Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December of 2024! I’ll be honest, one of the best things about this year right now is that it’s almost over. It’s been eventful, perhaps too eventful, here in 2024, but lo and behold we’re back into another holiday season, and that means that there’s a lull in crowdfunding. It’s not a complete lull; there’s still some solid campaigns out there, including a few big ones and even the tail end of a major event. That said, seven campaigns is a low watermark, and that’s even after poking around on the hanger-on crowdfunding sites. Even so, there are some gems here. We have journaling games, games in Scots, and even an entire month of Mothership. So let’s check out what’s in store.

Major Campaigns

First off in major campaigns is less of a single campaign and more of an event; over on Backerkit it’s Mothership Month, and will be for another 7 days. Mothership Month is organized by Mothership publisher Tuesday Knight Games, and features their first-party supplement Wages of Sin braced by twenty different third-party campaigns. The event is also pushing on Backerkit’s cross-collab functionality; in addition to five cross-collab pairs among the 21 campaigns, Tuesday Knight Games is also putting up another level of reward, sending ‘Supply Pods’ to backers for backing five projects at the physical level.

Next on the major list is a throwback, an old game campaigning a somewhat rare 40th Anniversary Edition. Cryptozoic Entertainment is campaigning a reprint of the first two editions of Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes, and not just the core games. A wide swathe of first and second edition supplements and modules are available here, as well as Mayfair’s stripped-down Batman RPG. It is worth noting, though, that this is a reprint. As has happened in the past with other licensed RPGs, Cryptozoic has gotten the rights to reprint the Mayfair catalogue, but do not have the rights to DC characters and cannot revise or expand the release in any way. That means no PDFs, even. Still, if you are a collector or have fond memories of the DC Heroes game, this is likely going to be your only chance to score as much of the game line as features in this campaign.

The last major campaign of the month comes from Shadowrun Publisher Catalyst Game Labs, and it’s a big, licensed doozy. Catalyst is campaigning an official Voltron RPG, with all of the mecha tchotchkes that implies (although, sadly, no equivalent of the Zordon Dice Tower). The game as described in the campaign seems rather Savage Worlds-like, with attributes and skills represented by a die type from d4 to d12. It will be interesting to see how this sort of system plays out, but the details given in the campaign are quite sparse on how the game scales up and down between characters, giant robots, and forming Voltron. Still, not like the stewards of Shadowrun have anything to worry about when it comes to designing for scalability and game balance…right?

Indies of Note

First off is a small game from Gavriel Quiroga, designer of Warpland, Neurocity, and others. Lords of Death and Illusion is a game of ‘powerful sorcerers battling each other’, and although it’s self-contained there are also mechanics for Troika and Mork Borg, in addition to Quiroga’s earlier games Warpland and Hell Night. Lords of Death and Illusion is short but sweet, and the aesthetics make me think ‘Gavriel Quiroga presents: Mork Borg’ which is both not giving the game’s themes enough credit but is also cool as hell.

Coming in right on time for a particular movie adaptation is The Lost Chronicles of Oz, an OSR game and setting based on Cairn and Brighter Worlds. Now, the thing about public domain settings is anyone can make adaptations of them, and I had to stop a minute and look at this campaign as it vaguely resembles Andrew Kolb’s Oz, a 5e-compatible setting released a few years ago. To be fair, a lot of the aesthetics in both cases are due to going back to the source, namely L. Frank Baum, and I can’t fault any aspiring Ozian for doing that. Still, even with a different mechanical throughline I can’t help but wonder if this game is dipping its pen in the same well one too many times. The mechanics and intent of the game are clearly different, so I’d still say that Lost Chronicles is worth checking out, even if it’s going to have to work a lot harder to bring something new to the setting.

Next up is Endling, a solo journaling game that employs a tarot deck. That sentence is describing more and more games in the mid-2020s, but Endling’s concept hooked me. You’re the last human alive. You are the Endling. The game covers the journey you make from your bunker in the Arctic Circle south, and in addition to Tarot-driven prompts you have to make a path between your bunker and your destination while managing resources: Food, Fuel, Gear, and Will. As much as the journaling game is falling into a bit of a pattern, if the writing nails the mood of desolation implied by the storyline then Endling could be truly excellent.

Another interesting little game being campaigned this month is The Widds. The game is a story about being lost in the woods, but it’s more about the found family formed between the four characters: a prince or princess, an animal friend, a forester, and a grandparent. The game is more strictly a narrative game than anything else, with a consistent structure for telling the stories about being lost in the woods. Another interesting thing about this game is that it’s written in both Scots and English, and as the designer is a language scientist this keys into both the game and the folklore it was inspired by. The Widds is a small, specific game, but has something for players interested in language, folklore, and freeform gaming.

Five Year Retrospective

Coming in slightly below the benchmark of ten campaigns, December of 2019 was also a fairly slow month in crowdfunding. Out of the nine campaigns covered, two failed to fund, but the remaining seven had some interesting titles. GiantLands, an attempt at writing an old-school D&D-alike by two classic designers, fell into more than a little controversy and then released to little fanfare as the game, it turned out, wasn’t that good. On the complete other side of the coin was Electric Bastionland, a game that mildly interested me during crowdfunding and then got its hooks in me after I grabbed a copy. Somewhere in the middle were releases by two indie darlings, Frasier Simons’ Retropunk and Nathan D. Paoletta’s One More Thing. Both of these games released and charmed their respective audiences, but you don’t hear that much about them (or their designers) these days.

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The year is wrapping up, and crowdfunding is, for now at least, going a little quiet. In the leadup to the holidays even the designers need a break, and it’s not like any of these campaigns will fulfill in time for Christmas, is it? I hope you’ve enjoyed this year of crowdfunding and crowdfunding retrospectives. It’s hard to say what 2025 will bring but I’ll be here for it, sifting through campaigns and looking for those diamonds in the rough. From all of us at Cannibal Halfling Gaming, have happy holidays and a happy new year, and come back here in 2025 for the next Crowdfunding Carnival!

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