Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! We’re seeing the post-GenCon movement begin, and several of the big publishers are starting their engines up again with new campaigns. At the same time, there are a number of good indies out there which are worthy of your attention. Let’s get to it.

Major Campaigns

Lots of movement among the big guys this month, though not a lot of new or original games. Looks like those tariffs and changing cost structures are coming for risk-taking, sadly. We do have one new game coming from Onyx Path, Monster Kingdoms. The game looks like fairly run-of-the-mill dark fantasy, with one key twist: A heavy emphasis on playing monstrous characters. As much as the setting has nothing standing out other than how big it is (13 different kingdoms!), focusing on how character types are different from the norm is a fairly strong play. This is also an early outing for the newest edition of Storypath, Storypath Ultra.

A couple new game editions are being campaigned this month, including one from a company seemingly coming out of hibernation. Dream Pod 9 (how long has it been since you’ve heard of those guys?) is campaigning a new edition of their game Tribe 8 called Tribes in the Dark, which is (unsurprisingly) now based on the Forged in the Dark ruleset. Tribe 8 is a post-apocalyptic game that goes heavy on fantasy, and the new version is focusing on notions of found family and dynamics of your ‘cell’ which are a stand-in for the gang in Blades. I think the thematic alignment is pretty good here, and Tribes in the Dark could join A|State as a deep cut but ultimately successful FitD reinvention.

Less of a deep cut, a second edition of Shadowrun Anarchy is being campaigned, this time by the French publisher Black Book Editions. Shadowrun Anarchy was a promising fork of Shadowrun let down by editing (a common story in the Shadowrun product line) and lack of marketing support, and this time around could be different. It looks like the new edition is following in Sixth World’s footsteps with a heavy emphasis on Edge, which may work better in this context (I thought it worked all right in Sixth World but the Shadowrun fans haven’t stopped complaining). I’m not exactly sure why Black Book is leading this edition instead of Catalyst, but to be honest, it’s probably a good thing.

Couple other small notes: Steve Jackson games is campaigning a solo campaign for The Fantasy Trip called Path of Mastery. Cool addition to SJGames’ throwback fantasy property. Finally, Kevin Crawford has started a campaign to fund an offset reprint of Stars Without Number Revised. Don’t think we’re going to see many changes (though adding some conversion material for the other Without Number games would be really cool), but these books are only available in limited offset runs, so if you want a physical copy that isn’t POD this is your only opportunity until the next reprint campaign.

Indies of Note

First, let’s start with something silly yet completely amazing. What do you get when you cross Mork Borg with Nordic-inflected mystery like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Well, you get Cörk Bord, which has to be my favorite manipulation of the Mork Borg nomenclature so far. The game takes the Mork Borg ruleset towards investigation, adding in enough horror to both stay aligned with the underlying philosophy as well as making everything just a tad more Scandinavian. Despite the implied lightness of Mork Borg, the new mechanics in this one, including the Clue Chain for administering an investigation, look to make Cörk Bord something actually a bit different and new in the Borg-alike world.

Continuing on in the horror vibe we have A Little Drop of Poison, a detailed ‘survival horror’ TTRPG. The game as described wears its video game influences on its sleeve, with the campaign being almost game book-like in its specificity. I am interested to see what this will look like; having a defined map, ‘item drops’, and ‘new game+’ make it sound like it could be GMless. Is it? Unclear. There is a solo variant, though. Many things about this game make it sound like the designer is not quite familiar with tabletop design norms, but in this case it makes the game sound intriguingly different as opposed to yet another rehash of D&D.

Next up, a couple of solo game projects caught my eye this month. I have wondered why it seems that I’ve been giving solo games more attention in the crowdfunding context, but when you consider how I generally read and filter campaigns, it makes a lot of sense. I’m looking for a game that immediately tells me what it’s trying to be and why I should play, and solo games more often than not are able to drill down immediately to what the experience is supposed to be. Take the next campaign, We Don’t Live on the Surface Anymore, as an example. The game is a journaling game about living through the end of the world, where everyone has moved underground. That’s a neat idea, and I want to see how the game follows through with it. And while the mechanics of the game aren’t groundbreaking, both ‘Oregon Trail-style resource management’ and ‘animal companions’ tell me that there’s a good amount going on here to investigate the core idea.

The other solo game I’m looking at this month also does a great job presenting a core premise it’s exploring. You Were Made puts you in the shoes of a synthetic lifeform, but specifically an ‘echoform’, designed to hold memories as humanity is going extinct. Once again, the ideas being explored are way more interesting than any mechanical flourishes, though the prompt card deck is certainly a nice touch. I am continually impressed by the sorts of thought experiments and philosophical considerations appearing in the solo game world, and You Were Made is no exception.

Next up we have three very different RPGs folded into one campaign, being spearheaded by Tyler Crumrine of Possible Worlds. First is Cosmic Century Knights, by James d’Amato and Andrew Mierzejewski. This game centers around a fantasy world of one hundred cosmic swords, which have abilities selected, mixed, and matched by your table. There’s a neat mix of player-facing worldbuilding and a strong world concept here which sounds very cool. Next is Homecoming, by Meghan Cross. In Homecoming, you return to your ancestral home to solve the mystery of what happened to your mother. Play progresses by opening rooms and flipping cards to find rooms, discoveries, or events. As I’m right now deep into a playthrough of the digital game Blue Prince, this room discovery mechanic is scratching an itch for me at the moment. Finally is Tyler’s own game, Chuck. This is a solo game where your romantic partner has been shrunk down to only a few inches tall. It’s certainly a unique concept, and the implementation seeks to blend comic and serious elements as you mix the silliness of the concept with some real considerations of what it means when relationships grow apart.

Finally we have Tomb Runners. It’s not often that a game jumps out at me for purely mechanical reasons, but this is one of those times. Tomb Runners is an OSR game in the original definition, meaning it’s intended to be compatible with the wide range of fantasy gaming materials that were being published from 1974 all the way into the present. The difference here is that while Tomb Runners wants to maintain that compatibility and have that bent towards old-school play, it’s also taking cues from narrative game design about stringing together successes and actions into a cogent narrative of the dungeon. While there are certainly other games which have taken this approach (both Macchiato Monsters and, somewhat indirectly, Dungeon World), this is a new ground-up approach which could be a whole new twist on dungeon crawling.

Five Year Retrospective

The pandemic retrospective continues, and the September 2020 crop was once again five games. What a five games they were, though. Arium is a game creation toolkit that I backed, and though it impressed me when I read it, I still haven’t given it a fair shake. Maybe I should do that soon…better late than never, after all. Orbital is another gem from Jack Harrison, a more conventional game than his breakout Artefact but using some of the same layout and design choices as his Artefact-alike Bucket of Bolts (which is also great). And then, this was the month of Free League’s Twilight:2000. It might seem cringe to give the biggest nod to the biggest publisher, but I ran Twilight:2000 for well over six months and I haven’t stopped wanting to play with its systems more. It may be coming up again on my to-run list in the near future, using a campaign prompt I’ve shared before.

To round it out, both Locus and Legends of Avallen funded, released, and are out there, somewhere, should you want to find them. The pandemic game lists are shorter and tend to be more successful, but there are still plenty of these games falling prey to the post-Kickstarter thud and disappearing into the mists.

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We’re seeing some stirring in the game design world, but outside of the hotly contested 5e heartbreaker space, there aren’t too many big new releases going on. Still, the indies are out there leading the charge, with some big publishers putting forth new editions and supplements. See any good campaigns I missed? Feel free to comment down below. Have an upcoming campaign for your game or your company’s game? Reach out to us and we’ll include it in consideration for when it’s released. Not a game designer? Read some campaigns, pledge some games, and join us next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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