Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2024! We’re just out of the weird, liminal part of December, so excuse me if I’m still a little longwinded and full of cheese. Nonetheless, we have a number of campaigns to talk about, including one very large one.

It is a new year, and Shannon Appelcline released his annual Year in Review over at the Designers and Dragons website (a move from the article’s usual home on RPGnet). While the article covers much of the past year’s news very concisely, I want to call your attention to the top Kickstarters segment about ¾ of the way through the article. The top three campaigns of 2023 were all third party supplements for 5e. Since Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk began six years ago, there were only two years where the majority of the top 5 best funded campaigns weren’t 5e supplements, 2018 and 2022. Even more damning, the only supplements in these lists which I still hear people discuss in social media in any fashion were all authored by the company which is currently running the largest campaign in this article. At least this new one isn’t (technically) D&D.