Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for May! It’s spring, and the buds on the trees have burst open into green leaves. Similarly, the post-ZineQuest hangover is over and RPG campaigns are bursting forth all over Kickstarter and BackerKit. Want a game about fishing, or making jam? How about a three-book space opera extravaganza? There’s lot’s to check out this month, so let’s get to it.

Major Campaigns

The major campaigns this month don’t fit into the standard profile of original games, but they’re worth talking about nonetheless. Mongoose Publishing is crowdfunding the next major campaign for Traveller, The Singularity Campaign. Taking place at the height of the Third Imperium, the Singularity Campaign sees characters contacted by a long-dormant AI, so powerful as to be godlike. Set across three books, The Singularity Campaign starts with characters crewing a luxury liner, solving the mysteries of the ship and its passengers, and eventually find the alien progenitors of the AI who has been serving as their benefactor. The Singularity Campaign is aiming to bring relevant technological issues back to the fore of their space opera, and I think this campaign could be quite a good one.

A major campaign in impact if not exactly in origin, Mythmere games is crowdfunding the third edition of OSRIC, one of the first D&D retroclones from 2006. Besides being one of the first and arguably becoming a namesake for the OSR, OSRIC is also one of the most popular retroclones based on AD&D rather than Basic D&D. The new version is said to be easier to learn, with more broken up text formatting and more and better examples. It also is stripped of all OGL material, which may be one of the reasons for developing the new edition in the first place.

Indies of Note

Let’s start out in the TTRPG origin genre, swords and sorcery, but make it different. Defy the Gods is a sword-and-sorcery game set in a fantastical Ancient Mesopotamia. What makes this game unique though is bringing in mythic stories about tyrants and gods alongside queer love and reveling in the drama that mix creates. While mechanically and somewhat thematically aligned with Thirsty Sword Lesbians (as noted in the campaign), Defy the Gods stays in genre by combining the romance with massive power grabs and the underlying storyline of fighting a world that’s set against you.

The next game mixes fantastical with real in order to make some commentary, and I think it works quite nicely. Mad as Hell from Soulmuppet Publishing is a demon-hunting RPG, but the demons are created by the violence of capitalism. Address the root causes to cut off how the demon feeds, and then take it down with weapons built from the solution you created. The system is a simple 2d6 system shared with other SoulMuppet games like Best Left Buried and Orbital Blues, but the art and in-world writing is what really ties everything together.

The next game is particular in a way that I always love. Midnight Muscadines is a “cozy-dark” game about making magical jams. Yes, jams, as in similar to jellies but made with whole fruit instead of just juice. Characters venture into the night to gather the aforementioned muscadines, which are (in real life) a group of grape species which are native to North America. Characters gather the fruit, make the jam, and protect the light of Nimm. The game uses cards and dice (explaining the number of 52-entry lists in the campaign), and can be played solo, GM-less, or traditional.

Vox Dei isn’t the furthest departure from the Mork Borg formula, but amping up the religious undertones and Heresy in a way I haven’t seen since I last played, well, Dark Heresy is a tried-and-true way to get more grimdark into Mork Borg’s compact ruleset. While it may not venture too far, the game has a whole new set of its own art and worldbuilding which makes it a Mork Borg companion with solid potential for fans of the original game.

The Mothership fandom has been inviting to third-party material of all kinds, but expansions and adventures have been more the preferred contribution than straight-up hacks. Summer of Lovecraft is a straight-up hack, though, and it brings in a number of setting beats to make something that feels new and interesting. Characters in Summer of Lovecraft are members of the Society of the Unbroken Night, dedicated to finding and rooting out horrors beyond comprehension. This does mean Lovecraftian monsters, of course, but the game also takes place in the late 1960s, meaning a very different vibe from Lovecraft games set during Lovecraft’s time. And while I know it’s probably not the intent of the game…I really want to use it to play Scooby-Doo. It’s that line about the VW bus that just set me off in that direction.

Next up is a campaign bringing two card-based RPGs into full print runs. Possible Worlds Games is publishing fishing RPG Tacklebox and people-watching RPG Better Strangers and bringing them both into a card deck format from their original digital-only itch releases. Tacklebox is a reality-bending fishing game, intended to be a surreal storytelling game. Better Strangers, on the other hand, helps generate a story from actual people-watching you’re doing while playing the game. Both of these games tackle atypical RPG story conceits, which puts them high on my personal list.

Finally, a campaign that’s a new edition of an existing game, but one that’s near and dear to our hearts. NessunDove is campaigning a ‘Hallowed Edition’ of Our Queen Crumbles, the storytelling game released by Cannibal Halfling contributor Jason Brown. The Hallowed Edition expands the original zine length of the game, improves the art, and shifts the whole game to a pick-up-and-play format in a small box set. In addition to everything, the game will be released in Italian and English. I’m looking forward to this new edition, and am really happy Jason has seen such success with the game.

Five Year Retrospective

May of 2020 was still “a deeply weird” time in the world, and although I pushed forward covering 4 campaigns this month, they fell out in an abnormal way, though perhaps that’s to be expected. First, the good: Both Deadlands: Weird West and Torchbearer 2e delivered and delivered well, though coming from experienced and professional creators, that’s unsurprising. Both of the other campaigns, Skull Diggers and Bloodlines and Black Magic, failed to deliver. Skull Diggers is officially on hiatus (so not a ghosting, just a straight-up fail) and Bloodlines and Black Magic posted an update about the “long, hard road to the finish line” in March of 2025. While not ghosting your backers is good, if you’ve failed to deliver a tabletop Kickstarter within five years of its funding, you have failed to deliver.

To be honest, I expect the weirdness in this phase of the retrospective to continue; we were still in the initial stages of the lockdown through into the summer, and fall and winter weren’t exactly ‘normal’ either. For me personally there wasn’t really a return to normalcy until May of 2021, which also marked the time when I moved out of the living situation I had been stuck in in the pandemic up to that point. From a five year lookback, though, the weirdness gives an opportunity to think on that time and those stories, and see how game designers trying to be active at the time fared.

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May and June are peak times for campaigns prior to the con calendar really filling up, so it’s no surprise I saw so many good campaigns this month (more than the ten I listed here). Think there’s something particularly interesting I missed? Let us know in the comments. Have an upcoming campaign by either you or a designer you like? Sound off here or reach out to us directly! And no matter what, have a good spring, get outside, but do take some time to check out new games as well. I’ll see you next month in the next Crowdfunding Carnival!

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