Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for October! We’re in spooky season, but more importantly, con season has wound down and the game designers have wound up. Tons of solid campaigns are on Kickstarter and Backerkit, and we have a few majors and some interesting tie-ins as well.

Before we get going here, it’s worth noting that as of today, Kickstarter United, the union representing Kickstarter employees, is going on strike as they have been working without a contract since July. The union is looking to enshrine working hour expectations, especially important as Kickstarter has been working on a four-day workweek for the last three years. Any allowances to ‘revert to normal operations’ by management would effectively constitute a 25% increase in workload with no adjustment in compensation. As seen on their website Kickstarter United is not asking anyone to boycott Kickstarter or withhold support from creators, so our normal monthly review will go on. That said, please visit the union’s website to see what you can do to support. With that news out of the way, let’s look at some campaigns.

Major Campaigns

The big boys have returned this month; though I’m a little late to cover it, Monte Cook Games crossed the million-dollar threshold with a new edition of Cypher System. I don’t generally cover campaigns that have already ended but this is a big one for 2025; there are late pledge options available as well should that be your sort of thing.

Another campaign is approaching a million dollars, though not from the same sort of major: Fabula Ultima is campaigning a reprint plus a bestiary, and is as we speak crossing into vaunted seven-digit territory. I’ve played Fabula Ultima and although it’s not a new game per se, it’s highly deserving of this level of investment.

Still ongoing is a campaign for Free League’s newest game, a roleplaying game based on the comic Invincible. This seems aligned well with Free League’s typical strategy: Pick a known but not massive license in a genre they want to explore, then use it to release their own twist on the genre that may or may not align with what’s there before. I’m not incredibly familiar with Invincible but as the campaign is already over $300,000, it appears that enough people are for Free League to be secure in their licensing decision.

An interesting side note among major campaigns is that we’re seeing a number of tie-in or spinoff campaigns for popular RPGs, all going on this month. These campaigns are for board or card games taking place in the same setting as the RPG, but of course using a different or just narrower set of play expectations than the RPG does. First and probably largest is Pathfinder Quest, actually being campaigned directly by Paizo. Pathfinder Quest is a ‘cooperative adventure board game’, which certainly sounds to me like a GMless RPG-adjacent experience a la Gloomhaven.

Second such project is Cyberpunk Legends: Into the Night, which is not being campaigned by R. Talsorian but rather by partner Night Crew Games. Cyberpunk Legends is a “story-driven co-op card game”, once again indicating the desire to make a GMless, RPG-adjacent experience. It also appears that there may be an LCG element to this one, based on the number of different iterations and additional cards it’s possible to buy.

Finally we have tie-ins to games that aren’t one of the top three properties in the space; Posthuman Studios is campaigning SCUM: An Eclipse Phase board game. SCUM looks like more of a traditional competitive board game than an RPG-lite experience, though it definitely turns on the Eclipse Phase setting and uses the existing factions and mechanics effectively. Out of the three this one both looks the most interesting and also, just due to the complexity on display with the boards and mechanics, still the one I’d be least likely to play. If you like big complicated board games, though, this is almost certainly going to be worth checking out. On the complete opposite end is Monsterhearts: Welcome to Drowned Lake, a spin-off card-based video game for Avery Alder’s excellent Monsterhearts. Welcome to Drowned Lake looks like a fascinating take on Monsterhearts, but with a C$160,000 minimum goal (sadly reasonable due to the cost of development), the team will have an uphill battle. That just means you should click through and see if you can’t help them out.

Indies of Note

Lots of indies this month, so I’ll just jump right into it. Eat God is a lot of things, and the description both in the Kickstarter campaign and the pre-print game’s itch page go around in circles a bit, but despite that a core interpretation of the game resonated with me: this game is lampooning the tropes of Exalted with lighter rules and the implication that, in addition to having the power to eat God, you’re also a muppet. I am so here for this.

Next up we have Absurdia, a game taking a more comic approach to horror akin to Welcome to Night Vale. That’s not to say that Night Vale doesn’t have comic elements, but Absurdia puts those front and center, mixing cosmic horror with mundane domesticity and using a PbtA framework to hold it all together. It’s probably not the first PbtA game with a bureaucracy-centric playbook, but I am more than happy to help another one sprout into creation.

Next up from Soulmuppet Publishing we have another claim that inspiration is better than licensing, and a winning one at that. Doomspiral is a fantasy RPG inspired by, among other things Fromsoft RPGs designed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, namely Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Instead of 5e like the ill-fated Dark Souls RPG, Doomspiral uses an original system that is described upfront as being crunchier than other Soulmuppet games (think Orbital Blues or Best Left Buried) and more intended to lean into some of the ‘feel’ of the video games it’s based on.

You may have seen that I have a soft spot for weird games aligned with the other ways I was a nerd as a youth. As I was a choir kid in high school, I feel downright obligated to share Acapellapocalypse, a game that crosses singing with killing zombies, or as one reviewer says, “Glee with 28 Days Later”. I am a little concerned with all the straight-up Glee references (down to calling characters Gleeks), but let’s be perfectly honest, a glee club/zombie apocalypse crossover could be a Ryan Murphy TV show without much effort at all. The game does not actually require singing, which is both cowardice on the part of the designer (I kid! …mostly) and insurance that the game may actually be accessible.

Next up we have Herring and Ink, a new take on the mystery genre. While Gumshoe and then later Brindlewood Bay represented new and different mechanical approaches to in-game mysteries, Herring and Ink is a solo mystery game, taking yet another approach towards balancing player-facing story generation and having a mystery to solve. I’m interested in if this one does well because I think this style of generation could be worth reading and considering for mystery designers whether or not they’re interested in solo play. The game combines cards and dice to make for a game that both uses player generation and still provides outside pressure (in the form of a clock) to create tension.

Finally we have Glatisant, an Arthurian duet game. Played across a ‘board’ of playing cards, the two players are the Knight Errant and Questing Beast, and must meet on the same card to win the game. However, only the Questing Beast knows what conditions the Knight must fulfill in order to win. Combine this with journaling prompts and you get an interesting game both in the Arthurian mold but also ultimately about relationships and how two people work together.

Five Year Retrospective

Another short and strange update in October of 2020, and another where most of the games covered successfully delivered as well. Personally, I’m very glad I hear more about Broken Compass and Worlds Without Number than a licensed Stargate game, and I’m also glad that Cannibal Halfling alum Maria Fanning was among those successfully delivering games from this month. Also of note is Good Strong Hands, which later got a full review.

I also did a consideration of Kickstarter’s role in the space, and I think it’s still worth reading. It has not gotten easier to get funding for RPG projects, and the capital intensity of not only a print run but anything more sophisticated and with more accessories often means that the designers with more recognition are even less able to realize their vision for their games than those who would be able to make do with just a PDF. There’s another dynamic, though, which I didn’t cover five years ago but was true then and is true now. Kickstarter is pretty much the most inexpensive way to distribute your game. Kickstarter’s take from a successful campaign, percentage-wise, is lower than the comparable takes of DriveThruRPG and even itch.io (whose default rate is 10%). Now, many will end up paying more if they need to do complex fulfillment (and bringing in another third party), but you also pay more to DriveThruRPG to do print-on-demand for your games. Given that cost factor, Kickstarter will continue to be one of the most popular paths to a game’s first print run, regardless of how much money you have on hand.

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No matter what’s happening in the world, there are games being designed. Check out this month’s bumper crop, but also remember to check out Kickstarter United and see how you can help their fight for sustainable wages and to make management keep up their end of an existing bargain. And as always, play some games, read some games, and be sure to come back and join us for next month’s Crowdfunding Carnival!

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