Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.

Major Campaigns

Renegade Game Studios, the publisher perhaps better known for their tie-ins than their game design, has once again shown their skills at making money by leading a Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG to I believe the largest RPG crowdfunding on Backerkit and number two overall (with over $9 million it’s bigger than Avatar Legends but smaller than the Cosmere RPG). I just picked up the first book and, honestly, I’m now afraid that I won’t get that far into the series before it jumps the shark. Like Avatar this campaign is dripping with doodads, and frankly I’m not convinced there should be an RPG of this at all. Just go pick up XCrawl Classics.

Indies of Note

First off this month is Secrets of the Vibrant Sky. Secrets of the Vibrant Sky is a solo game about exploring a sky realm (not Skyrealm as in Jorune, but even so) through exploration mechanics and journaling prompts. What makes this interesting, though, is that the game is the third in a series, each taking place in a different part of the setting. This is from Nerdburger Games so it’s a designer we know and like, but I also think this approach to expanding solo games is worth watching. This isn’t the only example of re-examining a game setting in an additional game (another example here would be Thousand Year Old Vampire and So You Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire), but I think there’s definitely interest in re-examining and deepening setting exploration in solo games that Secrets of the Vibrant Sky could take advantage of.

Next up is Petmon. For some reason the monster taming genre seems to have more dances with copyright infringement: Fans orbit around their chosen property and often orbit too close, as we’ve seen in the digital world with titles like Palworld. I was somewhat assuming that Petmon was going to be a case like this, but in reading the campaign I was pleasantly surprised. Now yes, Petmon is heavily inspired by Digimon, but that mostly comes through in the relationship between humans and their monsters. The actual game is based on the mechanics of Jenna Moran’s Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, making it unique in the world of RPG hacks. If you’re a Digimon fan or just looking for a way to bring monster taming to your table, this is one to watch.

The next project is also taking notes from some interesting indie games, but in a very different way. Silent Laeke is a mystery storytelling game inspired by, among other things, Twin Peaks. The game plays out scene by scene with cards driving the story, and while I don’t think the mechanics quite line up the overall structure reminds me of certain Bully Pulpit Games like Fiasco and Desperation. The game also looks to be heavy on accessories, but rather than doodads these items are intended to amp up immersion with the story. The risk with a game like this is always that it’s bound to a specific setting and story, but I find this setting and its inspirations intriguing enough that I’d want to check it out.

Another entry in the hack space is Night Shift: Devil Division. The game is a tactical RPG set in 1990s Japan, contrasting the cultural shift caused by economic downturn with demons and monsters. The inspirations include Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man, but what’s interesting to me about this game is it’s one of the first hacks I’ve seen of MCDM’s Draw Steel. I don’t think that’s a bad foundation for what seems to be at its core a monster skirmishing game, but as always it’s the changes that will really make this game pop.

I am a fan of worldbuilding games, and this next one looks at worldbuilding from a fun angle. Court of Clouds is a worldbuilding game where you create a pantheon of Gods in the style of Greek or Norse mythology. Using playing cards to provide some randomization, you set up your pantheon and then create the stories and drama that will serve as the actual ‘myths’ in your mythos. In addition to sounding like a fun game in its own right, one could imagine using Court of Clouds to produce deities and domains for your next fantasy game, or otherwise as a tool for some more theological setting development.

The next campaign is for One Of Us Will Die, a social deduction game with a bit more RPG DNA than some others in the genre. Among the players there will be a Mark, who is destined to die at the end of the game, Adventurers, who can save the Mark at the cost of their own life, and a Traitor, who is trying to discover and kill the Mark before their fate arrives. By completing story milestones, each player can drive the story towards the fate they are most interested in. These milestones are tied to archetypes, different character types which make for different narrative arcs thanks to their milestones. In addition to the overarching structure and character archetypes, the game also comes with ten different scenarios that let you play out what happens in different framings, including cosmic horror, space sci-fi, fantasy, and a few historical settings as well.

Our final project this month is perfectly timed given the earlier article on mashups. Epic Brick Adventures is an RPG using, well, ‘plastic building bricks’ as both a physical representation of the world as well as mechanics (through bag-building) and even a buildable character sheet. Why ‘plastic building bricks’? Well, it sounds like the team is already in conversations with a certain Danish toy company to smooth out potential copyright issues; that has resulted in some art being removed and placeholders added to the campaign, but it indicates that this team is serious about bringing the game to fruition. (As a note, Epic Brick Adventures noted use of AI in some of their marketing materials, but the statement on the game is that the text and art are 100% human-made. I’ve opted to include them in the article as the game is human-made, but wanted to offer this disclaimer for full transparency).

Five Year Retrospective

May 2021 was a solid crop of crowdfunding. Several of these titles, namely Fantasy World, Blood, Sweat, and Steel, and Orbital Blues, are now on my shelf and needless to say fulfilled very well. Orbital Blues even got enough recognition to have an entire Orbital Blues Month over on Backerkit! Ironsworn:Starforged and Court of Blades also went on to do fairly well for themselves. We did have one funding miss, the ambitious Tangent Space did not make its pledge target. Kudos for setting a realistic $20,000 target, though, if they had tried to go lower just to make sure they succeeded, then the game may have just ghosted instead. Speaking of ghosting…there weren’t any! The other projects from the month all appeared to fulfill successfully, making this indeed a very solid month overall.

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It’s been a big spring for dungeon supplements, first with Megadungeon Month and now with OSE Month. On one hand these events have been great for encouraging high-quality supplements given how Backerkit runs their events, on the other hand they have overshadowed original games somewhat. I’ve still had some luck finding those originals, but it does serve as a reminder of what people want to spend their money on in many cases. If there are other original games I’ve missed, let me know. If there is interest in more hacks, supplements, and adventures, let me know that too; Backerkit has made it easier to find and filter good secondary material whereas before there was a lot of chaff in the wheat. No matter, hopefully your spring is a time for rebirth in RPG enthusiasm. Play some games, support some creators, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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