Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for October! I have to admit, autumn snuck up on me and I’m not quite in spooky season mode yet. That’s ok, because we have a wide range of games that designers are trying to bring to life, no necromancy required! Want to be a dinosaur? Roadtrip to Oregon? Have the gods try to ruin your life? We’ve got you covered. And if you are already in the Halloween mood, there are a few horror games snuck in there as well.
Major Campaigns
A pretty small crop of ‘majors’ this month. Two campaigns to at least note: Good Society, the Jane Austen RPG, is Kickstarting a second edition. My first encounter with Good Society was in a crowdfunding roundup, where it confused and delighted me. I’m glad to see that it has continued to be successful. Also crowdfunding is a print run/revision of Fetch My Blade, the solo game of dog and master. We’ve covered that before as well, we even have a blurb in the campaign! As with Good Society, really excited to see Fetch My Blade continue to do well over the years.
The one big campaign worth noting, major in impact if not exactly revenue (though who knows), is the second edition of Microscope. Microscope is Ben Robbins’ worldbuilding game of grand scope, capable of helping players trace out thousands-years long histories, zooming in and out as they please. In the campaign Ben states he wants to make Microscope even easier to pick up from the word go, and that sort of improvement is very exciting to me. If you’re interested in worldbuilding or collaborative storytelling even slightly, check this one out.
Indies of Note
First game this month is a fun one, Portland Oregon Trail. Using the Polymorph system, Portland Oregon Trail mixes the classic Apple II game of westward expansion with the classic hive of crust and hipster-y that is Portland Oregon to build a GMless roadtrip game. Polymorph is light enough to accommodate some fun Oregon Trail-inspired mechanics, but this one is at least slightly more about the vibes and slightly less about dying of dysentery.
Next up is Tempora. I’m a sucker for time travel games, so this game about going back in time and fixing (or creating) time paradoxes definitely stood out to me. I wish the campaign provided a little bit more information about the mechanics and how the premise is actualized…but when that premise is best summarized as “time travel was a terrible idea”, I’m on board.
Moving along we have Atrapos, a mythic fantasy RPG from Soulmuppet Publishing. Taking place in a setting inspired by Ancient Greece but still its own thing, Atrapos hews a bit more to a ‘Greek Tragedy’ conceit to align with Inevitable and Orbital Blues, other Soulmuppet games. What makes this interesting to me is leaning into the overarching theme from Greek myth of gods which actually meddle in the lives of their mortal subjects. Of course, when following in the steps of ‘sad space cowboys’ and ‘sad Arthurian cowboys’, it means Atrapos is a game where the gods may be trying to literally ruin your life.
Another designer is showing up again on Kickstarter; in addition to the fellows at Soulmuppet we have another game by Kobayashi, the designer of Black Sword Hack. This new game, Darkness Protocol, is OSR-based but takes inspiration from another very different well, survival horror video games. The game centers around Haunts, locations that have other dimensions leak through, resulting in monsters and dark energy fields. The characters, picked from one of four classes, need to learn the truth about what’s actually coming into our world. One cool thing: the game runs with a Doom Clock, where each hour of real time spent in a Haunt results in new threats emerging.
Believe it or not there are two survival horror games this month, and they couldn’t be more different. While Darkness Protocol is a stripped down experience, Ink Ribbon aims for a more maximalist experience, providing a box set with all the gewgaws, more rules, and theoretically more depth. The rules previews look like a game somewhere in the Cyberpunk wheelhouse; not excessively crunchy per se but definitely locked down with a fairly substantial mechanical core. That said, this game is the brainchild of Emmet Byrne, creator of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and holder of an RPG CV as long as my arm. If executed well this could be an intense and satisfying trad horror experience, and I’m willing to bet on the design team.
Kids games are always of interest here at Cannibal Halfling, and this next one is doubly interesting. The Portal Witch is a game of magical world-hopping kids, but it’s also built with the Cortex Prime ruleset, something I wish I saw more of out in the wild. The Portal Witch is a mysterious but friendly character in a hub world called The Cauldron, and from there characters can travel out to other worlds and solve problems. The Witch helps with magical costumes, which are an intriguing modification of a Cortex ‘Prime Set’ that shows some thought has been put into this design. The game is currently in an ashcan form with about 60 pages of content, but it sounds like there’s room for expansion if the campaign is successful.
We’ve got another core system adaptation coming up, this time in the form of Void Wardens. Void Wardens is an over-the-top anime RPG, specifically based on settings and series from the 80s just as anime was beginning to be embraced in the west. Appropriately, the game uses Savage Worlds for mechanics, a solid foundation for what sounds like a wild, pulpy setting. Of course, with the number of influences on tap it’s going to have to but in some effort to distinguish itself from its mechanical stablemate Savage Rifts. That said, the mix of anime and 80s cartoon aesthetics with kitchen sink characters and abilities could provide an interesting middle ground between something more like Rifts and something more like Twilight Sword or Fabula Ultima.
Last but certainly not least is Herd of Horns. This is a game that lets you play friggin’ dinosaurs, which is cool. Beyond that it’s aiming to be, in a way at least, the Bunnies and Burrows of dinosaur games. For those who don’t know, Bunnies and Burrows intended to be an at least somewhat realistic portrayal of rabbit biology, and similarly here the self-described ‘paleo-nerds’ are trying to ground the dinosaur adventures and keep the game empty of goofy conceits like time travel or magic. In fact, the game focuses exclusively on ceratopsids (the clade of dinosaurs that includes triceratops among others) and the Lampanian stage towards the end of the Cretaceous. So hey, if you want realism with pretending to be a dinosaur, this is one of the only ways to go.
Five Year Retrospective
Five years ago we had a slate of games kind of similar to this one, a lot of various indies and only a smattering of experienced designers, no real ‘majors’ to speak of. Storybrewers, the publishers of Good Society, show up in both, with October of 2021 being the campaign time for Fight with Spirit, their sports RPG. Blackbirds was somewhat of a major game, though Grim and Perilous hasn’t really been in the news recently save for their spat with World of Game Design over a recent crowdfunding campaign. Blackbirds, luckily, was fully completed, a beneficiary of the short-lived partnership between Dan Fox and Grim and Perilous and Andrews McMeel Universal. Luckily all of the projects this month were funded and completed, including both foodie RPGs and QUEERZ!, which I’ve seen in my local gaming store. As we keep moving forward in history the completion rates of all these games tend upwards, both because of increasing professionalism and because of the larger slate of games to look at each month. It’s a tough balance; it gets harder and harder for creators to stand out, but us buyers generally have a better and better selection to choose from…at least if you can filter out the 5e slop.
Another good crop of games, with a wide range of approaches and genres. Any other campaigns I should highlight? Comment down below. Got a campaign brewing yourself? E-mail us and let us know when you plan to launch! Just want to check out some new games? Take a look at these and, if it moves you, let us know what you find cool in the broader carnival of crowdfunding. Read some games, support some creators, and I’ll see you next month for another Crowdfunding Carnival!
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