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 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 Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re firmly out of con season and we’re out from under the shadow of Wizards of the Coast trying to release a book. More broadly it seems that the rush to be the next d20 has also abated, which has meant more and more interesting campaigns this month! This was a very full crop with new campaigns shooting in almost by the hour as I was trying to write this thing. That also means there are a few solid campaigns out there I wasn’t able to get to; I’m both sorry I’m not able to cover everything but also glad I didn’t have much dross to read through to get up to ten campaigns this month. We’ll start with a dizzying four different major campaigns, representing The Gauntlet, Renegade Game Studios, Onyx Path, and a Youtube channel.
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 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.
As far as movements in the RPG hobby go, the OSR has been great for weird. It makes sense: If you want to put stuff in your game that’s atypical, hard to explain, or just plain out there, games which give the GM the latitude to treat them appropriately without forcing you to use giant stat blocks or the square-cube law are going to be a very good fit. We’ve seen some very good weird come out of old-school spaces: Dungeon Crawl Classics is great at making D&D weird, and both Chris McDowall and Luka Rejec have made some memorably weird spaces to plumb through. We’ve got some new weird coming through, though, and it’s bombed out and full of mutants.
Plasmodics is a love letter to Gamma World by way of Into the Odd with the spark tables to prove it. It’s the newest game by Will Jobst, and it’s on Kickstarter right now, campaigning until September 6th. The game has spare but extremely intentional mechanics, and does a pretty great job of casting you as mutants with freaky powers. Will gave me a chance to take a look through the Preview Edition of the game, and it does a great job of taking the ideas in the original Gamma World and going some very untoward places with them. If you want a Mad Max game except only for Beyond Thunderdome, and also want the possibility to literally blow up the world in play, you’ll want to read on.
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 August! We’re steaming right out of the gate with some big ones this month! There’s an old stalwart getting a new edition, and the next multi-million dollar licensed…thing. Additionally, though, we have some really interesting games, new twists on old systems, small-scale innovations, and even some neat translations. Let’s start with the big stuff though; a new license, an old license, and a new lease on life for the old house system of West End 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.
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