). 

Incursion is a game mixing supernatural horror and espionage. That in itself isn’t particularly noteworthy, after all Delta Green exists. What interests me in Incursion, though, is that characters are sleeper agents, activated by cybernetics they didn’t know they had to become living weapons. The sleeper agent trope is pretty neat and there aren’t many games dedicated to making their PCs sleeper agents, so I’m at least a little intrigued. Adding horrors man was not meant to know? Icing on the non-Euclidean cake. $15 gets you a digital copy.

Not a solo game, exactly, Badger + Coyote is a duet game, taking the superstructure of GMless and solo games and applying it to two people exactly. It’s also about the quirky and cute pairings of badgers and coyotes which actually do happen in nature (as well as becoming a huge meme, because of course it did). The game is based around several dozen story hooks which take about an hour to play out (though some can expand into longer sessions), and includes guidance around both duet-style roleplay as well as playing badgers and coyotes. A digital copy is $15, but you can get a digital copy of the travel-sized rules as well for less.

Fearful Ends is an interesting game concept, sitting more alongside Dread, Fiasco, or Ten Candles than traditional horror games. In Fearful Ends, your characters are supposed to be pushed to their limits, to an inevitable collapse. Playing through that arc is a different experience than more traditional gameplay, but as evidenced by the above examples (and others like the Fate Horror Toolkit) it can be incredibly effective and affecting. The special sauce, so to speak, of Fearful Ends are the mental and physical stress cards, which help give prompts to players to direct their characters’ downward spiral and how it manifests at the table. While I personally would have wanted to understand more about the setting and premise underlying the game, its closest comparables are also archetypal, for better or for worse. If you too want to see how Fearful Ends stacks up against a heavyweight like Dread, a digital copy is $15.

Five Year Retrospective

October of 2018 was a month of many extremes, but perhaps not many surprises. Americana, Cult, Return to the Stars, and The Dawnline represented the core of our typical Kickstarter coverage, indie campaigns which funded, delivered, and continue to chug along under the radar. The bigger campaigns have somewhat more interesting narratives; Judge Dredd was campaign by EN Publishing, and though it appears to have delivered successfully the game is no more, with publisher Rebellion now holding the RPG rights for the property. Successful or not, this makes Worlds of 2000AD likely the shortest-lived game covered here so far. Bunnies and Burrows was looking pretty good with its new-found support from Frog God Games, but the campaign and the ensuing final product have underperformed compared to what we typically see from new editions of vintage games. On the other hand, we had two breakouts, neither of which were too surprising if you knew the backstory. Things from the Flood, sequel to Tales from the Loop, of course did very well for Free League, though it does still sit somewhat in the shadow of the original. Lex Arcana also posted very good numbers, and while that sounds like a breakout it makes more sense when you know that the game was designed by some of the same team that designed The One Ring. The problem child of this month’s coverage is The Forest Hymn and Picnic, another ghosted campaign and one with little hope of ever following through.

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Here in October the days are getting shorter again; time to curl up with a good sourcebook! We’re going to keep trucking from here until the end of the year; November may have some solid campaigns but December will see things slowing down. From there, we do it all again! Slow January, ZineQuest February, and then we’ll just about have processed where 2023 went. For now, though, check out some of the campaigns above. Anything else on Kickstarter worth backing? Let us know about it! And whatever you do, be sure to come back next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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