Welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of the year! No way around it, it’s a slow January, like many that have come before. Indie designers are often holding their cards until ZineQuest (formally announced in December), and major publishers are focused on closing out the year, which often means entering the new year with no projects on the slate (lest there be liabilities with no revenue recognition). As such, coming out of the New Year’s holiday there is often a small slate of projects, if any worth reading at all.
But fear not! This month’s update will be short but sweet, with three projects that are certainly worth looking at. While there are no major publisher campaigns active at the moment, there are two small format games tackling ambitious topics: Civilization building and mashing up time travel and giant robots. Then, we have a large-format labor of love which, though it follows in the footsteps of those before it, is still worth some consideration.
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December of 2024! I’ll be honest, one of the best things about this year right now is that it’s almost over. It’s been eventful, perhaps too eventful, here in 2024, but lo and behold we’re back into another holiday season, and that means that there’s a lull in crowdfunding. It’s not a complete lull; there’s still some solid campaigns out there, including a few big ones and even the tail end of a major event. That said, seven campaigns is a low watermark, and that’s even after poking around on the hanger-on crowdfunding sites. Even so, there are some gems here. We have journaling games, games in Scots, and even an entire month of Mothership. So let’s check out what’s in store.
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for November! We’re heading into the end of the year, and for multiple reasons it’s a great time to put the real world to the side and check out some games! November was a pretty big month; nearly 20 campaigns passed my deck and needed to be narrowed down to make this article. So though I say it every month, it’s certainly true this month: While every campaign I cover here is solid and interesting, many of the ones I didn’t have space for are too. We’ve also seen another big month for Backerkit, with a bumper crop of intriguing games making the upstart crowdfunding platform an equally (if not perhaps more) intriguing place to look for new games as Kickstarter.
We’re ready to start, though! We’re going to cover a few major campaigns by some of the big guys, though we really only have one (maybe two) standalone games to talk about. Then, we have a good number of indies. Cross-collabs, solo games and tarot mechanics await you below.
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! September is a classically thin month, sitting in the shadow of GenCon. It was so thin five years ago that I actually skipped wonking about it to write an editorial. This year, though, is a bit better. Seven campaigns is still thin, yes, but these are all good ones. Also, interestingly, this may mark one of the first months where the majority of campaigns aren’t from Kickstarter! That’s right, four out of seven campaigns are from Backerkit this month. Backerkit was the best contender for second place pretty much since they started doing crowdfunding, but this may indicate a sea change.
Sea change or not, we’ve got some solid games this month. Solo games, Year Zero, and a generic Onyx Path game are all waiting for you to peruse and perhaps pledge. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for July! July is the summer doldrums in the RPG world, no doubt about that. With GenCon in early August, a large portion of the design world shifts the timelines of their games so that they have either announcements for GenCon, or something to sell at GenCon. As a result, product announcements, be those releases or crowdfunding, rarely if ever happen in July; the potential benefits of waiting just a few weeks are too much. As a result, this article will not hit the target of ten campaigns; the designers aiming to put forth original RPGs are exactly the ones who would benefit the most by using GenCon as a platform.
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for June! We’re just starting to creep into con season here in the US, and there is an attendant slowdown in major campaigns as a result. That said, there’s still a lot of energy in crowdfunding, and this month it felt pretty easy to come up with at least ten to cover. More of an issue were some of the campaigns themselves. Did you know I actually opened a campaign, started to write about it, and then had to actually Google the name of the game to find out that the campaign was for a fourth edition of the game, because that hadn’t been written anywhere in the campaign’s text? Don’t do that! Don’t assume we know anything about your game, because the fact is that unless your name is Mike Pondsmith or Mr. Paizo (or Gary Gygax, I suppose), we don’t! No one knows anything about your game! Anyways. There are some solidly interesting campaigns here, both from your larger studios and some completely new outfits. Let’s check them out.
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for May! The push in April means that the crowdfunding machine is quiet, at least in terms of big names pushing big games. For newcomers, though, there is some variety. We’ve got dystopias, we’ve got mecha, and we’ve got…maggots. Come with me, and see what games you want to throw some money to this spring.
The tavern is the fulcrum point of the adventuring lifestyle. It’s where wandering heroes can find food and shelter after weeks out in the wilderness, it’s where quests can often begin… and it’s where quite a few stories find their happy ending. After all, being an adventurer is a tough life. Many adventurers, whether they retire after a successful career or call it quits early, get the idea to be the ones running the tavern, providing the same things they needed back when to a younger generation. It can take some doing, however, integrating back into settled society after a life living on the road and by sword and spell. How do you let go of who you were, and who will you become? Let’s have a taste of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern from Takuma Okada, now on Backerkit with Evil Hat Productions!
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! As you business types know the first quarter is over, and it’s time to kick things up! More realistically, ZineQuest is over and PAX East is recently in the rearview, meaning that the first set of product announcements in the tabletop gaming world have kicked off in earnest. Commercial con season runs from roughly PAX East to GenCon in August, so we’re in the height of major announcements and the crowdfunding campaigns which accompany them. As such, we have four major glorified pre-orders campaigns that you can check out. Beyond that there’s still a lot of momentum in the indie space, at least somewhere down in there. Sifting through the weird porn minis and 5e “supplements”, I’ve picked out five indie campaigns that are worth checking out and, quite possibly, worth a pledge as well.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 