Tag: Backerkit

So Rewarding

Surprise!

I came home from work on Friday to discover a wonderful surprise in my porch. I wrote about the Kickstarter campaign for Swedish Machines, Simon Stålenhag’s new art book way back in September of last year and ‘lo it has arrived! This was particularly pleasant because I didn’t realise they were shipping already (I have backed a lot of projects and, honestly, I can’t keep up with the updates for all of them, dear reader.)
Just feast your hungry little eyeballs on this:

Digital Surprise(s)!

Fifth Season RPG

Another major surprise came yesterday when I checked my inbox and found a link to the PDF Preview of the Fifth Season Roleplaying Game. This one has been in development by Green Ronin for more than two years and has been hit with delay after delay so to finally have a version of it stored away in my overstuffed RPG documents folder was a pleasure unlooked for. It was literally the first project I ever backed on Backerkit so I forgot it was there entirely.

As many of you will be aware, I have an ongoing Dragon Age RPG campaign going right now (we recently picked up again for Act II of the campaign, using a published adventure, which will get a post of its own when we are done.) The Fifth Season RPG uses essentially the same rules engine, Green Ronin’s own AGE (Adventure Game Engine) system originally developed for their generic Fantasy AGE game.

The game is, of course, based on the incredibly successful series of novels by modern master of the SFF craft, NK Jemisin. The Broken Earth trilogy tells the story of a dark fantasy world where a feared and reviled underclass of people with the power to manipulate the earth itself are employed/enslaved in the interests of everyone else. The earth itself, on the continent known as the Stillness, is a constant danger to its populace and the orogenes use their powers to calm it and make it safe. But every so often, the earth rebels so strongly against its inhabitants that it becomes uncontrollable, unleashing terrifying earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and tsunamis of dreadful power, seemingly in an effort to end all life. This is known as a Season, the Fifth Season of the title. The story follows the trials of a small number of these orogenes and the people closest to them as they attempt to survive a Season and discover some hidden truths of this harsh world.

The books have won a lot of awards and deservedly so. They are some of my favourite SFF books of the last ten years. If you haven’t read, them, dear reader, do yourself a favour. You can easily find them in your local secondhand bookshop these days but the audio-books are also a pleasure to listen to.

Anyway, when the RPG was announced I didn’t hesitate to back it. But, despite Green Ronin’s long experience of producing licensed games like Dragon Age, and the Expanse (I have also backed the new version of this game, The Transport Union Edition, which I’m eagerly awaiting) this one seems to have suffered a few setbacks and delays. They have tried their best to alleviate the issues by keeping in touch with the backers and offering a 10% discount on their webstore, and I think a lot of the problems were out of their hands, to be fair, so I am giving them the benefit of the doubt. Also, I’m loving what I have seen of the preview PDF so far. The artwork is gorgeous and it makes liberal use of the source material. As its a preview, I won’t share much, but here are a few shots of the illustrations:

The Vastlands Guidebook and Our Golden Age

I’ve been writing a lot about Ultraviolet Grasslands recently. We’ve just completed the third session of our campaign and we’re all loving it so far. Rarely have I run a game that has so sparked the imaginations of the players, both at the table and in between sessions. My wife, who plays forager-surgeon and Lime Nomad, Stebra Osta, explained to me today so much about the character’s people, how their nomadic encampments are set up, the importance of water in their culture, their dress and food, the way they braid their llamas’ hair… The breadth of the unknown in UVG is truly its greatest strength. Its staunchly anti-canon stance has given the players explicit permission to make the world the way they want it to be. So, do we really need more source-books for it? If they are written the way UVG was written? Absolutely. I mean, the random spark tables, the loosely described peoples, the maps with gaps, the mysterious origins of everything: they all come together to make a wonderful frame for you to fill up with your fellow players. I have no reason to believe Mr Rejec wouldn’t produce more work with the same structure and content. Well, this week, I am getting to see the beta of one of the two books in this crowd-funder and a whole section of the other.

The Vastlands Guidebook is the full set of Synthetic Dream Machine rules to play a campaign of UVG. It is very similar to the UVG Player Guide Book that I mentioned in my UVG Character Creation post but with far more detail and some very tasty art. It has full character creation rules, including a whole bunch of new Paths, eg. Barbarian, Purplelander, Tourist and Skeleton. There are mechanics for everything you could want to do in your game. It’s got powers, random NPC creation tables, corruptions, more vehicles and mounts etc. etc. I’m already thinking of ways I can get some of this new stuff to our table.

Our Golden Age is a setting book for the Circle Sea area of the Vastlands, the part of the world your average caravan in UVG is leaving behind at the start of their adventure. Luka Rejec released a teaser for the Yellow Land section of the book and it looks just as sumptuous and bonkers as you would expect from the creator of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. After a brief overview of the geography, climate, government, economy etc. you get some very fun tables. Events tables, travel tables, very unusual merchant tables, fashion tables. Then we have some interesting factions with eminently usable NPC members, a page about the Géants, enormous and unstoppable biomechanical soil farmers left over from another era, and into a section about the cities and places of interest in the region. These include Safranj, the Saffron City, with its key control of the drug/spice, saffron and vibrant opera scene. The Refining Plain: “Autorefineries of livingstone linked by arteries of basalt and tentacles of shipmetal, sinews of standardstone and great mushroom vent-mounds stud the plain below the voidtouching mountain Vulkana.”

The Yellow Land very much gives me Nausicäa vibes. It has an environmental disaster theme and even has Orms (like the Ohmu in Miyazaki’s masterpiece) dangerous animals that tear up the land.

A warning for the unwary traveler:

The Automatic Tourist Entity (A.T.E.) has compiled a list of must-see places in the Yellow Land for centuries. Recently, many warn it keeps suggesting destinations with a terrifying preponderance of surprisingly cannibalistic local practices.

I cannot wait to see the finished product and get it in my grubby little mitts.

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!

Kickstarters/Backerkits I’m Excited About Part 1

Making things people want

In Business Studies class we learned that market research was crucial to the successful launch of a new product or service. Back in those days that meant doing a lot of time-consuming leg-work. Methods of market research included surveys posted to homes and businesses, cold-calling people to find out what type of toilet paper they used or which newspaper they read, talking to supermarket customers, that sort of thing. The results of your market research could very well determine whether or not your idea got to market. If it was received poorly by a majority or respondents, forget it!

Of course, the internet has made all of this work a lot easier and quicker. Not only that, with the arrival of platforms like Kickstarter and Backerkit, it feels like the process is reversed to some extent. What I mean by that is that now, you can launch your idea on Backerkit and see how popular it is. If it makes enough money for you to be able to make the thing, you know that, at the very least, just enough people want it. If it fails to fund, back to square one. There is the other possibility that you end up with a run-away hit on your hands, of course, and that seems to lead to its own problems sometimes. I think we have all been stung by a campaign that promises so much but drags on for years with little or nothing to show for it.

Do take my words with advisement, dear reader, I have never launched one of these projects so I am merely an interested observer.

The topic of this post, though is the projects I am excited to have backed and the ones I am most looking forward to seeing come to fruition.

Golden age

There is no doubt in my mind that we are living through a golden age of indie RPGs. In large part, this has been made possible by the existence of Kickstarter and similar sites, where indie gamers can go and geek out about the incredibly niche story-game or gnarly OSR module that they never knew they always wanted, even if there are only 237 of them. Those 237 people will get something that would not have been produced without their excitement, their enthusiasm and their money.

Of course, it’s not just your independent gamers using the service. You see Free League and Goodman Games using them to launch products even when it is probably fair to say they would have been perfectly successful without them. But what a way it is to build hype for the launch! When you sign up for one of these things you are getting communications from them almost every day as they hit stretch-goal after stretch-goal. They get to big-up their new thing to a captive audience of people who they know want it. What a perfect way to be able to flog you some more addons! Dice, tote bags, t-shirts, entire other games and supplements…
I don’t necessarily feel great about this. Mainly because I am so susceptible to it. But I do feel very good about being able to support truly independent creators for whom this is the only way they would be able to produce the games they do.

Anyway, here’s a list of the stuff I have currently backed that is still live. These are things I can’t wait to get my hands on and that I would recommend others support:

On Backerkit

  • Get it at Sutlers: A Troika Adventure Generator. The first adventure/sourcebook/something to provide any real detail on the fabled city of Troika itself, in particular, a department store that your adventurers can get jobs at in between jaunts into the hump-backed sky.
  • So You’ve Met a Thousand Year Old Vampire. The sequel to the incredibly popular “Thousand Year Old Vampire” solo RPG. I’m not usually big into solo games but the original really grabbed me.
  • Our Golden Age (OGA) : An Ultraviolet Grasslands RPG []equel (This one might be over by the time I post this. Sorry!) This “[]equel” has done incredibly well in its campaign. As the follow up to a book that I heard about on a podcast and immediately bought but have not read yet, this was a pretty speculative back for me but just look at it!

On Kickstarter

  • Simon Ståhlenhag’s Swedish Machines. I have been fascinated with Stålenhag’s art for years. It tickles a little part of my brain labeled “This Could be Real.” I love the Tales From the Loop RPG and I have the art book for that too. I held off backing this one for a while but eventually decided I had to have it.
  • Kal-Arath: Sword and Sorcery by Castle Grief. Kal-Arath is a truly independent game and setting being made by a mutual I discovered on Instagram. It looks fun and old school as all get out.

Back up

Like I said, all of these are still live (or if not, they just finished before I posted this.) Over the next few days, I’m going to go into detail on some or all of them and give you a reason, dear reader, to go and back them like I did. For now, why not go and have a look at their campaign pages to see if they can tempt you!

What are you backing right now, oh reader? Or what is a project you are so glad or so sad you backed?

Drop it in the comments!