Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for November! We’re heading into the end of the year, and for multiple reasons it’s a great time to put the real world to the side and check out some games! November was a pretty big month; nearly 20 campaigns passed my deck and needed to be narrowed down to make this article. So though I say it every month, it’s certainly true this month: While every campaign I cover here is solid and interesting, many of the ones I didn’t have space for are too. We’ve also seen another big month for Backerkit, with a bumper crop of intriguing games making the upstart crowdfunding platform an equally (if not perhaps more) intriguing place to look for new games as Kickstarter.

We’re ready to start, though! We’re going to cover a few major campaigns by some of the big guys, though we really only have one (maybe two) standalone games to talk about. Then, we have a good number of indies. Cross-collabs, solo games and tarot mechanics await you below.

Major Campaigns

Not a huge month on the major campaigns front, but a few to note. First, the one major campaign for an original game is being headed by Sine Nomine Publishing himself, Kevin Crawford. Ashes Without Number is kinda sorta a new edition of Crawford’s game Other Dust, but given that Crawford is cutting off the edition throughline as well as putting in work to modernize the game alongside other ‘Without Number’ titles, it still counts as new here. While the ‘Without Number’ series hews firmly to its d20 roots, Crawford’s sandbox gaming mission statement and experience running tight Kickstarter campaigns makes this one an easy recommendation for fans of old-school gaming and the post-apocalypse.

Two more major campaigns that aren’t quite original games, but are original game adjacent. Monte Cook games is campaigning The Darkest Woods, a system-agnostic horror campaign that follows in the footsteps of their earlier horror campaign The Darkest House. The campaign is distributed both in book format and a richer digital version as well. From a different horror angle, Free League is campaigning two supplements for Vaesen, Mythic Carpathia and City of My Nightmares; the first expands the game to central Europe and focuses on Prague, while the second is a standalone campaign set in Stockholm but adaptable to other European cities.

Last but not least, Atlas Games is straddling the line between a new edition and a reprint with Ars Magica Definitive Edition. The game is still, in essence, the pre-existing 5th edition, although ‘heavily expanded’. The new print edition does look gorgeous (with a gorgeous price tag accompanying it), but the other interesting note is that this reprint is accompanied by an Ars Magica Open License, essentially moving the rules text into Creative Commons. The campaign even has stretch goals (which, as it steams towards $700,000, have almost all been met) which include moving more and more existing Ars Magica supplements into the open license, even including a full Spanish translation. Come for the slipcase, stay for the emerging third party support.

Indies of Note

First off we have a couple campaigns doing something interesting; this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this but it did seem like a great time to highlight it. Confluence: The Living Archive is a sci-fantasy RPG focused on exploration and an ever-changing world. Fatebound is a magic school game…except it’s more of a magical military academy where witches train to become Fates, magical enforcers. These two campaigns, despite wildly different thematic content, are ‘Cross-Collab’ projects on Backerkit. Each project shows up in a sidebar on the other’s campaign page, and anyone who backs both projects at a certain level will receive an additional ‘Cross-Collab’ reward. From a Backerkit perspective I’m all for this; it provides yet another option for creators to engage with each other and share their efforts for a bigger total result. In terms of these two campaigns, though, I’m willing to admit I don’t get it. I think they’re both worth checking out, but the setting and the mechanics of both are so different I’m not sure how the ‘Cross-Collab’ is actually netting them more backers. Despite my skepticism, apparently it’s working; 72% of Fatebound backers also backed Confluence. Confluence is also doing better and doesn’t have the same numbers in reverse (20% of Confluence backers backed Fatebound), so the larger campaign appears to be uplifting the smaller one. Interesting stuff.

Next up we have, if such a subgenre exists, what sounds like a serious tearjerker of a game. The Time We Have is a two player game (from the same creator as Rom Com Drama Bomb – Ed.) where the players are brothers, playing the game on opposite sides of a literal door. One of the brothers has been bitten by a zombie, and there’s only so much time before they turn. While not the first game about inevitable death, this one seems to make the topic smaller, more intimate, and in that way oh so much heavier. This definitely fits in the category of a game that I’d have to be in a very specific frame of mind to play; even if I don’t end up playing it, though, I definitely think it should exist.

Unknown Worlds tickles a very specific interest for me: it’s a largely generic collaborative worldbuilding game. These two categories rarely mesh; systems and schemas like PbtA work the best when they’re framed around something specific. Of course, Unknown Worlds does have some specificity to it, the game is accompanied by Field Journals that build out three specific settings using the game. The details on how the game works are fairly light, but what few mechanics are detailed point to mostly traditional concepts. Even so, if Unknown Worlds can effectively enable a GM to drive collaborative worldbuilding within a schema of their own, outside of the provided setting, I’d be running it all the time.

Next, we’re howling at the moon with Rue from Ruin. Rue from Ruin is a solo RPG about being a werewolf, but it adds a nice shot of mechanical heft beyond the typical prompt-driven experiences. The game starts you very shortly after having been turned into a werewolf, and sees you learn more both about your wolf side as well as the nature of your betrayer, the person who led you to turn. Both the really solid in-built plot and the promise of some robustness to help you game it out (the character sheet sample in the campaign looks fantastic) make this a solo game to watch in my view.

While I’m excited about the mechanics in Rue from Ruin, that doesn’t mean I’m against a solid journaling game. Storeys is a horror journaling game with a neat and tight conceit: You’re uncovering the horror that lies within your own apartment building. As someone who has been involved in a number of multi-unit living situations, this immediately jumps out at me as dripping with potential. Now you only need to figure out what that dripping is coming from the walls… Horror journaling about apartment living could be cathartic or could give you the jibblies in the comfort of your own walk-up, and I’m here for it either way.

Last but not least is A Fool’s Errand. Another tarot-based game (after Fatebound), A Fool’s Errand mixes science fantasy with the occult and a pantheon of jealous gods to produce something unique and not just a little Troika-like. Players co-create the previous apocalypse of the world, and as you poke the bear that is the gods of the Major Arcana, you may also get to create the next one. Given the list of influences and the intrigue of the world, I’m hoping this is a tarot-driven ruleset that draws me in.

Five Year Retrospective

While it’s not quite a match for last month, November 2019 continued the trend of having a significant number of successful but also influential campaigns kick off. Two major campaigns, Vaesen and Kingdoms and Warfare, both cleaned up, and Vaesen is still campaigning supplements, as noted above. Then, from smaller but still mighty designers, both Voidheart Symphony and Doikayt had strong impacts on gamers when they came out. The month wasn’t as bowl-you-over incredible as October; there were three canceled/unsuccessful campaigns, and a number of games that, as is typical, didn’t make much of an impact. In terms of truly poor outcomes, though, there weren’t any. Every game either failed to fund or was funded and delivered, and no ghosts or campaign fails is a very good thing.

As we’re moving into the end of the year, the stats are coming into view. The ghost rate is down from nearly 9% to 5%, which also means the total delivery rate is up too, at nearly 84% from nearly 79%. Interestingly, the fund rate and the success rate (although measuring success is still a difficult thing to do) have remained fairly constant, which says to me that the sampling methodology is fairly consistent through time. On the plus side, though, the success rate for non-major publishers (majors succeed at about 100%, not surprising) has gone up by six percentage points, meaning that of the campaigns I highlight, I’ve found incrementally more indie designers who resonate with audiences and have their game take off. Can we draw solid conclusions from these numbers? Not really. My project screening may have been changing but so was Kickstarter, so it’s hard to attribute these changes to any one thing. And besides, once we wrap up this year the next year in the retrospective is 2020…and we all know that’s going to get weird.

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This week especially, it’s important to remember to take care of yourself. Ultimately, no matter what happens, we’re still here, and tomorrow is still coming. I may be saying this to myself as much as to any of you. Engage with the people you love and the things you love, and make sure you have the energy you need for the road ahead. Read some campaigns, make some pledges, and play some games! I’ll be here next month, same as any of us, and I’ll be ready with some more campaign coverage in the next Crowdfunding Carnival.

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