Happy new year, and welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2026! Creators are warming up their engines after the holiday season, and we’ve got a range of things to look at.

Let’s talk 2025 first. The year had a fair share of challenges for creators, not the least of which were tariffs and other economic challenges. At least one project, Magpie’s hotly anticipated trio of card-based RPGs, fell victim to this uncertainty; while the impact is certainly greater for board games and others which have physical components, it makes planning a project harder even if the physical release is secondary to getting the game into the world.

As far as crowdfunding broadly, there are a few trends which are evident, at least to me. Taking a look at Shannon Appelcline’s excellent 2025: The Year in Roleplaying, we see seven crowdfunding projects which cracked the million dollar mark, of which only two were original games (and one of those two, Fabula Ultima, was for a revision of an already released game). The conservatism in large campaigns is evident. When we compare to last year, there were also seven multi-million dollar campaigns, though in 2024 four out of the seven were for standalone, original games. 2024 also included the record-breaking Cosmere RPG, so there’s a significant drop in total funding simply from not having Brandon Sanderson in the corner wearing his Monopoly Man outfit. One bright spot in the shift, though, is that in 2025, three Backerkit projects were among those million plus projects, a strong indication that Backerkit has stepped up to the plate as a bonafide Kickstarter competitor. There’s more competition coming this year: Backerkit is now officially launching a Zine Month event, ZineTopia, which unlike earlier adjacent ‘Topia’ events will be during February, directly against Zine Quest. We’ll have to see how that goes.

For now, though, let’s focus on January. It’s always a little quiet right after the holidays, but that hasn’t prevented folks from bringing forth games to be judged worthy of funding by the crowd.

Major Campaigns

The one major campaign for this month is a second edition, but it’s a revival, with the original game being older than I am. Toon is being campaigned by Steve Jackson Games; while the original was designed by Paranoia designer Greg Costikyan (with help from later video game great Warren Spector), the revision is being punched up by Steve Jackson and Jay Dragon, bringing the 40+ year old game into the modern era. Toon was genre-busting when it first came out; I’m interested to see what tricks Steve Jackson Games has up their sleeve to make the second edition more than just a nostalgia play.

Indies of Note

First up this month is Cultists and Cubicles, a Mork Borg hack proving any genre, even office comedy, will get at least two Mork Borg hacks. Corp Borg is already out there and plays very well to the ‘Office Space’ crowd, but if Cultists and Cubicles can lean into the tech industry specifically, maybe by making the character sheets Kanban boards and have at least one monster made out of support tickets, I’ll be on board.

Next up is Young Asgardians, a game of Norse mythology and Gods in Asgard. What’s interesting, though, about Young Asgardians is that it’s targeted at kids six to ten; the designer first made the game for his own kids and is now expanding and publishing it. While he has experience publishing this is his first game, but I appreciate that the game is trying to be its own thing; not to take away from ‘Hero Kids’ but it can be harder to get kids interested in what looks like the “for kids” version of an adult game. Hopefully Young Asgardians can follow in the footsteps of others like Power Outage which have succeeded in this space.

Coming in just a tad early for Zine Month, Campgrounds and Cryptids is a collection of four solo RPG zines. What makes these interesting is that they’re based on Dark Fort, the original game which was later expanded into Mork Borg (which just means Dark Fort in Swedish). The preview pages show a nice mix of garish Mork Borg-like artwork with more functional, high-contrast blocks and tables to ensure the zines stay usable. The adventures within are both solo and ‘procedurally generated’, which is intriguing; I’d like to see if setting up the adventure with random rolls as described ends up providing the amount of replayability being touted.

The next project is the kind of project Kickstarter claims to be all about. Song of the King is the first game of a young and ambitious designer which has a fascinating conceit. Characters are musicians who must deal with monsters the closer they get to “The Void”, a wellspring of creative energy that could help power them and their careers forward. The designer mentions Icarus and flying too close to the sun, but this is the first time I think I’ve seen the creative process modeled in this way before. The project is rudimentary but there is a clear idea there; I’m not sure if we’re going to get Sam over his goal in a week, but I think it’s worth taking a look and making a pledge if it interests you.

This is perhaps one of the wilder ideas I’ve seen being crowdfunded, and I lowkey love it. Monopoly RPG is a sideloaded set of rules to turn a game of Monopoly into an RPG (Copy of Monopoly not included). Chance cards and properties are augmented with Jobs, Secrets, and Quests, and now you have a whole new reason to round that board besides driving your fellow players into bankruptcy. I’m incredibly curious to see how well Monopoly RPG works, and if the designer is successful, maybe The Game of Life RPG can be next.

The designer of the Hardy Boys RPG is back with The Nancy Drew RPG! Nope, not kidding, that’s literally what’s going on here. Sixpence Games apparently did very well with the Hardy Boys RPG and they’re following a similar template here, albeit with an even tighter timeline. The first of the Nancy Drew stories entered the public domain only a week ago but the Kickstarter campaign is ready now, jumping at the opportunity. Like the Hardy Boys RPG this game will be based on the system from Sixpence’s ‘Fear of the Unknown’, though with some modifications to align with the ‘inverted mystery’ structure of the early Nancy Drew stories. Both this campaign and the earlier Hardy Boys campaigns had modest goals but delivered quickly, so I expect this would be a sure bet if you’re interested in Nancy Drew or more public domain RPGs in general.

Five Year Retrospective

As I said back in January of 2021, the end of 2020 made the new year feel like a nationwide collective hangover. The actual crowdfunding of it all was a bit thin with four projects, but overall those four were well-chosen; I backed Olde School Wizardry and enjoyed what I received, and Cuticorium was an early appearance of Ulysses Duckler, who’d make a more full-featured appearance on Cannibal Halfling later. I also referenced Shannon Appelcline’s Year in Review much like I did this year, and the difference between the two is stark: While we talked about seven million-plus campaigns for both 2024 and 2025, 2021 had zero, with the largest campaign, a reprint of Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting for 5e, topping out at less than $800k. Still, the tail of 2021 seems to show a lot more variety, with the quarter million club including not only a bunch of 5e dross but also Twilight:2000, Torchbearer 2e, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Wanderhome. I feel like there were more, better large campaigns back at that time, but looking at Shannon’s stats it’s clear that 5e filler was actually clearing the most money. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Another quiet January, though not as quiet as back in 2021. Luckily there’s a mix of some interesting and ambitious games among all the supplements and weird minis. Check out some campaigns, maybe help out some creators, and I’ll be back next month with another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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