Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! The world outside is crazy, so come on in and take a gander at some quality, handpicked RPG campaigns. We’re seeing some solid activity from major players this month, albeit maybe too much activity from some. And then there are of course a number of fantastic indie campaigns, covering the fae, werewolves, kids with weird powers, and more. Check it out!

Major Campaigns

A couple major campaigns worth noting this month. First, Catalyst Game Labs (known best as the current publisher of Shadowrun) is campaigning an official Frostpunk RPG. If you haven’t heard of it, Frostpunk is a video game that involves managing a settlement built in a frozen arctic environment where heat is precious and leadership means tough decisions. The game’s setting is certainly interesting, and while the mechanics don’t directly lend themselves to a TTRPG, I’m interested to see if this particular combination works.

Secondly, major publisher Kobold Press is trying to add another original game to their quiver with Riverbank. Riverbank is a game of anthropomorphized animals and “cake and teatime”. The cozy vibes are backed up by a vaguely defined but “highly playable” (hopefully the designers are better than the copywriters, jeez) new game system. One interesting thing is a set of opposed attributes, Animality and Poetry, which might give a little more narrative structure to the game’s gentle themes. I’m not sure if Riverbank is going to be anything new, but if Kobold Press pulls this off it could be another entree into narrative gaming for the D&D crowd, and that’s a very good thing indeed.

Couple of other campaigns to note, though whether these are recommended is a tough one. Onyx Path is campaigning another Exalted Essence project, and Free League is campaigning another edition of Alien, strange considering how new the game is. While these are certainly campaigns from major publishers, they also aren’t supporting new games or seem particularly necessary. Let the rabid fans and other irresponsible spenders get these, and you can buy the books when they’re actually out…if they’re actually worthwhile.

Indies of Note

We’re starting off with a not-quite complete game, but an adventure collection that I actually find interesting. The Adventure and Hobbyist Annual 2025 is a collection of three “System-Adventurous” scenarios designed by RPG luminaries Epidiah Ravachol and Nathan D. Paoletta. By “system-adventurous”, the designers mean that the adventures are written to support different styles of play and have additional mechanics that allow them to work with many potential systems that are aligned to how you want to play them. What intrigues me is that the ‘how’ here is vast; think a scenario that can be played as cozy…or horror…or just straight-up action. I am completely intrigued by this idea, and want to see how they’re going to pull it off.

The next game takes ‘kids with superpowers’ in a completely different direction than, say, Masks, and I’m here for it. Extra Ordinary is a Belonging Outside Belonging game that puts the players in the shoes of kids with powers in a world that doesn’t know what to do with them. In addition to the typical range of playbooks (including some overlap with Masks in terms of concepts), the game also defines six Aspects of the world, which are potent ways to organize the conflicts that arise in the game: The Ordinary, the Extraordinary, the Danger, the Need, the System, and the Design. When running a game without dice, having these pressures and tensions laid out can help move things forward. Additionally, the game comes with two backdrops that provide worked examples of how this all comes together: The X-Subjects, where your characters are escaped experimental subjects, and Ridgecast Academy, where the characters are together in a school for the “gifted”. I think this is a really interesting look at a genre I’m familiar with, and can’t wait to check it out.

Next up is Woodlander, a game of anthropomorphized animals that is notably dissimilar from Riverbank above. Instead of cozy vibes, Woodlander is a game of adventure and wilderness exploration, though as is perhaps inevitable when it comes to playing talking animals, the game claims to balance ‘coziness and heroics’. There are a few interesting mechanical widgets here, including a tension mechanic that makes sure things keep happening as the characters explore. While the art is gorgeous the campaign doesn’t quite make the link between the gameplay loop and being talking animals, though there is at least mention to the fact that you’re all playing what appear to be talking rodents. Still, if the game is more Redwall than Root, it has a solid chance at success.

Every genre under the sun can exist in an RPG. Even ‘nuns with guns’. Sisterhood is a game of ‘nuns with guns’ fighting demons in a modern world gone awry. Armageddon is coming, brought on by the five horsemen of the apocalypse (the four you know, plus an additional one, Conquest), and it’s up to the Sisterhood to stop them. One neat thing about the system is the combat, which uses a game board made up of a cross and a pentagram clashing. Each sector of the board has a different maneuver, reminding me just slightly of Spellbound Kingdoms. While the setting is likely more creative than the mechanics, Sisterhood looks like it’ll be a holy good time.

The next game is dark fantasy, but what sets it apart is not the genre but how it does it. Sickest Witch is a game of witches, yes, but the magic system makes for a fascinating setup. The vast majority of your magic points in the system are shared among all witches in a pool called the Cauldron. So, you all have to work together on what magic to cast. That is interesting, but it doesn’t end there. Magic points are acquired by harvesting body parts, so there is a brutal weight to how you acquire all that power. Although I’m not necessarily into edgy for the sake of edgy, I think that a game like this that really forces you to think about things like power can be very interesting. There are some promised social network aspects of the game, I just hope they’re all separable lest the book become worthless when the Discord is inevitably shuttered two years from now.

Speaking of Dark Fantasy. Do you like the idea of Mork Borg, having a visual-heavy, art-driven dark fantasy RPG, but perhaps are not the biggest fan of the intense, high-contrast collage style of that particular game? You might enjoy Hellworld Earth. By designer Gavriel Quiroga, Hellworld Earth is also an intense, visually driven dark fantasy game, but the style is old-school black and white line art which, from the campaign, looks killer. The campaign is loose on mechanics details, but the game involves a group of scientists traipsing through the post-apocalypse on a mission to save humanity. The characters are pre-generated and the encounter list is tight, but it’s still more black metal RPG goodness in a forty page form factor, and I think that’s pretty cool.

The next game takes us into the fae lands, this time on the side of the fae. The Cunning Folk puts players into the role of the mischievous ‘folk’ who are seeking revenge against an Offender. This will require reaching across into the mortal realm and stirring up trouble, of course. Mechanics are relatively light, built on a d6 dice pool and intended to evoke humor whether the rolls are successes or failures. One interesting feature is that you will level your dice pool up and down, with larger pools increasing the chance of ‘over-success’ and making it more difficult to hide in the mortal world. Still a light game without much in the way of depth, but some fun details that will make The Cunning Folk a solid choice for a game night.

Last but not least, Rage at the Moon is relatively straightforward: A gamebook about becoming a werewolf. Although there’s not that much to say about a gamebook, the premise is cool: You’ve been bitten by a werewolf and have 24 days before the next full moon to make it to Moon Rock where it is said you will get the choice to embrace or reject the wolf inside you. Rage at the Moon will be over 200 pages long and printed in a novel format.

Five Year Retrospective

April of 2020 marked the second time that the normal Kickstarter roundup was co-opted, though this time it was because of an exogenous pressure: the world had shut down for the COVID-19 quarantine just two weeks earlier. Depending on your perspective it’s either strange that it’s been five whole years since the pandemic started, or that it’s only been five years since the pandemic started. Either way, there was a fairly logical paucity of crowdfunding projects as many people scrambled to figure out how to deal with their lives being upended and livelihoods threatened. In the place of the normal crowdfunding roundup, I did a roundup of pandemic-specific sales, of which there were many. I don’t normally cover commercial promotions outside of crowdfunding, save for the occasional particularly relevant or interesting deal over at Bundle of Holding. If there’s an interest to cover promotions or sales (say in a Weekend Update), please comment and let us know.

---

It’s spring now, a perfect time to start anew. Whether it’s a new system or a new gaming group, there’s no better time to see what’s out there and what’s got designers typing away. Any good campaigns I missed? Thoughts about the ones listed here? Feel free to leave a comment below. Otherwise, we’ll be back next week to talk about games some more, and back next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!