May 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

April showers bring May flowers, and April crowdfunding successes bring minor May slumps it would seem. Check the raw data to confirm my summaries:

• 164 campaigns
• 23 Backerkit
• 1 Crowdfundr
• 140 Kickstarter
• $7,228,432.90 raised
• $727,356.92 on Backerkit
• $505.00 on Crowdfundr
• $6,500,570.98 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 18 accessories
• 34 adventures
• 1 advice
• 1 anthology
• 1 audiobook
• 12 campaign settings
• 1 reprint
• 64 supplements
• 31 systems
• 1 zine
• 56 distinct systems used (17 original)
• 79 campaigns (48.17%) used D&D 5E and raised $3,093,350.95 (42.79% of all money raised in May)
• 44 campaigns used AI in some form (26.83% of total) and raised $441,459.48 (6.11% of all money raised in May)
• 35 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 44.30% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 17 different countries
• Top 3: 84 in USA, 20 in UK, 11 in Canada
• Singleton countries: Austria, Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Vietnam

Backerkit's May

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in May were:

1. Call of the Sea: The Everhart Expedition by Shadowlands Games ($168,971.44 from 1,295 backers)
2. Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition by Space Penguin Ink LLC ($143,496 from 1,683 backers)
3. Tome of Intangible Treasures 2 - A Hunter's Guide to Rituals by Lone Colossus Games ($64,210 from 743 backers)
4. Midnight Muscadines - The Cozy-Dark TTRPG of Magical Jams by Pandion Games ($50,190 from 720 backers)
5. Grimwild: Expanded Hardcover Print Run by Oddity Press ($47,225 from 597 backers)

I would not call this a bad month for Backerkit by any means, but this marks the first time that a month in 2025 didn't outraise its 2024 counterpart (just about $8,000 less this year than last). And this is despite having more campaigns this time around than in May 2024! All told though, this does follow a broad pattern of a minor mid-year slump that was evident last year.

Crowdfundr's May

Crowdfundr revives itself every once in a while, and this time it was with 1 campaign: Cat by John Wick...by John Wick ($505 from 26 backers).

Kickstarter's May

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in May were:

1. Realm Brew: Magnetic Map Tiles for D&D by The Shop of Many Things ($1,492,062 from 8,417 backers)
2. Zaman's Guide to the End of Time (And How to Fix It) by Loot Tavern ($830,853 from 6,737 backers)
3. Pocket RPG. Play DnD Anytime. Anywhere. Magnetic. Patent Pe. by Pocket RPG ($612,821 from 2,847 backers)
4. Humblewood: Beyond the Canopy by Hit Point Press ($558,096 from 5,022 backers)
5. The Kingdom of Keshanar: Ancient Egypt 5e Setting & Campaign by David Dean Hadden ($404,008 from 2,627 backers)

I can never tell whether really successful D&D crowdfunding campaigns take air away from smaller indie game crowdfunders or benefit from their absence in the first place. This month in particular, every single one of the top 5 campaigns were about D&D in some way (if not a supplement/campaign setting for it, then an accessory explicitly enhancing the play experience). Were they so successful because they took away attention from other campaigns or did they receive increased attention because of the lack of other campaigns? As always, it's basically impossible to tell but there are two tangential pieces of evidence that suggest the former.

First, there were more campaigns this May than last year (140 vs 133) yet less money raised ($6,500,570.98 vs $7,238,839.84), meaning more competition for eyes and less money available. This also manifested in lower average and median money raised in May 2025.

Second, system diversity. May 2024 saw 61 distinct systems (26 original) while this month saw 56 distinct systems (17 original). Of the pre-existing (non-original) systems, 25 were used in only 1 campaign (true for both years). D&D accounted for 59 campaigns in 2024 (39.07%) and 79 in 2025 (48.17%). Some of this can presumably be chalked up to survivor bias (I'm not keeping track of campaigns that didn't meet their funding goals because even my neuroses have their limits, so it's possible that any number of original/non-D&D campaigns failed to fund [though this would be further evidence toward my overall point]), but even so we're seeing a decrease in non-D&D crowdfunders and a more than corresponding increase in D&D crowdfunders between May 2024 and 2025.

What's the overall takeaway? Hard to say. It's something that I'll be interested in tracking over time (basically whether a rising tide floats all boats or whether D&D crowds out other systems) because to say anything meaningful these have to be long-term trends and not monthly blips.

May 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 18 (2024) - 23 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 133 (2024) - 140 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $735,159.58 (2024) - $727,356.92 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $7,238,839.84 (2024) -  $6,500,570.98 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 34 (2024) - 44 (2025)
• Money: $251,400.35 (2024) - $441,459.48 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 59 (2024) - 79 (2025)
• Money: $4,936,605.69 (2024) - $3,093,350.95 (2025)

I've mentioned most of this already, but I always find it helpful to have it laid out in a separate section.

The primary point to draw attention to: the D&D 5E money raised in May 2025 looks a little low, but this doesn't take into account most of the Accessory category of campaigns. Since they aren't usually system-specific (nor indeed engaged with mechanics at all), I don't categorize them with any system. But if you were to add the top 1 and 3 campaigns from Kickstarter this month (both explicitly referencing D&D in their title and body text) to the D&D 5E money, you'd see that May 2025 basically evens out to May 2024's D&D money raised. Were there D&D-related accessories in May 2024 that should raise that money too? Absolutely, but they were nowhere near the top 5 campaigns that time around and therefore won't affect the total all that much.

Games That Are About Choosing the Pope (To Me)

Me preparing to write this post

As a regular (read: lapsed, queer, nonbeliever) Catholic, I of course felt the Catholicism reenter my body upon hearing of Pope Francis' death, and there is no better way to commemorate the ongoing Papal Conclave (from the Latin cum clave because they are freaks) than to discuss games that are about choosing the Pope (to me).

The Criteria

We doing a three-way factorial analysis babeyyyyy (aka an alignment chart). The are two axes we'll be using are:

The Narrative Axis: the degree to which the game is about choosing a Pope

1. The game is about choosing a new Pope
2. The game is about making a decision of religious importance
3. The game is about making any decision of importance

The Mechanics Axis: the degree to which the game resembles the functioning of the Papal Conclave

1. The decision is made through secret ballot
2. The decision is made democratically
3. The decision is made by any means necessary

Throughout this post, these will be abbreviated to N1/2/3 for the Narrative Axis, and M1/2/3 for the Mechanics Axis.

N1/M1: The Conclave of 1492: A Game of Faith and Power by Shawn Roske

Pretty straightforward: this is a Golden Cobra 2023 submission about the actual historical 1492 papal conclave. Secret ballots, real popes, the whole nine yards. Fun fact: this was the first conclave to be held in the Sistine Chapel!

Would that all of our game rooms looked this good

N1/M2: Behold My Grand & Glorious Hat And Weep by Kay Marlow Allen

We're already in questionable territory given that there is no explicit voting in this game, but there is a Pope present and you are given the opportunity to produce an Antipope if you can get enough players to agree with you so it counts. Plus who doesn't like making silly glorious hats?

N1/M3: The (Orc) Pope is Dead by Grant Howitt

In this silly little one-pager, there's no voting to be seen anywhere! A bunch of orc cardinals fight amongst themselves to replace the Orc Pope - hilarity ensues.

N2/M1: ???

Once again in trouble: I could not find a single game about general religious decision-making that was governed by secret ballot. If you know about one, hit me up.

N2/M2: Papatouille by bujold

This game can be best summed up by a potential alternate title that I'm making up: Everyone is (Pope) John. Inspired by the original game by Michael Sullivan, this game sees an older rat (the Father), a younger rat (the Son), and a pigeon (the Holy Spirit/Ghost) take control of a tourist named John who was somehow named Pope. Is this actually democratic? Only in the sense that three people make all the decisions and will eventually need to agree amongst themselves to some extent.

N2/M3: Benediction by Laura op de Beke

Another Golden Cobra 2023 submission, this LARP sees you play as a bunch of nuns awaiting the arrival of a traveling miracle worker. You're not making a decision so much as figuring out how you feel about this strange man coming to see you, but sometimes important decisions can be internal as well as external.

N3/M1: Death Game by Laurie O'Connel

This whole post will have been worth it if only because it made me finally read this game after I backed it last year. Everyone (players and GM alike) submit a possible gimmick for the arena the death game is happening in, and then everyone votes by writing down their pick and giving it to the GM (just like the papal conclave!). On top of that, the GM position rotates whenever a player character dies, with the old GM fleshing out an NPC to enter the game with (just like the pope!).

N3/M2: The Hench Union LARP by Sam Dunnewold

The third and final Golden Cobra submission on the list, but this time from 2021. Here, a bunch of henchfolk and their supervillain boss must come to an agreement about their contract negotiation. What's keeping everyone at the table? Mutually assured destruction via doomsday devices on each side. The henches can vote to set theirs off, while the supervillain can unilaterally detonate theirs at any time (just like the pope!).

N3/M3: Picket Line Tango by Emily Weiss

IDK what to tell you. A murder mystery in space against the backdrop of a union strike? Seems like a game about picking the pope to me!

April 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

So last month I talked about $2.5M that went 'missing' from March TTRPG crowdfunding compared to last year, and it would seem that I've solved the mystery of its disappearance: it just went to April instead. Read on to see the details, or peruse the raw data if you're so inclined. But first, the broad summary:

• 201 campaigns
• 51 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 150 Kickstarter
• $9,925,409.32 raised
• $2,180,147.02 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $7,745,262.30 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 11 accessories
• 47 adventures
• 1 audiobook
• 8 campaign settings
• 1 novel
• 64 supplements
• 66 systems
• 1 translation
• 2 zines
• 91 distinct systems used (48 original)
• 82 campaigns (40.80%) used D&D 5E and raised $2,136,602.54 (21.53% of all money raised in April)
• 49 campaigns used AI in some form (24.38% of total) and raised $213,130.42 (2.15% of all money raised in April)
• 36 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 43.90% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 14 different countries
• Top 3: 101 in USA, 38 in UK, 10 in Australia and Italy
• Singleton countries: Belgium, Poland

Backerkit's April

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in April were:

1. Castle Zagyg Galleries of the Arch Mage by Troll Lord Games ($601,490 from 2,669 backers)
2. Brambletrek - Tales in the Hundred Acre Woods by Crossed Paths Press ($414,208.69 from 2,709 backers)
3. Dungeon Denizens 2, How To Write Even Better Adventures, & More GM Tools! by Goodman Games ($314,525 from 2,404 backers)
4. RiverBank: A cozy RPG of elegant animals, chaos, & whimsy by Kobold Press ($155,817 from 1,631 backers)
5. Exalted: Essence Player's Guide by Onyx Path ($106,361.01 from 1,438 backers)

Backerkit's trajectory in 2025 continues to improve, with the platform seeing both more campaigns and more money raised each month than the one before it. This was helped in April in large part by Pocketopia, a "celebration of portable easy-to-learn tabletop games." (Though in all fairness since this lasted from March 13 - April 3, so it's sort of more relevant to talk about in March? Look I have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere, and I've opted to take the ones provided to me by the Gregorian calendar.) Pocketopia alone raised $1,068,937 across 61 projects, but removing the strictly boardgame offerings it was responsible $726,234.15 across 34 TTRPG projects (33.32% of April Backerkit money raised and 66.67% of April Backerkit projects) with over half of this money coming from one project (#2 on the list above, Brambletrek).

One other interesting datapoint here is RiverBank, a campaign that has a number of notable firsts for publisher Kobold Press:

• Their first original system (ignoring Tales of the Valiant, which is close enough to their previous 5E content that I'm counting it among it). It promises a sort of Wind in the Willows experience following the madcap adventures of anthropomorphic genteel animals.
• Their first campaign on Backerkit, as opposed to Kickstarter
• Their first campaign in years to not crack $200k (the last one being Book of Ebon Tides in November 2021)

I don't point this out to say that this campaign failed by any means, and I truly wish Kobold Press all the best in their endeavors, but it seems to point to an artistic silo that they find themselves in. By the mere existence of this campaign, they're clearly interested in trying out new things beyond endless iteration on 5E and the like, but their audience very demonstrably was not so interested in this new direction. I will be very interested to see whether they continue to stretch beyond their current comfort zone, or perhaps how often they do so.

Kickstarter's April

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in April were:

1. ALIEN RPG - Evolved Edition and Rapture Protocol by Free League ($2,407,782.82 from 11,741 backers)
2. Shadowdark RPG: The Western Reaches Setting by The Arcane Library ($2,405,108 from 12,923 backers)
3. Professor Primula's Portfolio of Palaeontology by PalaeoGames ($365,894.94 from 3,933 backers)
4. ZAMANORA: Ballad of the Witch by Eren Chronicles ($328,961 from 3,197 backers)
5. The Dark Moon Rises by Archmage Press ($247,450 from 1,789 backers)

It must needs be remarked that it only takes a few successful campaigns to turn a month from "normal" to "remarkable." Case in point: Kickstarter's April, which saw just under half (48.5% to be precise) of its money raised by just two projects. Were it not for both of these projects, Kickstarter would have seen its second month in a row and third month this year where it made less money in 2025 than in 2024 (and that's before we account for inflation - or before somebody accounts for inflation, I have to draw the line somewhere).

This does raise an interesting question though: how many backers (on any TTRPG crowdfunding project) are showing up just for this project and how many are generally interested in TTRPGs? What I mean to say is, to what extent are the backers that come out for IP tie-ins like the ALIEN RPG sticking around on Kickstarter to check out other games? This is the fundamental question, the same one that gets relitigated every time Wizards of the Coast does something that indie designers object to. Does a rising tide lift all boats? Or does it just drown some of us?

The answer to both questions seems to be no. Let's take a look at some statistics: April's average ($51,635.08) and median ($3,841.24) campaign money raised are the highest they've been this year. Both of these stats being higher than the last three months at least shows that small campaigns aren't being hurt by mega-successful ones, but they're also not being helped all that much. April's median is only about $550 more than January's, and that was the worst overall performance Kickstarter has seen in the 1.5 years I've been tracking these stats. So yeah, very little correlation (let alone causation) can be drawn from these data.

April 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 8 (2024) - 51 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 137 (2024) - 150 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $845,617.27 (2024) - $2,180,147.02 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $5,683,707.15 (2024) -  $7,745,262.30 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 33 (2024) - 49 (2025)
• Money: $310,089.95 (2024) - $213,130.42 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 70 (2024) - 82 (2025)
• Money: $2,486,126.48 (2024) - $2,136,602.54 (2025)

There isn't much to talk about here that I haven't already mentioned. As always, I am heartened to see that AI campaigns continue to make very little money compared to non-AI campaigns, but I continue to be concerned about the sheer number of them. At 49 campaigns using AI in some form or another, April is officially the month with the most AI campaigns since I've started tracking the stat. At what point does the slop become so pervasive that it starts to make everyone else feel bad about having their projects on the same site?

Let Us Build a Tower: A Readthrough Review

The following is a review of the game Let Us Build a Tower by Caleb Wimble. I was provided a copy of the game to review but received no other compensation.

Let Us Build a Tower (LUBAT) by Caleb Wimble is a game that strikes me as an excellent encapsulation of the current state of OSR playstyle. Whether this is a positive or a negative for you will depend largely on your existing feelings about said movement and the many-headed hydra it has become. While reading through this book, I personally found the answers to questions I have had about OSR-style games for years, and for that I will remain eternally grateful.

To start, let's get back to the basics. Let Us Build a Tower: A Mythic Bronze Age Adventure in Babel crowdfunded on Kickstarter in November/December 2023, raising $20,699 from 414 backers on the promise of "an epic megadungeon-building ascent to Heaven full of wonders and hellish dangers through ever-stranger floors." The game as it stands now, ~1.5 years after the campaign's end, is 140 pages that contain all the rules you need to run four different classes of Throne-Seekers through 1,296 possible combinations of rooms and events, an extensive bestiary, and a smattering of details about other cities in the desert sands around Babel. The campaign also funded the Tower Builder App, a product now freely available that generates floors of the ruined Tower of Babel complete with rooms and events.

 So what does this all amount to? Well as I read through this book about endless adventure in a crumbling cursed structure of Biblical proportions, I was reminded of nothing so much as one of my all-time favorite games The Binding of Isaac. For though LUBAT's primary game influence is credited to The Gardens of Ynn (which makes sense, the former draws extensively on the depthcrawl mechanics introduced by the latter), this newer iteration has much more in common with the roguelike genre of videogames given the way that the Tower of Babel resets itself every time your Throne-Seekers leave its walls and the overall easy manner with which player characters might meet their end. This combined with extensive religious subject matter and randomly generated twisting maps full of strange rooms made for an obvious connection to a game that I have spent over 41 days of my life playing.

And it was this connection to Binding of Isaac that sparked a sort of divine revelation to me about the nature of this game. For you see, as I was reading through the rooms and events and monsters you might encounter while playing, I couldn't help but ask myself..."So?" They all seemed very gameable and fun to encounter, but they weren't quite adding up to something that felt like a very compelling roleplaying game. All you're doing is going from one room to the next, dealing with or fighting creatures you find there, and collecting treasure.

Much like you do in Binding of Isaac.

The game I've played 41 consecutive days in total.

Send help

So clearly I'm not opposed to spending significant amounts of time running through procedurally generated levels. But what has compelled me to play so much of one game but balk at the same in another? Well in BOI, I'm pushed forward by a sense of mastery and mystery. M(a/y)stery if you will (and I will not). Different characters have different powers, there are literally thousands of active and passive items to encounter that can be used in different ways, and there remain several hundred achievements I have yet to unlock. The impulse for mastery is satisfied whenever I manage to complete a run or unlock a difficult achievement, and the impulse for mystery is sated each time I enter a new room and find out what awaits me on the other side (usually an adorably disgusting monster to kill). LUBAT surely has the mystery with the depthcrawl mechanics slowly ratcheting up the strangeness of the rooms and encounters, but the book itself seemed to be missing the mastery. Yes, you can level up your Throne-Seeker with a nicely modular system that gives a surprising amount of customization to the small roster of classes, but that just doesn't hit the spot in the same way that navigating the bullet hell of BOI does.

Now you might notice that I specifically said "the book itself" is missing the mastery, and that is the nature of my personal aha moment (which has been extensively documented in OSR blogs, so this is not an original idea by any means): mastery in LUBAT comes from internal motivation rather than player skill. Why is your Throne-Seeker, specifically, exploring the ruined Tower of Babel? Well there's the obvious: it's there, it's full of treasure, and there's supposed to be a literal stairway to heaven somewhere inside. But what might you want any of that for? What does the treasure do for you? What would you do with the power of a god if you managed to actually enter heaven? The answers to those questions are where *gasp* roleplaying enters the picture, and truly what separates LUBAT from BOI. Throne-Seekers must deeply and sincerely want something to be willing to risk death and divine transformation to get it.

To the game's credit, the "Mythic Shinar" section offers information about a wide variety of cities near Babel and the petty warlords/ambitious sorcerers that fill them, but this section is also the most confusing addition to the game. (It was, appropriately, a stretch goal for the Kickstarter and not presumably part of the original vision.) It expands the focus of the adventure beyond Babel, but most of the game's text is about Babel: its rooms, events, monsters, treasure. Expanding the world beyond it provides some helpful context to imagine the reasons a Throne-Seeker would enter the cursed tower, but it also dilutes the focus of the adventure. The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, the primary predecessors for LUBAT, don't really bother with explanations for why you might enter them; they're either just there for the exploring, or else they're making it difficult for you to escape them. I don't really prefer this style of adventure, but I must admit that it gives them a certain purity of purpose. You either engage with their puzzle boxes as they are, or you don't.

Here at the end of the review, it might seem silly to say that the main thing I took away from LUBAT is "characters need a motivation," but it was a genuinely important revelation for me. In games like D&D, my impulse to play comes from the story, sure, but also from the mechanical progression. There are spells to pick, cool abilities to play with, and ever stronger monsters to test my character against. Storygames tend to provide upfront story beats and motivations to pursue, and while perhaps a little lighter on the "mastery" side of things, the broad roadmap given means that I have guidelines within which I can explore while still being confident that I'll end up somewhere meaningful. OSR games (for me) fall into something of an uncanny valley between these two: not enough mechanical levers to look forward to pulling and little to no story roadmaps to follow. I still don't think that OSR games will ever be my favorite to play, but I now realize that I was approaching them too passively. I was used to games that bring more to the table and can carry me along with them a bit more, but in LUBAT you'd better be ready to help build that Tower of Babel yourself or it might just crumble out beneath you.

Some final itinerant thoughts about LUBAT that don't really fit anywhere else in this review:

• The bestiary is truly fantastic. The Fallen Ones, Great Serpents, and Legendary Revenants in particular are really dynamic antagonists/patrons/monsters to encounter. Provide information about these early and often to your players, it will help motivate them to keep climbing the tower (I know that it would motivate me!).

Who wouldn't want to meet LILÎTU in the Tower of Babel?

• I deeply respect the amount of research that clearly went into this game, and I find the combination of Old Testament and Sumerian mythology really compelling. It's just familiar enough to have something to grab onto, just strange enough to be surprised.
• Love love LOVE the spellcasting system: carry around a bunch of Babel Stones that each have one word on them, and combine those words into brief descriptors that govern what a spell can do. It's a system that will likely require some practice to get the hang of, what with negotiation around the power level desired by a spellcaster, but one that can make for highly creative results.

On Con Games and the Apocalypse (World)

 This past weekend I did a very silly thing that has become part of a pattern for me: running games for the first time at a convention for strangers.

On the three occasions I have attended a con thus far in my life, I have always run games, and of those games there is always at least one that I have not played previously. I consider myself a pretty good GM and thus see cons as an opportunity for me to try out some new stuff in a one-shot environment. This time around I was bringing Apocalypse World and The Warren to the table, games that I had been very excited by upon reading them for the first time within the past few years but had yet to actually play. Surely, I figured, being familiar with PBTA games in general would allow me to make one-shots for them without too much trouble.

I was wrong.

Okay that's overdramatic; the games were fine and the players said they had a good time, but I definitely struggled a bit more than I expected to with Apocalypse World in particular. There would be times when I'd grasp in vain for an appropriate move to resolve what a player had just described or struggle to figure out how moves might cascade into each other appropriately and thereby keep the action churning along. Nothing went off the rails, but sometimes it felt like the wheels were spinning without catching much traction.

At the time I was confused: I had familiarized myself with the moves, created some pre-gen characters so that we could get started playing right away (and so that I would be familiar with the moves present at the table), and created a setting with conflicts ready to boil over the moment action started. So what went wrong?

Well as I've been thinking about it since then, I've realized two important things:

1. I wasn't always making the best use of AW's arenas of conflict in my games.
2. I'm not 100% convinced that AW makes for the best convention games.

Let's break these ideas down.

Working with Arenas of Conflict

In the linked article above, Vincent Baker lays out the 8 arenas of conflict he sees in Apocalypse World: honest negotiation, commitments & obligations, negotiation in bad faith, implicit threat of violence, explicit threat of violence, outbreak of violence, nonviolent physical striving, and weirdness. These are all places where characters (PCs and NPCs alike) can come into conflict with each other over their differing goals and motives. Additionally, all of these arenas have Basic Moves associated with them, allowing for players to take a variety of approaches when trying to accomplish things and gently encouraging players with certain stats to focus primarily on particular arenas (someone with a high Hard stat is going to be most mechanically effective when in the "Explicit threat of violence" and "Outbreak of violence" arenas, for example).

Now it's worth saying that these are descriptive and not prescriptive; the arenas are not laid out in the rules nor are the associations between them and the Basic Moves. But it all makes general sense: you can't really say that you're negotiating with someone if you're trying to seize something from them by force. The mob might be able to say that, but the reality is still that they're taking something, not asking for it.

But even with that said, even with no one telling you that these are the arenas of conflict available to you or that certain moves are associated with said arenas, something is missing from the game if you don't make full use of these arenas, something both narrative and mechanical. Narratively, you're not getting a full scope of what the world you're playing in can offer, while mechanically you're missing out on some of the cool stuff that your characters can do.

In one of my games, for example, a military strike force came to claim ownership of a derelict oil platform where a community of people live. By the end of the game there had been threats of violence, outbreaks of violence, and even some negotiation, leading to a lot of going aggro and reading a person/situation, but not so much seducing/manipulating someone or opening your brain to the world's psychic maelstrom. The game just felt a little incomplete to me, the person running it and most clued into all the moving parts.

Apocalypse World Con Games? Prep Wisely

The real central lack of my two games, I now realize, was the absence of Commitments & Obligations. My players were very happy to slot themselves into my world and make up some history with each other, but without more explicit ties from my world to them it was a little too easy for them to all team up and work together.

In most games this would be a great thing! No one likes the player in the D&D party who's an edgy lone wolf and doesn't want to work with anyone else, but for Apocalypse World you really want some conflicting loyalties among the players. They don't need to actually come into direct conflict, but it really helps if they have to renege on some other agreements in the world in order to work well with the other players. That way, the decision to work with the other PCs cascades into new NPCs showing up and getting involved in the action, and the decision to work against the PCs creates more action between the people at the table.

AW is a game that expects and encourages conflict between player characters because it creates interesting, dynamic stories, and I'm honestly not sure if people in a convention setting are necessarily always ready for that. (Not the interesting dynamic stories part, the PC conflict part.) Trad play cultures (especially D&D) are full of horror stories of player conflict gone wrong, tearing apart tables and ending friendships, and people looking to try out some fun games at a convention might just be averse to getting anywhere near that kind of play.

I can say for sure that at my tables players were always trying to get along and work together, which is great! But it's not really what Apocalypse World is bringing to the table. Had I known better, I would have prompted the players to explore that kind of conflict and to make sure that we were all on the same page for what to expect. And if they weren't interested in that (which is completely fair), I would have needed some strong backup NPCs to barge into situations and start fucking everything up.

March 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

Turns out my version of an April Fool is to immediately write a monthly retrospective! Zine Month/Zine Quest are essentially done, so it's time to read the tea leaves and see what we can divine about the future. And folks? It's a mixed (tea) bag.

• 294 campaigns
• 34 Backerkit
• 6 Crowdfundr
• 254 Kickstarter
• $4,205,543.02 raised
• $1,918,365.98 on Backerkit
• $6,182.91 on Crowdfundr
• $2,280,994.13 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 15 accessories
• 1 actual play
• 65 adventures
• 4 advice
• 1 audiobook
• 18 campaign settings
• 1 fundraising
• 2 reprints
• 73 supplements
• 111 systems
• 3 zines
• 150 distinct systems used (84 original)
• 73 campaigns (24.83%) used D&D 5E and raised $815,507.09 (19.39% of all money raised in March)
• 47 campaigns used AI in some form (15.99% of total) and raised $317,417.28 (7.55% of all money raised in March)
• 21 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 28.77% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 22 different countries
• Top 3: 161 in USA, 46 in UK, 19 in and Canada
• Singleton countries: Denmark, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, Singapore, Vietnam

Backerkit's March

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in March were:

1. The Magnus Archives RPG: Tangled in the Web by Monte Cook Games ($1,015,475 from 6,174 backers)
2. Terraforming Mars - the official TTRPG by Shadowlands Games ($376,758.63 from 1,800 backers)
3. Adventures in the Household: Journey to the Garden 5E by Two Little Mice ($131,216.21 from 985 backers)
4. Festival of the Forgotten: A Dark Carnival D&D 2024 Handbook by Storytellers Forge Studios ($85,337 from 730 backers)
5. Hexploration Decks & Tiles-- Hexcrawl/Sandbox RPG Support by Inkwell Ideas ($62,991 from 773 backers)

You'll permit me some editorializing here (as it is my blog after all): I still kind of can't believe that a Terraforming Mars TTRPG exists (or will exist). I love the game, but it's very difficult for me to imagine how exactly it connects to an adaptation in a meaningful way. That said, when I read the Quickstart I was pleasantly surprised at a lot of the ideas it contains. There's an ideal of playing through the various phases of Mars' terraforming, with player characters being related to the ones used in previous phases but changed somehow (the example given, I believe, was employees of one of the vast terraforming corps in one phase and rebels against the same now-dominant corp in the next).

That said, plenty of those ideas are also deeply confusing and contradictory in their current form. Case in point: a significant portion of the quickstart devoted to combat. Not necessarily my primary concern in a game about scientific mastery over an uninhabited alien landscape while grappling with corporate control of said landscape! (Of course I understand that violence is going to be an intrinsic part of the corporate control in question, but does that really need detailed combat maneuvers and tables full of weapons? I'd say no.)

If there was ever any doubt, official TTRPG adaptations are here to stay (as evidenced by the massive success of the first Magnus Archives TTRPG supplement). I'm just glad that they also are bringing with them some interesting ideas.

Crowdfundr's March

There were 6 campaigns on Crowdfundr in March, which were:

1. Load the Simulation: Train hard. Hold together. Drift alone. by Cezar Capacle ($1,651 from 133 backers)
2. The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire-A Draw Steel Adventure by Andie Margolskee ($1,149 from 151 backers)
3. Pirouette - A Ballet Horror TTRPG by InnocentGoblin TTRPGs by Michael Sweeney ($1,071.91 from 52 backers)
4. Anomaly Hunters, a TTRPG of monster hunting and TV by Wendigo Workshop ($866 from 34 backers)
5. Letters to a Young GM by John Wick ($790 from 54 backers)
6. This Town Is Full Of Monsters by Aleks Samoylov ($655 from 11 backers)

There remains not much to say about Crowdfundr.

Kickstarter's March

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in March were:

1. Fighting Fantasy - Solo Adventure Gamebooks - Back In Print! by Steve Jackson Games ($319,101 from 5,331 backers)
2. Gods of the Forbidden North Trilogy by Pulp Hummock Press ($168,704 from 1,660 backers)
3. The Lady Pirates Tarot & Sails of Fate 5e Supplement by Baroque Publishing ($108,949 from 1,209 backers)
4. Immortals: Hubris & Glory (5E) by Black Lantern Productions ($98,722.20 from 821 backers)
5. Mappa Mundi - An Exploration + Ecology RPG by Three Sails Studios ($97,610 from 1,849 backers)

I want to talk briefly about Gods of the Forbidden North Trilogy as the first $100,000+ campaign in a while to use AI in any way. It was used here to make the promo video (commissioned by the author using his own money, he is careful to stress) and nowhere else in the product. And I have no reason not to believe that.

HOWEVER!

The trailer still looks like ass lol.

The "Use of AI" section on Kickstarter says "the creative filmmakers at Big River Film Co. who shot the marketing video at the top of this Kickstarter page did experiment with AI elements to explore what they, as real artists, could accomplish by pushing boundaries with such technologies." Now the word 'shot' is doing a lot of work here, because when watching the 1 minute and 14 second video I don't think there was a single frame that didn't seem AI-generated.

And again - it looks like ass.

What experiment are they doing here exactly? What boundaries are they pushing? It just boggles the mind that someone with the budget to commission a video like this couldn't...commission a better one.

Pay attention, too, to the primary justification that comes at the end: "this project’s promotional video is a strong example of how AI can be a powerful tool in leveraging the playing field between small, independent creators and large corporate entities with staggering budgets." No it isn't! This video looks cheap! It consumed god only knows how much energy and water, and it shit out this 74 second turd of a video and a metric ton of carbon emissions. It's the equivalent of "I went to ______ and all I got was this crappy t-shirt" except if the t-shirt was also actively killing the person wearing it and everyone around them (or more accurately, if it were actively killing a bunch of people in the Global South who are already bearing the brunt of climate change).

I'm fucking sick of it. Creators need to do better, and the 1,660 people who backed that campaign need to care about more than their silly little roleplaying game that's probably going to sit on their shelf unplayed.

March 2024 vs. 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 21 (2024) - 34 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 232 (2024) - 254 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $939,594.09 (2024) - $1,918,365.98 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $4,897,291.24 (2024) - $2,283,379.13 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 34 (2024) - 47 (2025)
• Money: $152,318.82 (2024) - $319,802.28 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 69 (2024) - 73 (2025)
• Money: $1,918,554.37 (2024) - $815,507.09 (2025)

Something is going on with crowdfunding right now, and I have absolutely no idea what. $1,635,141.22 - that's how much more money was made in March 2024 over March 2025. Kickstarter campaigns raised over $2.5M LESS this year despite increasing the number of campaigns that successfully funded. The top is weirdly falling out (falling off?) of Kickstarter TTRPG campaigns, as evidenced by:

• Kickstarter March average: $21,109.01 (2024) - $8,989.68 (2025)
• Kickstarter March median: $2,956.05 (2024) - $2,320.09 (2025)
• Kickstarter March D&D average: $28,399.15 (2024) - $8,801.27 (2025)
• Kickstarter March D&D median: $2,556.05 (2024) - $2,206.73 (2025)

Some of this can be explained by high profile, company-backed campaigns moving to Backerkit, but even that doesn't explain it all. There were 10 campaigns in March 2024 that raised $100,000+ as opposed to 6 in March 2025, and that shortfall accounts for almost the entire discrepancy between these two years (assuming that the average high-value Kickstarter money raised across both years [~$367,000] is representative, the absence of 4 of those represents a reduction in $1.468M).

What does this all mean? Well as always, in the absence of year-over-year data and perfect macroeconomic oracular knowledge, it's impossible to say. But given what we do know: I'd say this is a sign that some people are already waiting to see what's going to happen with the US economy and an impending trade war. But it's not the relatively big publishers, because your Steve Jacksons and Monte Cooks ran big campaigns in March that are undoubtedly going to be affected by tariffs and paper costs. Instead, it's the ambitious third-party D&D people who are kind of vanishing. And this makes sense! If you're a small team preparing a big tome of a book that you anticipate a big audience of D&D enthusiasts will snap up, I'd be concerned about the potential success too. Will your small team be able to handle the chaos of a fascist hopeful-dictator as you try to deliver products? Will people balk at paying unexpectedly high costs for shipping and allow tomes to pile up in your house or a rented warehouse? Will tariffs suddenly change right before a shipment arrives internationally and completely wipe out most of the profit you made? It's stressing me out just thinking about it, and I've never had to even try to do it before.

So yeah (*chuckles weakly, as though trying to put a brave face in spite of a mortal wound*) April Fools...what a fun holiday. Can't wait to see what happens this month...

February TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

Zine Month/Quest are receding into the rearview, though there are still plenty of crowdfunding campaigns still wrapping up that are part of those events. So let's see how they impacted February's numbers, shall we? As always, check out the raw data here.

• 223 campaigns
• 19 Backerkit
• 2 Crowdfundr
• 202 Kickstarter
• $4,132,821.22 raised
• $1,194,103.59 on Backerkit
• $1,951.66 on Crowdfundr
• $2,936,765.97 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 9 accessories
• 55 adventures
• 1 advice
• 1 app
• 2 audiobooks
• 6 campaign settings
• 1 fundraising
• 63 supplements
• 84 systems
• 1 zine
• 110 distinct systems used (59 original)
• 58 campaigns (26.01%) used D&D 5E and raised $1,773,005.23 (42.90% of all money raised in February)
• 39 campaigns used AI in some form (17.49% of total) and raised $197,675.97 (4.78% of all money raised in February)
• 28 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 48.28% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns

And for something new: country statistics!

• Campaigns were based in 21 different countries in February
• Top 3: 111 in USA, 34 in UK, 12 in Australia and Canada
• Singleton countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, Vietnam

Backerkit's February

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in February were:

1. Legend of Kain Official Encyclopedia and Tabletop Role-Playing Game by Lost In Cult ($752,960.51 from 4,853 backers)
2. Terror from the Underdeep: A Giant Box of 5E Adventure by Goodman Games ($255,047 from 1,626 backers)
3. Level Up: A5E Gate Pass Gazette Annual 2024 by EN Publishing ($39,932.77 from 641 backers)
4. Broadsword Guide to Hunting Werebeasts by DMDave Publishing ($30,303 from 396 backers)
5. Starships & Soldiers - A Mothership Sci-Fi RPG Toolkit by Hammer City Games ($20,532.06 from 695 backers)

February is an odd month for Backerkit's top campaigns in that they're a little heavier on the D&D 5E offerings than usual. My working theory is that when there is a flood of weird shit (or at least unfamiliar shit, as evidenced by the 59 original systems funded this month), the average crowdfunding backer tends to coalesce around the things they do recognize. For Backerkit, that's a couple of 5E campaigns, a MÖRK BORG-based game for an existing IP (Legend of Kain), and a Mothership supplement (which I believe was originally intended to be part of Mothership month last November).

Crowdfundr's February

I genuinely almost forgot to put in these data since there are campaigns on Crowdfundr so infrequently. In February there were 2:

1. Rol de Guerrilla Vol.1 - Media Docena de Rol by ¡Rol o Barbarie! ($1,337.66 from 132 backers)
2. Secrets in the Static: Lynchian Horror TTRPG by Thought Punks ($614 from 34 backers)

Kickstarter's February

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in February were:

1. A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting by Darryl Jones ($449,998 from 3,247 backers)
2. KULT: Divinity Lost - Dark Realms and Other Horrors by Helmgast ($394,922 from 2,164 backers)
3. Monster Vault 2: Deadly Creatures for 5E D&D and TOV by Kobold Press ($261,864 from 3,749 backers)
4. The Oracle RPG App - Less Prep. More Play. by Nord Games ($257,090 from 1,222 backers)
5. Glumdark by Exalted Funeral ($149,439 from 2,719 backers)

Kickstarter's February is very similar to Backerkit's: top campaigns are dominated by recognizable systems (5E) and/or people (Kobold Press, Exalted Funeral).

February 2024 vs 2025

So how does February compare between this year and last year? If you'll recall from last month, Kickstarter money was way down and Backerkit's technically was too (but only if you include the MCDM RPG, which is practically the definition of an outlier). Well this time around we're seeing more of a return to form:

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 12 (2024) - 19 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 214 (2024) - 202 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $884,266.93 (2024) - $1,194,103.59 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $2,468,976.14 (2024) - $2,936,765.97 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 35 (2024) - 39 (2025)
• Money: $236,973.58 (2024) - $197,675.97 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 57 (2024) - 58 (2025)
• Money: $592,773.60 (2024) - $1,773,005.23 (2025)

These data actually poke some significant holes in my "people like familiar things" narrative given that money raised by D&D 5E campaigns more than doubles from year to year. If my half-baked idea were accurate, we wouldn't necessarily expect to see such a jump since the conditions are more or less the same between the two years (in terms of number of campaigns and unfamiliar systems).

Some of this is explained by an increase in 5E campaigns on Backerkit (2 campaigns raising $2,535 in 2024 vs 5 campaigns raising $333,080.42 in 2025), but something similar can be seen on Kickstarter (55 campaigns raising $590,238.60 in 2024 vs 53 campaigns raising $1,439,924.81 in 2025).

To wildly speculate about a different dynamic that could be at play here, I wonder if economic uncertainty and a generally pessimistic feeling about the economy (at least here in the US) could drive people to familiar, comfortable pastimes as well. D&D 5E as a familiar touchstone could give people faith in a fairly high floor of enjoyment and therefore a solid return on 'investment' so to speak, whereas original or unfamiliar systems present more of an unknown to the average TTRPG enjoyer and therefore a riskier place to spend their money.

Keep in mind that this is the most armchair of psychology, and proving this would take a hobby-wide level of surveying that would likely produce inconclusive results given that people are generally bad at self-reporting data on themselves.

Me rn

Lord knows I wouldn't be able to give particularly consistent reasons why I back the campaigns I do, even when I think ones I don't back sound interesting too.

Well that's it for February! See you back here in a month to break down the remaining Zine Month/Quest campaigns (and then some).

Gaming With Death

 

Warning: spoilers for Spiritfarer (2020, Thunder Lotus Games) and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025, Jump Over the Age).

In late 2021 and early 2022, I had a mild breakdown. It began a few days before I was scheduled to fly home with the unwelcome news that COVID cases were spiking again despite vaccinations. The spike in cases was not particularly new by this point in the pandemic (I had canceled a flight home in 2020 because it didn't feel safe for me personally or responsible in a public health context to do so), but I think that I had perhaps subconsciously hoped that the vaccination rollout would have changed something, anything, about the new reality we continue to find ourselves in.

My brain began spinning up the anxiety loom, weaving intricate tapestries of terrible futures that could befall me: I could catch COVID on the metro to the airport and die, I could catch COVID on the plane and die, I could catch COVID and bring it back to my family and we could all die. The focal point that this doom spiraled around was my clearly imminent death, followed by the simple question:

What will it feel like to die?

I was intensely stuck on this point. I had no frame of reference for what oblivion would feel like because it inherently can't feel like anything. Even the idea of drifting in an endless dark void presupposes that you will still exist to experience the crushing emptiness. It perhaps goes without saying that, though I wouldn't call myself an atheist, I have no strong faith in any particular afterlife. Even reincarnation, which at least entails the further existence of my abstract self, will necessitate the end of the specific entity that is my current subjective existence. The examination, consideration, and abandonment of each potentially comforting afterlife possibility occupied all my waking hours (which were ever so conveniently extended by semi-regular panic attacks that kept me awake far longer than I wanted to be).

Until I was able to start escitalopram (great value Lexapro for those not in the know) about a month into 2022, the miasma of this obsession hung over me, choking out much the light and keeping new life from growing. Even now, three years on, I sometimes feel the old specter loom and know that it is something that I will be battling for the rest of my life. The old me, ironically, is dead. Let us instead turn to the new one that struggles to be born.

Two games that have helped me process this are Spiritfarer, a 2020 cozy lifestyle sim from Thunder Lotus Games where you play the titular spiritfarer helping departed souls on their way to an afterlife, and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, the 2025 sequel from Jump Over the Age where you play a sleeper (an emulated human mind put in a robot body to work for the Essen-Arp corporation) on the run from your benefactor-turned-tyrant Laine.

Though vastly different in setting (dreamlike afterlife ocean vs scattered settlements in an asteroid belt) and tone (cozy chores vs cyberpunk dystopia), the games are shockingly similar in many ways. Take the main characters: amnesiac individuals who accumulate a varied cast of characters as they figure out what they want out of their second lease on (after)life. Or world structure: a slowly expanding map of settlements you visit many times as you run missions for both yourself and your shipmates. Or ending: the death of your character, at a time more or less of the player's choosing, that gives them a chance to move on to something new.

It is less the ending of these games that has helped me process my feelings about dying and more how they both help you get there. Both games have a sort of bell curve experience: an  introduction to the world that's pretty linear and introduces fundamental mechanics, a quite open middle that allows you to explore the world on your own terms (assisted by quests that point you to various points of interest), and a slow whittling down of gameplay until there's not much left to do but move on.

In Spiritfarer, this comes as you complete your shipmates' quests and bring them to the gate where they can move past this afterlife ocean to whatever is next. You build up the boat that you travel on over the game, adding livestock and agriculture modules as well as homes for your guests until you have a truly massive edifice that practically rivals any of the towns you can visit in the game, but when your last companion moves on you're left with an empty boat that feels all the emptier from the buildings you added to it. Similarly, the map that was so exciting at the beginning of the game with the unexplored spaces on it so full of potential is now all filled in, nothing left to discover. And this is good! This is how it should be. The whole game is about you helping these whimsical and troubled spirits make peace with their lives and themselves so that they can move on, and secretly the game has been walking you along the same path. Of course you could keep playing, keep fishing and growing flax and catching falling stars and traveling the same well-sailed sea routes...but don't you want to rest? Don't you want to try something new? And what could be more new than the place beyond this, the place where all of your friends have already gone? You've accomplished what you needed to here. Isn't that enough?

Citizen Sleeper 2, on the other hand, builds up to a grand confrontation with Laine on Darkside, the space station where his gang reigns supreme. His influence has been growing in you (literally) ever since he stopped your reboot at the beginning of the game, kicking off the whole chain of events that led to this moment, and this is the time where you can finally free yourself from him. And you do...but that's not the end. See, you were being rebooted to break your artificial body's dependence on stabilizer, a futuristic cocktail that counteracts the planned obsolescence Essen-Arp built into sleepers, and the incomplete reboot is starting to take its toll. You accumulate more permanent glitches, a game mechanic that expresses the fundamental decay your body is experiencing, and your companions warn you that if you don't complete the reboot you will die. But it was the reboot that created the amnesiac character so convenient for a player to step into (after all, if the character doesn't remember anything then it all has to be explained to them - and to the player). Are you willing to risk losing everything again? Everything you worked for, the relationships you forged, the life you made for yourself? What if it were all taken away from you a second time?

After the revelation that the reboot must be completed, you still have some time left. I used that in my playthrough to complete the last quests I had: creating an archive for the history- and tech-obsessed Juni, seeing the Greenbelt asteroid come alive with stepsilk I had retrieved, partying in the isolated colony of Olivera, dealing with a drive containing incriminating information about one of the corporations waging war in this system (the ultimate conclusion of which is probably the most disappointing things in the game). And when I was done with all that, I was left with basically nothing to do. I could do various odd jobs in the scattered settlements, but all the people I cared about had settled down and started moving on with their lives. The only way for me to move on with mine was to finish the reboot, but it was as I began returning to Darkside to do this final task that I realized that whether I survived it intact or not, my influence on the world and on the people who traveled with me would live on regardless. I might be different when I wake up, or the same, or I might not wake up at all, but the choices I made and things I did mattered.

Both these games lay out what I hope to have at the end of my life, whenever that comes: the feeling that my world map has been essentially picked clean and I'm ready to move on. I know that the real world doesn't work that way and that there will always be new things to do, new experiences to have, new people to meet, but these games have shown me that there is a beauty and a purpose in putting a character to rest and letting them move on to the next part of their story, even if it's somewhere that you can't follow.