Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re firmly out of con season and we’re out from under the shadow of Wizards of the Coast trying to release a book. More broadly it seems that the rush to be the next d20 has also abated, which has meant more and more interesting campaigns this month! This was a very full crop with new campaigns shooting in almost by the hour as I was trying to write this thing. That also means there are a few solid campaigns out there I wasn’t able to get to; I’m both sorry I’m not able to cover everything but also glad I didn’t have much dross to read through to get up to ten campaigns this month. We’ll start with a dizzying four different major campaigns, representing The Gauntlet, Renegade Game Studios, Onyx Path, and a Youtube channel.

Major Campaigns

A few big things are happening this month! First, none other than Renegade Game Studios is campaigning the official Welcome to Night Vale RPG using their Essence20 system. If you’re wondering how d20 mechanics built for Hasbro toy commercials cartoon series and a lot of combat will translate to a spooky narrative podcast…I am too. The campaign is mum to any mechanics changes, save for ‘one unique skill’ called Weird. We also don’t know if this game will have rules for getting tetanus.

In perhaps more intriguing news, indie game collective par excellence The Gauntlet is campaigning The Between, a Victorian monster-hunting game built off of the same fork of PbtA as their sleeper hit Brindlewood Bay. While Brindlewood Bay hit just right for fans of Murder, She Wrote, the theming of The Between is more likely to resonate with a wider gaming audience. And resonate it has; the campaign is running comfortably in the six figures, reinforcing its place in the ‘major campaigns’ section.

Another bit of intrigue among our major campaigns is coming from Onyx Path Publishing with their new game Curseborne. This one is interesting, especially if you’re a longtime World of Darkness fan. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Hunter, they all theoretically took place in the same world. That said, the games were balanced so differently, so self-contained, that attempting to mix the lines usually ended poorly. Curseborne isn’t explicitly a World of Darkness game, but it takes place in a world that sounds very similar, using the most recent version of Storypath, and has very similar character archetypes. It is designed to be, for lack of a better term, World of Darkness crossplay. There are vampires, there are werewolves, there are demons, and in theory you can play them all in a mixed party. It is fascinating that Onyx Path is low-key admitting that a crossplay system needed to be designed from the ground up, but I won’t look this gift horse in the mouth. This could well be the trad alternative to Urban Shadows; let’s hope Onyx Path fulfills it a bit faster.

Last of the major campaigns this month is a relative unknown blasting out of the gate with a $250,000 initial fund thanks to the designer’s Youtube channel. Broken Empires is the brainchild of Trevor Devall, creator of the ‘Me, Myself, and Die’ Youtube channel, and he’s following in the footsteps of The Dungeon Coach by leveraging his followers to make a splash on Kickstarter. Like DC20, though, Broken Empires has all the hallmarks of a fantasy heartbreaker. Trope-driven fantasy setting? Check. Derivation from an existing system that isn’t explicitly mentioned in the campaign? Check. Invention of a new category of RPG to distinguish the game from its direct predecessors? You know it’s a check. That all said, I am still interested in this game. Pull all the content creator BS aside, and this could be the next generation d100 game that the hobby is looking for. Some of the ideas listed here are really interesting, like the player-driven social mechanics (triggering skills like how Moves are triggered in PbtA) and rich single-roll resolution. It has all the hallmarks of a heartbreaker overpromise, but I want it to work; that in fact may be the biggest thing that makes it a heartbreaker in the end. I’ll be watching this one; expect a review if it comes out.

Indies of Note

We’ll start here with a new entry from a veteran designer. Spencer Campbell is perhaps best known for his work on LUMEN, and his new game LOOT uses the most recent iteration of the LUMEN mechanics. LOOT is built on emulating ‘looter shooters’ which means a focus on tactical combat and of course lots of different loot items to pick up and boost your character with. One interesting thing is that the mechanics are diceless: The tactical elements of the game are expressed via a 6×6 grid; instead of randomness the game plays out through positioning and resource management. Spencer has been pushing out games a bit under the radar for some time now, but LOOT is as good a campaign as any to check out his neat approach to tactics and genre emulation.

This next game has a concept that I’m surprised I haven’t seen before: let’s use the gory bombast of Mork Borg for a horror movie RPG. Chainsaw is taking Mork Borg and turning it towards slasher films. The stylistic elements align perfectly, though the new mechanics both intrigue and worry me. A fear mechanic makes perfect sense for the genre but risks becoming a cavalcade of checks, and dismemberment mechanics are also a potential bog-down unless down with more style than substance (i.e. don’t add hit locations). There are more mechanics and I think they make sense, but I also worry that perhaps the designer needs to go play a bit more Mork Borg. Still, the style is perfect, the art is fantastic, and this is exactly the kind of tropey I can get behind.

The next campaign to check out is a Forged in the Dark game, but that doesn’t really tell the full story of what’s going on. Gold Teeth is coming to us from two designers who started in the digital world; Jim Rossignol in particular is one of the founders of gaming review site Rock Paper Shotgun. Gold Teeth is a game of piracy, but even that doesn’t tell the full story of what’s going on; this is a game with its tongue firmly in its cheek but also full of cosmic horror. Yes, those two things are both true. The tagline which almost whisked my money away the moment I read it was “Monty Python’s Master and Commander as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch”. Now piracy is a great platform for Forged in the Dark, you can see similar shipborne antics (albeit in a different genre) in Scum and Villainy. What ties this together for me, even from just the campaign, is the writing. Pirate FitD isn’t a stretch, nor is Lovecraftian Pirate FitD, but the voice of these designers comes through in the campaign and makes me excited to see what they produce.

Another interesting title from this month is Tarotweaver, and in case the title didn’t give it away this is a Tarot-based ruleset. The core mechanics don’t utilize the whole of the deck, instead using card draws as a substitute for dice and looking for numbers less than or equal to the character’s Aspect score. The Aspects are based on the four suits of a Tarot deck (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), and drawing a card which is less than the score but of a different suit results in a success with a complication. There are also hand mechanics that come into play for skills the character has training in, resulting in a fairly strong use of card mechanics. I’m curious as to the role of the major arcana here, though some GM-facing tools using the major arcana are noted. Overall, this looks like it could be a really solid card-based game.

Also working with cards we have One Last Fight coming from Hit Point Press. One Last Fight is, as opposed to a playing card or tarot game, a custom deck intended to create a (their words, not mine) ‘roguelike’ experience of adventurers fighting their final nemesis. The cards provide both the challenges that lead up to the final boss as well as key storytelling moments, and the game ends either with the nemesis defeated for good or the players all facing death as they reach the end of the Challenge Deck. One Last Fight could be a really interesting take on the limited run game; I’m not sold on calling it a ‘roguelike’ but I do think the campaign is worth supporting.

Finally, an honorable mention that’s worth noting thanks to the impact its previous editions have had on many a GM. Inkwell Ideas is campaigning a new version of Worldographer, itself the updated version of their original Hexographer. Hexographer has been a fantastic map-making tool for years, and the shareware version was great for cash-strapped GMs (me in college). Now, though, the team is looking to improve the software while still enabling it to be a one-time purchase. Though the package is a bit expensive, the economics of writing software for the RPG hobby is arguably worse than the economics of actually writing RPGs; Inkwell Ideas has been providing hexes by the thousands for years now, and they provide tools that are worthy of support.

Five Year Retrospective

Looking back, October 2019 is one of the wildest months I’ve covered. Heart, Root, Under Hollow Hills, and Agon all campaigned in the same month. Then add in SLA Industries 2e, Haunted West, and a Robert Schwalb game (Punkapocalyptic) and the hit rate is just so incredibly high. I’m not personally enthused about all of them (as many of you have already read about Root), but there’s no doubt that those games, especially the first four, are all tremendously successful. Months like this are what you want to see, times when so many of the games you find personally interesting all hit it out of the park at once.

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October continues to be a good month! We’ve got tactics, we’ve got tarot, we’ve got an ill-considered podcast adaptation, we even have a fantasy heartbreaker that just might break my heart with what it’s promising. It’s a good time to be a Kickstarter aficionado and, with all of these interesting games poking their heads out after the collective hangover of the D&D 2024 release, it may even be a good time to be a gamer as well. Play some games, pledge some campaigns, and I’ll see you for next month’s installment of Crowdfunding Carnival!

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