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.

September 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

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

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

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

Backerkit's September

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in September were:

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

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

Gamefound's September

The 3 campaigns on Gamefound in September were:

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

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

Kickstarter's September

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in September were:

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

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

September 2024 vs 2025

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

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

August 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

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

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

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

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

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

Backerkit's August

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in August were:

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

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

Gamefound's August

The 4 campaigns on Gamefound in August were:

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

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

Kickstarter's August

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in August were:

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

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

August 2024 vs 2025

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

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

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

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

A Blog Post 1 Year in the Making

 

Last summer (2024), I completed my third rewatch of the incredible show of Gravity Falls and I found myself struck by something going into the 3-part "Weirdmageddon" finale: the entire show has been taking place under the looming specter of the Pines siblings going home at the end of summer.

Upon this realization, I felt a little odd. That is, after all, the premise of the whole show. It's referenced many times throughout its two-season run, whether it's Mabel wanting a summer romance or Dipper feeling compelled to solve Gravity Falls' mysteries before he has to leave. But it doesn't feel particularly urgent until the end of Episode 37 "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future" when (spoilers for a 10-year old show) Mabel tries to create an endless summer and inadvertently releases Bill Cipher into our reality.

Why does Mabel do this? Well, for a constellation of reasons, but primarily because the summer is about to end and all her friends (including her twin brother) are seemingly about to abandon her on her birthday of all days. It's been a wonderful summer, but the prospect of it ending so badly almost retrospectively taints it for her to the point of it all being for nothing. Worse than nothing even, because she had something so good and then would have lost it.

So what does this have to do with TTRPGs? I felt like there was something there but wasn't sure at the time, so I wrote the reminder you see at the top of this post to make myself return to the idea at a later date. Then that date came and went. And went. And went. Until I could barely even see it in the rearview as I drove out of Gravity Falls with Dipper and Mabel.

At some point, I decided that I would simply revisit it in a year's time. It'll make for a funny bit, I thought, a blog post about time-limited games that itself is time-limited. Then today came and I actually deleted that reminder because I felt that I had nothing to say. A whole year to think of the perfect blog post and what did I have to show for it? A masterpiece of theory? An incredible bit of advice? Something even halfway funny or thoughtful or interesting? No!!!!!

But then I restored the reminder and chose to write this anyways, because I realized that this post was never about having the perfect thing to say. It was about deadlines, procrastination, and time, both in-game and out.

So what would it mean to have a game on a timer? The Cross Stitch by Ben Mansky is a MÖRK BORG adventure where the players are stuck in a 30-minute timeloop that resets in real time. 60 Minutes to Curtain, a LARP I just wrote for Dice Exploder's 1 Hour or Less Jam, is about a community theater group having just 60 minutes to get their show ready for opening night. OMEN by Spencer Campbell is a one-shot game about a world ticking ever closer to its doom via a dwindling dice pool that gets rolled at the beginning of the session and never refreshes; when it's gone, so is everything else.

Games on timers are nothing new, but they are often short. The games mentioned above take only one session to play (maybe two in the case of The Cross Stitch); what would a whole campaign on a timer look like?

In many ways, grand TTRPG campaigns of the sort imagined by many a Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu or Shadowrun player are already on a timer. How long until the players' schedules make it so that the game ends by default, in a whimper and not a bang as weeks since playing become months and months become years? How long until some thoughtless comment or action from the real world causes two or more of the players to cease speaking to each other? How long until a major life event (a child's birth, a new job, a family tragedy) makes it impossible for one or more players to devote 4 hours a week every week to Faerun or Eberron or your DM's homebrew world that's definitely not Middle Earth mashed up with whatever other fantasy series they were reading most recently?

Truly, the longer a campaign goes the more likely something like this will happen - and while the same is true for non-trad games, it is definitely trad games that tend to have the longest running campaigns and therefore fall afoul of these pitfalls most often. And I challenge any players of those campaigns to turn down the promise that was made to Mabel: a chance to keep playing, forever, in a perfect game where your friends will never be sidetracked by other things going on in their lives.

So I want to see games that face this grim reality head on, much like Mabel must do to save her brother and everyone else in Gravity Falls. What would it be like to have a game where one of the rules is that you can only play during the summer? What would it be like to have in-game and out-of-game time pass at the same rate, with telegraphed calendar events in-game barreling toward you at a seemingly breakneck pace? What would it be like to play a game you know will end on a specific day and time (either in-game or out-of-game)?

Ultimately what I'm really asking is, what choices would you make in those games, knowing those things? What choices would your characters make if they knew the same things you knew?

I think it would look a lot like it did in Gravity Falls: it wouldn't feel like it mattered, right up until it did.

July 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I talked back in the March about how the top fell off of Kickstarter TTRPG campaigns, with a decrease in money raised from February to March 2025 and a huge decrease compared to March 2024 largely driven by fewer high-grossing campaigns. Well, we're seeing something similar happen here in July 2025 except it's happening across the board and to a much greater degree. Take a look at the raw data, and let's get into it.

• 146 campaigns
• 17 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 3 Gamefound
• 126 Kickstarter
• $2,053,031.64 raised
• $445,168.07 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $52,681.29 on Gamefound
• $1,555,182.28 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 15 accessories
• 33 adventures
• 1 audiobook
• 1 book
• 1 campaign settings
• 1 fundraising
• 67 supplements
• 26 systems
• 1 translation
• 60 distinct systems used (12 original)
• 59 campaigns (40.41%) used D&D 5E and raised $553,001.66 (26.94% of all money raised in July)
• 50 campaigns used AI in some form (34.24% of total) and raised $244,932.90 (11.93% of all money raised in July)
• 33 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 55.93% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 16 different countries
• Top 3: 63 in USA, 22 in UK, 13 in Italy
• Singleton countries: Mexico, Sweden, Turkey

Backerkit's July

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in July were:

1. Castles & Crusades Adventurers Backpack REFORGED! by Troll Lord Games ($131,023 from 1,147 backers)
2. Last Train to Bremen by Possum Creek Games ($72,690 from 1,334 backers)
3. Fragged Kingdom 2 | ttRPG by Wade D ($60,697.17 from 736 backers)
4. TAZ - A Roleplaying Game of Post-Cyberpunk Resistance by Mana Project Studio ($53,417.48 from 516 backers)
5. Folk Hero - a solo mode and sourcebook for the Punk is Dead TTRPG by Critical Kit Ltd ($31,213.11 from 546 backers)

Hard to say what happened in July, the month with the least amount of money raised on Backerkit since this past January. Part of it is undoubtedly a certain lack of high-profile campaigns on the platform, but perhaps the larger part is that it's also the month with the fewest campaigns since January as well. Kickstarter, as a larger platform with (presumably) more users always has a lot of campaigns going at once. People go there to check out what's new because there's always something new (maybe not in precisely the area that you care about, but there's something). In June 2025, on the other hand, there was almost a full week at the end of the month (6/25-6/30) where no new TTRPG projects were launched. Things picked up again in the beginning of July with fairly regular launches, but this kind of lull in activity either creates or is emblematic of an environment where people aren't checking in regularly to see the churn of projects starting and projects ending. Kickstarter is a platform where people go to discover new projects all on their own; Backerkit seems like a platform where people still have to be funneled in from elsewhere. In specific instances where this isn't the case (Mothership Month in Nov-Dec 2024, Pocketopia in Mar-Apr 2025), you end up with more projects on the platform and fairly high average/median money raised.

Beyond this, the most interesting thing to me on Backerkit this past month was seeing what might be part of the first major wave of Draw Steel content. Both campaigns in question (Ratcatcher Magazine for DRAW STEEL - Issue 01 and Raiders of Ivywatch—A Draw Steel Adventure) didn't raise much money, and they're far from the first ones I've seen, but there are a couple more currently live and the final pdf just became available for backers. We're a little over a year-and-a-half out from the original record-breaking Backerkit campaign, and now that it's about to enter the wider ecosystem I'm very interested to see how it will be received (especially in the world of crowdfunding).

Gamefound's July

There were only 3 campaigns on Gamefound in July:

1. Kryształy Czasu by Dark Rabbit ($46,797.02 from 246 backers)
2. Minerim GDR by Mist_games ($5,670.27 from 54 backers)
3. 450 Steampunk Battle Maps for TTRPG and VTT by Agnesagraphic ($214 from 9 backers)

Not much to say here other than I have learned that Kryształy Czasu is a classic Polish TTRPG dating back to the early 90s. A whole world of TTRPGs outside of the Anglosphere? It's more likely than you'd think!

Kickstarter's July

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in July were:

1. Land of Eem: Beginners RPG for Kids + Underlands Expansion by Exalted Funeral ($227,887 from 1,809 backers)
2. Fantasy World Creator: Chronicles by GAME START ($173,044 from 1,014 backers)
3. Echoes in the Deep - A Fateforge Tale: Advanced Solo TTRPG by Adeliane ($84,222 from 1,053 backers)
4. SideQuest Volume 1: A Collection of 5e Solo Adventure Shorts by Obvious Mimic ($74,074.38 from 1,860 backers)
5. CBR+PNK: OVERLOAD by Mythworks ($67,095 from 1,465 backers)

After several banner months in April-June, July is a real outlier for Kickstarter. It's the lowest amount raised in a month since January, which was also uncharacteristically thin on the ground. By this point in 2024, Kickstarter TTRPG campaigns had raised ~$3.5M more than the current count with only 2 more campaigns (1069 in 2024 vs 1067 in 2025). I really have no explanation here beyond the relative absence of big players this past July. No big D&D 5E campaigns (as in huge campaign settings or supplemental sourcebooks), relatively few big indie publishers beyond those present in the top 5 campaigns above; there was only 1 additional campaign beyond those 5 that even raised more that $50,000 and that was a Swedish AP publishing the adventures they've played since it began in June 2017. There haven't been any big economy-related fuck-ups shake-ups in the last few months and US tariffs remain in flux, but this has also been true for the last few months and therefore doesn't really explain this sudden drop (both month-to-month and year-to-year).

It's a real mystery, and it just goes to remind us that models and trends have excellent explanatory power in hindsight and incredibly limited predictive power.

July 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 14 (2024) => 17 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 143 (2024) => 126 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $978,983.04 (2024) => $445,168.07 (2025)
• Average campaign: $69,927.36 (2024) => $26,186.36 (2025)
• Median campaign: $12,716.00 (2024) => $10,395.00 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $4,472,629.89 (2024) =>  $1,555,182.28 (2025)
• Average campaign: $31,277.13 (2024) => $12,342.72 (2025)
• Median campaign: $4,435.00 (2024) => $3,126.00 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 43 (2024) => 50 (2025)
• Money: $157,621.97 (2024) => $244,932.90 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 75 (2024) => 59 (2025)
• Money: $1,541,340.98 (2024) => $553,001.66 (2025)

Two things to note here:

First, I remain impressed that the median money raised by campaigns is so resilient to reductions by 1/2 to 1/3 of overall money raised. It really continues to show that there is a solid (and quite low) floor of small campaigns that make up the vast majority of TTRPG crowdfunding projects. As always, you can't necessarily rely on these things (because I've had a project fail that was looking to raise less than the July 2025 Kickstarter median), but setting your sights in the low thousands of dollars for a first crowdfunding attempt is a reasonable goal, even if you're going to have to work quite hard to get that much.

Second, it remains deeply concerning to me how much AI slop continues to fill the space. I recently had to switch up my methodology for keeping track of projects on Kickstarter (because the search for successful projects now only returns things from mid-2024), and that meant combing through all the projects set to end in the next few days' time. Now that I'm seeing all of those, I'm realizing that there are even more AI projects that don't fund successfully. It's not that many more (and I'm considering sticking to this methodology so that I can potentially see what percentage of projects fund at all), but there are still more out there and it fucking sucks.

Let me just say this now: I know for a fact that my 50% success rate (1 yes, 1 no) with crowdfunding my games has made me happier than any of the loser slop-merchants I now duly record on the daily. I may have made less money, but I'm a better artist, a better gamer, and, quite frankly, a better person than any of you.

Die mad about it.