Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! We’re steaming right out of the gate with some big ones this month! There’s an old stalwart getting a new edition, and the next multi-million dollar licensed…thing. Additionally, though, we have some really interesting games, new twists on old systems, small-scale innovations, and even some neat translations. Let’s start with the big stuff though; a new license, an old license, and a new lease on life for the old house system of West End Games.

Major Campaigns

A couple big campaigns to discuss this month. First, Gallant Knight Games is getting kicked up to the big leagues because they’re updating the West End Games D6 System. Perhaps best known as the mechanics behind the original Star Wars RPG, D6 is getting the universal treatment, collecting mechanics from all sorts of D6 games over the years and compiling them into a definitive ‘Second Edition’. Now a new generic version of an 80s/90s workhorse isn’t going to get everyone excited, but I’m personally looking forward to this. Alongside the new edition of BRP, we’re looking at some of the greatest hits of the last 40 years being made accessible to a new audience of players and designers.

Speaking of new audience…There is a campaign for an official Neopets RPG. Now, I wasn’t ever into Neopets, but as the game originally released in 1999 I am exactly the age (okay, maybe slightly older) targeted by the game and its bold new “online play” thing. I have no idea how this is going to turn out and, as the campaign mentions 55 (!) different playable species, it may be more of a trainwreck you can’t look away from. Still, as far as big weird licenses from the 90s and 2000s go, this one’s up there.

We also have a behemoth, this year’s massive six (or seven?) figure campaign. Brandon Sanderson has assembled a dizzying setting in the form of the Cosmere, and now Brotherwise Games is turning the Cosmere into a TTRPG. The initial campaign is focused around the Stormlight Archive, but an expansion into Mistborn is coming (sorry, Crafty Games). The game is going to have three hardcover books, d20-based mechanics, and “purpose-built innovations” which are all clearly lifted from other games. Sigh. Although I immediately make comparisons to Avatar Legends, the Cosmere TTRPG has one thing that will increase its reach and staying power: In the campaign it states that each book will have new canonical setting information, forcing a Cosmere completionist to buy the full RPG line. …yay?

Indies of Note

Plenty of indies to peruse; this month we apparently let off the pre-GenCon steam because it was hard to keep the total down to ten! First off we have Our Golden Age. Our Golden Age is a sequel to the award-winning Ultraviolet Grasslands. Like Ultraviolet Grasslands, it is a standalone game, but also like Ultraviolet Grasslands, the setting is primary. In Our Golden Age the setting is the Circle Sea, promising a somewhat more “civilized” setting than Ultraviolet Grasslands (the campaign’s word, not mine). In addition to Our Golden Age, the campaign includes the Vastlands Guidebook, which pulls out the mechanics developed by designer Luka Rejec into its own standalone production. Ultraviolet Grasslands was an intense project that was hard to put your thumb on when it was first campaigned. For me, though, with the help of some of the press the game has received (and some time reading Gene Wolfe), I think I want to dive in. Of course, you can add a copy of Ultraviolet Grasslands to your pledge if you missed it the first time.

Next up we have The Entropic Isle, a hack of Cypher System created by Cypher Unlimited. While one of the key inspirations for The Entropic Isle is Gods of the Fall, a first-party Cypher System setting, the other is Mork Borg, known for being deadly, dark, and d20. What makes this hack interesting is there is concerted effort taken to move away from the assumed power and narrative control levels of Cypher and Numenera to create something “deadlier”. Will it work? Quite possibly. Is a deadlier Cypher a new and interesting direction for the ruleset? Well…quite possibly. I personally have not read many third-party Cypher System games, and I’m interested to see what the system looks like when the writing and design isn’t coming from the Monte Cook Games nerve center. 

Next we have Ion Heart. Ion Heart is mecha…but perhaps not in the way you’d think. The baseline here is “cozy solo mech game”, and it’s about your character and their mech best friend exploring the galaxy and discovering new planets and people. While the designers name a number of inspirations including The Iron Giant (the one I saw immediately) and Becky Chambers (both the Wayfarers series and Monk and Robot), another one I think is going to play into how this game ends up working is Wanderhome. The setting of the game is, like Wanderhome, about traveling after a war, after a great calamity that’s no longer occurring. I think the writing and theming sounds great, the question is always about the mechanics. The game is built around settlements, narrative ‘home bases’ where stories start, and story circuits, which provide events that lead up to a finale. Between this and some mech upgrade mechanics it does sound like there’s some interesting stuff to engage with, but like any other game, it’ll all come down to execution.

Speaking of execution, our next game has some really intriguing ideas, in a package that needs six players. Before the Flood is a map-making game which is completely asymmetric; all six of the roles in the game do completely different things. Land may be responsible for adding geographic features,while Nature creates landmarks. Weal creates good fortunes, Woe creates ill fortunes. All six players come together to tell the story of a world that will be destroyed; the eponymous flood is coming. To me, the ritualistic mechanics that flow back and forth between players are intriguing, and build up the structure and constraint which are key prerequisites for an excellent GM-less game.

The next game, Sparkle Stars, is a rules-light magical girl RPG. Using a trading card-based system, the game casts players both as characters in a magical girl show as well as producers of that show, fighting for ratings. The card mechanics are interesting, because while the cards get played kind of like dice (play the highest card to drive the scene), the meta-mechanic is a trick-taking game, where you need to meet a bid of tricks in the correct suit in order to maintain your ratings. As far as using playing cards to their full potential, this is really cool. There’s something else cool about this: Sparkle Stars was originally designed in Japanese, and the campaigning publisher, Silver Vine Publishing, is aiming to translate it into English. Finding and translating indie games from another country is such an incredible way to highlight different ways of thinking about RPGs from other gaming cultures, and I’m really happy I found this one.

I’ve found another card-based RPG, though this one is “card-based” in a somewhat different way. Threadcutters casts the players as occult assassins traveling across four worlds: Coins, Cups, Swords, and Wands. Yup, this is a tarot-based setting, and there are, unsurprisingly, roles for tarot cards to play. The game is broken down into two phases: First, there are diceless mechanics which are used to describe the setup and positioning of the assassination. Then, the actual hit is modeled using a tactical combat system. The game will include sixteen different ‘hits’, I’d be interested to see how extensible the mechanics are. While Threadcutters is a small project, a collaboration between just two people, the setting and the mechanics have enough new and interesting ideas in them that I want to see this cross the finish line.

Taking a very different approach to assassinations is Hunt(er/ed). The game is a two player game where one player is the Hunter and the other the Monster. Both players are trying to roll doubles first, moving closer to their opponent. Driven by prompts, the game aims to not only see who wins the hunt, but also what they actually do when they do so. Like other games this month, this is a simple premise and simple mechanics that will succeed or fail on the strength of its writing.

Five Year Retrospective

August 2019 was the center of ‘Break Kickstarter’, a movement aiming to use the platform in ways that were untested and unexpected. That may be one of the reasons that a staggering one third of the campaigns covered in the original article failed to fund. Despite that, a couple of the ‘Break Kickstarter’ campaigns did yield some truly interesting successes. World Champ Game Co’s Brain Trust Kickstarter was built on supporting a podcast where WCGCo designers Will Jobst and Adam Vass would design a game live week by week. This eventually evolved into A Guide to Casting Phantoms in the Revolution, which is still available from WCGCo and sold out of the physical edition. Similarly, Nathan D. Paoletta’s Color Trio campaign, which involved pledging towards three games that didn’t exist and therefore breaking all existing best practices regarding crowdfunding, actually did deliver all three games promised (it did take four years, but given the ambition of the project I’ll forgive that this time). Also climbing up the ladder this month were two much less surprising games: The second edition of Fiasco was a pretty easy slam dunk (and was also executed very well), and the Atlas Games vehicle Magical Kitties Save the Day was an attempt at an underserved market by a high-profile company which unsurprisingly did well.

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I’m pretty excited about what I found this month. There are more small games that truly look interesting, and also some big ones that continue to push the hobby in really interesting directions. And while I’m not super jazzed by yet another multimillion dollar licensed…thing, the fact is that all of these licenses bring fresh blood into the hobby, and that is ultimately more of a good thing than derivative d20 mechanics are a bad thing. Any campaigns I missed? Want to declare your love for the Cosmere and tell me I’m wrong? Go ahead and do it (respectfully) in the comments! For now, though, go make some pledges, play some games, and I’ll see you back here in a month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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