December 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

Another year gone, and a rather strange December for TTRPG crowdfunding closes it out. Here's the raw data; let's dive in.

• 178 campaigns
• 63 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 2 Gamefound
• 113 Kickstarter
• $4,021,004.70 raised
• $1,712,583.76 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $20,154.16 on Gamefound
• $2,288,266.78 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 11 accessories
• 43 adventures
• 9 campaign settings
• 28 Holiday Markets
• 1 magazine
• 1 platform
• 1 podcast
• 3 reprints
• 50 supplements
• 29 systems
• 1 translation
• 1 zine
• 60 distinct systems used (14 original)
• 68 campaigns (38.20%) used D&D 5E and raised $795,500.44 (19.78% of all money raised in December)
• 38 campaigns used AI in some form (21.35% of total) and raised $125,773.25 (3.13% of all money raised in December)
• 25 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 36.76% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 17 different countries
• Top 3: 89 in USA, 30 in UK, 11 in Canada
• Singleton countries: Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore
  

Backerkit's December

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in December were:

1. Twilight Sword by Two Little Mice ($822,492.30 from 5,189 backers)
2. Infernals: Crowned by Hellfire for the Exalted 3E RPG by Onyx Path ($191,285 from 2,126 backers)
3. Mausritter Junk City by Exalted Funeral Press, Games Omnivorous, and Losing Games ($168,735 from 1,956 backers)
4. DCC+5E Crowdfunding Exclusives & Mystery Gifts! by Goodman Games ($66,155 from 570 backers)
5. Loot Tavern Lighting Sale by Loot Tavern Publishing ($46,756 from 355 backers)

Gamefound's December

The 2 campaigns on Gamefound in December were:

1. Vileborn - Das düster-heroische Rollenspiel by Ulisses Spiele ($19,874.72 from 208 backers)
2. 1130+ Fantasy Battle maps for TTRPG and VTTRPG by Agnesagraphic ($279.44 from 7 backers)

Kickstarter's December

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in December were:

1. Life After Everything: Astro Oceans 🌊 Tarot Tabletop RPG by Gifted Ocean ($363,871 from 2,418 backers)
2. Fighting Fantasy - Solo Adventure Gamebooks - Set 2 by Steve Jackson Games ($278,223 from 3,977 backers)
3. Apocalypse World: Burned Over by Vincent Baker ($215,104 from 3,763 backers)
4. The Dungeon Reignited. Set of 2 Book of Battle Mats for RPG by Loke Battle Maps ($168,212 from 1,569 backers)
5. Tome of Mystical Tattoos III for D&D 5e by Karl Nicolas ($152,837.86 from 1,810 backers)

December 2023 vs 2024 vs 2025

	2023	2024	2025
Campaign count
Backerkit	7	35	63
Kickstarter	112	130	113
Money pledged
Backerkit total	$116,631.00	$1,898,104.11	$1,712,583.76
Backerkit average	$16,661.57	$54,231.55	$27,183.87
Backerkit median	$8,599.00	$13,703.65	$5,091.89
Kickstarter total	$3,062,243.35	$2,213,471.01	$2,288,266.78
Kickstarter average	$27,341.46	$17,026.70	$20,250.15
Kickstarter median	$4,507.04	$3,266.92	$3,602.00
AI
Campaign count	32	37	38
Money pledged	$150,217.33	$145,101.71	$125,773.25
D&D 5E
Campaign count	48	73	68
Money pledged	$999,475.20	$917,977.49	$795,500.44

Backerkit has come a long way since December 2023, but it's really interesting to compare its Dec 2024 vs Dec 2025 considering that both Mausritter Month and their Holiday Market happened in 2025. Let's break down the stats of both:

• Mausritter Month
• $323,197.86 pledged (18.87% of money pledged on Backerkit in December)
• 16 projects (all successfully funded)
• $20,199.87 average
• $9,570.55 median
• Holiday Market (TTRPGs only and limited to projects actually providing something gameable and not just merch)
• $261,890.54 pledged (15.29% of money pledged on Backerkit in December)
• 28 projects (no funding goals)
• $9,353.23 average
• $3,255.65 median

Mausritter Month was clearly a success by any metric (all projects funded, pretty good average, really high median), but it notably raised less money from fewer projects than either Mothership Month. Not only that, but you would think that these kinds of initiatives would boost the overall money pledged on Backerkit, but instead there was a slight decrease from 2024 to 2025. It is definitely too early to say that backers are experiencing Month fatigue the same way I am, but these numbers might explain why Backerkit is ramping up their promotional events: they need them to boost otherwise flagging traffic.

I'm going to be getting into it in a 2025 wrap-up post, but this year was not great money-wise for TTRPG crowdfunding. There are more projects than ever and less money to go around, and nothing from the past 6 months suggests that's going to change anytime soon. These promotional events from Backerkit are relatively easy ways to get users on their platform, entice creators to put their campaigns there, and the money that comes from it will keep the floor from falling out of their bottom line. Obviously I can't speak to how healthy their other types of campaigns look, but I can't imagine they're looking all that much better than TTRPGs right now. A combination of US economic uncertainty and tariffs playing havoc with both international shipping and component production is going to make everyone just feel less than great about putting money down on something that isn't a sure bet.

Which brings me to the Holiday Market. I personally don't like it. It makes complete sense for Backerkit and the creators involved, but any move by a crowdfunding platform towards becoming a sales platform just doesn't make me feel good. Especially because the whole premise was that anything you 'back' will ship within just a few weeks and (theoretically) arrive in time for Christmas. So these aren't even campaigns for reprints! It's just a promotional 'preorder' event, even more so than many 'crowdfunding' campaigns are these days! Again, makes complete sense for creators to participate since it's an easy way to sell some extra inventory you might have lying around, but that just seems like something that doesn't belong on a crowdfunding platform.

There's not really a bigger conclusion to draw from this in the end, at least not yet. My brain is pretty goopy just from general post-holiday post-New-Year post-travel stuff, so I'm really saving up anything particularly relevant for the full year review coming sometime soon.

The Awards 2026 Design Diary #4: Gaming Like It's 2024-2025

 As I mentioned in the previous Design Diary, The Awards 2026 will be picking up where we left off: in June 2024.

 

Despite this announcement appearing in the fourth installment of this series, it was actually one of the first decisions I made when I set out to bring back The Awards and was based on three rationale.

Rationale #1: Fighting the Hype Cycle

As someone who has made a hobby out of tracking TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns, I suspect few people are as aware of the hype cycles that this field runs on. There are nigh uncountable numbers of hugely successful, $100,000+ projects that seem to essentially disappear once their campaigns end. Not in the sense of them being scams and not delivering on the promised material, but in the sense that the hobby's collective attention just kind of moves off of them. And this makes sense given that any crowdfunding campaign is going to have a lag time between collecting the money and actually making the thing they want to make. Hell, there's even a lag time between the campaign ending and collecting the money that was pledged. So what tends to happen is that buzzy games generate a lot of hype, possibly a lot of money, and then 6-18 months later (if backers are lucky) the product actually arrives. But what's happened in the interim? Why, 20-50 equally buzzy games have shown up, gotten a lot of attention, and raised a whole bunch of money themselves. By the time your big crowdfunded game actually shows up, it's quite possible you've completely forgotten about it between other projects you've backed and the games that you're actually playing. I know that this happens to me with some frequency, at least.

So how do The Awards propose to combat this? Well, since we took 2025 off, it seems only good and right to pick up where we left off and see what great stuff was made from June 2024-May 2025. By focusing on games that have been out for nearly 1-2 years, we're hopefully getting some more mature and field-tested games, things that have been in people's hands that the judges might have even played already. We're also pushing back against the hype cycle by bringing these """""older""""" games back into the public eye when we announce the winners, hopefully giving them another boost of attention beyond what they might have received when first released.

Rationale #2: Fairness

This is a fairly minor reason, but the eligibility window for The Awards in the past has unfairly impacted any games released in May (and also April a little). I don't know how many games were released on, say, May 31, 2024, but those games would only have been eligible for The Awards 2024 and would have required their designers to already know of this whole endeavor (a tall order to be sure). By giving The Awards a year's lag time, designers get a lot more time to even hear about The Awards, let alone submit their games for consideration.

On top of this, and this ties into Rationale #1 a bit, the distance of a year also gives designers some needed perspective to figure out what games they want to submit. Recency bias is a hell of a thing, and newly released games could easily be seen as far better or far worse than they actually are. Anyone interested in submitting to The Awards can now really take a hard look at their catalog from June 2024-May 2025 and figure out how to put their best foot forward.

Rationale #3: The Bit

This comes last because it's the weakest rationale, but commitment to the bit is absolutely central to The Awards. Just look at our name, for God's sake. Now the bit here isn't specifically that we're behind the times or anything, it's that we're different from those other award shows.

 

Yes, we're straying hard into "not like other girls" territory (explicitly so just a sentence ago!) but it feels relevant and important here. I'm not trying to say that we're better than other award shows, but it behooves us to set ourselves apart from them. I covered this to some degree back in Design Diary #1, but I'm looking for The Awards to have a coherent and distinct identity, and having a more retrospective approach to our submissions just makes The Awards stand out from our peers and be that much more memorable.

Closing Thoughts 

Now all that said, The Awards is nothing if not ever-changing. This year's experiment could prove disastrous: designers might have no desire to submit their """"""older"""""" stuff, the general TTRPG public might have no interest in what was the best of 2024-2025, the sun could collapse in on itself ~4-5 billion years early...

All things that are equally likely to happen as a result of these decisions I'm making right now!

But barring that last item in that list, The Awards can always change and adapt. It could be that The Awards 2027 will bring us back up to speed and current events! Either way, I'm excited about the retrospective focus of The Awards 2026, and I hope you all are too!

The Awards 2026 Design Diary #3: Designing for Difficult Games

This design diary is a bit more philosophical than previous ones, as I've recently been thinking about the kinds of games that I'd like The Awards to recognize.

"Now just hang on there a second," you might say, "I thought you didn't want to put your thumb on the scale of The Awards! I thought you weren't a judge! Is this all some kind of giant conspiracy to just recognize the games you like???"

Well, rude interrupting straw-person, I don't, I'm not, and it isn't. What I'm talking about is categories of games that I think should have a home in The Awards and how to design towards that goal. In particular, I'm talking about two recently-defined (though certainly not actually new) genres of game.

 

#1: Faggot Games

I'm starting with something potentially controversial and uncomfortable because these are exactly the kinds of games I want to see in The Awards. If you're unfamiliar, Darling Demon Eclipse (the host of The Awards 2024's winner announcement stream) somewhat defined the genre in January:

• Loud queer sexuality, without a desire to make play more comfortable for cishet people and prudes.
• Departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust.
• A central role for fetish, kink and sexual fantasies. Faggot games aren't always necessarily /about/ these things, but they loop back to them as much as possible.
• A focus on challenging and unexpected visuals. Blend the cozy and the macabre, the outside and the mainstream, in ways they didn't know they even wanted. Keep them guessing.

"Keep them guessing" is a great axiom all by itself for The Awards, but when I say that I want faggot games submitted to The Awards, I specifically mean that I want gross, uncomfortable, horrific games to be submitted, games that push the limits of what you might feel comfortable reading, let alone playing. I don't want stuff like faggot games, I don't want games in the spirit of faggot games, I want actual. Faggot. Games. Made by faggots, for faggots.

The problem, of course, is whether the judges will necessarily agree with me. And they have every right to disagree, of course! This is not The Faggot Awards, after all. (Eclipse already did that. Twice, kind of.) But what I do want is to have judges who won't reject these kinds of games out of hand simply because they might not be 'for' them.

I also do not want to put judges in a position where they feel obligated to engage with something that could cause them distress. Faggot games are challenging; they have sharp edges that could and probably will cut you when handled. What I hope to do is create an environment where when judges find themselves with cuts, they can apply bandages as needed and go back for more - maybe with gloves on this time.

I'm realizing that I, as the Coordinator, am going to need to take a more active role in the judging process. Not in choosing the games, but in communicating with the judges, understanding where they're at with the games, and maybe even actively challenging them to explain or defend some of the opinions they express. This is all a delicate balance to strike, and it runs a greater risk of overreach on my part, but it also means I need to choose judges who can, with both love and irritation, tell me to fuck off and leave them alone when needed.

 

#2: Expressionist Games

I think it relatively unlikely that anyone in 2025 could have found this post without already being aware of Jay Dragon's Expressionist Games Manifesto, but if by some miracle you have then go ahead and follow that link. I will not wait for you to catch up, so I suggest you read it quickly.

Whatever you think about expressionist games and this manifesto (and I have thoughts about both that are not pertinent to this conversation), they're a fascinating perspective on games and design that opens up some really fruitful artistic visions.

They are also (take it from someone who will soon wrap up playing in a Triangle Agency campaign) deeply frustrating at times.

The big challenge I see here is that expressionist games are polarizing and demanding. The multi-award-winning Triangle Agency clearly doesn't need any help from The Awards to recognize its artistic merit, but the expressionist games to come certainly might. These are games that benefit from deep dives into their dense texts, that want you to sit and think about what they're saying (and what they're leaving out), that might seem difficult to bring to the table or 'too much' to properly process. The timeline of The Awards is not particularly well suited to all of these needs.

Just out of necessity, The Awards does not have the luxury of giving judges all the time they could possibly need. And out of sheer logistics, the judges cannot take all the time they could possibly need - they have lives, after all, and they're giving so much of it to The Awards already. This challenge dovetails with what I grappled with in my previous Design Diary, trying to get as much good shit into contention for The Awards while also keeping the workload hopefully reasonable (or at least manageable).

Part of the answer might just lie in a directive to the judges: if you're really having a hard time figuring out whether something should advance to Round 2, it probably should. Anything that makes you sweat and frown and furrow your brow over whether you like it or whether it's interesting enough is probably worth further discussion.

Final Thoughts

That's the real goal of The Awards in my mind: finding stuff that's worth the time spent discussing it. I've played a lot of really fun games that I don't want to spend much time talking about, and I've played a lot of really bad games that I'd just rather forget about. But the stuff that really sticks in my brain that I want to talk about for hours? I want to show that to everyone and say, "Hey look at this shit. What's going on here, huh?"

So send The Awards your faggot games, your expressionist games, your huddled masses of games yearning to breathe free be played (or at least read). But make sure that they fall within the submission window. Because I haven't said this before, but that window is picking up right where The Awards left off: June 2024. More on that next time!

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: The Judicial Branch

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: The Basics

 

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.