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.
Tag Archives: crowdfunding
Out of the shelf and onto the table
The thing that separates the TTRPG hobby from most others is commitment. The oft-stated platonic ideal of TTRPG gameplay, the long-running campaign, requires you and three to five other people to carve out time on at least a monthly (and preferably more frequent) basis for possibly years in order to play through a game of typical length. Although one-shots certainly exist, as well as con games where you need only bring yourself, fact is that if we talk about how mainstream RPGs are designed, the campaign is how they’re meant to be used. While every hobby improves with time and experience, your bicycle doesn’t care how often you ride it, your skis don’t care how many times you make it to a mountain each winter. Traditional RPGs, typified by D&D but including the vast majority of games published from a sales basis, have entire chapters of rules which are only applicable if you’re playing the game over an extended period of time.
Continue reading Out of the shelf and onto the table
The Data on Million-Plus RPG Crowdfunding Campaigns
Crowdfunding began to change the RPG world in 2012, when Monte Cook Games campaigned Numenera. At the time Monte Cook was best known for his work at Wizards of the Coast, and a new game with new mechanics in an unfamiliar science-fantasy setting was not what one would call a sure bet. On Kickstarter, though, the project gathered more than half a million dollars and made it clear that the DIY financing opportunities presented by crowdfunding were very real and very useful. Fourteen years later, crowdfunding is both an enabling technology for hundreds if not thousands of creators and is the way many RPG creators are able to get their games made at all.
Like most of the hobby, all crowdfunding is not created equal. In 2016 the first RPG Kickstarter crested a million dollars, and then in 2024 the first RPG Kickstarter exceeded ten million dollars. While Numenera went on to have a long sales cycle after its crowdfunding, more and more companies are building their revenue around Kickstarter; many crowdfunded games will earn 80% or more of their revenue from crowdfunding and provide little to no sales tail (what I call the “Kickstarter Thud”). And these two phenomena are encroaching on each other, with new creators often leveraging massive YouTube audiences into equally massive crowdfunding campaigns which then melt into the hobby with little fanfare.
Continue reading The Data on Million-Plus RPG Crowdfunding Campaigns
Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2026
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! It’s after GenCon, and as is expected, the announcements flowed heavy from this con. A lot of the announcements were for D&D, and they weren’t necessarily positive, unless you’re really excited about marketing tie-ins. The movement from the rest of the industry, though, gives me reason to be optimistic.
Fact is, announcing a game in or around GenCon is a gamble, especially because GenCon is historically linked with D&D. In 2024, few were daring to make big announcements for fear they’d get swallowed up in the hype for the then-upcoming 5.5e rulebooks. Now, though, a lot of companies are being bolder, and that’s even before WotC decided to turn to the dark side with Universes Beyond.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2026Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026
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.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close enough to GenCon to suck the air out of the room, it is close enough that most of the major publishers will wait a couple months before any big announcements, giving the little guys a chance for some more spotlight. We’re seeing it now and, as you’ll see later in the article, we saw it five years ago as well. With that said, let’s get into it. No major publishers this month, but we do have the newest campaign from one of the most successful singular designers going.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026Weekend Update: 4/11/2026
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.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 4/11/2026Crowdfunding Carnival: Zine Month 2026
Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re more than halfway through February, and Zine Month is still going strong. As I covered a couple of weeks ago, Kickstarter’s Zine Quest and Backerkit’s Zinetopia are the key leaders of the month, with Kickstarter’s event currently a little more than double the size of Backerkit’s. Still, you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t check out both.
Overall funding rates are high, with the combined total being north of 70%. Still, there are a number of projects looking to still cross the finish line, and some of them are certainly deserving of more attention. For this mid-month check-in on our zine events, I’m going to focus solely on projects that are still looking for that final push before February is out.
Before we get into it, I’d like to highlight a few non-zine projects: Blades ‘68, the groovy supplement to Blades in the Dark, is campaigning on Backerkit and it looks smashing, baby, yeah! Over on Kickstarter, Free League is bringing the Trudvang setting to Dragonbane, and Green Ronin is campaigning Mutants and Masterminds 4e. Definitely some cool stuff going on, but let’s stay on target, and try to get some zines printed. Every campaign below isn’t quite funded yet, so if any of these sound interesting, consider throwing a few dollars towards the designers. They’ll notice and appreciate your contribution much more than the big guys above.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: Zine Month 2026Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2026
Welcome back to another Crowdfunding Carnival! It’s not just any Crowdfunding Carnival, though…it’s February. And that means it’s time for Zine Month! And this is a big deal, because for the first time since 2022, it’s actually time for Zine Month, not just Zine Quest. Backerkit has stepped into the ring and it looks like they’re going to stand toe to toe with…wait, I’ve just gotten word that Backerkit’s Zinetopia event is capped at 63 projects? Meaning that if we extrapolate from Kickstarter’s typical Zine Quest growth profile they’ll end up being around 30% of the size? Hm. Oh dear.
It’s not a bad showing, to be clear; 63 non-Kickstarter projects is more than we’ve ever seen from the alternate Zine Event folks since Kickstarter made the confusing decision to move Zine Quest to August. But ultimately there were more Zine Quest projects live even by February 2nd, and unlike Backerkit Kickstarter will let you tag any zine project started in February as Zine Quest, so we’re likely to have well over 200 projects by February’s end, if not even more. It is notable, though, that while the number of projects live in the first week of Zine Month is similar this year and last (around 150), the split is around 60/40 Kickstarter and BackerKit, meaning that a lot of people took Backerkit’s rival Zinetopia event seriously.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2026
