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...