Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2024! We’re just out of the weird, liminal part of December, so excuse me if I’m still a little longwinded and full of cheese. Nonetheless, we have a number of campaigns to talk about, including one very large one.

It is a new year, and Shannon Appelcline released his annual Year in Review over at the Designers and Dragons website (a move from the article’s usual home on RPGnet). While the article covers much of the past year’s news very concisely, I want to call your attention to the top Kickstarters segment about ¾ of the way through the article. The top three campaigns of 2023 were all third party supplements for 5e. Since Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk began six years ago, there were only two years where the majority of the top 5 best funded campaigns weren’t 5e supplements, 2018 and 2022. Even more damning, the only supplements in these lists which I still hear people discuss in social media in any fashion were all authored by the company which is currently running the largest campaign in this article. At least this new one isn’t (technically) D&D.

Major Campaigns

Coming into the final stretch, the major campaign of note this month is of course the MCDM RPG. Matt Colville’s team opened the campaign mere days after last month’s Crowdfunding Carnival, but we get to catch it here on the tail end which, in all honesty, is a better place from which to evaluate its success (and in the month of D&D’s 50th birthday, no less).

At just about $4 million, the MCDM RPG is the biggest of the new D&D alternatives which went for crowdfunding (though in that category it only has one competitor, Tales of the Valiant by Kobold Press). It’s also one of very few original games to break 2 million, sitting in a rarefied category alongside Avatar Legends and…The Old Gods of Appalachia? This puts the game in a somewhat odd position of blowing all of its peers out of the water…but at the same time potentially sitting in third in the ‘also D&D except’ arms race. The winner so far is Paizo, and while Pathfinder is a distant second behind D&D, it’s got a significantly larger audience than MCDM’s 25,000 or so backers. In third is Darrington Press with Daggerheart, because not only did they not need to crowdfund (which is a bit of a flex in the TTRPG world), but it’s the only D&D alternative made by Critical Role, and that counts for something.

Is it necessary to look at these games as competing with each other? Well, yeah. Having read the previews and playtest docs, these are all D&D alternatives. That’s…kind of it. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means they’re all trying to do the same thing. Even if we assume they all have skilled game designers at the helm, the likelihood that all four of them are different enough to last more than a print run or two is low…and lower still for the three not named Pathfinder.

From the little information we have so far, Matt and his team are in a good position. If I were Kobold Press, I’d be trying to figure out what my strategy is, but MCDM’s cool four mil is nothing to sneeze at. Is it enough to square up with Darrington Press though? Or Paizo? Hard to say.

Indies of Note

Elsewhere in crowdfunding, there are plenty of games which aren’t trying to slay Goliath, and both them and us are better for it. First up is Eldritch Automata, a horror game using the Year Zero Engine. Of course I’m burying the lede here, because it’s a mecha game using Year Zero, replete with all of the psychological trauma that has become the hallmark of the genre right alongside the giant robots. Now, I have been following the Year Zero Engine with interest since Forbidden Lands came out, but despite the release of the SRD there haven’t been any third party YZE games that have really hit yet. This, though, is one of the strongest I’ve seen, and I’m not just saying that because giant robots are absolutely Seamus’s kryptonite (curse you – Ed.). Gehenna Gaming has existed as an outfit for a few years, mostly doing events and some actual play. It doesn’t look like much of their back catalog has really ‘hit’, but this pivot could be a strong one for them. $30 gets you a PDF.

Next up is a curious game, but one that I find personally interesting. With Breath and Sword is a solo RPG, but is specifically described as an RPG to help combat anxiety. The game is built around grounding methods and breathing techniques for helping to resolve an anxiety attack. The more effectively you’re able to use the techniques, the more impactful your encounter will be. Now, I’m an anxiety sufferer; like any mental condition there is a range of severity and I’m lucky that both the magnitude of my anxiety as well as the coping mechanisms I’ve picked up over the last two decades have been minimally disruptive to my ability to live a productive life. That said, my experiences with anxiety help me understand how useful more tools are in the arsenal for getting through each day, and from that perspective I’m happy to see someone try to develop a tool like this. How well it works (either in general or for any specific person) I do not know, and the campaign does include the caveat that this of course is not a substitute for medication. $20 gets you a PDF; I’d normally note the low goal for this campaign but without any print run and with the first draft already done I consider the overall risks to be low.

The next game is another solo game and also another game about mental illness (though not a tool for managing one). Cyan starlight is a game about the last human traversing the galaxy in the style of space operas from the 70s and 80s. It’s also a game that comes from a deeply personal place for designer Alan Bahr, who used the game to document his struggles with bipolar disorder. The game is based on Breathless, a game by Rene-Pier Deshaies-Gelinas which was also adapted into Stoneburner, another feature in an earlier carnival. As you progress through the game you discover clues about why you’re the last human in the universe; these clues come together into one of 512 different endings to the game. If you’ve ever been pulled at by loneliness and isolation, this sounds like a perfect game with which to explore that.

Considering meditations, we have Whispers in the Woods. Sparse on mechanics, Whispers in the Woods aims to tell stories of villagers delving into dark and unforgiving woods. Unlike something along the lines of Trophy, though, this game aims to let the players decide what that story means for them. Requiring only d6s, Whisper in the Woods builds out its potential stories mostly through procedures and frameworks; there are defined roles and many random tables, rules for both solo and GMless play, and a few rules more advanced than rolling a single d6 should you want that. Beyond the flexibility I’m also captivated by the game’s style; to really hit as a fairy tale RPG you need to look the part. €14 (~$12) gets you a PDF.

I will say this was the first Crowdfunding Carnival where I kicked a campaign out of contention for using AI art (feck off, Skynet – Ed.). To anyone else planning on going to Kickstarter with AI-generated or otherwise lightly plagiarized material in your game, all I have to say is: Do better. On the other hand, if a campaign using AI art makes it past my filter and you, a reader, notice it, help me do better and let me know. Crowdfunding Carnival is for people who actually make things, and there are plenty of ways to make a great looking game with public domain art and imagery or even no art at all.

Five Year Retrospective

2019 had a quiet January and, while some of this is normal yearly cadence, in hindsight ZineQuest may have already been inducing small creators to wait until February with their project ideas. The original announcement of ZineQuest came out in November of 2018, so creators had plenty of warning for moving their projects. No matter the reason, this roundup had eight games, and I warned in the article that a couple of them stretched the parameters set forth (original games or revisions of games more than fifteen years old). First, the good: Low Fantasy Gaming: Deluxe Edition and They Came From Beneath the Sea were the two standouts in terms of continued sales success. Low Fantasy Gaming is in retrospect a slam dunk, but this comes before massive successes like Old-School Essentials (May of 2019) and Mork Borg (June of 2019). It also funded at little more than US$20,000, so even though the game has continued to do well it started from a modest base. They Came From Beneath the Sea is less of a surprise; it’s an Onyx Path game.

While this month had no failures to fund it did have one ghosting; Map Maker Adventures released a beta PDF (v0.99 I think) and then disappeared. This combined with the relatively high ticket price makes it an especially frustrating fail, and it doesn’t appear that refunds were given. Overall, though, more good than bad in this month, and at least one campaign that deserves some recognition even if it hasn’t stayed visible in the scene; Dragon Scales, a game of casting runes, is still available on Etsy (given that the designer started with and primarily produces sets of physical runes as opposed to rulesets), and has been used as an add-on in subsequent Kickstarters by the designer. While this sort of thing isn’t hugely visible by people like myself on the hunt for rules and games, it still deserves some kudos.

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While it’s a quiet January like many of them, everything is overshadowed by the emerging battle to hack at the shins of the giant, just in time for its 50th birthday. Which game will emerge victorious, and which ones will be discussed as often as the Old Gods of Appalachia RPG? Elsewhere on the internet, what games are waiting to come out of the woodwork, finally getting room to breathe as the giants fight on elsewhere? It’s a whole new set of adventures in 2024, and you can find some great ones right here in the Crowdfunding Carnival!

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