August 2026 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I feel like I say this every month, but this month is one of the stranger on record for TTRPG crowdfunding. There was an 11-day period (August 4-14) where 11 massively successful campaigns ended with US$7,837,170.24 pledged (82.66% of all money pledged in August). What's more, there was a full week (7/28-8/4) when all 11 of them were live and, theoretically, competing. But we'll circle back to that later. Check out the raw data and let's dive in!

(Edit: updated on 10/14 to reflect missed campaigns)

August 2026 featured:

95 campaigns

• 19 on Backerkit
• 2 on Gamefound
• 92 on Kickstarter

$9,937,780.29 raised

• $5,623,032.44 on Backerkit
• $721,475.32 on Gamefound
• $3,593,272.53 on Kickstarter

Types of campaigns

• 11 accessories
• 27 adventures
• 1 advice
• 6 campaign settings
• 2 fundraising
• 1 playtest
• 38 supplements
• 26 systems
• 1 zine

44 distinct systems used (18 original)

• 50 campaigns (44.25%) used D&D 5E and raised $4,341,091.89 (43.68% of all money raised in August)

33 campaigns used AI in some form (29.20% of total) and raised $176,984.69 (1.78% of all money raised in August)

• 26 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 52% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns

Campaigns were based in 13 different countries

• Top 3: 56 in USA, 26 in UK, 8 in Canada
• Singleton countries: Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Netherlands

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in August were:

1. Dungeons and Daddies: Not a BDSM Sourcebook by Dungeons and Daddies ($3,111,193 from 17,102 backers)
2. Deathbringer TTRPG by Professor DM by Roll For Combat ($1,326,922 from 7,737 backers)
3. The Ghost in the Shell: Tabletop Roleplaying Game by Mantic Games ($495,723.24 from 4,035 backers)
4. DCC RPG Book of Funnels by Goodman Games ($277,992 from 3,125 backers)
5. Merryshire Detective Club by Pelgrane Press ($85,787.60 from 935 backers)

The 2 campaigns on Gamefound in August were:

1. DC Justice League Unlimited Roleplaying Game by D20 Culture ($718,411.63 from 2,801 backers)
2. MythWatch by Mythemakers ($3,063.69 from 28 backers)

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in August were:

1. Seven-Part Pact by Steve Jackson Games ($1,068,197 from 5,795 backers)
2. Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster by Mike Shea ($464,986 from 8,946 backers)
3. Kinks & Cantrips: Adventures in Subspace by Stellara Books ($272,411 from 2,666 backers)
4. Limithron's Pirate Map Collection by Limithron ($265,993 from 2,363 backers)
5. Terra Mortis | Solo Post-Apocalyptic Deckbuilding RPG by Lion Banner Games ($219,714 from 1,613 backers)

August 2024 vs 2025 vs 2026

	2024	2025	2026
Campaign count
Backerkit	20	17	19
Kickstarter	121	122	92
Money pledged
Backerkit total	$1,580,419.62	$1,351,822.34	$5,623,032.44
Backerkit average	$79,020.98	$79,518.96	$295,949.08
Backerkit median	$15,903.00	$10,588.00	$30,566.00
Kickstarter total	$18,711,813.48	$1,702,917.95	$3,593,272.53
Kickstarter average	$154,643.09	$13,958.34	$39,057.31
Kickstarter median	$4,239.00	$3,364.00	$3,053.51
AI
Campaign count	29	42	33
Money pledged	$145,005.70	$167,835.73	$176,984.69
D&D 5E
Campaign count	49	59	50
Money pledged	$1,956,290.32	$875,395.60	$4,341,091.89

Promised I'd circle back didn't I?

Seeing the data from these past few years should provide some context for how strange this month was. A sizable decrease in the number of campaigns (the lowest number for Kickstarter since January 2025, lowest for Backerkit since this past January) and yet an equally sizable increase in money funded, compared to both last month and last August. August 2024 obviously stands apart from this, but that's when the Cosmere RPG finished (something of a Crowdfunders Georg). Also, as an aside, that's when the Neopets RPG ended. That shit raised the 4th-highest amount of money that month. Good thing that people learned their lesson and didn't give a bunch of money to an IP-based project without much evidence to back up the grand promises made.

Anyways, like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this was driven by a legendary run of massive campaigns all ending in an 11-day period. All but one of the campaigns that raised more than US$100K ended in this stretch of time. But even more specific than that 11-day period was the two days of August 13th and 14th, when five campaigns ended that raised US$6,280,027.24 (63.19% of all money pledged in August).

Although this is very much not the norm (especially because these campaigns weren't even part of some promotional Month), these campaigns provide a little insight into the typology of highly successful TTRPG campaigns, which I have created three categories for (well, four , but the fourth doesn't really count): External Audience, Intellectual Property, and Known Entity.

• External Audience campaigns feature popular artists who have not previously been involved in making TTRPGs deciding to publish something. They are almost always involved in the field in some way  They benefit enormously from having large fanbases who are already interested in supporting them, which should translate to more backers and more high-dollar backers (I do not have the empirical data to back this up, but it just tracks). In August 4-14, this was:
• The Dungeons & Daddies podcast making a 5E supplement/campaign setting out of their highly successful podcast
• Professor Dungeon Master (who I shan't link to), a YouTuber with 157K subscribers at time of writing, making a game
• Intellectual Property campaigns are exactly what they sound like: licensed TTRPGs of existing media. Similarly to External Audience campaigns, these benefit from a large audience predisposed to be interested in the game, but crucially they can't usually be as effectively targeted by the creators. I don't think the Ghost in the Shell mangaka, publisher, or anime studio is really putting out a call to go back the TTRPG adaptation (but I could be wrong). In August 4-14, this was:
• The Ghost in the Shell: Tabletop Roleplaying Game
• Children of Time: The Roleplaying Game
• (worth saying that the only other US$100K+ game in August was DC Justice League Unlimited Roleplaying Game, another IP campaign)
• Known Entity campaigns are the broadest category as they rely on the previous success of the game system, designer/publisher, or both. Even though this is something of a catch-all category, it highlights that monetary success in crowdfunding rarely comes out of nowhere. In August 4-14 this was:
• DCC RPG Book of Funnels (popular system, well-known publisher)
• Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster (third in a series of GM advice books)
• Seven-Part Pact (Jay Dragon + Steve Jackson, plus years of public playtesting and positive reviews)
• The Wildsea: Sourdown (popular system, well-known publisher)
• Terra Mortis | Solo Post-Apocalyptic Deckbuilding RPG (something of an outlier, but previous successful campaigns including a US$100K+ one must have built an audience)

You might be wondering what the fourth type is, but I think you already know: it's D&D 5E. The reason I don't really consider this to be a real type of mega-successful campaign is because it's nowhere near as diagnostic as the other types. There are far, far more D&D 5E crowdfunding campaigns that make less than US$1000 than there are US$100K+.

Eagle-eyed readers have doubtless already noticed that these categories are by no means mutually exclusive. The Dungeons & Daddies campaign was a D&D 5E book (and Professor DM's game is basically just a type of D&D given that it's clearly marketed to that audience). Children of Time is being made by Rowan, Rook, & Decard, very much an indie TTRPG Known Entity. You could easily make the case that Jay Dragon brought her own External Audience to Steve Jackson Games (though that's iffy given that Jay is an actual designer rather than YouTuber or podcaster). In fact, when these conditions align you usually get a sort of force multiplier that increases the overall success.

None of this is intended to discount the work that went into the design of any of these games; I'm mostly trying to dig into how it was possible that so much money was raised by these campaigns in largely overlapping time periods without backers feeling exhausted. These categories, I hope, help point out how the audience for these campaigns did not overlap (though I am of course sure that there are many people out there who backed several of these) and examine how fragmentary/siloed the TTRPG field is.

When you boil it right down, these categories are mostly just different ways of saying that something made money because it was already popular (and because the people behind it possess the monetary/cultural capital needed to make and run a professional campaign). But there is value to separating out these different classes of popularity, and in pointing out that capital alone (see: IP games) does not necessarily result in the greatest success. Rather (and this is a conclusion I often return to in these roundups), it is the cultivation of a TTRPG-specific audience that most consistently results in the success of individual campaigns, and that is something that relies on a lot of (ultimately harder) work being done before and between campaigns.

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...

A Modest Literary Analysis of "Use of AI" Sections on TTRPG Kickstarters, Part 1

As you are no doubt aware, the use of AI-generated content in TTRPGs is increasing. I was unfortunately reminded of this fact by @Ettin64, one of the creators of the fantastic Hard Wired Island.

Well, this sucks. There are a bunch of TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns and 500-1000+-page (!) books on DriveThruRPG that are obviously just AI-generated slop: https://t.co/2gJit8okGK

— lo-fi ettin to study/relax to (@Ettin64) December 13, 2023

The associated reddit post contains 13 links to DTRPG pages, of which about half have been delisted at the time of writing, and 4 links to completed Kickstarter campaigns that declare they have used AI.

I decided to revisit my November crowdfunding stats as well as my ongoing December crowdfunding stats to see exactly who is using AI and how. The full stats will come later (around the beginning of January), but right now I, like Ettin, am interested in the rhetoric these campaigns are using to talk about their use of AI.

Just so that we're all on the same page here, this is what Kickstarter has to say about using AI in projects on their platform:

Projects using AI tools to generate images, text, or other output must be:

• Open and Honest: Disclose in your submission and on your project page
  • what AI technology you plan to use in creating your work 
  • how you plan to incorporate the AI-produced content in your project

AND

• Original and Creative: Disclose in your submission and on your project page
  • the extent to which your project is your original work, and 
  • the specific elements you will be creating using AI output

Seems simple enough. So let's see some of the examples of this in action.

Standard Fare

First up is the standard stuff. I won't link any specific campaigns here, suffice it to say that it boils down to "We used Midjourney. We have a license to use Midjourney images." (Substitute Midjourney for whatever AI image creation was actually used). There's not much to say here. It's simple, it's to the point, it fundamentally misunderstands the question that they're allegedly trying to answer:

Do you have the consent of owners of the works that were (or will be) used to produce the AI generated portion of your projects? Please explain.

Almost by definition, artists whose work has been used to train these LLMs cannot consent because the training data is scraped from the internet. The one exception seems to be Adobe Firefly, which they claim is only trained on Adobe Stock and public domain images.

The question of credit raises its thorny head again in the next category of answers...

In the Current State of AI

Several campaigns use shockingly similar language (well not that shocking, two of those campaigns come from the same creator):

In the current state of AI we do not think there is a way that you can credit, but if such a thing occurs in the future we will be sure to implement it. 

Notice the use of "we think" and "if such a thing occurs in the future," creating a rhetoric of plausible deniability. "Well gee, we recognize that this is stealing from artists, but unfortunately there's just no way to get around it. Aw shucks, well if we can steal more ethically in the future we'll be sure to do that."

These campaigns also have identical answers to what parts of their campaign will use AI:

For the illustration of the pages we are using Midjourney, then use Photoshop to edit the illustration for the desired result.

So they're using Midjourney, but human labor is entering the picture to get the "desired result." If I had to speculate, this labor involves mostly eliminating the telltale signs of AI-generated art, but I will grant that there could be other goals here. Speaking of other goals...

Our Artistic Vision

One creator, Mizo Games, has a fascinating take on why they use AI art in all three of their campaigns:

The art generated for this project was created using Midjourney AI exclusively in response to our own unique prompts and direction. We did not use any pre-existing prompts or works from other Midjourney users as the basis for our art. While Midjourney's algorithm inherently draws on its training data, we made original creative decisions in iteratively guiding the AI output through descriptive prompting and deliberate selection. The resulting images reflect our artistic vision and choices alone.

There is a strong focus on "artistic vision" here, a real attempt to show ownership of the generated art by tracing its creativity through their human brains. Interestingly, they show more concern for the property and creative license of "other Midjourney users" than the artists whose work was used as training data in the algorithm. By focusing on how "unique" their prompts are, they seem to feel they can claim artistic legitimacy, ignoring presumably that anyone could use those same prompts and achieve exactly the same results. Still, this presents a fascinating rhetorical turn by virtue of recognizing that there is some illegitimacy tainting the use of AI-generation. If there weren't, there would be no need to defend it this way. Artists don't generally feel the need to disclose that their art was produced by their own unique thoughts and actions, as it's generally understood to simply be true. When it isn't (plagiarism, tracing, clear inspiration that isn't credited), people tend to take notice.

This concern about artistic legitimacy takes on a new form in the next category...

Specifically Not Writing

Too many campaigns to count have some variation of the following in their Use of AI section:

Covers are made with AI. All interior art is made by artists. No AI was used for writing any of the encounters, rules or any part of the product itself.

This one in particular is fascinating as it seems to admit that only humans can be artists (making AI what exactly?). But it's the latter half that bears closer inspection. "No AI was used for writing any of the encounters, rules or any part of the product itself." Well, if it's good enough for cover art, why is it not good enough for the writing? It appears to be almost a recognition that AI generation of writing in a TTRPG project would be illegitimate. The many campaigns that have some version of this all betray the same fundamental concern: that use of AI will render their products corrupted in some way. And while Mizo Games wrapped their use of AI into their overall creative vision, these other creators have instead divorced visual art from their TTRPG product. By separating visual art (cover or otherwise) from the writing, they are creating two categories of creativity in TTRPGs: the core (writing, pure creativity that cannot be touched by AI) and the periphery (visual art, incidental concerns that can be tainted by association with AI because they won't affect the perception of the core material).

Next time

 And with that, I'll leave the rest of the categories for next time. These are:

• Stretch Goals
• The Economics
• Outliers

As a final note, there is a small category of campaigns that report using AI tools like Grammarly to polish their writing. I don't know where I personally stand on this, except to say that a human editor is going to be able to do that job much better. On some level, I commend those campaigns for disclosing that information in the first place as it is certainly nowhere near the level of AI use that these other ones are.