Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Con season is well and truly over, with PAX Unplugged wrapping before Thanksgiving. That, combined with the upcoming holidays, has caused Kickstarter to slow…turns out game designers need a vacation too! We don’t have ten campaigns to look at this month, but there are still a number of interesting games on the horizon which are worth examination.

Major Campaigns

It’s a fairly quiet December in crowdfunding land, but we do have one large campaign that’s worth talking about. Two Little Mice of Outgunned fame are campaigning their next game, once again published by Free League. Twilight Sword is a game with video game inspiration, one that sees you becoming a hero of legend and bringing hope back to the land of Radia. That sounds  somewhat generic, but it’s burying the lede a bit…Twilight Sword looks like the Legend of Zelda. It looks a whole lot like the Legend of Zelda. While it could be a coincidence that the name seems like a mashup of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, this really does look like the Zelda-iest TTRPG to ever Zelda. With the key features it even seems to be going for the sorts of exploratory gameplay seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which could be really cool. I’m interested to see where this goes; I’m imagining that the recent setbacks Nintendo has suffered in their Palworld lawsuit may have emboldened the Two Little Mice as far as going forward with this game is concerned, but we’ll still have to see if Radia is as interesting and lore-deep as Hyrule is.

Indies of Note

Only a few projects this month, but they’re each interesting. First off we have Gravity. Gravity is a GMless game about various characters facing a common threat. Each character has their own agenda, though, so how the conflict plays out could go in many different ways depending on each character’s motivation and methods. The game has a PbtA-adjacent structure, with Playbooks defined by Moves, but with a twist: Each character can only use each of their moves once. As the threat grows nearer, everyone’s options are running low and the choices become increasingly desperate. This sounds like a really neat way to mechanically bound a storyline; I definitely want to give this a try if it becomes a reality. The game has about a week left to go and isn’t quite over the funding hurdle, so please check it out.

Next up is Victim. Victim was originally a series of board games released by Hexa House, a design studio based in Singapore and Thailand. Now, they’re translating the experience into a horror RPG intended for one-shot play. The game seems mostly scenario-based but has a few interesting twists, including mention of a ‘time attack’ mode as well as ‘traitor’ rules which would assumedly add an adversarial angle to play. The structure as described seems to somewhat hybridize the existing board game rules with an RPG structure, but the company did get their start in board games. This is likely worth investigating, especially as it seems that the team isn’t bound by a lot of the same working assumptions that cause American designers to churn out so many repetitive products.

Speaking of casting off old working assumptions, the next game to check out is Card Drives. Card Drives is described as a solo deckbuilding RPG, and casts you as a computer hacker (or perhaps a ‘console cowboy’) who is hacking with a Cyberpunk 2020-style cyberdeck. Cyberdeck manages to be a play on words, though, because your deck of cards represents your deck and what actions you can play in the net. The game is also described as ‘roguelike’, though in the tabletop world that’s likely a somewhat trendy/faddish term for a game where death is frequent and replay is expected. While I’d want to get my hands on the game to see how much RP is in this RPG, I think the concept is great and want to give it a spin myself.

Finally we have A7. A7 reads as a heartbreaker in many ways, from the lengthy development by a single designer to the extensive lore and maximalist character options. That said, A7 is a sci-fi game in a transhumanist setting, which piques my interest. Transhumanism is a genre touched upon in mainstream RPGs, but rarely; Eclipse Phase is arguably the most successful transhumanist RPG, with GURPS Transhuman Space another potential contender. A7 focuses on a much longer timeline but still purports some hard sci-fi elements in spite of the far-flung setting. The campaign has a long way to go to meet its goal, but I’d love to see this setting more fully realized.

Five Year Retrospective

Apparently December of 2020 was when game designers started to perceive normalcy, because that’s when projects started failing again. I jest, slightly, but three projects failed to fund from this month, and they weren’t anywhere close. To be fair, one of them I called out as ambitious but doomed in the article due to their lack of low-cost pledge levels…but I didn’t expect them to sputter out with only eight backers. Timeless was the worst of the bunch but Diadem and SpaceFest Unlimited all completely crapped out, getting no material support and, luckily, owing nothing material in the process.

It does get better from there. It appears all seven of the other campaigns fulfilled successfully; Our Last Days was very sparse on backer updates, but the comments section confirmed that games had been sent out and received. I received my copy of Ace Adventure and the Flying Royal Flush, and was very pleased about it. Speaking of Ace Adventure, designer Brian Liberge’s next game, Last Kiss, just finished crowdfunding earlier this week, unfortunately not lining up with promotion in this carnival. Even so, you can take a look at Seamus’s preview and follow on BackerKit so you know when the game is out.

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Perception aside, we’re still probably six months away from ‘normal’ when looking back through the five-year telescope. January of 2021 meant participating in a digital con and then February began the process of leaving the place I had lived for about six years at that point. June of 2021 was a vague hallmark of normalcy for many, but especially for me, it was the point that the turmoil had at least reached a plateau. Even with everything else going on, though, the games, and the crowdfunding, continued.

A bit of a short one this month, but even at half strength I still think there are a number of very interesting campaigns that could use some exposure and love. Have a happy holidays, cast out the darkness, and play some games when you get the chance. I’ll see you all in a month for the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2026!

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