Come one, come all, to the Crowdfunding Carnival! It might be summertime sadness, but things are a bit quiet here at the carnival. That said, at least one barker has taken the opportunity to put a fresh coat of paint on the old tent. Kickstarter has rolled out a new search page, including significantly more filtering options. Also of note is the new ‘TTRPG’ category. While this first appeared last month, the line between it and the old Tabletop Games category was still blurry, so I opted not to bring attention to it. There’s still crossover between the two, but it looks like the more specific categories should help with searching. In addition to TTRPG there’s also STL being added as a category, which should help filter minis and other accessory-specific campaigns away from your search page if that’s not what you’re looking for.

While I don’t have proof I’d anticipate that Kickstarter is responding to the ever-increasing competitive pressure from other providers like Backerkit. While Kickstarter is still dominant in the broader crowdfunding space, Backerkit has brought the heat in TTRPGs as well as other toys and games categories. This month’s campaigns come from both services, and as is often true in the doldrums of July, it’s the indies that have come to play.

Major Campaigns

As is typical for July, campaigns led by large publishers are in a lull due to prep for GenCon. We do have one campaign that, though indie in size, is major in impact. Meguey Baker is campaigning a second edition of PsiRun, a game that was first released in 2011 but has roots all the way back to 2007. PsiRun is a one-shot/short-shot game where players take the role of superpowered fugitives on the run. In addition to psychic powers all characters have amnesia, so the details of your powers, the nature of your captivity, and the capabilities of the ‘chasers’ who are after you all evolve as the game is played. PsiRun is an incredibly influential game, and I personally can’t wait to see what 15 years of games, design, and discussion at the Baker House will do to shape it further.

Indies of Note

Plenty to talk about in the indie world, but I want to first mention an upcoming event on Backerkit, ENnies Emporium. It’s a collection of projects brought to the site by nominees for the 2025 ENnies, in advance of this year’s awards which will be given out at GenCon. The event runs from July 6th to the 16th, so if there are any nominees from last year you took an interest in, be sure to check this out.

And now, onto the rest of the games. I’ve always been one to say that the post-apocalyptic genre is often rooted in hopeful escapism; while there are certainly dystopias, rebuilding the world is one of the biggest, most potent fantasies one can have. It’s with that in mind that I look at the campaign for Embers of Humanity. Described as ‘hope-filled post-apocalyptic roleplaying’, Embers of Humanity is based on a simplified version of BRP and “OSR vibes”, the game started in 2025 and saw some expansion, but is now looking to fund a print run for the first time. The game is settlement-based, already written and tested, and has a wonderful OSR-adjacent affinity for good random tables.

Speaking of OSR-adjacent, we have Dweomerdark. This game about dwarves delving into dark dungeons is perhaps selling itself short amidst a shuffle of Shadowdark-alikes, but it’s not quite that. This is based on Songs and Sagas by Fari RPGs, and written by none other than Alan Bahr, better known as the steward of TinyD6 and the founder of Gallant Knight Games. I’m always here for more new-school approaches to old-school gaming, and that’s what this is, no more and no less.

This next game is not something you’ve seen before…at least not all these ingredients in one game. Brave Horizons is a “creature-capture tabletop game set in a post-apocalyptic solarpunk world”. The ‘keytures’ which are key (heh) to this game are…well, I don’t think they’re close enough to Pokemon to provide any copyright worries, but structurally this is very Pokemon. Each creature is built around elemental types or ‘affinities’ which are going to look very familiar to you, and in certain places the mask slips, like calling each character’s initial creature a ‘Starter’. While I can snark about the very direct inspiration, though, fact remains that the monster hunting, creature capturing genre has not, despite a few attempts, seen a game break into the TTRPG mainstream. Maybe Brave Horizons could be it, if the polish of the campaign and the promo art carries through to the rules and layout of the final product.

We have another post-apocalyptic game up next, and yet another campaign where the designer buries the lede. Force of Extinction is another post-apocalyptic RPG, yes. Build a settlement, survive the harsh wastes, blah blah blah. Force of Extinction is a kaiju post-apocalyptic RPG. You have to click into the campaign to see the tagline ‘Escape from LA meets Godzilla’, which is either a failure of imagination or a failure of marketing. That aside, there’s a lot of promise here. It seems like the designers understand what their specific ‘thing’ is here, emphasizing the monsters and the ‘Build-a-Beast’ mechanics, which are awesome. I hope they are bold enough to double down, because there’s a great game in there that may be buried by another Mutant: Year Zero clone that I don’t think anyone will actually care about.

I’m always a sucker for meta, and this shows through in the next campaign. Il Fantasma del Giallo is a neo-noir RPG with a bit of a twist. Characters in this game are Actors stuck in the Yellow, the hyper-narrative noir world their films are based in. They can return to the Real, but the Yellow will always draw them back, whether because of instinct, addiction, or some unfulfilled need. The Yellow also has The Killer, a being of pure narrative chasing the Actors down…but only their Roles die, the Actors remain. Inspired by Giallo cinema and pushed forward with trick-taking mechanics, Il Fantasma del Giallo sounds like the sort of metatextual nightmare I’d like to get stuck in.

Next project is another solo RPG with an interesting mix of premises. Shadow in the Stars places you in the role of a starfighter pilot taking on a sequence of missions to make it to an alien homeworld. While you need to fight through enemies to get there, you’re dealt a significant twist in the form of amnesia: You don’t know why it’s your mission to kill these aliens, even as you must do so to survive. This game like others has adopted the video game term ‘roguelike’ to emphasize it’s meant to be replayed multiple times; while the term is just as nebulous in the tabletop world as it is in the digital one I am starting to see a throughline with the solo games that choose to use it. Beyond that, this seems like it has an interesting mix of tactical mechanics and a prompt-driving premise that could make for intriguing solo play.

This next campaign is a ‘glossy’ campaign, focusing on high production value to bring backers in. That’s not a dig, per se, but it does tend to align with broader, safer games. Cthulhu Dreamt is aiming to bring survival horror to the Mythos; the game is set in a near future where unknowable cosmic horrors are, well, quite knowable and real. This is, from my perspective at least, aiming down the middle of the more classic ‘play to lose’ cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu and the more over-the-top “save the world” action movie of Fate of Cthulhu. The mechanics seem fairly conventional, though being specifically a d12-based system is a choice more for uniqueness than statistics, a point I ironically made five years ago in the roundup I’ll review for the retrospective.

Another glossy campaign, ChaosWood looks like it’s trying to take the gameplay and book design sensibilities of Shadowdark and package them in a bigger, more board game like format. The mechanics do look a bit more original, mixing some OSR distillation tricks with stats that remind me most of WFRP (and that’s not a bad thing). There does look to be a lot of work put towards making the dungeon crawl here more of a board game, with two dungeon boards and a fair host of pre-generated NPCs and monsters. I’m not exactly sure how well it’s going to work, but I think it looks like as solid an attempt as I’ve seen so far from an indie designer.

Last but not least, it’s another Mork Borg clone! Borglikes, like PbtA games before them, seem to have morphed from a me-too fad into a  much smaller group of games which actually consider which system matches their use case. I hope that’s the case with Forgotten Odysseys, a Borglike set in swords-and-sandals Greek mythology. The game looks well-considered, focusing specifically on an Odysssey-like journey home. Being a Borglike it surprised me that the art direction was more ‘Greek Classic’ and less ‘300’, which would have been an obvious linkage back to the Stockholm Kartell vibe. That said, I think the tight focus matches the tight system, and would be interested to see how it compares to the similarly-themed but more narrative Agon.

Five Year Retrospective

July of 2021 was, as I called it at the time, still a ‘hot pandemic summer’. The collection of campaigns was perhaps a bit eclectic, but given the amount of text I dedicated to, well, complaining about how many bad Kickstarter campaigns there were that month (assumedly ones I did not cover), it may make sense that summer 2021 was a time to dig deep and get away from the unnecessary 5e materials and truly loathsome heartbreakers. By whatever metrics I was using, though, July 2021 turned out pretty damn good, with every single campaign funding and, from what I can tell, every single campaign fulfilling successfully as well. I don’t necessarily think any of these games went on to breakout success, but a number of designers got dreams into the world, and sometimes that’s enough (especially in the middle of 2021).

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Not a bad crop of RPGs to pull from the summer heat, all told. Of course, August will be something completely new, with the potential for big games being announced at GenCon or simply allowed to slip into the hype cycle after the show is over. For now, though, there’s some good stuff to mull over. See any I missed? Feel free to comment below. Have your own crowdfunding campaign coming up? Reach out to me or Seamus so we don’t miss it next month. No matter what you do, check out some games, pledge some campaigns, and join us here next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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