Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! September is a classically thin month, sitting in the shadow of GenCon. It was so thin five years ago that I actually skipped wonking about it to write an editorial. This year, though, is a bit better. Seven campaigns is still thin, yes, but these are all good ones. Also, interestingly, this may mark one of the first months where the majority of campaigns aren’t from Kickstarter! That’s right, four out of seven campaigns are from Backerkit this month. Backerkit was the best contender for second place pretty much since they started doing crowdfunding, but this may indicate a sea change.

Sea change or not, we’ve got some solid games this month. Solo games, Year Zero, and a generic Onyx Path game are all waiting for you to peruse and perhaps pledge. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.

Major Campaigns

One major campaign this month, but it’s a pretty fascinating one. Normally I don’t get terribly excited about campaigns from Onyx Path, given that most of their development efforts are focused on their existing World of Darkness and Exalted properties. This month’s campaign, though, is a bit special. Onyx Path is campaigning Storypath Ultra, a generic version of their Storypath house system that powers Chronicles of Darkness and Exalted. I am pretty excited about this; Storypath Ultra is intended to make customization easy but also make use of the potential for complexity that can be seen in games like Exalted. If executed well, this could be Onyx Path’s answer to Genesys (and potentially be supported better).

Indies of Note

For the indies this month we’re starting off with a sequel. Tim Hutchings has attempted to make lightning strike twice with So You’ve Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire, a sequel in spirit to his solo RPG hit that lends its name to this new game. As implied by the title, your character crosses paths with a vampire during their life, and it’s up to the prompts and the mechanics of the game whether you discover the truth about them and how that ends up affecting you. It is in fact a very different narrative from Thousand Year Old Vampire, and the two games stand apart from each other. That said, if you were a fan of the first one you should definitely check this one out.

Next up from Kids in the Attic we have Sleepy Hollow, a game focused around the folklore of 19th century New England. I need to point out to the designers that Sleepy Hollow is in New York, but aside from that minor quibble this looks like it could be an intriguing game. Sleepy Hollow is built off of the Year Zero Engine, and if I was a betting man I’d say they’ve set up the mechanics much like Vaesen, a first party title with some thematic overlap. I’ve been excitedly looking for third-party Year Zero content, and Sleepy Hollow looks like it both hews close enough to existing games that we know the formula works and also adds a new twist. That the twist is the exact sort of American macabre that runs in my veins is even better.

Bit of an honorable mention here, but worth noting. Jack Harrison (or Mousehole Press) is campaigning the Lost & Found Collection, a reprint of three zine-sized games, Artefact, Bucket of Bolts, and Counterpart. All three of the games see you creating the history of a significant item: Artefact follows a weapon, Bucket of Bolts a spaceship, and Counterpart a robot. You follow the people that come into possession of these items, and detail a significant event that occurs in that time. The Lost & Found games are both interesting solo experiences as well as useful prompts for inserting the relevant items into larger contexts within other games. Although this campaign is technically for a reprint, I’d still encourage anyone who hasn’t played one of the Lost & Found games before to check this out.

Another honorable mention here: Barbarians of Lemuria was only released ten years ago, but I’m still excited to bring the new Mythic Edition reprint some attention. Barbarians of Lemuria is a sword-and-sorcery game that uses its own 2d6-based system. Combine that with a fantasy post-apocalyptic setting and you have a winner that continues to show up in Reddit and forum recommendation lists. It was even turned into a generic game, Everywhen, which I quite liked when I reviewed it. The new reprint is technically not a rules update; instead the publisher of the French translation is reprinting the English edition as an omnibus including five adventures which were originally written for the French version. There are some minor corrections, but overall the biggest change is the upgrade from print-on-demand to an honest to goodness print run. If you’re already a fan or are just Lemuria-curious, this is a great time to get in.

Next up is a game that’s…well, it’s the weirdest Into the Odd hack I’ve seen so far. Miami 86 is a game that takes inspiration from Vice City as much as Miami Vice, and is about playing career criminals and dirty cops in the 80s. And, weird as it is, the mechanical bones really do seem to come from Into the Odd. If you read the one-page edition of the game available now, you see the same cut down d20 rules, same combat with no to-hit rolls, and same random tables. Technically the game is more directly based on Yochai Gal’s Cairn, but given the throughline there, seeing Into the Odd first is a matter of my personal familiarity. Anyway. Miami 86 is certainly an interesting use of a light OSR ruleset, but I think there’s some potential there for the right gamer.

In all honesty, the next game is a concept that I’ve been waiting to come around. Netcrawl is a cyberpunk RPG written using Dungeon Crawl Classics mechanics, but it’s not only the d20 that’s a throwback. Harkening back to William Gibson’s cyberpunk of the 80s, Netcrawl is a throwback game of conquering cyber-dungeons as VR hackers. That’s right: VR hacking done as a complete self-contained game, taking the netrunners from Cyberpunk 2020 and making them even more 80s. Netcrawl is the most complete attempt I’ve seen of diving into the original pre-Snow Crash cyberpunk aesthetic, and that makes it both very different than most cyberpunk RPGs you’ve heard of and certainly worth investigating.

Five Year Retrospective

September is often a thin month; this time around I needed an extra day to punch up my campaign list. Back in 2019, though, it was thinner still, and when I got to maybe 5 campaigns, of which I felt excited about one, I gave up, and instead wrote Why TTRPG Kickstarters Fail. The advice contained within the article is still relevant as ever, though things have changed a bit. For one thing, it was likely easier to make a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019; if you spent some time on your campaign and weren’t completely new to the RPG scene you could usually push past a reasonable funding goal. Now, though, is a bit different. The Kickstarter signal:noise ratio is weakening, and with social networking fragmenting, it’s harder to market to a large enough interested audience. There’s still a lot of potential in crowdfunding, even for someone just starting out…but compared to five years ago, it’s going to take more patience and more work.

While I didn’t do a roundup back in September of 2019, I did call out one campaign, Never Knows Best by Fraser Simons, perhaps best known for his cyberpunk PbtA game The Veil. Never Knows Best did successfully fulfill and did kind of disappear into the aether as well. Fraser himself has disappeared into the aether…while he’s had a solid track record of Kickstarter delivery that dropped off with his most recent, The Veil: Inheritance. Hopefully everything is going okay and we’ll see the third Veil installment eventually.

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September means post-GenCon doldrums, but there was some great stuff this month! Check out these campaigns, and keep watching both Kickstarter and Backerkit for new campaigns. Anything I missed? Intriguing upcoming campaigns? Comment here or reach out on email. Either way, I’ll see you all next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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