Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We’re wrapping up Zine Month, but despite Backerkit’s more delineated timeline there are still some straggler campaigns here and there. We’ve also seen the big campaign space heat up, as not only were there several notable campaigns during Zine Month (looking at you, Blades 68) but we have big announcements at the end as well, including at least one out-of-nowhere success. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.

Major Campaigns

The biggest news in new games this month comes from Magpie Games with their latest licensed venture. Temeraire the Roleplaying Game takes place in the setting of Naomi Novik’s novel series of the same name, a Napoleonic fantasy world of dragons and dragon tamers. More notably for Magpie is that the game is *not* PbtA, instead using a custom inhouse system that Magpie is calling Aedana. This is not the first Aedana game, that would go to Magpie’s Fallen London RPG. It, notably, isn’t out yet. This wouldn’t be the first time that Magpie has stacked two licensed properties in their development queue…and with that in mind I’ll be excited to try Temeraire when it’s completed in 2030.

Also of note this month is that Monte Cook Games is campaigning a new edition of Numenera. The science fantasy game was an absolute trendsetter in crowdfunding space, becoming the first TTRPG to break $100,000 and breaking it massively with an over $500,000 campaign back in 2012, when such a feat was unheard of. It’s a little more common now, but MCG is still celebrating that the new campaign has exceeded the value of their original campaign some 14 years later. The science fantasy setting of Numenera is a very specific thing that’s not to everyone’s taste, but I think it’s the best expression of the Cypher System that it helped create even today, and is certainly deserving of the attention it’s getting.

Finally is a game that, to me at least, came out of nowhere, raising over a million dollars which is unheard of for an otherwise unknown RPG company. Pumpkin Spice is a self-described ‘magically cozy RPG’ which sees you playing as witches running a magical coffee shop to help protect a ‘fount of magic’ underneath. There’s a whole lot of detail on what sorts of shops you can run, and a quirky personality quiz telling you which witch you should play…but little detail on the rules. To be fair, there is a quickstart for that. Still, when even the campaign emphasizes the art and lore over playing the game at all, you can’t help but wonder. Whatever angle they’ve chosen it works, and hopefully the game will hold people’s attention when it’s completed.

Indies of Note

First up we have Streets of Magic, a game described both as pulp fantasy and ‘old school’. The style of the game has a distinct urban fantasy vibe, and it reminds me of Shadowrun without any explicit cyberpunk elements. The rules highlighted in the campaign are specific without being particularly spare, think of it as more aligned with the ‘Without Number’ or Borg games. While there are plenty of specific, player-facing mechanics, the overall design is intended to frame rather than fully define character abilities. While this is running in a well-trod lane, the style and setting details still make it worth a look.

Of Folk and Fey is a leftover zine, but is trying a few things that look interesting. The game is inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales, and has opted to use a Cortex-like ‘roll and keep’ dice system. Additionally, there’s a mechanic cribbed from Daggerheart’s ‘Hope and Fear’ rules, which when combined with a dice pool seems like a lot of moving parts. Nonetheless, if this dice mechanic is employed effectively, Of Folk and Fey could be a tight, intriguing game.

The next game, Residue, is a solo horror RPG of a type that’s been intriguing me recently. Residue is based on exploration more than journaling prompts, so gameplay consists of moving around a randomly generated hex grid that you populate based on randomly rolled regions and areas. You’re looking for four ruins, after which you can find the location of the Anomaly and trigger the endgame. The game sounds intriguing, the design looks great, and while it’s a leftover zine the final 96 page length pushes it a bit closer to full-sized game territory.

The next game, Beasts, has a simple conceit: Animorphs with the serial numbers filed off. For those of you who weren’t into K.A. Applegate’s series when you were Scholastic Book Fair age, know that it started as kids granted the ability to change into animals by a strange alien race and went deeper and deeper into their being used as soldiers in a massive alien war as the series continued. Beasts starts on the deep end here, but that’s a good thing in terms od presenting the promise of cribbing from the series in the first place. Designer Adrian Mejia has some big-name game credits to his name, and I’m excited to see what he does with Beasts.

I’m always a sucker for unique form factors, which brings us to Tales from the Tape Deck. Tales from the Tape Deck is a game designed to fit into a cassette tape case, smooshing down an old-school ruleset into a little plastic box you may have forgotten in the center console of your car. While the main descriptions of the ruleset are just comparisons to other games (DCC, Shadowdark, Mork Borg), I am interested in seeing the volumes of the game that take these sensibilities to different genres than grim dungeon. The designer, Ahmed Suffety, is another with a solid resume of TTRPG bona fides, so I think we’ll get some solid twists crammed into obsolete media.

Atlas Imprecatis is taking a known ruleset and using it for something notably different. Based on No Dice, No Masters, Atlas Imprecatis uses the rules to frame, essentially, a storytelling game where you and fellow players create an urban legend. The fun here is that, based on the character playbooks and moves, the creation process blurs the line between diegetic and non-diegetic, with events happening in-game being used to reveal the moves played and tokens spent to define the reality of the legend being explored. This looks like an intriguing twist on other ‘build the mystery’ games like Apocalypse Keys and The Between, where the ambiguity and player direction fits very well within the genre.

Finally we have Mage Borg. Yes, Mage Borg is obviously a Borg-alike, but the game is focused around a magic university, and exactly in the way I’d want. Yes, that means this game has a course catalog, extracurricular activities, and of course a number of arcane arts to learn. Speaking as someone who built a magical university in Burning Wheel, this tickles my mind in exactly the right way. The light rules of Mork Borg contrasted against potentially bureaucratic procedures of higher education sounds like a match made in purgatory (complimentary), and I’m inclined to try this one out.

Five Year Retrospective

March of 2021 saw Zine Quest spill over into the next month, and as a result half the post was taken up by yet more zines, putting a punctuation mark on just how successful 2021 had been for the event. The big names were no slouch either, with both Coyote and Crow and City of Winter (the follow-up to Fall of Magic) being highlighted.

The most notable project in this month, though, was Stonetop. Stonetop was touted as fantasy PbtA and has since gotten positive exposure from outlets like the Indie Game Reading Club. However, all that press was based on the playtest version, as Stonetop was only actually completed this year, putting it in the ‘extremely late’ category next to others like Urban Shadows 2e. Stonetop is actually fulfilling hardcopies as we speak and, while it has been a good long time, I did back it and am excited to see what the final product looks like. Expect to hear more about Stonetop soon. As much as five years is very late, it’s at least not the extreme of Far West. Incidentally, and perhaps owing to the fact that it took 12 (yes, 12) years, Far West is crowdfunding again. Not sure I’d recommend it.

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There’s momentum here in March, whether it’s inertia from Zine Month or one of a few big new games. We only have a few months between the zines and the cons, so I’ll be on the lookout for new games and campaigns as we move through spring. Have a campaign you want to highlight? Have some thoughts on the ones I’ve discussed here? Feel free to sound off in the comments below. In the meanwhile, read some campaigns, pledge for some games, and I’ll see you next month in another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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