Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for June! We’re just starting to creep into con season here in the US, and there is an attendant slowdown in major campaigns as a result. That said, there’s still a lot of energy in crowdfunding, and this month it felt pretty easy to come up with at least ten to cover. More of an issue were some of the campaigns themselves. Did you know I actually opened a campaign, started to write about it, and then had to actually Google the name of the game to find out that the campaign was for a fourth edition of the game, because that hadn’t been written anywhere in the campaign’s text? Don’t do that! Don’t assume we know anything about your game, because the fact is that unless your name is Mike Pondsmith or Mr. Paizo (or Gary Gygax, I suppose), we don’t! No one knows anything about your game! Anyways. There are some solidly interesting campaigns here, both from your larger studios and some completely new outfits. Let’s check them out.

Major Campaigns

There are a couple major campaigns this month, both on BackerKit and both for emerging properties. First off is Onyx Path with its JRPG-inspired At The Gates. This is new territory for Onyx Path which immediately piques my interest both because of some of the weird and wonderful original games they’ve put out (Pugmire, anyone?) as well as my complete fatigue with pretty much every ongoing game line they’re supporting. While Onyx Path supports games with rich settings and At The Gates is definitely banking on its built-in setting, I can’t help but think this is fast-following the mechanically more interesting Fabula Ultima. At only about 1000 backers, it looks like I’m not the only one having this thought.

Next up is Rowan, Rook and Decard with Hollows. With the tagline ‘TTRPG Boss Fights Done Right’, Hollows is a tactical game designed around combat builds and mechanically rich fights. While this seems quite different from Spire and Heart, arguably RRD’s biggest properties, Hollows is following in the design legacy of RRD’s earlier game Unbound. It’s also aiming squarely at the sparsely populated tactical RPG segment, and in a gaslamp fantasy setting to boot. Hollows has some nice momentum here at the start of its campaign, and I’m going to think very hard about throwing some money at this one.

As a final note, Kickstarter has had relatively few high-profile campaigns this month, and none that I could see for original properties. However, Free League is campaigning a supplement for the Blade Runner RPG, Replicant Rebellion. While not a typical fit for a Crowdfunding Carnival, this expansive supplement provides more material for playing Replicants and (more importantly to some) not playing the cops. Could be worth checking out if your issue with Blade Runner was more thematic than mechanical.

Indies of Note

Lots of indie campaigns to talk about this month. First, we continue to rack up hits on the list of ‘Mork Borg hacks I really didn’t expect’. Animort combines Mork Borg with old-school cartoons, even having the audacity to put ‘Steamborg Willie’ in the subtitle. In an interesting twist, the game borrows a mechanic from the original Toon in that characters can’t die. Of course here, not being able to die means not being able to escape… There is no official Cuphead RPG, but Animort might be exactly what you’d use for a Cuphead RPG.

Next up is Revolt! Revolt is interesting in that it’s a board game framed somewhat like an RPG; there are many board games that misuse the term ‘RPG’ but I think Revolt is actually aiming for an RPG-like experience (of course whether the game succeeds at that is an open question). Players take on different factions trying to overthrow a monarch who must travel the map and gather support, with card draws determining exactly how things go. The game does blur the line between RPG and board game effectively, which at least makes this worth checking out; there are also some pretty interesting digital tools including a Miro board to help make digital play a possibility.

Kids in Capes sounds like Kids on Bikes, and there’s good reason for that; the game is a spin-off of the original, bringing the original designers back to add some super-powered flavor. While the concept of Kids in Capes walks right up to the line of the conceit of Masks, I think it manages to walk alongside it by maintaining the emphasis on the small town adventure from the original game; this is also a key opportunity given that RAW Masks takes place in Halcyon City, with all the urban tropes that implies. This is certainly an interesting twist off of Kids on Bikes, and I’m even more intrigued by the original designers being the ones developing it.

The next campaign on the list is, from my skewed vision, the Shadowrun-ification of Captain Planet. Overgrowth is a game of “deranged nature wizards fighting corporate warlocks”, which does essentially give us the thematic thrust of captain planet plus a lot of weird magic. The system for this game is called the BadAss system and was first used for the designers’ game Splatter League. Splatter League had a Kickstarter with all of 43 backers, so that may be why you never heard of it…but apparently the system is solid enough for another go. The emphasis on wacky ‘terminally player character’ solutions is intriguing to me, and it sounds like they’ve nailed down the mechanics and scope of the game that may give Overgrowth a fighting chance.

When you hear that a game is about delving into a psychically instantiated dungeon, your first thought is a diceless system originally designed for social and community-focused games, right? Me neither. However, what makes Psychodungeon potentially interesting is a semi-adversarial twist on the “GM-full” approach where you have one player who is the Client (the person who instantiated the psychic nightmare dungeon) and one who is the Dungeon. With these players providing a little more push-pull to the token economy, the game has the potential to be very intriguing indeed. Much like Wanderhome (which is referenced in the campaign), though, the game will need great writing and an utterly tight gameplay loop to actually pull this off.

In 2023 the first of The Hardy Boys mystery novels entered the public domain; at this point six of the books have so entered and two more will enter next year. Someone has jumped on this to make an official Hardy Boys RPG. Like many campaigns this one is a little thin, though Sixpence Games has some degree of experience so I think this could be executed decently. However, the draw here is obviously the “license” and an attempt to push into the highly uneven mystery RPG genre with a known brand. It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes; only the original stories are in the public domain, and the first arc of books saw heavy revision starting in 1959. Beyond that, even if the series continued to 2005, it is certainly a vintage property; I’m interested to see how adventure stories from 1927 and 28 are translated into a modern RPG context nearly 100 years later.

Last but not least, we have The Island of Doctor Moreau. We saw a bit of inside scoop regarding the game from Ulysses Duckler himself in Sabrina’s earlier interview, but this is the first time I’ve looked at it in depth. Based on the original H.G. Wells novel (in part), the game casts one player into a GM-like role as Dr. Moreau (or more than one, or potentially none), and the others into a mix of newly created island denizens or one of the 44 pre-determined cast members, originally developed as part of a forum roleplay, who make up the islands’ inhabitants. Like Duckler’s earlier game To Change, the mechanics are primarily driven by card draws, using deck exhaustion as an overarching pacing mechanic. Although I was not a participant in or even aware of the roleplay that served as an inspiration for this game, the connection to ‘messy forum roleplaying’ is immediately apparent to me (I was not on GAIA Online but two members of my high school gaming group were, and I heard stories). From my more distant perspective, I’m interested in seeing another take on the fixed ensemble roleplaying game, a genre which currently only has one solid example (Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast) out in the world.

Five Year Retrospective

June of 2019 was a heavyweight month for crowdfunding. First off, the month had no failures and no ghosts…every project made it through funding and on to fulfillment. While this may have meant there were fewer risks taken on smaller, newer projects, it’s easy to see why when you look at the headliners. June of 2019 was the month Mork Borg campaigned. In 2019 this was just a fancy looking book from a group of scrappy Swedes, and it’s since exploded into a sensation. Also this month we had Hard Wired Island and Hearts of Wulin, two indie games that went on to no small degree of acclaim and sales, although neither quite had the staying power of the black and yellow they were campaigning besides. There were some other victories as well; Weirding Woods sold very well on its own website and has been supported by a number of supplements, while both Dark Trails and Golgotha built up audiences of their own as well. Most of these games are still for sale on one platform or another; sadly The Deal appears to have been removed from DriveThruRPG and isn’t actively available on the Broken Ruler Games site either. Even so, all in all this has been a high point in 2019 so far; it’s always fun to go back and see a veritable phenomena start to form before we quite knew what it was.

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Almost summer here at the Cannibal Halfling headquarters, and it looks like plenty of designers are sheltering in the AC to bang out another game. Any campaigns you think are worth noting besides these? Let us know in the comments! Any crowdfunding platforms doing something worth a damn besides Backerkit and Kickstarter? I mean, I checked, but let us know in the comments! Otherwise, pledge some campaigns, play some games, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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