Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close enough to GenCon to suck the air out of the room, it is close enough that most of the major publishers will wait a couple months before any big announcements, giving the little guys a chance for some more spotlight. We’re seeing it now and, as you’ll see later in the article, we saw it five years ago as well. With that said, let’s get into it. No major publishers this month, but we do have the newest campaign from one of the most successful singular designers going.

Major Campaigns

While still an ‘indie’ in the sense of being independent, Kevin Crawford releases some of the most celebrated titles in the old-school space. His newest book isn’t a game per se, but what it is should be even more exciting for gamers who both like old-school D&D and designing their own settings. The Book of Unnumbered Worlds is a system-agnostic worldbuilding toolkit that takes some of the resources from games like Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number and expands them. While definitively intended for fantasy gaming, the book aims to cover setting topics like cosmology and religion, geography, politics, and (of course) monsters and ruins. This isn’t the first worldbuilding guide and won’t be the last, but I’m particularly excited to see a worldbuilding guide from arguably the pre-eminent sandbox game designer currently working.

Indies of Note

First up we have a storytelling game that draws deeply from the traditions of Tarot. Hands of Fate takes reading Tarot and mixes it with a unique game board that creates a narrative Tarot spread. What really makes it different from just pulling cards, though, are the Fates. Each Fate both establishes a lens through which the cards will be interpreted, but also pushes the course of the game by narrowing the cards that can be drawn into the players’ hand. The game can be played solo, duet, or with a group, and doesn’t require any pre-existing knowledge of Tarot.

The next game is Cold War alt history, which itself isn’t that interesting. However, when I saw that it takes place in an underground city built in a future Soviet Union controlled by cyber-Brezhnev…well, that’s intriguing. Dark Leningrad is a sandbox game from Kobayashi, the designer likely best known for The Black Sword Hack. Based on Traveller/Cepheus, Dark Leningrad puts you in the shoes of normal people who have become dissidents in this dystopian underground city. Your character must balance their day job and their dissident activity, and even seemingly normal tasks can lead to encounters with strange anomalies, psychic cats, or mysterious portals. As an extra layer, the art in Dark Leningrad is done by Gavriel Quiroga (Warpland, Neurocity).

We continue on with another game about the Weird and paranormal. Strange Roads mixes 90s nostalgia and a Kids On Bikes-like premise with a distinctly supernatural plot: The Void Signal is bleeding into the world, warping people, places, and animals, and it’s up to your characters to go from town to town and figure out what’s going on. This game is clearly a labor of love, and while the rules samples are from pre-layout Microsoft Word tables the promo art from Wilson Palaccio and Bryce Yzaguirre looks fantastic and gives a good idea of the potential that’s here. While not explicitly based on Traveller this is also a 2d6 system; the relatively light rules but focus given to travel and creating the characters’ hometown make me think that this could be a really solid nostalgia play.

Another small, weird, and fun looking game, Retcon the RPG is both a tropey superhero game and also based on the webcomic of the same name. While I tend to think that all superhero properties are fairly tropey, Retcon invokes the ‘law of conservation of ninjitsu” and cementing “strength in audacity” by literally having an Audacity stat instead of strength. Retcon is apparently (or maybe formerly) based on Cairn, though as the designer states it’s now something else entirely; in addition to straight up superheroes there are 8 eras of history (genres?) which allow many larger-than-life concepts to fit into the game.

The next game approaches superheroics in a very different way. Noir 1933 is a game of pulp heroes, specifically (as the title would indicate) around the time of the Great Depression. While clearly inspired by early comics heroes, the game aims more to focus on communities that had to hold together during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, battling poverty, racism, and apathy from local government and law enforcement. The game takes a formula seen in other games like Urban Shadows where play focuses on a specific city district, and it’s that district that drives the underlying conflicts that the characters must face. The dice mechanic sounds interesting, too…each character has a ‘suite’ of dice that forces them to consider when to use their largest dice and when to hold them back. Tying it all together is art and writing from ten impressive contributing creators.

We have another urban game, and this one for obvious reasons I couldn’t ignore. Soot and Charms: Boston presents a fantasy Boston from the height of the industrial revolution, where Fae and ancient magic collide with electrification and Thomas Edison’s inventions coming in from Great Barrington and Niagara Falls. The game, based on Hopes and Dreams by Fari RPGs, presents five character kits which allow different angles to interact with the fantasy elements of the setting. There’s magic, there’s weird science, and it’s all set against the background of late 19^th century Boston, which of course piques my interest as I’ve lived there most of my life.

Our last indie of the month is certainly the most ambitious. Strigovia is an Eastern European dark fantasy setting, made by a team in Poland. While the URL does say otherwise, throughout the campaign it’s emphasized that this is a standalone game that neither requires nor is compatible with 5e. I do think the game likely takes a lot of influences from the d20 sphere, but if they say it’s standalone, I’m satisfied that that’s the truth. D20 or not, there are some really neat mechanics being touted here, including building the magic system around the idea that magic is a debt that must be paid back. The intent here is to be both dark fantasy and low fantasy, and as reviewer Dave Thaumavore said after playtesting, “This forest is mean”. The campaign is also including 34 minis, with 28 of them available at certain pledge tiers and the remaining six available only as STL files (to be clear, all 34 will be available as STLs, but 6 are too big to cast and ship). The campaign also has a small run of custom dice, and while I don’t tend to give much credit to the little bonus items in a campaign, I will say here that there’s a level of care taken that permeates across the game, the supporting materials, and the entire campaign.

Five Year Retrospective

June of 2021 made for a crowdfunding roundup that is close to the platonic ideal of what these articles can be: a whole lot of weird, interesting games, one mainstream title to keep it grounded, and at least one game which ends up doing better than you could have imagined at the time. That one game from five years ago is ARC, which has become a solid member of the Exalted Funeral library. Similarly, I have copies of both Campfire and My Body is a Cage gracing my bookshelf, both successful campaigns and obviously ones that piqued my attention. Exalted: Essence is the mainstream title, and while Exalted fandom these days seems rather insular compared to where it was the last couple of decades, it’s still selling books to be sure.

In terms of the success rate of the games far after the article, we diverge from the platonic ideal fairly dramatically. As you likely know from my past retrospectives, I don’t consider projects that do not fund a failure: Putting your idea out in the world and having it not gain traction is a learning experience, and you’re able to learn with little risk. Successfully funding and failing to deliver, though, is the hallmark of a failed project, and while there are exceptions, generally hitting the five year mark with no delivery means you have failed to meet expectations, even if by some miracle you still deliver later. In this case, both Into the Mother Lands and Somninauts ended up as dead projects, failing to fulfill. While we’ve seen the number of dead projects decline as we’ve been doing five year retrospectives, they still happen, and in some cases like this month, even happen from designers who are otherwise known quantities.

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We’re heading towards summer, and some of the weirdness is coming out in the RPG crowdfunding. Strange cities, dark forests, and the law of conservation of ninjitsu all await for eager players who are looking for something new to take a chance on. Good campaign I missed? Something upcoming for next month? Let me know in the comments. Otherwise, play some games, support some creators, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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