Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! It’s after GenCon, and as is expected, the announcements flowed heavy from this con. A lot of the announcements were for D&D, and they weren’t necessarily positive, unless you’re really excited about marketing tie-ins. The movement from the rest of the industry, though, gives me reason to be optimistic.

Fact is, announcing a game in or around GenCon is a gamble, especially because GenCon is historically linked with D&D. In 2024, few were daring to make big announcements for fear they’d get swallowed up in the hype for the then-upcoming 5.5e rulebooks. Now, though, a lot of companies are being bolder, and that’s even before WotC decided to turn to the dark side with Universes Beyond.

This makes for a somewhat unusual carnival this month. Fully half of the campaigns are in the ‘major’ category, and it was almost more until I did some rebalancing. We’re seeing a lot of excitement in the space, and maybe early indications of a sea change as more and more publishers are willing to bet against D&D, even around GenCon.

Major Campaigns

We’ve got some big games announced in and around GenCon this year. First off is Jay Dragon’s magnum opus Seven Part Pact, a GMless/GMfull RPG/asymmetric board game of seven wizards all vying for knowledge and power in completely different ways. By completely different ways, I mean you essentially have seven completely different rulesets which are all set to collide as you learn spells and struggle with the inherent patriarchal station of being a wizard. Seven Part Pact is an exercise in grandiosity arguably not seen since Monte Cook’s Invisible Sun and its infamous black cube. Invisible Sun, when adjusted for inflation, raised $900,000 on Kickstarter. Will Seven Part Pact bridge a $200,000 gap in its last week and change? I don’t know, but I’m almost as curious to find out as I am to try this game.

Next up is Rowan, Rook, and Decard’s Children of Time RPG, based on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel series. The books see humanity abandoning Earth on generation ships called Arks, and the game has you detailing out an Ark of your own and the planet you’re heading towards. It sounds like a solid adaptation of the source material without being locked into the exact events of the books, which I always like. It’s also the latest in a series of game projects where authors are getting involved in the adaptation, a tradition with a rich history dating all the way back to The Dresden Files RPG.

There are more licensed games coming down the pike, the next one being an official Ghost in the Shell TTRPG. Designed by Games Workshop alum Alessio Cavatore and Animon Story designer Zak Barouh, the game looks to be built on an escalating dice system akin to Savage Worlds, although more pared down and specific to the setting. It will be interesting to see how Ghost in the Shell fits into the existing cyberpunk genre, both among standalone games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun but also other licensed adaptations like Blade Runner.

Up next in the licensed category is DC Justice League Unlimited, a pretty significant license considering how little fanfare there seems to have been. Being spearheaded by a group called D20 Culture, the game takes a template-based approach to superhero creation and keeps the mechanics simple, adding to the d20-based system tech like plot points, editorial complications, and the ‘Crisis Die’. If this all sounds a little Cortex-like, there’s a reason for that: Cam Banks of Cortex Prime and Marvel Heroic fame is serving as the Editor, though the system is not Cortex (it’s called the Entropy system) it does clearly borrow from other earlier supers RPG successes. This game looks to bring in modern rules design to the big guns of the superhero world; hopefully it has the success and support it needs to stick around a while.

Finally, a bit of a lark. Hackmaster was invented as the fictional game played in the comic Knights of the Dinner Table, but became not only a real game but also “singlehandedly created the old school revival movement” and is also apparently “the best roleplaying game ever”. While Kenzer and Company is keeping their tongue firmly in their cheek for this campaign, Hackmaster has evolved into a surprisingly playable game from what was originally a comic joke, and is now releasing a special edition for their 25th anniversary. Given the pricing and the insane stretch goal list I’m not 100% sure this campaign isn’t itself a bit of a joke, but that may be the risk you have to take if you want a special edition copy of Hackmaster.

Indies of Note

First on the indie front is the simply named ‘Zombie Survivor RPG’. This is a solo game that sees you trying to survive a zombie outbreak originating from a mysterious research facility nearby. The vibe I’m getting off of this is almost Project Zomboid-esque, and like any solo RPG the writing of the prompts and random encounters will make or break the experience with this game. That said, grounding it with a somewhat crunchier skill-based system and providing both a map of the subdivision the game takes place in as well as some nice (and human-made) game art is selling me. Definitely a solid consideration for fans of the zombie genre.

Next up is Harmony, a “very cozy RPG”. The game doesn’t seem to be focused around a cozy setting or one of the archetypal cozy activities like farming, fishing, or crawling out of debt slavery imposed on you by a greedy raccoon. No, Harmony sets itself more in contrast to traditional games like D&D by stating it’s more focused on personal growth and emotional challenges. I’m into that, I am…but the game has no stated genre or mechanics, save for a ‘5d8 system’. It still may be worth checking out. It’s already funded (albeit at a very small goal), so throw five euros (eight bucks) towards this to see what this game of personal growth really is. I’m intrigued, but only the very, very low cost of admission is making me overlook the complete vacancy of the campaign.

Building on the popularity of pulp fiction across RPG genres, Strange Stories is a game aiming to tell shorter anthology stories in the vein of The Twilight Zone. The book has five different adventures that lean in that direction, though the stretch goals of the campaign aim to take that up to thirteen. With a fairly simple d6-based system, it does look like the writing of the adventures is the core draw here; luckily the team designing and writing this game has a number of key credits including games from Chaosium and Pelgrane Press. If you’re looking for one-shots and enjoy the Call of Cthulhu school of adventure design, Strange Stories could be right up your alley.

Speaking of Pelgrane Press, the publisher is campaigning their next game, Merryshire Detective Club. Based on GUMSHOE, Merryshire Detective Club seems to be riffing off of the cozy style of detective story popular in British literature and riffed off in RPGs thanks to Brindlewood Bay. Instead of old ladies solving murders, though, you have halflings, dwarves, and human-sized rabbits. The game also seems to integrate cozy in a more modern definition of the word, ensuring that tea time and spinning tall tales are integrated into the mechanics just as much as investigation. This is an interesting and perhaps inevitable turn for GUMSHOE, though I can’t help but wonder if the system can still stack up against the more deliberate and modern mechanics seen in Brindlewood Bay and The Between.

Finally, an honorable mention: Mythworks is campaigning a second supplement for their weird fantasy tree-sailing RPG The Wildsea, Sourdown. Like the earlier expansion Storm and Root, Sourdown is introducing a new reach, a new character, and new ship options, plus more setting info digging into the earliest years of the Verdancy. I might be biased as I’m playing in a Wildsea campaign right now, but this looks like yet another great opportunity to expand on the already-wild setting of this game.

Five Year Retrospective

Five years ago there was also evidence of bets against the house, but it mostly came in the form of the massive Avatar Legends TTRPG which was crowdfunding at that time. We covered that in a separate article, so the campaigns investigated in the roundup were a bit smaller, though still with some good headliners. The new edition of A|State led the roundup, which has been a fairly successful entry in both the Forged in the Dark and 2000s revival canons. Fate of Dungeons and Banality did drop off without funding, but Carbon Grey, The Devil Made Me Do It, Fedora Noir, and Dueling Fops of Vindamere all made it successfully to sale. Although the big games cast longer shadows, it was a month where crowdfunding worked as intended and produced a number of solid games.

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With the number of big games out campaigning, all I can say is that I hope the excitement continues. See a campaign I missed? Feel free to reach out in the comments below. Planning on running a crowdfunding campaign yourself? Reach out and we’ll be sure to check it out for the carnival when it goes live. Otherwise, keep pledging games, checking out campaigns, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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