Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for November! It’s a big one here; apparently holiday shopping has gotten everyone riled up, because there are campaigns everywhere! My first pass caught a dozen and a half, and even more have started even in the last 48 hours. As always, if there’s a game I didn’t cover that you think is deserving of notice, sound off in the comments.
For now, though, let’s get into it. A bunch of the majors are campaigning this month; even beyond the campaigns below we also have Pinnacle and Magpie with new supplements for existing games Savage Rifts and Avatar Legends. Needless to say there’s a lot, so let’s get into the big ones first, including Paizo’s Backerkit debut and the first official translation of a Japanese legend.
Major Campaigns
It’s a big month in crowdfunding land, and that’s especially true among the big incumbents. Whereas normally we have one or two major dollar campaigns to look at, this month there are five. First off and likely the one with the most hype, Mugen Gaming is bringing the first official translation of the Japanese RPG Sword World to the English-speaking RPG world. Sword World originally came out in 1989, using a Traveller-like 2d6 system and a hybridization between the class-based framing of D&D and the skill-based framing of games like RuneQuest. It also helped popularize the RPG ‘replay’ years before Actual Play took the American hobby by storm, and this ‘replay’ trend led to offshoot properties like Record of Lodoss War. With all that history behind it, it’s kind of a shame that the crowdfunding campaign is orbiting around a $375 “core set” tier and a $1,500 whale tier. Given that the system already exists, I’d wait for this one to come out for real instead of spending that much money on a 35 year old game.
Next up is a fascinating entry, both because of what it is and who it’s from. 13 Omens is a narrative horror RPG with a bag-building mechanic at the center. Players draw dice from the bag in the middle when they need to make rolls; as the story continues the GM adds ‘Omen’ dice which amp up the potential consequences. It sounds like a neat, narrative-leaning system, but what’s fascinating is that this is being campaigned by Paizo. Yes, Paizo of Pathfinder and Starfinder fame. Not only is this one of the first completely new games from the company (Pathfinder and Starfinder are D&Ds, and most of their other work has been around Savage Worlds adaptations), it’s also likely being shifted to crowdfunding for both capital preservation and diversification reasons made necessary by the Diamond Distributors fiasco. While Paizo may have been forced into diversification, they’ve come out swinging with this one, and I hope we see more design work from them in the future.
Next up is a big and fascinating licensed RPG. Renegade Game Studios is campaigning Immortal Universe, an RPG set alongside Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire. This is a fascinating license because it both follows the trend of adapting book settings (i.e. current games made with Adrian Tchaikovsky, Naomi Novik) and is also a good example of a recursive setting at least as far as TTRPGs are concerned. Much like how Black Sword Hack aimed to go back to some of the sword and sorcery settings of D&D’s Appendix N, an Anne Rice RPG is doing a similar runaround on Vampire: the Masquerade, which was notably influenced by Rice. I am cautiously optimistic about Renegade’s post-Essence20 run, but the fact that they’re referencing the AMC TV series in their campaign before the novels makes me think I may regret that optimism.
Speaking of novelists, Monte Cook Games is campaigning a new game set alongside the novels of Rebecca Roanhorse. Between Earth and Sky is another Cypher outing, unsurprisingly, but the Pre-Columbian fantasy setting adds a unique twist that will be well-supported by Roanhorse’s award-winning novels. Like both Numenera and Invisible Sun before it, though, Between Earth and Sky is going to depend on either being interesting in spite of Cypher, or getting the fanboys excited.
Last but certainly not least, Evil Hat is campaigning Rangers of a Broken World, a game by Leon Richardson that Evil Hat is publishing. Taking place in a magical, JRPG-inflected post-apocalypse, the eponymous rangers are heroes who use magic both within themselves and within the land around them to stand up to demons, automata, and other horrors. While the mechanics are original, the preview in the campaign seems to imply the sort of fairly light and flexible system that Evil Hat has years of experience understanding, marketing, and selling.
Indies of Note
There were a ton of indies I found this month, even after doing my normal ‘is this AI’ and ‘does this look bad’ checks I had 12 different campaigns I thought interesting, over and above the five majors covered above. I did, with some difficulty, get my list down to ten in total, but that does mean a lot of games are being left to the side this month. If there’s a campaign I don’t cover that you think is worth a mention, be sure to comment. These next five, though, are really solid combinations of interesting concepts, slick mechanics, and, in the case of the first campaign, a mashup I didn’t know I needed.
The House Edge is described as a ‘paranormal jailbreak RPG’, but it’s also a mashup between FIST and Triangle Agency, using FIST mechanics and taking place in the Triangle Agency setting. In addition to mixing a wild setting with a random table lovefest (intended in as complimentary a way as possible), the House Edge makes this all even better by putting the two together in a game about paranormal mercenaries trying to escape a time loop. All mashups need some sort of hook or synthesis to show that they add something new to the original source material, and The House Edge, to my eyes, has that in spades.
The next game leans into the surprisingly fruitful ‘characters are retired old folks’ genre. Instead of old ladies solving mysteries like Brindlewood Bay, ENCORE puts you in a retirement home for covert operatives. Your characters come together with a Flair (your old specialty or unique skill) and a Wrinkle (something about your aging that holds you back), and need to work together to pull off one last job. Aiming to be both fairly simple and fairly comedic, ENCORE looks like it’d be a lot of fun, maybe even as an epilogue to a FIST campaign.
I’m always a sucker for games that play around with player-player interactions and relationships, and Biophage puts that right at the center. Biophage is a two player game at its core, with one person playing the Host and the other a Parasite. The relationship between Host and Parasite pushes and pulls through the game as the combined character tries to survive and grow stronger. At the same time, the game also provides another play mode, Cleaners, where players take the role of those who hunt the Biophages and keep the world safe. The whole thing comes together with a simple but intriguing dice system which gives both outcome and effect in each roll, meaning you can end up with ‘Yes, And’, ‘Yes, But’, ‘No, And’, and ‘No, But’. I’m really interested to see how that works in play.
There are more parasites, erm, I mean Symbiotes, in the next project. Sophont takes Mothership’s core mechanics and uses them to portray an alt-future world where symbiont-infused mercenaries, known as Cutters, are the most advanced tool in the black ops toolkit for securing and protecting global power. Based on the characters and influences listed in the campaign, Sophont is aiming to be part-Cyberpunk, part-Conspiracy, part-Supers, and part-Horror; notably in addition to using the Mothership mechanics it’s also following in the Mothership tradition of looking slick as hell.
Finally this month there’s one piece of Seamus-bait (though I happen to know he’s already backed one of these projects), a double feature mechapunk RPG called Emberjack and DEBT MERC. Emberjack is described as ‘gothic horror Steampunk’, with Escaflowne listed as one of the key references, while DEBT MERC is described as ‘body-hopping posthuman’, with Ghost in the Shell listed as one of the key references. Both games will be contained in one book and both run on a system called Relict/TECH, which is an expansion of the designer’s Relict system first released in 2023. The core mechanic underneath both games is mechanically detailing the characters as both their core ‘self’ and their mech body; think of it as a variant of how Eclipse Phase does Ego and Morph. While two games in a book is itself a nice treat, I think having two different worked examples of how the ruleset does mecha will make this campaign yet more compelling for fans of the genre as well as aspiring system hackers.
Five Year Retrospective
November of 2021 was another diverse crop of games which also had a solid major campaign presence in the form of both the Mothership box set, GURPS Girl Genius, and CY_BORG. Beyond that, most of the campaigns went through fairly successfully. Kalymba did not reach its funding goal and was cancelled; it appears to have been relaunched and then had issues fulfilling. While track record is not the primary reason I don’t typically cover relaunched projects it is part of it, and unfortunately that shows through here. Beyond that one wrinkle were a number of very successful games, including Anamnesis, Women are Werewolves, and Shanty Hunters, which recently crowdfunded a sequel. Even without quite the volume of this month, 2021 showed that November is a solid time to launch Kickstarters, outside of the con schedule and right around when people are thinking about holiday shopping.
Holidays are coming up, so that could either mean it’s time for shopping or it’s time to protect your wallet. With that in mind, think of these projects not only for yourself but for the RPG fan in your life with a reasonable risk appetite. Whether for a gift, the table, or your shelf of opportunity, check out these games and comment about any I’ve missed. As always, check out some campaigns, support creators, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!
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