Backin’ Up

List

It might be hard to believe but I have another six, no seven entries in the list of projects I’m backing on Backerkit. Now, absolutely all of these are fully funded, their pledges have been called in and they’ve charged my card. I’m just waiting on their delivery at this stage.

So, let’s get into it:

1. Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure 5E+DCC
2. The Expanse Roleplaying Game: Transport Union Edition
3. The Between
4. Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game
5. Stay Frosty REMASTERED
6. 321RPG 5th Anniversary Expanded Rule Book + Encyclopedia Monstergoria
7. Terror from the Underdeep: A Giant Box of 5E Adventure

If you’re interested in seeing what I have currently backed on Kickstarter, click here.

1. Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure 5E+DCC

Goodman games produce some of the highest quality books and other products in the TTRPG industry. Anyone who has glanced admiringly at the Doug Kovacs covers of any of their five million adventure modules for Dungeon Crawl Classics will know what I’m talking about. They’re also incredibly interesting artefacts that look like they were first published in the seventies but have a modern OSR sensibility when you get into them usually.

Anyway, last year, I was beginning to build a small collection of DCC books and other paraphernalia when this project was launched on Backerkit. Their timing was impeccable if they were specifically looking for my support. I didn’t hesitate. Since they were bringing out both a DCC and a 5E version of the boxed set, I went with the DCC one.

The Caverns of Thracia is a remake of an original and iconic module by Jennell Jacquays. It was a Greek myth-based scenario and it was published by Judges Guild in 1979. The Goodman Games version promises you a year long campaign from the boxed set, at least. It should take DCC characters from level 1 to level 5 and it contains a whole mega-dungeon along with all the new monsters, magic items, spells etc. that you might expect from something a big as this.

I splashed out on a dice set and a few extra books when it came to my pledge so I am expecting something very special when this arrives at my door in a month or two! You can check out the campaign page here. Also, if you’re interested you can go and pre-order it from a store near you if you look it up online.

2. The Expanse Roleplaying Game: Transport Union Edition

Get ready to decelerate towards the Ring. And maybe charge your rail guns while you’re at it. You never know what Inaros and his Free Navy might have in store for an inners’ freighter on a mission of peace out past the Belt.

I got into the Expanse with the TV show. It was a relatively hard sci-fi look at how our solar system might look in a couple of hundred years but with an alien mystery at its centre. Unfortunately, the TV show got cancelled, so I started reading, nay, devouring the books by James SA Corey. There are 9 Behemoth sized books and they take our heroes, privateers aboard the Independent freighter, Rocinante, across more about forty years and from lowly jobs on a gas hauler to the centre of the greatest events across three wars and dozens of solar systems.

It gets big.

Which is a cool premise for a sci-fi RPG. You know?

Green Ronin produced the Expanse Roleplaying Game a few years ago, but it was brought out before either the TV show or the books were finished so it did not include rules or details to cover some of the most important and universe-defining events, factions and tech that turns up in the latter half of the story. The new version sets the action in the thirty year gap between the sixth book, Babylon’s Ashes and the seventh book, Persepolis Rising. This is a very convenient gap for an RPG writer to place a lot of major events. These will be based around the activities of the newly minted Transport Union, established to take care of trade and exploration across the solar systems recently opened up by the activation of the Ring Gate Network left behind by an enigmatic and lost civilisation.

It uses the same AGE (Adventure Game Engine) as Dragon Age so should be familiar to a lot of gamers already. I can say, it is very easy to learn and pretty intuitive. I’m excited to see how it has been modified for this setting.

They’re also producing both character and ship minis for this campaign! I doubt it is something I would use in this sort of game, but it would still be very nice to have.

Check out the campaign page here.

3. The Between

I have written a bit about some of my favourite RPG related podcasts and actual plays in the past. But I don’t think I have mentioned Ain’t Slayed Nobody’s current run of the Between on the blog before. I love this show. The players are great, as always, the production values are exceptional, the GM, also the game’s creator, Jason Cordova, couldn’t be better, and the game itself is entertaining and dark and creepy and fun in equal measure. It is one of those shows that I queue up and listen to as soon as it drops.

This game has actually been around for a while too. The Backerkit campaign was to fund the production of a physical version. If I’m honest, it’s not really the type of game I would usually be drawn to. Victoriana, rarified conversations in drawing rooms and illicit trysts in haunted houses are not really my thing. Or at least, I didn’t think they were until I listened to the actual play of paragraph-before-this-one fame. Turns out, I enjoy those things quite a bit. It reminded me, unsurprisingly of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by the late, great Kev O’Neill and Alan Moore (not the dreadful movie of the same name.) And I love that comic book.

Not only that, its based on the same ruleset as Brindlewood Bay, also from Jason Cordova and the Gauntlet, which I have discussed to some small extent here. And though I still haven’t had the chance to play it, I would love to. I think it’s one of the greatest innovations in RPG mechanics in the last decade and deserves all the plaudits it gets.

Anyway, the game looks great, the book looks great. You should go and order it when it’s possible to do that. In the meantime, go and check out the campaign page here.

4. Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game

Silence is golden. Words are vibrations. Thoughts are magic. Welcome to Nightvale

The cold open Welcome to Nightvale, episode 8, “The Lights in Radon Canyon” seemed an appropriate way to open this one.

I have been listening to Welcome to Nightvale for almost as long as it’s been around. It hooked me, originally, with its unique blend of weirdness, horror and humour. It kept me coming back as the desert town grew and changed along with its residents, like Cecil Gershwin Palmer, the Voice of Nightvale, John Peters (you know, the farmer?) and the Almighty Glow Cloud. I love the writing so much. The podcast’s co-creators, Jeffrey Craynor and Joseph Fink have been so prolific over these last 13 years, producing the podcast, related books, live shows (one of which I have even been to see. I got to meet Jeffrey Craynor there!) and lots of other Nightvale stuff. So it was about time we got a roleplaying game, right?

The game will use the Essence 20 system, which I am not even a little bit familiar with. It seems to be a system developed by Renegade Game Studios who are publishing this game. But, it looks like you roll a d20 to resolve actions, while adding another die depending on the skill you’re using and the proficiency you have with it. This all seems fine. But it’s not the mechanics that worry me here. Much like the Discworld game that I mentioned in the last post, I am just not sure how the RPG will retain and exemplify some of the core aspects of the podcast, its weird and uncomfortable hilarity, for instance. You do get something called “Weird Points” to effect situations in particular ways, apparently and according to Becca Scott in this How to Play Nightvale video and I’m sure they will have other mechanical and character options to keep it strange. I’m still not fully convinced this will come together in the right way at the table but I am obviously willing to get it and find out later.

If you’re interested in picking this one up, I believe there is a link to pre-order on their campaign page.

5. Stay Frosty REMASTERED

Look, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about this game before backing it. I have heard Tom McGrenery on the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast mention that he used a previous version for several of the modules that they reviewed on there. It’s a pared down, old school ruleset for running Aliens style sci-fi games and Tom has used it in some unlikely but interesting scenarios.
That, along with the fact that it was launched by the Melsonian Arts Council was enough to get me to back it. This is another company I would always back. Well, except that I won’t need to anymore now that I have become one of their subscribers. They recently launched this initiative, which means you pay them £10 a month and you get everything they publish along with special editions with limited covers and that sort of thing. This might mean they never have to run another crowd-funding campaign again!

This is a small snippet of the blurb from the Stay Frosty Backerkit page:

The system is perfect for point-crawls and dungeon-crawls where clearing rooms, blasting bugs, descending into hell, flying through space, and defeating hordes of monsters is on the table. Supports campaign length play and one-shot horror-tinged bug hunts.

You can find the original by Casey Garske here on DrivethruRPG for a steal.
And you can find the campaign page for the new version, also by Casey Garske, here. If you become a Friend of Melsonia, it is one of the books you will receive from them this year, also.

6. 321RPG 5th Anniversary Expanded Rule Book + Encyclopedia Monstergoria

Yet another one I am not terribly familiar with, 321RPG is something I backed on something of a whim to support John “Hambone” Maguire, of the Vintage RPG Podcast and his creative efforts.

This is the yet another one that’s not brand new. In this case, it’s an expanded edition, rather than a 2E or physical print edition. This is in celebration of the fifth anniversary of its original publication. The original game was designed to be flexible. They wanted it to be of use to any table in any genre and any play style, which are all incredibly difficult and lofty goals. Here’s what the campaign page says about the new version:

This expanded rule book is the culmination of four years of growth, a lifetime of gaming, and the incredible enthusiasm of our players. If there’s one rule for DMing that always holds true, it’s that you can never anticipate what the players will do. And that’s precisely what makes it all so exciting.

It’s also going to come with four new adventures, and an “Encyclopedia Monstergoria.”

Here’s the campaign page!

7. Terror from the Underdeep: A Giant Box of 5E Adventure

I think I fell for the marketing with this one. I am not really one for backing purely 5E based projects. If I had my druthers, I would probably move away from 5E altogether and maybe, someday, I will. But today is not that day.

I basically backed this Goodman Games project because it looked really really nice. Also, it’s massive in scale with more than 450 pages of content, new monsters, spells, magic items, fold-out maps and really exceptional artwork.

The version I decided to go for also comes with a bunch of DCC modules converted to 5E as well.

Here’s what the main adventure campaign for PCs of levels 8 to 16, is about, according to the Backerkit page:

The giant clans have allied – and no one knows why. Hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud and storm giants now work together to collect electrum. Their tracks lead to an abandoned city of the UnderDeep. In these lightless caverns, sinister cultists give the giants’ offerings to a misshapen kraken lord. Can your adventurers uncover the secrets behind this wicked alliance before it’s too late?

There’s a PDF preview on the campaign page.

Conclusions

Having covered each of the projects I am currently backing, I have come to the conclusion that I back too many things. There are, undoubtedly, a couple of these that I could have done without. I mean, I’m quite sure I will never even get to play most of them. But, as the old saying goes, playing games and collecting games are two different hobbies.

What are you backing right now, dear reader? Do we have any of these in common? Which ones are you most excited about? Get in the comments!