Well it's here and you can see it here if you haven't already. They hit their goal in about 6 hours yesterday so that's good and I'm hoping this is one of those realistic goals for what it would take to actually get it done and not a lowball goal like we see sometimes in this arena. I'm wishing them all the success in the world with this - and yes I did jump in on it - as I'd like to see Green Ronin get a win right now, particularly with what I would say is the best-supported superhero RPG of the last two decades. If you like superhero roleplaying I hope you will take a look.
I do have a few concerns here.
Personally I've cut back my crowdfunding participation as publisher after publisher puts everything out as a funding campaign. Some of them are not good at it and that spills over, fair or not, into the whole system. I've only done one other recently and that was for the new version of Apocalypse World as I want to see what the creators of it do with that whole thing. I see things like the Savage Worlds team having something like 5 of them in-flight now at various stages and I wonder how long that kind of thing can continue.
- Crowdfunding just feels less awesome than it did ten years ago, for whatever reason. I hope that's just a me thing and doesn't limit or cap off GR's ultimate success here.
- In the fall of 2022 they ran a Kickstarter to reprint some of the core books of the M&M 3E line and it barely made the goal - less than half of what they've achieved in a day with this effort - and made zero stretch goals. Now that was a reprint of a known game, not a new edition, so it's not exactly the same thing, and they have done much better this time already, but I do still wonder how many of us are there out there ready to jump on a major superhero game line update? They're doing well but as I write this it's less than 1000 backers. Are we so few?
Speaking of stretch goals ... these are weird. Those first four are 4E updates of some 3E adventures that have come out over the last 5 years or so. Then we get to what looks like an update of Atlas of Earth Prime but I'm going to guess a limited version, not the full book? I think these are good stretch goals in the sense that they are updates of things that already exist (and so easy to make) but I have to say they aren't exactly inspiring ... at least to me. There's not a lot of "new" here. Stretch goals rarely make any difference to me as to whether I'm going to jump on board something but I've seen some cool ones and these just seem kind of routine? Expected? How about a new villain team, or some exotic new location? I know 3E has a ton of supplements so that any general thing has probably already been covered in one of the books we have but that's why I was thinking something new would be good - show us there are frontiers yet to be explored with this system and not just updates or rehashes of things we already have!
How about "The Book of Omega: The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Villain"? We have pieces and parts scattered around different books but let's see an updated, comprehensive work on the guy who killed Centurion.
Alright so there's my negativity addressed and some ideas on how to improve it from my point of view. This team has been making it work for over twenty years at this point so they probably don't need my two cents but I've been right there alongside them and I'd like that to continue for a good long time. I'm looking forward to seeing where this new effort takes us.
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