Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! As you business types know the first quarter is over, and it’s time to kick things up! More realistically, ZineQuest is over and PAX East is recently in the rearview, meaning that the first set of product announcements in the tabletop gaming world have kicked off in earnest. Commercial con season runs from roughly PAX East to GenCon in August, so we’re in the height of major announcements and the crowdfunding campaigns which accompany them. As such, we have four major glorified pre-orders campaigns that you can check out. Beyond that there’s still a lot of momentum in the indie space, at least somewhere down in there. Sifting through the weird porn minis and 5e “supplements”, I’ve picked out five indie campaigns that are worth checking out and, quite possibly, worth a pledge as well.

Major Campaigns

It’s a big month in the commercial RPG world! Almost as if everyone got a memo to wait until ZineQuest was done, lest someone on Twitter complain about it…anyway. Several major campaigns going on, and more concurrently than we’ve had in a while. First off is Free League with a new edition of Coriolis, ‘The Great Dark’. It is explained in the campaign that The Great Dark is intended to be the next edition of Coriolis after the current one, The Third Horizon. While the game is still based on the Year Zero Engine it’s shifting focus towards exploration; the game takes place in The Lost Horizon, a new region of space, and the focus is on mounting expeditions into the ruins within. Exploration is a strong theme for a space opera game, but there’s also a bit of distance set between it and the original setting of The Third Horizon, clearly attempting to get players to buy in to the new game. I’m personally a Coriolis novice so this campaign was a great starting point for me; out of the major campaigns in this article this is the one I’ve backed with my own money.

Next up comes Rapscallion, a PbtA game of pirate adventure campaigned by Magpie Games. Magpie Games, incidentally, is just maybe about to send the terminally late Urban Shadows second edition to the printer, but they couldn’t wait for that milestone to start with another game. My main question is why? Was going from having the largest crowdfunding campaign in history to not even making the top ten sellers list, being ousted by Pirate Borg, too much? I could say much more cynical things about this choice of game but the reality is that I’m glad that Magpie is returning to original properties (I’m not particularly enchanted by their licensed games, and they haven’t exactly enchanted the market either). That all said, there is this little issue of product management. While product development is the purview of designers (and editors, and artists), product management is making sure that each product and product line gets the resources that it needs to meet its deadlines, product milestones, and sales targets. Starting a Kickstarter before actually sending your most delayed game to print is a failure of product management, even if by some unlikely miracle you actually get it done on time this time. I might check out Rapscallion after it’s actually on sale, but Magpie crowdfunding is now strictly in “fool me once” territory.

Speaking of existing reputations, Zweihander Reforged Edition has entered the crowdfunding world. Zweihander has been around the block a few times, having been covered in a previous crowdfunding roundup years ago. What’s happened since is the failure of Andrews McMeel to set up a games division, which sent the Zweihander crew reeling and looking for new distribution. While Reforged is an updated version of the WFRP retroclone, this campaign also serves to get the game back in circulation after losing its publisher, and from that angle it does make sense that crowdfunding is the logical way to raise capital. As long as Daniel Fox doesn’t get himself banned from any more RPG forums, it should go relatively smoothly.

Finally is the next campaign from Monte Cook Games, three different Cypher System settings all being campaigned under one title, Knights of Dust and Neon. If I’m honest I’m a bit disappointed; a Cyberpunk Western setting is way more interesting than a Cyberpunk setting AND a Western setting. MCG will likely do fairly well with these, but I’m doubtful more people will have any particular thoughts about these settings than there are people who realize that MCG actually did an Old Gods of Appalachia RPG.

Indies of Note

A lot going on in the indie space as well; these five games represent the most intriguing small campaigns available across Kickstarter and BackerKit. First off on the list is Siege Perilous. Campaigned by Kickstarter veterans Gallant Knight Games, Siege Perilous is a bit different than the typical Gallant Knight fare; the game is a solo or troupe (i.e. multiple players but GMless) game about Arthurian knights, based roughly on Firelights by Fari Games. The game is not only about undertaking quests as a knight, but fulfilling that duty as you age, and understanding how concepts like loyalty and faith change and change you. The game uses tarot cards as well as dice and, to my mind at least, seems to be built around a solidly affecting solo play experience.

Next up from small press publisher par excellence Exalted Funeral we have Mystic Punks. Described as a ‘dark world that needs saving from supernatural threats’, the setting of Mystic Punks seems to mix Heavy Metal with Ninja Turtles and throw it all together by way of Repo Man. There is an existing quickstart, so if you’re not sure if this melange of 80s influences will vibe with you, you can give it a try for free.

After that we have Astroprisma. Astroprisma is a retrofuturistic solo RPG, built around a star map that you have the goal of exploring. While Astroprisma looks a bit like Death in Space the mechanics are in no way the same; this game starts by emphasizing exploration but has faction mechanics, branching story paths, and a gleam on the retro aesthetic that combines Stockholm Kartell with Cowboy Bebop.

As a sign that I am in fact getting older, any game described as ‘alternate 90s’ immediately catches my attention. In this case the game that caught my eye was The Lost Bay, a ‘suburban gothic’ RPG using its own system. While the district-driven map and d6 dice pool certainly makes you think of Blades in the Dark, the aim is a bit grungier, with the different character ‘vibes’ based on 90s horror archetypes and not necessarily assuming the same sort of team play that a heist game does. With a promise of OSR-style dungeons and pointcrawls and the mention of ‘post-death character classes’, I am intrigued by The Lost Bay and think it’s worth some attention.

Although there are more and more journaling games entering the fray, Plane caught my attention with its premise. In Plane, you are a teleporter operator. Between your coworkers, your clients, and the occasional teleporter malfunction, your job is nothing if not interesting. While a traditional prompt-driven journaling game, Plane attempts to give the experience a bit more heft and granularity with branching story paths and ‘difficulty levels’ which change how you approach the various crises and interdimensional mysteries. I’m personally a sucker for transdimensional fiction, and if you’re like me in that respect you should check out Plane.

Five Year Retrospective

April of 2019 made for an interesting carnival. On one hand, no major campaigns and a bunch of oddball games made the article feel like it was aligning with the spirit of the crowdfunding carnival very well. Additionally, there were no ghostings this month, though RiotMinds got an honorary ghosting for releasing Ruin Masters and then failing on most of their stretch goals. If you ever wondered how Dragonbane became the chosen path of Drakar och Demoner, watching Riotminds fail through Kickstarter updates is certainly one way to learn that. But, for all the other campaigns which did fund successfully and then deliver successfully, a whole lot of nothing happened. Even Mysthea, campaigned by Mina McJanda of Legacy fame, barely seems to be on sale or in distribution, let alone available in a way that I could determine if it was ‘successful’ or not. One interesting exception here is Critical Core. The game didn’t have a typical RPG mission, being designed to engage with young players on the autism spectrum. But when I read their most recent update and saw they had distributed over 5,000 copies to parents, teachers, and other educators, I saw something that looked very much like a success. Kudos to the Critical Core team; you can check them out at their website.

Things may be quieting down for overall hobby games sales, but that means that there’s even more competition for your dollar in the crowdfunding space. Remember that there’s no FOMO like fake FOMO; if you’re ever on the fence about backing a campaign (especially a big corporate one), it’s almost always better to just sit out and buy the game after it’s actually released. It’s unlikely that any of these major companies will go the way of RiotMinds, but with Kickstarter becoming the default mode of releasing games it becomes even more important to vote with your wallet and give money to games you not only support, but that you actually want to take a risk on. Hopefully this carnival has shown a few games that are worth risking a bit of cash on if it helps them get made. Pledge some campaigns, play some games, and we’ll see you back here in May for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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