Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We do have a bit of ZineQuest drop when it comes to crowdfunding in the late winter and early spring, but that doesn’t mean people are stopping. There are eight campaigns we’re going to discuss today, in addition to looking back to March of 2019. Of particular note is Backerkit; the up and coming platform is still contributing campaigns at a steady trickle, including one major and two indie campaigns this month. That’s more than can be said of any of the other platforms we began investigating when this series shifted from Kickstarter Wonk to Crowdfunding Carnival, at least unless you expand your scope to include 5e shovelware and oddly pornographic mini models. Nonetheless, the Kickstarter/Backerkit crowdfunding world that we live in is getting us some big supplements, dragon riders, the Gilded Age, and a superhero retroclone. Let’s take a look.

Major Campaigns

Not many complete games from established publishers are being campaigned, currently, though given the history of large campaigns kicking off during February this makes sense. If you don’t remember, Free League’s campaign of The One Ring caused a fair amount of bellyaching given the thought that it was taking eyeballs away from ZineQuest campaigns. Of course that year ZineQuest did the best it has ever done in terms of campaign success and dollars, so the complaints may not have exactly rang true, especially now that we’ve had a few more quiet years in comparison. Still, this does mean that many companies are a bit gunshy about February crowdfunding, fearing the kerfluffle may have hurt Free League’s bottom line. It didn’t, but Free League’s next major crowdfunding campaign is kicking off later this month in, among other reasons, an attempt not to cross whoever’s left on RPG Twitter to complain about it.

There are a few honorable mention type campaigns going on. Starting at the beginning of March was the campaign for Dagger in the Heart, a campaign book for Heart: the City Beneath. Dagger in the Heart is written by Gareth Hanrahan and has the honor of being the first hardback supplement for Heart. Pinnacle Entertainment is also campaigning, gathering funds to release a new edition of the Savage Worlds Sci-Fi Companion. Savage Worlds is a flexible and elegant game, but the ‘Explorer’s Edition’ small-format core rulebooks are often quite pared down. The Savage Worlds Companion series was well done for Savage Worlds Deluxe and I’m glad they’re bringing it back for Adventure Edition.

There is one new game being brought about by a major company. It’s not any major company you’ve heard of, but given how it came to be it’s certainly not indie. Amplifier Game Invest is a game development private equity firm which is owned by Embracer Group, a gaming conglomerate which owns nearly 130 studios, primarily but not exclusively in the video game space (Embracer also owns Asmodee, likely their largest investment in tabletop). Amplifier has a portfolio of 17 active investments, one of which is Studio Hermitage, a group of industry veterans based in North Carolina. Studio Hermitage is currently campaigning Our Brilliant Ruin, a game where ‘upstairs-downstairs drama meets existential horror’ and the setting is Belle Epoque with some dashes of monsters and steampunk. The game claims to have an ‘original dice pool system’, but given the resumes of the main designers it’s wholly unsurprising that original appears to mean ‘Storyteller but with d6s’. Does that mean the game’s going to be bad? Of course not. It is important to know, though, that the reason this left-field game can come to town with big names down the board and a gorgeous campaign is investor money, likely a lot of it.

Indies of Note

First indie campaign of note this month is the new game from longtime designer Jenna Moran, The Far Roofs. The Far Roofs, at first glance, is about rats. Magical rats, who live on the rooftops in the city and have become not just human-like, but heroic. If you venture up on the roofs with the rats, though, you’ll find that it’s an entrance to a complete other world, a world of mysteries. The Far Roofs appears to borrow some mechanical elements from another one of Moran’s games, Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. And while Moran’s games are known for being cerebral and somewhat hard to wrap your head around, The Far Roofs is built around an integrated campaign in its core book that should make it easier to get started. In my mind I’m hearing Nobilis meets Mouse Guard, and that’s worth checking out.

Next up we have Path of the Aram Thyr. Published by Gallant Knight Games, Path of the Aram Thyr is a game focused on ‘progression fantasy’, a subgenre about a character continually gaining more skill as they rise to the challenges in their way. While I snarkily thought every version of D&D was a ‘progression fantasy’, comparing the game more specifically to anime like Naruto or Dragonball served as a better set of examples for me to understand what the game is getting at. The game seems built around picking up more and more new techniques, a maximalist design technique I’m not immediately a fan of, but it also is tailored to single-player gaming, as in one player and one GM. The impression I get is that the design of this game may be well-suited to technique-harvesting maximalism in a way that a party-based game likely isn’t. With a unique campaign structure but familiar d20-based rules, Path of the Aram Thyr seems well-positioned to offer something a bit different.

Time Tails is…well, Time Tails is certainly something. I think the best way to describe it would be crossing the physics-lite time travel shenanigans of Doctor Who with the very 80s, totally rad time travel shenanigans of Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Then, just to make sure there’s enough shenanigans to go around, make it furry. All in all Time Tails seems like an utterly unserious (in terms of play, not design) romp designed mostly to enable the use of magic and super-science powers to wreck the timeline in ten different historical eras. It’s the antithesis of more self-serious time travel games like Continuum, but there’s certainly room for silliness in the (in my opinion) under-inhabited time travel genre.

Warrenguard is a game about dragon riders, with an interesting mechanical twist. The campaign states that the game combines Wanderhome and Fate Accelerated, but looking more closely at the preview materials it appears that the game is based on both Wanderhome and Fate Accelerated, simultaneously. As a dragon rider your character will consist of both the rider and the dragon, and the rider is defined with questions and traits a la Wanderhome while the dragon is defined with approaches, aspects, and stunts a la Fate Accelerated. Ironically the closest overarching mechanical comparison I can think of is actually Lancer, where the combat system and freeform roleplay systems are completely divorced from each other. It’s a fascinating idea, but I’m going to have to know more about how it works to understand if it’s going to work at all.

Finally, Heroic. Heroic is a retroclone, cleaning up and updating the FASERIP system which powered TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes back in 1984. Utterly unlike the other games TSR was publishing at the time, FASERIP (an acronym of its stats) used percentile attributes and a ‘Universal Results Table’ to help model heroes across multiple power levels fairly. While the game ultimately lost out to Champions in the fight for a long-lived Supers RPG, the FASERIP system is spoken of fondly in many circles. In addition to some needed updating and cleanup, Heroic also provides a version of FASERIP that is completely separate from its Marvel origins, which is important for keeping a version of the game in print without summoning lawyers faster than Thanos can snap. I’ve always said the retroclone phenomena should extend beyond D&D, and Heroic could very well join games like Cepheus and OpenD6 in keeping the library alive and expanding.

Five Year Retrospective

There were a few big highlights from our crowdfunding roundup in March of 2019. First, and most explicitly successful, we covered Ultraviolet Grasslands in this article, which has gone on to receive no shortage of (well-deserved!) acclaim. Then, on a note more aligned to my personal opinion, was the ‘Vs. Kickstarter’ campaign. Graphic designer Thomas Deeny showed his talents on these hacks of Phil Reed’s ‘Vs. Monsters’ game printed onto little trifold pamphlets. I backed this campaign and was super impressed at how everything came together, always looking for excuses to bring the little games along anywhere I might need a “backup RPG” (sadly, you don’t usually need to carry around a backup RPG). All of the campaign’s games and more from the second ‘Vs. Kickstarter’ campaign are available on DriveThruRPG under Deeny’s Denagh Design imprint.

There were no ghostings this month, which is great. However, there is one ongoing project still pending, Manifest. That’s ongoing after five years. Now, the last five years have had some wild events, including a global pandemic. Additionally, staying the course and pushing your project across the finish line is a better outcome than ghosting your backers, or even giving up and offering refunds! I accept that, and appreciate that someone is still trying. With all that said, though, if you are a designer who ends up either ghosting your backers, or giving up and offering refunds, or taking five years or more to finish, for the most part the conclusion should be the same: You’re done. People took a chance on you, with their own money, and you didn’t deliver in a reasonable timeframe or at all. Game design is more than just designing the game, it’s delivering a product that you made promises about, including timeframe. At the very least, once you’ve failed to deliver a crowdfunding campaign (and taking five years is still a failure to deliver, don’t get me wrong), even if you want to keep designing games, it would be the responsible choice not to crowdfund one again, at least not before seriously leveling up your project management skills.

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I love March. It’s a little warmer, the days are a little longer, and I can rest from going through dozens of zines. We’re ramping back up in the crowdfunding world, and this month is just the start of the big projects we can expect between now and GenCon in August. As usual, hit us up with any campaign suggestions or scoops, because the Carnival comes by the first Wednesday of every month. Make some pledges, play some games, and I’ll see you back next month on another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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