November 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

Mothership Month 2025 and RPG Party are officially done, Mausritter Month is nearing its conclusion, and (sigh) OSE Month 2026 is on the distant horizon. On the plus side, I was referenced in a Rascal article! All in all, an interesting two-year anniversary of this whole project. Here's the raw data, let's get into it:

• 242 campaigns
• 46 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 24 Gamefound
• 172 Kickstarter
• $7,740,735.97 raised
• $1,836,907.08 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $374,321.14 on Gamefound
• $7,1186,728.47 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 22 accessories
• 73 adventures
• 2 advice
• 1 anthology
• 1 audiobook
• 1 book
• 18 campaign settings
• 2 platforms
• 5 reprints
• 62 supplements
• 52 systems
• 3 translations
• 88 distinct systems used (34 original)
• 76 campaigns (31.40%) used D&D 5E and raised $3,428,051.25 (36.48% of all money raised in November)
• 51 campaigns used AI in some form (21.07% of total) and raised $419,589.22 (4.46% of all money raised in November)
• 35 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 46.05% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 22 different countries
• Top 3: 114 in USA, 39 in UK, 15 in Canada
• Singleton countries: Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey

Backerkit's November

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in November were:

1. Mothership: PROSPERO'S DREAM by Tuesday Knight Games ($445,846 from 5,025 backers)
2. Lodestar: A Spacefarer's Manual | Space Fantasy in 5e! by The Dragons Vault ($331,898.43 from 2,909 backers)
3. Designers & Dragons: Origins by Evil Hat ($249,015 from 1,556 backers)
4. Pathfinder® for Savage Worlds – Carrion Crown by Pinnacle Entertainment Group ($84,631 from 689 backers)
5. WRASTLEVANIA by 9th Level Games ($70,690 from 1,040 backers)

Gamefound's November

The top 5 campaigns on Gamefound in November were:

1. HeXXen 1733 - Jäger des Ewigen Eises by Ulisses Spiele ($73,443.87 from 425 backers)
2. The Wildsea: Tigers on the Wire by Mythworks ($56,189.15 from 990 backers)
3. Ambition by The Press Betwixt ($38,592.03 from 199 backers)
4. The Table of Adventure: The Official Dungeons and Dragons Game Table by Game Theory Tables ($31,571.01 from 9 backers)
5. Trenchcoat Raccoons: A Chaotic, Fail-Forward Heist RPG by OneShot TPK ($30,325.05 from 551 backers)

Kickstarter's November

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in November were:

1. Obojima Tales From Yatamon by 1985 Games ($859,145 from 7,167 backers)
2. Bastions & Guildhalls: A Modular Map Maker by Czepeku ($536,354 from 11,431 backers)
3. GHOST IN THE SHELL ARISE - Tabletop Roleplaying Game by Mana Project Studio ($498,868 from 3,216 backers)
4. Dungeons of Drakkenheim: Daggerheart by Dungeon Dudes ($448,956 from 3,713 backers)
5. Mega Dungeon: The Mines of Silverdeep by Dungeon in a Box ($415,575 from 1,857 backers)

November 2023 vs 2024 vs 2025

	2023	2024	2025
Campaign count
Backerkit	10	29	46
Kickstarter	164	150	172
Money pledged
Backerkit total	$1,256,857.98	$2,601,889.34	$1,836,907.08
Backerkit average	$125,685.80	$89,720.32	$39,932.76
Backerkit median	$58,370.49	$25,602.00	$15,695.93
Kickstarter total	$9,018,619.50	$8,957,845.53	$7,186,728.47
Kickstarter average	$54,991.58	$59,718.97	$41,783.31
Kickstarter median	$6,189.33	$5,382.44	$5,768.63
AI
Campaign count	29	37	51
Money pledged	$375,584.36	$362,118.92	$419,589.22
D&D 5E
Campaign count	67	76	76
Money pledged	$5,824,894.60	$2,343,963.24	$3,428,051.25

Here at the two-year anniversary of this project, we have the first chance to actually compare more than two years' worth of data! Some interesting things that jump out at me:

• Although Kickstarter and Backerkit are obviously competitors for users and money, there is no clear evidence that they are actually taking anything from each other. Backerkit's fortunes have largely risen (both in campaigns and money raised) while Kickstarter's fortunes are mixed (more campaigns, less money)
• "More campaigns, less money" is really the name of the game: from Backerkit to Kickstarter, from AI campaigns to D&D 5E projects, there's more stuff out there than ever and less money to go around. What's important to note, though, is that these are all successful projects. So even though there's less money on the whole (and on average and on median), more people than ever are (in theory) able to make the stuff they want to make.
• Backerkit's average/median money pledged dropping precipitously from 2023 to 2025 strikes me as largely a good thing. It means that more people are using the platform to fund smaller projects, rather than it being primarily for larger companies/creators (which was definitely the case in November 2023).
• AI use in TTRPG crowdfunding projects continues to depress me, but I take some solace that the average money pledged has dropped by over $4k from 2023 to 2025 ($12,951.18 to $8,227.24). I hate that the number of projects has increased by 75%, but at least they're making 36.5% less money on average.

I'll keep making these three-year comparisons up until next November, at which point I'll have to figure out a more efficient way to compare data.

Mothership Month 2025 and RPG Party Debrief

So I talked last month about Month fatigue, and that hasn't changed (especially with the discovery in the interim of Backerkit's Holiday Market and that OSE Month is coming in May 2026). But I have reconsidered a small part of my issues with them, and I'll go over that once I examine the actual outcomes of Mothership Month 2025 and Gamefound's RPG Party.

Mothership Month 2024 featured 21 successful campaigns and raised $1,001,068 (according to the official page, my data show ~$995k for some reason) from 23,116 backers (obviously not all unique, but at least my data and the official page agree).

Mothership Month 2025 featured 27 successful campaigns and raised $858,140 (according to the official page and my data, though mine show slightly more for some reason) from 20,710 backers (again, agreement between data sources).

Using Backerkit's official numbers, that represents not only a nearly $143k decrease in overall money raised but $15,886.94 less per campaign ($47,669.90 average in 2024, $31,782.96 in 2025).

So at the end of all this, the important question to ask is: was it all worth it? For Backerkit? Almost certainly. It drives attention and money their way and gives them great PR for future themed Months. For the creators who participated? Definitely! They get to make what they wanted to make, and for all my complaining about hegemony last month I don't really believe that anyone involved in Mothership Month 2024 or 2025 secretly didn't want to make something for Mothership. (That concern is, again, reserved for the pipeline that initiatives like Mothership Month, Mausritter Month, and now OSE Month create to receiving broader Backerkit resources.) For backers? It's great for the ones who like Mothership, and, though we already knew this, that's clearly a large audience.

The main people I'm concerned about are those who fall outside of the in-group here. Creators who don't make stuff for Backerkit-approved OSR games. People trying to find time to get their smaller projects visible to a wider audience. People who might have, for instance, submitted their project to Gamefound's RPG Party.

This initiative mostly coincided with Mothership Month and Mausritter Month and made some big promises, like free ad money (based on follower count), workshops with industry veterans from Chaosium and Magpie Games, and marketing boosts from DTRPG. In the end, of the 23 featured campaigns, 17 were successful and raised $246,746.54 from $3,788 backers. Most of these projects were fairly modest in scope (with the exception of a project with an outlier goal of $69,000 that did not fund) and had professional-looking pages with videos and a decent amount of art.

Can you attribute the 6 failed campaigns to Mothership/Mausritter Month? No, I'd attribute it more to the lack of visibility both on and outside of Gamefound. But I also can't rule out the attention that the themed Months on another platform received. An end of year goal of mine will be to try to disentangle the effect that initiatives like Pocketopia, RPG Party, Mothership Month, etc. have on projects that are not included in their orbits. Do they reduce the money other projects receive? The backers? Can you even determine this? Do they seem to affect other platforms? Here's to finding out!

I said in the intro to this section that my feelings on these themed Months have changed a little, and they have. What I realized is that I have strayed a bit close to the capitalist event horizon in focusing so much on the money raised by all these projects. And while that unfortunately does matter, I've slightly lost sight of the continued increase in projects that get funded at all, which these Months and Topias and Parties seem to only be helping. I continue to have concerns about the hegemonic positions of crowdfunding platforms and whether smaller creators are getting the attention, money, and support that I truly think they deserve, but the fact remains that there are more games getting made than ever. And to slightly misquote Marge Simpson: I just think that's neat.

Except games that use AI. Fuck you, go to hell, jump in a lake that you drained for your shitty plagiarism machines you fucking vultures.

The Awards 2026 Design Diary #2

Judges: what are they good for? Absolutely everything!

But what do they actually do in/for The Awards?

Judges' responsibilities

Let's start from the basics: the judges basically are The Awards. They are the ones responsible for reading, evaluating, and voting on all the submissions. I'm just the admin side making sure they have what they need to do their job. Here's the basic timeline of a judge's work for The Awards 2024:

Application and Selection

Interested parties submitted self-nominations to be judges in April 2024. The information requested was as follows:

• Their name
• As much demographic information as they cared to provide (race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc.)
• Where they lived (for the purposes of getting global perspectives in judging)
• Their games manifesto: Your games manifesto should show how you think about games. It should be fairly short (a paragraph, maybe two at most). It should be honest. It should explain why you want to be a judge for The Awards 2024. We are looking for diversity in the judging panel, not only in terms of the judges’ identities but also in how they think about games. Don’t say what you think The Awards wants to hear; tell us how you really feel.

Judge self-noms closed on April, judges were selected in May (with the help and input of two judges from The Awards 2023), and they didn't have much to do until June, when all the submissions were in.

Conflicts of Interest and Round 1

Once all submissions were in, the first thing the judges had to do was go through the list of submissions and flag any conflicts of interest they had. This was defined fairly broadly (all the way from "frequent collaborator" to "have an Opinion about their social media presence") and judges were expected to interpret it as fairly and honestly as they could. The only consequences from these disclosures were that some submissions just weren't judged by everyone in the first round, and not all conflicts of interest even necessarily resulted in a judge not voting on that submission if I deemed it to be sufficiently low-stakes.

During Round 1, each judge had 3 months to get through all the submissions, not knowing who any of the others were, and give each a simple yes/no vote. In 2022, we had 197 submissions; in 2023, 333 submissions; and in 2024, 104 submissions. This was, as you can imagine, a wildly different amount of work each year. In an attempt to corral that work, The Awards 2024 had the following policy for both submitters and judges: judges were not obligated to read more than 50 pages of submissions per submitter. Submitters were also limited to 3 submissions or 50 pages of material, whichever limit was hit first. Items longer than 50 pages were allowed, but there was no guarantee the judges would ever read more than the limit. Not everyone hit the 50 page mark, but imagine if they had: at 78 submitters that would have been 3900 pages to read in three months! 1300 pages per month! Just over 43 pages per day! I'll return to this later, but it remains my biggest current challenge in redesigning The Awards.

Round 2 and Discussion

Once all Round 1 votes were in, I tallied them up and assigned a cutoff value that would leave the judges with 40-50 finalists. Out of a group of 10 judges in 2024 (we started with 12, but lost two through attrition), 4 yes votes were enough to bring a submission into contention for winning.

While tallying votes, I also brought the judges into a shared Discord server. This was where they would further discuss their thoughts on the submissions (finalists or not) and develop their ideas for what they would deem Awards-worthy. After I shared the list of finalists in the server, they then had 2 months to deliberate on finalists and decide on their votes.

Crucially, they didn't have to come to a particular consensus or all agree on 20 winners. Every judge received 20 votes to allocate as they saw fit. They could give 20 submissions one vote each, one submission 20 votes, or any distribution in between. The philosophy here was that anything that inspires a judge to put all 20 of their votes on it probably deserves to be recognized as a winner. The results of this in 2024 gave 14 clear winners and 13 borderline results that all received the same number of votes, resulting in two further rounds of voting in which each judge had a number of votes equal to the available slots left (6 for the first runoff, 4 for the second runoff) and could only give 1 vote per submission. In retrospect, perhaps I should have applied the same logic to the runoffs as I did for Round 2. You live and you learn I guess!

Winner Announcement Livestream

Once all 20 winners were determined, the last thing the judges did was participate in the winner announcement livestream. Each selected two winners that they wanted to talk about and wrote a short 2-3 minute explainer of why they deserved to win on of The Awards. Last time around, this was in November 2024, marking the end of a 5.5-month commitment on the part of each judge.

So what's potentially changing for 2026?

The workload

I was a judge for the first iteration of The Awards and had an absolute blast reading through all the submissions. I have also read through (or at least skimmed) every single submission for The Awards 2023 and 2024, even though I have no influence on the outcome.

I am a sicko in this way.

And while it's true that I'm looking for TTRPG sickos to be judges for The Awards, most people don't have jobs where they can devote a significant amount of time over the summer reading through TTRPG submissions for this random awards show they joined. So, I'm trying to develop ways to mediate the intensity of the workload on the judges.

Some possible solutions:

Further limit page count

The current page limit/required reading is 50 pages, but I could reduce it further. I'm loath to do this, though, because that starts to cut into people's ability to submit more than 1 moderately sized zine. I feel it might cause more submissions of 1 big thing than a couple of smaller things. The same goes for reducing the maximum number of submissions from a limit of 3 to 1 or 2 items. If the goal of The Awards is to recognize smaller projects, people should be able to submit multiple smaller projects.

Extend the length of Round 1

There's no intrinsic reason Round 1 has to last three months. I could give it another 2-4 weeks, but I don't think the answer to managing judge workload is to have The Awards take up more of their year. Still, it's on the table.

Cap on submissions/submitters

I could put a cap on the number of submissions/submitters The Awards 2026 will accept, which would also have the effect of setting an upper limit of pages judges would have to read. Since the end goal is to have 20 winning submissions/submitters, the cap could be 200 submissions (always having 10% of what was submitted be winners) or 100 submitters (always having 20% of the submitters be winners). This is certainly the easiest change to make, but it does then penalize people who might be interested in submitting to The Awards but don't hear about it right away.

Have judges cover subsets of submissions

There is precedent for this, as I had to do this for The Awards 2023 when we received 333 submissions. It was patently obvious no judge could realistically be expected to do that in the time allotted, so each judge received about 2/3 of the total submissions. This is another realistic possibility, but I would certainly prefer that the judges read all submissions to make sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle that might otherwise have been a serious contender.

Judge anonymity

Judges for The Awards have always been anonymous during the process, but from The Awards 2023 onwards they have participated in the winner announcement livestream and been identified on social media. During a recent talk I had with Clayton of Explorer's Design (and my fellow judge for The Awards 2022), he floated the idea of having the judges be public faces of The Awards from the moment they were selected.

This has two main benefits: additional voices to amplify The Awards on social media, and a potential draw for people who would want their submissions judged by particular people. Clayton has particular experience with this as a judge for the Ennies, as he was able to advocate for people (not particular individuals, just broad participants in design communities) to submit their games precisely because his judge-ship was public knowledge.

I'm torn, because I like the ability for the judges to be able to do their work in relative 'quiet' without feeling like people who submitted their games are reading the tea leaves of their social media presence, and I prefer that the judges not interact prior to the end of Round 1 so that their opinions are as much their own as possible.

HOWEVER

I think I'm: a) far overestimating how much submitters to The Awards would care to scrutinize the people judging their work considering that (to the best of my knowledge) the Ennies haven't had that issue in the 20+ years they've been going; and b) not giving potential judges enough credit in them being able to protect the integrity of their own opinions if they know who the other judges are.

The verdict

Unlike in the first Design Diary, I have no firm conclusions. There are tradeoffs for all the proposed ideas, and I'll really need to dig into the underlying philosophy of The Awards in order to guide the ultimate decision-making process. Until then, I would love to hear feedback on any of the proposed ideas!

October 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

October: big month for Kickstarter, not so much for Backerkit, and Gamefound is around too I guess. Here's the raw data, let's dive in:

• 181 campaigns
• 17 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 7 Gamefound
• 157 Kickstarter
• $7,740,735.97 raised
• $417,015.22 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $133,721.22 on Gamefound
• $7,189,999.53 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 29 accessories
• 30 adventures
• 2 advice
• 1 audiobook
• 15 campaign settings
• 1 platform
• 3 reprints
• 63 supplements
• 34 systems
• 3 translations
• 65 distinct systems used (24 original)
• 79 campaigns (43.65%) used D&D 5E and raised $3,500,523.50 (45.22% of all money raised in October)
• 50 campaigns used AI in some form (27.62% of total) and raised $194,597.15 (2.51% of all money raised in October)
• 29 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 36.25% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 16 different countries
• Top 3: 87 in USA, 29 in UK, 13 in Italy
• Singleton countries: none

Backerkit's October

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in October were:

1. Black Market Guide to Immortality by Nine Heavens Press ($121,014 from 1,325 backers)
2. Ars Magica Edición Definitiva by Blagdaross Ediciones ($54,915.20 from 254 backers)
3. Art & System: Games for Expanded Play by Central Michigan University Press ($54,382 from 984 backers)
4. Epic RPG Fails, Extra Insulting Insults & Even Dumber Dares! by Loke Battle Mats ($45,237 from 982 backers)
5. Horror Cinema Classics RPG by Wayward Studios ($33,419 from 230 backers)

Gamefound's October

The top 5 campaigns on Gamefound in October were:

1. Zakazane Ziemie by Kensumi ($41,917.03 from 275 backers)
2. VOIDBIRTH by Black Magic Creative Inc. ($37,281.01 from 581 backers)
3. Deadlands - Durch den Unheimlichen Westen by Ulisses Spiele ($25,548.17 from 155 backers)
4. Nomads Unbound by Mind's Vision ($18,057.64 from 107 backers)
5. Blunderbuss RPG by Archmage Arispen ($9,996.36 from 131 backers)

Kickstarter's October

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in October were:

1. Fabula Ultima TTJRPG Celebration Edition + Bestiary Vol. I by Need Games ($1,625,036 from 6,404 backers)
2. VOIDSEA - Eldritch High Seas 5e D&D Supplement by Voidsea ($1,061,941 from 5,090 backers)
3. One-Shot Wonders 2: Over 100 NEW Adventures for DnD 5E by Roll & Play Press ($758,815.92 from 6,214 backers)
4. Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying by Free League ($405,808.19 from 3,513 backers)
5. Daggerheart Class Packs by Darrington Press ($295,138 from 2,036 backers)

October 2024 vs 2025

	2024	2025	Change
Number of campaigns
Backerkit	23	16	-7
Kickstarter	166	157	-9
Money pledged
Backerkit total	$1,262,228.19	$415,479.70	-$846,748.49
Backerkit average	$54,879.49	$25,967.48	-$28,912.01
Backerkit median	$9,853.00	$12,571.00	+$2,718.00
Kickstarter total	$6,519,099.07	$7,189,999.53	+$670,900.46
Kickstarter average	$39,271.68	$45,796.18	+$6,524.50
Kickstarter median	$4,055.38	$3,835.00	-$220.38
AI
Campaign count	41	50	+9
Money pledged	$143,749.67	$194,597.15	+$50,847.48
D&D 5E
Campaign count	82	79	-3
Money pledged	$2,693,794.03	$3,500,523.50	+$806,729.47

Let's talk about promotional Months...

Folks? I might be getting Month fatigue.

We are currently in the middle of Mothership Month and Mausritter Month on Backerkit, and RPG Party on Gamefound. This rounds out a year that featured Zine Quest 2025 on Kickstarter, Zine Month 2025 on non-specific platforms, and Pocketopia on Backerkit. Now I am on record last year saying that I like Mothership Month and my feelings on that haven't changed per se, but I'm starting to question the overall utility of these endeavors, both for the artists hoping to get their work funded and the general public on the receiving end of what increasingly feels to me like a firehose of material.

The main problem I see with these Months is a certain hegemony that they inadvertently enforce. I am not claiming that Mothership or Mausritter are oppressing anyone - that would be silly, they have no institutional power to make that happen - but they are becoming canonical games in the eyes of the platforms that do have institutional power. Consider this: if we were to get Mothership Month and Mausritter Month every year (something that seems fairly likely to happen), that's nearly two calendar months out of the year on Backerkit where the focus is primarily on those two games rather than any others. It's not like Backerkit is preventing other projects from funding at the same time, but why would you want to compete with the projects that have explicit support from Backerkit (a big banner on the platform, bundled shipping, extra rewards for backing more, etc.)? When platform economies are dependent on the ability to attract and maintain attention, it becomes imperative to consider everything that could affect that, including competing projects that could take money away from yours. And yeah, it's not actually a zero-sum game since not everyone's decision-making process boils down to "Which of these two games can I back?", but nobody has an unlimited TTRPG crowdfunding support budget so decisions do have to be made.

On another note, and as further evidence of the hegemony Backerkit is actually actively cultivating, let us examine their promotional page for Zinetopia 2026, Backerkit's contribution to the Zine Quest/Month milieu. If you scroll down to the "Participation Expectations" you'll see this little tidbit about how they're prioritizing applications (in the following order):

1. Previous Topia and/or Group-Collab experience on BackerKit
2. Past crowdfunding success on any platform
3. Referrals from qualifying applicants
4. Open applications

They're building a stable of creators with proven success at both crowdfunding and their previous Months on Backerkit. So if you make a Mausritter or Mothership project that does well, you now have a better chance of getting official support for future projects, which then compounds further and further.

Again I must make it clear, I am not ascribing to the creators of Mothership or Mausritter any sort of conspiracy to oppress or keep down TTRPG creators who don't want to make stuff for their games. But the canonization of those games as ones that Backerkit wants to support has that knock-on effect to some degree. Backerkit wants to help people make art, but they also need to make money. And what's that right below the list of application prioritization? The disclaimer that "BackerKit reserves the right to remove projects that we deem aren’t ready to launch." "Projects that aren't ready to launch" to me reads as "projects we are afraid will fail," which defeats the stated purpose of crowdfunding. How are new creators and artists supposed to get started if the platforms they can use only want to cultivate sure things?

No one wants a project to fail, but failure is going to happen from time to time. Except that's obviously bad business/PR for Backerkit, who are touting in the same article that 100% of their 2025 Topia projects (250 in total) have funded, so they're going to naturally push for safer projects - perhaps projects being made for popular games with institutional backing like Mothership and Mausritter.

What's my overall point here? It's certainly not to boycott Backerkit and cease participation in these Months and Topias. But I want to sound some alarm bells about the influence that these platforms are having on the TTRPG space, and the push toward professionalization that could crowd out smaller artists. Especially considering the current furor around setting low crowdfunding goals and the revelation by one of the creators of Equinox TCG that it was Gamefound itself who told them to set a much lower goal than they truly needed. Just remember: platforms aren't your friends, and their own incentives are unlikely to ever truly align with yours.

The Awards 2026 Design Diary #1

 

Inspired by Clayton Notestine's debrief on his participation in the 2025 Ennie Awards and Split/Party's "What awards do for us?" article (which I contributed to via an interview about The Awards), I've decided to start an open record of my thought process and design goals for The Awards 2026.

That's right! The awardiest awards of the TTRPG space are back baby! After a casual year off, we're back and better than ever, ready to deliver weird award excellence right to your grasping little hands.

My discussion with Lhuzie of Split/Party and Part 4 of Clayton's debrief helped crystallize ideas I've been ruminating on for the past few years, and the easiest way to further develop those ideas is to actually get them written down. Hopefully, by sharing the development of these ideas with more than just my own brain I can both hone them to a fine point and help build interest in this overall project. To start, though, I'm going to follow Clayton's article point-by-point to answer some crucial, foundational questions about The Awards 2026.

What's the purpose of The Awards?

The stated purpose of The Awards is to find and elevate small, weird bits of this artistic medium so that other people can play, enjoy, and be inspired by them. But beyond this, it's fun to get together with people (whether friends or relative strangers) and just yap about this shared interest of ours. Some of my strongest opinions about TTRPGs have been developed or changed during conversations before, during, or after game sessions (to say nothing of the time I spent as a judge for The Awards 2022) and I want The Awards to play a role in developing and improving that type of discourse more broadly.

What can The Awards produce?

Discovery

The Awards specifically wants to honor and recognize games that might have a hard time being discovered otherwise. Random shit on itch, games that had a small crowdfunding campaign, things that might get themselves deprioritized on social media algorithms, I want all of these to have a home in The Awards. I truly believe that many of these games are more than good enough to receive recognition from other TTRPG award shows, and I hope that they get it there too, but until then hopefully The Awards can balance out the scales a bit.

Education

I'm not so conceited as to think that I have such a singular perspective on TTRPGs that everyone can learn something from me specifically, but I'm a firm believer that a curated pool of judges with interesting perspectives and a lot of time to discuss games together can come up with some fascinating insights they might not have developed separately. I've never quite had the same space to discuss games as I did as a judge for The Awards 2022, mostly because there's never been another space where that's all we were doing for two months straight. A specific list of games, a specific goal to pick 20 of them as worthy of recognition, and a small group of people to bounce ideas off of can generate some real magic.

Change

My vision for The Awards is a constantly evolving one, and I hope that by doing stuff like these design diaries I can keep it fresh and interesting. Every previous version of The Awards has looked a little different than the ones before it, and I want to keep that ethos going forward.

3 things to steal from outside RPGs

#1 Some awards are not zero-sum games

Check! The Awards has always recognized submissions based on a general high caliber of artfulness and craft, which is why we don't even have a hierarchy of ranking winners. There are no tiers of recognition, just a slate of 20 winners that the judges think deserve both recognition and your attention.

#2 Many awards tailor their judge panels

This is absolutely the point I am thinking about the most right now, and one I will be devoting an entire post to at some later point. As our system currently stands, the Coordinator (myself) selects 10-12 judges from all applications, trying to self-consciously diversify both the TTRPG opinions and life experiences represented in the overall panel. Despite these efforts, all previous judges panels have been less racially and gender diverse than I personally would like to see due almost entirely to the demographics of the applicants we received. I see this as primarily a challenge upstream of the actual judge selection process (though I may also move to a more committee-based judge selection process in order to dilute biases I might have), and so I am tentatively declaring that the judges panel for The Awards 2026 must be at least 50% people of color and at least 50% people of marginalized genders.

I understand that quota systems come with their own issues, but right now I believe that making a public commitment to diversifying our judges panel will encourage a broader cross-section of the TTRPG community to both want to be a judge and submit their games for consideration.

To be clear, this approach to tailoring the judge panel is quite different than what Clayton is proposing, as his focus is more on drawing on professional expertise to lend legitimacy to awards like "Best Layout" or "Best Art". I think this works well for those kinds of awards, but part of my mission for The Awards is to develop and promote expertise. Anyone who takes the time to read 150+ TTRPGs (the lowest number of submissions we have gotten thus far) has the experience needed to decide which of those 150 are worthy of specific recognition, and the process of them discussing submissions with other judges will further hone their taste and discernment. Technical expertise (here meaning mastery of writing, design, editing, layout, graphic design, and/or visual arts) absolutely has a place in the judging of The Awards, but when I balance it against other priorities in the structure of the institution I do not consider it as fundamental of a goal. Preexisting expertise is certainly a plus when evaluating potential judges for The Awards, but I do not at this moment consider it to be a prerequisite.

#3 Most award shows have closed voting

Once again, check! Really not much to say here, other than I personally have no interest in a popularity contest deciding what is award-worthy (or at least not on a large scale; one could argue quite compellingly that any voting process is a popularity contest).

3 things RPG awards can change

#1 Roleplaying awards should specialize

The Awards is already specialized to some degree: we are focused on weirder, smaller, artsy games. The question that logically follows from this is, of course, who gets to decide what is weird, small, and/or artsy?

Well historically that has been up to the judges, and it's not like they have a rubric to say how 'weird' or 'artsy' something is. We have, however, previously used an unofficial metric to determine how 'small' a game is: in the first year of The Awards, the judges decided to disqualify anything that had raised more than $100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign. This metric was discussed in The Awards 2023 and 2024, but was ultimately not used in the latter (as is clearly evident by at least one winner having surpassed that benchmark). For The Awards 2026, I plan on making this metric official: any game, book, podcast, or other TTRPG-related material that has raised over $100,000 on a crowdfunding website is not eligible for The Awards 2026.

Let me be clear: this is not about gatekeeping who gets to be 'indie.' I do not give a shit about that particular wasps' nest of discourse. What it is about is the mission of The Awards, which is to elevate games that you might have missed out on or overlooked otherwise. A game that raises over $100,000 on Kickstarter? That's doing fairly well on the visibility front, even if it's not breaking crowdfunding records. A game released on itch that only the creator's followers might have seen? That could be genuinely mind-blowing, but only if enough people get their eyes on it.

Does this potentially exclude some genuinely incredible pieces of art from consideration? Yes. Was the $100,000 cutoff fundamentally arbitrary and chosen because it's a nice round number? Also yes. But this is part of the process of honing in on what exactly it is you care about when designing something like this, and at its heart what I most care about is leveling the playing field for games and artists without a lot of resources behind them.

#2 Roleplaying awards should be online-first

Check, check, check! The Awards really has no other choice, given that there are no sponsors or institutional backers behind it to fund anything in-person, but even if we did I would prefer to stay online for exactly the reasons Clayton outlined.

#3 Roleplaying awards should be about people

I could not agree more with this statement if I tried. This is why I decided to involve judges in announcing the winners of The Awards 2023 and 2024, to give them a chance to share what they found so great about the winners they had selected and to give a general audience the chance to see the people who had put in so much work and passion on this project. In a perfect world, I would try to extend this to the winners too, to engage with them after they won to help get the word out about their cool stuff, but as I am only one person I have to either proceed very deliberately so as to not overextend myself or find collaborators who can help with the vision.

Which brings me to my final point...

This is all incredibly preliminary, and even the definitive statements I've made here could be subject to change. There are several months to go before anything becomes official, and if you have opinions, ideas, or criticism about anything I've presented here, you can email me at theawards.games@gmail.com or DM me on Bluesky. I can't promise anything will come of it, and I reserve the right to ignore people who appear to be engaging in bad faith, but I do genuinely want to engage with people who care about this kind of thing.

So anyway, we've reached the end of this first Design Diary, and I just want to leave you with the (un)official motto of The Awards:

Make weird shit. Make shit weird.

September 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

If you're not already aware, the Kickstarter workers' union is currently on strike but have not called for a boycott of the site. To find out what you can do, please check out the corresponding part of their website.

Now on to the TTRPG stuff (which of course wouldn't be possible without the incredible labor of the workers at all of these sites)! As always, raw data is available.

• 140 campaigns
• 14 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 3 Gamefound
• 123 Kickstarter
• $4,085,057.66 raised
• $1,617,387.33 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $9,174.10 on Gamefound
• $2,458,495.73 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 10 accessories
• 3 Actual Plays
• 41 adventures
• 1 advice
• 4 campaign settings
• 2 fundraising
• 3 reprints
• 42 supplements
• 33 systems
• 1 translation
• 59 distinct systems used (14 original)
• 51 campaigns (36.43%) used D&D 5E and raised $815,352.14 (19.96% of all money raised in September)
• 40 campaigns used AI in some form (28.57% of total) and raised $227,946.95 (5.58% of all money raised in September)
• 25 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 49.02% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 16 different countries
• Top 3: 73 in USA, 23 in UK, 8 each in Canada and Italy
• Singleton countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Greece, New Zealand, Portugal

Backerkit's September

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in September were:

1. Cypher: Faster. Easier. And Even Better! by Monte Cook Games ($1,025,264 from 5,576 backers)
2. Ways and Means: A Heart Sourcebook by Rowan, Rook and Decard ($295,760.49 from 2,795 backers)
3. Nightfell The Witches' Path by Grim Moon Studio ($99,694.52 from 1,088 backers)
4. Deadlands Classic 20th Anniversary Reprint & AudioBook by World's Largest RPGs ($74,142 from 808 backers)
5. Monster Kingdoms by Onyx Path ($43,991 from 766 backers)

When it's not a peak time of year for Backerkit (basically Zine Month through Pocketopia or February to May this year), the platform really operates on something of a feast or famine model. When the big players in the space (Monte Cook Games and Rowan, Rook and Decard, for example) show up, they tend to run up the numbers both for their own projects and everyone else's, to a lesser extent. You can really see this impact in the median amount of money raised within a month, as that statistic is more resilient to outlier data points than averages are. While this is evidence that a rising tide does indeed lift all ships, it's also not the best thing to have the success of your project be somewhat tied to the mere coincidence of a bigger project funding at the same time. Especially when there is no actual guarantee that this will happen, it's just that more eyes tend to be on the platform and therefore more people have the chance to see your project.

Gamefound's September

The 3 campaigns on Gamefound in September were:

1. Kaliban Uniwersum by Wydawnictwo Hengal ($8,599.09 from 97 backers)
2. Modern RPG Battle Maps for Every Scenario – TTRPGs & VTT by Agnesagraphic ($297.94 from 15 backers)
3. 360 Western Battle Maps For TTRPG and VTT by Agnesagraphic ($277.07 from 14 backers)

Not much to talk about for September, but watch this space: there's a big wave of TTRPG campaigns coming on Gamefound in October.

Kickstarter's September

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in September were:

1. Shadowrun: Anarchy 2.0 by Black Book Editions ($285,844.39 from 2,960 backers)
2. Wares Blade by LionWing Publishing ($237,751 from 2,549 backers)
3. Aetherial Expanse: Dreams of the Drowned God by Ghostfire Gaming ($235,321 from 2,250 backers)
4. Skullduggery: The 5E Urban Fantasy Companion by Beadle & Grimm's Pandemonium Warehouse ($231,236 from 2,127 backers)
5. Another Adventure Double Feature! by Olivier Revenu ($144,254.21 from 1,755 backers)

Shadowrun: Anarchy 2.0 is a fascinating project, if only because it just goes to show that there are cottage industries based around 'fixing' ponderous trad games that aren't D&D. I'm sure that this is not news to many people (clearly this particular project has been around long enough to get a second edition), but it's an insight into a side of the TTRPG field that I simply don't normally get. This effort at least makes more sense with a game like Shadowrun, as the world that the game lays out is considerably more idiosyncratic than the broad make-it-yourself fantasy worlds that D&D typically trades in. That is to say, if you find the world of Shadowrun particularly fascinating and dynamic, I completely understand the impulse to make the game system lighter and easier to run (whereas the same impulse for D&D just makes me feel like you'd probably just have a better time running a different game since many people don't exactly use published D&D settings).

September 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 12 (2024) => 14 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 101 (2024) => 123 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $1,454,136.46 (2024) => $1,617,387.83 (2025)
• Average campaign: $121,178.04 (2024) => $115,527.70 (2025)
• Median campaign: $45,192.50 (2024) => $13,990.60 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $2,296,019.12 (2024) =>  $2,458,495.73 (2025)
• Average campaign: $22,732.86 (2024) => $19,987.77 (2025)
• Median campaign: $3,967.00 (2024) => $4,658.00 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 31 (2024) => 40 (2025)
• Money: $215,538.99 (2024) => $227,946.95 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 50 (2024) => 51 (2025)
• Money: $1,168,288.21 (2024) => $815,352.14 (2025)

We're seeing something of a return to form for everything except the money raised by D&D 5E projects this month. Probably the most interesting stat to hone in on is the median Kickstarter money raised, which is the highest it's been thus far this year. This speaks to a slight slump in the highest-earning campaigns and a slight bump for the lowest-earning ones, which to me seems like a good thing. We should all be hoping for a higher floor for crowdfunding, as that helps more art get made on the whole. Do I think this speaks to any kind of significant trend? Absolutely not. I would need to see evidence of that over the course of months if not years, and the median Kickstarter money raised by this point last year is actually higher than it is this year. Does that feel particularly worrying? I'd say: not really? Given all the economic fuckery over the past 9 months, I'm actually surprised the 2025 numbers aren't lower. Kickstarter is well on its way to undershoot the TTRPG money it made last year, Backerkit looks like it may fall just beneath its 2024 amount, and both platforms have not yet seen smash hits like they got last year (Cosmere RPG and Draw Steel! nee MCDM RPG, respectively). I have no real conclusion to draw here other than to say: everything appears to be leveling off unless you're already a 'big' company. And if you're not? Well, I hope that a couple thousand US dollars is enough to fund your project.

August 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 A bit of bad news before I get to the meat of the retrospective: the search function for successful Kickstarter campaigns simply...stopped working this month.

All three of the campaigns picture funded in the last week of May 2024

As such, I have been forced to switch my methods from the more reliable "looking through successful campaigns from the past day or so" to the far less reliable "looking at campaigns about to end and hoping that I don't take too long between checking so I don't miss anything." I've potentially missed a few campaigns here and there this month, but I definitely got most of them. That said, it's deeply frustrating to have to be so "on" (even more so than usual for this project) so if you get anything out of this series I have a small favor to ask of you: go to Kickstarter Support and report a bug about this search function. I've already done so and they've told me that they're working on it, but if more people do so then perhaps they'll make it a bit higher priority. It's certainly not the biggest problem in the world (hell, it's not even the biggest problem with Kickstarter), but I would greatly appreciate the minute or two it would take for you to help get this tool back up and running properly.

That said, here's the raw data for August 2025! Let's get into it:

• 143 campaigns
• 17 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 4 Gamefound
• 122 Kickstarter
• $3,153,588.22 raised
• $1,351,822.34 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $98,847.93 on Gamefound
• $1,702,917.95 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 15 accessories
• 41 adventures
• 1 advice
• 5 campaign settings
• 2 fundraising
• 48 supplements
• 30 systems
• 1 translation
• 54 distinct systems used (16 original)
• 59 campaigns (41.26%) used D&D 5E and raised $875,395.60 (27.76% of all money raised in August)
• 42 campaigns used AI in some form (29.37% of total) and raised $167,835.73 (5.32% of all money raised in August)
• 28 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 47.46% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 16 different countries
• Top 3: 69 in USA, 25 in UK, 9 in Australia
• Singleton countries: Belgium, Hong Kong, Norway, Vietnam

Backerkit's August

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in August were:

1. Drakonym - A Narrative-First Dragonbonding TTRPG by Crossed Paths Press ($446,418.93 from 2,487 backers)
2. Vaults of Vaarn Second Edition by Vaults of Vaarn ($271,815.81 from 3,371 backers)
3. Monsters of Murka Trilogy: Ratified & Radified by Action Fiction ($269,058 from 1,382 backers)
4. Memento Mori: The Old City by Two Little Mice ($147,390.39 from 1,189 backers)
5. SHIVER Corporate: A Corporate Horror Comedy TTRPG by Parable Games ($86,921.15 from 646 backers)

It's fairly unusual to have new systems be really successful on any of the platforms I look at, so it's nice that in August the most successful campaign was (seemingly) original. Additionally, it's quite heartening to see something like Vaults of Vaarn 2e be so successful on Backerkit. None of the three of these games are exactly 'for' me, but it's nice to know there are thriving subcultures out there that are supporting games that aren't just from WotC, Paizo, or the couple most successful indie publishers. Granted, Crossed Paths Press, Two Little Mice, and Parable Games run some of the most consistently successful Backerkit TTRPG campaigns so it's not like they're exactly scrappy underdogs, but it remains a sign of a healthy (consumer) ecosystem that it's not only people like Exalted Funeral or Brandon Sanderson who can consistently bring out backers.

Gamefound's August

The 4 campaigns on Gamefound in August were:

1. Pendragon - Das Artus-Rollenspiel by Ulisses Spiele ($87,579.50 from 427 backers)
2. Dragons! Dragons! Dragons! for 5e by Deimos Infinitum Publishing ($5,622.35 from 68 backers)
3. The Ronin's Daughter by Brick By Brick Games ($4,994.42 from 117 backers)
4. After the Fall: 700 Post-Apocalyptic Battle Maps by Agnesagraphic ($651.66 from 15 backers)

There's not much to say here other than I have a personal beef with Agnesagraphic (or Agnieszka Polanowska on Kickstarter) for forcing me to log so many AI slop map projects. I really thought I was safe on a new platform but here she is...

Kickstarter's August

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in August were:

1. Dragonbane RPG Miniatures — Northern Beasts by TitanforgeGames ($357,301 from 2,154 backers)
2. Three New Battlezoo Secret Tomes for Shadowdark! by Roll For Combat ($282,772 from 1,953 backers)
3. Pets & Sidekicks: Companions for D&D, Level Up A5E, and ToV by Morrus ($111,744.36 from 1,571 backers)
4. The Ultimate Customizable Adventure Notebook for TTRPGs! by Oddities Chest ($108,574 from 1,007 backers)
5. UNDERISLES: Roleplaying with Sign Language by Hatchlings ($77,800 from 1,015 backers)

Kickstarter money seems to have rebounded from last month's unexpected lull, but it's all looking quite same-y. D&D 5E, Dragonbane, Shadowdark, Tales of the Valiant - it's all just variations on the same theme. Very happy to see UNDERISLES in the top 5 as both a successful game for a small team and just something other than the standard fantasy adventure stuff (even if it's still a fantasy adventure game).

August 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 20 (2024) => 17 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 121 (2024) => 122 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $1,580,419.62 (2024) => $1,351,822.34 (2025)
• Average campaign: $79,020.98 (2024) => $79,518.96 (2025)
• Median campaign: $15,903.00 (2024) => $10,588.00 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $18,711,813.48 (2024) =>  $1,702,917.95 (2025)
• Average campaign: $154,643.09 (2024) => $4,054.74 (2025)
• Median campaign: $4,239.00 (2024) => $2,893.91 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 29 (2024) => 42 (2025)
• Money: $215,538.99 (2024) => $167,835.73 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 49 (2024) => 59 (2025)
• Money: $1,956,290.32 (2024) => $875,395.60 (2025)

Things look better for the state of crowdfunding now than they did last month: still a drop in money raised but not the 50-66% reduction across the board. It might look really bad for Kickstarter, but you have to remember that August 2025 saw the Cosmere RPG campaign raise $15M, so that money is an outlier among outliers. If you take that one campaign out, you're left with Kickstarter raising ~$3.6M in August 2024. It still represents slightly more than a 50% drop year-to-year, though.

I said last month that July was an outlier for TTRPG crowdfunding, but with this month adding another data point it's looking increasingly like this might be a new normal. Money is simply down across the board for these crowdfunders, even (or perhaps especially) for the previously quite reliable 5E campaigns. We're not cratering out by any means. (The one real benefit of the Kickstarter search function breaking is that I'm getting a much better sense for how many campaigns fail to fund, and it's not all that many.) But the constantly precarious state of crowdfunding feels like it's getting more precarious.

It takes three data points to set a pattern, so who's to say: maybe September will exceed our wildest expectations (and to be perfectly honest there are already a couple very successful campaigns that have either finished or are close to finishing as I'm writing this), but this month and the last have really shown me how unreliable this environment is.