I Did Finally Receive My Scientific Barbarian Kickstarter Books

 

I've talked about this one before but the story does finally have an ending. The Kickstarter funded in November 2023 with an Estimated Delivery of Feb 2024. After that we got various updates and long periods of silence. This month I finally received the package with all 6 issues and at first glance it looks like everything is correct. So it's on the shelf and I won't be posting about it any more here. 

Am I happy I backed this? No.

If I had known up front that it would take this long to complete would I have backed it? No.

Will I back any future crowdfunding efforts by this team? No.

A thing to keep in mind with any RPG Kickstarter is that the vast majority of them will get made whether you back them or not and the days of great deals or exclusive extras are long gone. I often find RPG Kickstarter items available online for less than I paid for them via the KS very soon after release. I also find that any "exclusives" nowadays tend to be "exclusive until six months after launch" or so - so don't let that fear of missing out push you into backing something. Most of the time I would say just wait - they will make it and they will want to sell it to you once it's finished. In the meantime, you don't have money tied up in someone else's drama and health problems. 

Monday Hot Takes: Stretch Goal Dilution

 

Originally it felt - to me anyway - that the goal of a "stretch goal" on Kickstarter was to incent people to jump in to help add value to the final product for the same cost. You would end up with a bigger book or more pieces in your game or more levels in your video game or more art in a book or full color printing instead of black & white only. I feel like that has been diluted over the last few years . It's probably related to the "crowdfunding as preorder" trend we see now instead of the old days where things were genuinely being created as part of the campaign. 

The Kickstarter for Underworld: Sunless Depths for 5E D&D and TOV has a good example of this:

New adventure ... alright ... another new adventure, sure ... pregen characters ...

Pregen characters? As a Stretch Goal? Implying there is some value in pregen characters? Seriously? This isn't even a new RPG where an example of some completed characters might be interesting to see - it's for 5E and Tales of the Valiant! In what world are 5 pregen characters worth anything?  In general I'm a fan of Kobold Press but this is just a waste of everyone's time.

The Guild had a Kickstarter to make a movie recently too and their stretch goals were mostly "make more movie" - what one would hope for right? At the end though they were adding music videos and finally an animated special. Not strictly making the movie bigger or better but at least they were fairly late in the game if still outside the boundaries of "let's make the thing better". I dislike this less.

Deathbringer had a big crowdfunding effort with a lot of stretch goals:

Most of them were adding monsters or items to the book so that's fine. Some were tokens to be used on the battleboard which was admittedly a significant part of the campaign so OK I guess. A VTT - OK not really part of the book and I'm sure they will sell access to this later. Online character creator -  That's fine, especially if it's free to everyone down the road. The one for offering unpainted versions of the statues which are pricey extras ... yeah that's a cop-out. There were a lot of these goals so I won't get too cranky about these few outliers but it's worth noting them. I feel like some of them are pretty loose-fitting as far as stretch goals should go.

Heck, the latest Savage Worlds Kickstarter for Deadlands didn't even bother with Stretch Goals. "Here's what we're making and here's a chance to order all of the other stuff we make for Deadlands too if you want it!" and that's pretty much it. Can't complain about your stretch goals if you don't have any!

40K Friday: MiniWarGaming

 

"They Play and Call It Work"

Something a little different this week ...

For those unfamiliar MWG is a miniature wargaming enthusiast site and YouTube channel that's been around for close to 20 years now. They made their way mainly focusing on 40K but they have always included some other games as well. For a while they had a physical store, then transitioned into mainly the YouTube work, and expanded over the years as well. Recently they started doing a lot of 3D printing and ran some Kickstarters for 3d printable terrain. 

Dave and Matt - the two main guys here

They were one of the early 40K YT channels that got big, probably the biggest for several years, and they were one of the first to monetize it - before Patreon etc. - with their"Vault" program where some videos were free on YT and others were in the Vault behind a paywall. It worked really well for them for I would say a long time. They are a bunch of polite Canadians, focused more on narrative and creative stuff, less on the tournament thing, and a lot of people talk about how MWG helped get them into the whole hobby. So they were well-known and well-liked in 40K circles - some nice guys who found a way to live the dream of doing miniature stuff for a living.

Lately though it hasn't been so great. Their views have been declining. They proved that that this could be done and now other players have entered the game and are doing better than the originals. The last few years have seen Matt, one of the two founders, make multiple videos telling everyone that times are tough and they'd really appreciate people signing up for the Vault. They knew -and announced  - that they were in trouble and to their credit they did try some new things but it apparently was not enough.

The single biggest misstep they made though was probably the Ravaged Star Kickstarter they ran in 2023. It brought in 1.6 million dollars - great! - for a very 40K-ish miniatures game with a bunch of boxed sets of minis and rules and a lot of people were pretty excited about it. However as we ride towards the end of 2026 it has not fulfilled, communication has been thin, and backers are now rioting. It's a pretty colossal failure for a team that is online posting YouTube videos multiple times per week. 

That all came to a head this week as multiple other YT'ers started posting videos and asking questions about it and about MWG in general. MWG announced layoffs of most of their staff.  It's been all over the 40K internet and YouTube this week and in response they too released a video opening up about the state they are in, how they got here, and how they plan to get through it. It's a shame things have reached this level for a group of people everyone liked and who have been a part of the online element of the hobby for years. 

For me I have been a Vault member in the past because I liked what they were doing. The 5th-6th-7th edition 40K years were peak for them and they were a lot of fun to watch. I've never met them in person and I've never been to their bunker. I backed some of their recent terrain Kickstarters because it looked solid and they had managed to fulfill the first few of those with no problems. I did not back Ravaged Star - I remember them hyping it up but then (and now) I have absolutely no need of another game that's pretty much alternate 40K and whose miniatures I did not particularly care for. I suppose I dodged a bullet there but I feel for the people who did jump in, trusting Matt and Dave, only to see it fizzle out and vaporize. 

To be fair they did say the money for the Kickstarter is separate and it will be fulfilled, that they just did not realize what they were getting into when they did it (not uncommon honestly) but there were no dates given and considering the first wave was supposed to be "on a boat" multiple times now over the last year I wouldn't expect anyone to give them the benefit of the doubt. As much as I like them, well, once you take people's money you are obligated - regardless of what the crowdfunding site's terms say - to deliver or you will pay a price. When your normal business depends on people liking and watching your content on a daily basis you have really put yourselves out there and it's going to be a hard fall if you fail. I have seen more anger and venom directed at MWG this week than I've seen in the last 15+ years combined. The worst thing I've seen said about them before was that they were pretty loose with the rules in their batreps and that was not an unfair comment but it has reached a whole new level now. It's sad to see a reputation built up over all that time devastated this quickly.

One final comment: MWG used to be a lot of fun to watch because Matt and Dave were on it and in the videos and making a lot of the content. Banter Batreps, Beat Matt Batreps, APOCALYPTICON!,  "Mark of Dave" comments when going through an army - they were the faces of the endeavor, not just the owners. I would say we liked them and that as much as anything else was a big part of their success. As time went on though, they were on the channel less and less. A lot of the people they brought in were good, but it wasn't Matt and Dave. Also, as time went on, it became apparent that they were not all that thrilled by or interested in these later editions of 40K. As other channels sprang up with say, 8th edition, and started cranking out new formats and new approaches to making videos they kind of stayed the course or even pulled back. It felt like their hearts were just not in it anymore. I get it, I don't always love the newer editions either, but if you want to make money doing this kind of thing ... current edition 40K is the vast majority of what people want to see. If you cut back on that how do you keep going? Sure I'll watch a 4th edition 40K batrep in 2026 but how many other people will? Oldhammer and Midhammer have a definite presence online but is it enough to sustain a 40K channel at their past or current level? I'm pretty comfortable going with "no" there. 

Anyway, I've watched these guys a long time, liked a bunch of what they've done, my kids and I used to watch their stuff weekly, and it's just hard to see their current state. I really hope they can right the ship, handle their obligations, and find a new course so they can stick around for us to watch in the future.  

The DEATHBRINGER RPG Kickstarter, err, Backerkit is up and running

 

Can't rally argue with that art ...

Sure, I'll hype it because it looks interesting, I've been hearing about it for years, and I like what I see of the guy running it. It feels a little like Spaceballs - it's Deathbringer: The Crowdfunding!

I like a lot of what Professor DM puts out there. He's a YouTube guy but don't hold that against him. He's of a similar vintage as some of us who have been doing this for a while and he's not just there to hype the latest thing for D&D - he may be big on hyping his own thing now, and he's definitely a D&D type game guy, but he's not a big WOTC guy, and he also doesn't push everything OSR as the one true way. 

I know guys who used to draw stuff like this in high school

I was already interested in this one but I will say that playing Dungeon Crawl Classics for a while now has me even more interested. Taking the old school basics and customizing them in some significant ways is far more interesting to me (and rewarding to play) than just re-editing the same damn rules we were all playing 40+ years ago. I have that already - do something new with it! I think we have a great example here.

His whole approach is less rule-mongering and more doing things in the game. I appreciate that. There is a lot of stuff that has built up over the years in D&D type games  - and others too - that is mostly there because it's been there in prior editions and more rules and clutter are hung off of these parts with every update. One great example of clearing a section is the combat zone/"Ultimate Dungeon Terrain" thing he uses:

He typically shows this on a lazy susan in the middle of a table so it can be rotated by players as needed. Notice the change here from modern D&D - we're not counting squares. It's a simple question of "how close are they?" with three possible answers. Now this is not the first game to use abstract distances, range bands, etc. but it's presented here as a concrete physical representation that facilitates play in a big way. To me that's useful. For some games I like counting my squares or hexes and drawing my maps but sometimes this approach would save a lot of time. Mutants & Masterminds, to get away from the dungeon for a minute, uses a similar concept when it comes to ranges and I could definitely see using a diagram or layout like this the next time I run that game. Would I use it for a 4th Edition D&D game? No. Traveller? Maybe. Champions? Not sure. It's a useful concept that's easily ported to other games.

Some other points I liked:

• You get three "death dice" to use during a session to add to rolls. They're d6's, they refresh every session and there's no carrying them over. This is clearly very bennie-like ala Savage Worlds but I like bennies so  I like this.
• Initiative: Straight from the KS page - whoever started the fight goes first, then their side; players declare actions clockwise, then everyone rolls at once. Simultaneous fights resolve as chaotic mass rolls. We've been playing around with ideas on initiative here so I like seeing a set of rules - especially a D&D type game - that doesn't get hung up on individual initiative. It's become a very "set" element in games these days and I'm convinced there is a lot of room to experiment. 
• Death: it can happen a lot in a combat-heavy D&D type game so why not do something fun with it? Here he spells out 3 stages:
• First time dying gets you a scar and something called a Prestige Talent which buffs your character
• Second time means you're "maimed" and get another talent
• Third time, well, you're about to be dead but you get one final action that's an automatic crit success. 
  
  Awesome! I like these a lot!

So I see a lot to like here with multiple concepts that distinguish it from Yet Another B/X Game. I also see a few things some people may not like:

• It's a class and level, armor class and hit point system, d20 based. It's fine by me but I know that's not attractive to some. I see that it goes to level 20 and my feeling is that 10 would probably be enough but the ridiculous over-the-top vibe here probably demands 20 levels.
• The contributing writers for the adventures at least are all YouTubers. Some of them have a track record of published material but some of them ... I don't know.
• The rewards are ... also ridiculously over the top. Shirts, jackets, posters, dice (multiple sets), pins of the class archetypes (?) ... yeah that's a red flag for "Crowdfunding Success" as it's a bunch of crap no one actually needs to play the game but pads out the KS $$$ figures. I get it, I won't begrudge someone making money but these are the kinds of items that tend to get delayed or screwed up in some way that tarnishes the whole effort and to have that many of them ... it's not great. 

Finally there's the timeline: They state Spring 2027 to deliver final PDFs and Summer 2027 to ship the printed material. Well, I'd love that to pan out - but I wouldn't count on it. PDM has been running Deathbringer for people for years but now they're going to be putting it out for playtesting to backers and I suppose we will see how that goes. 

Now I don't want to seem all down on this - one of the things I do like about it that I haven't mentioned is that there is a definite point of view here. From the tone - which you can detect from the art alone I would say - to the philosophy of make it faster and make it more exciting and action-oriented - I like it when a game designer has a well-defined concept of what they want a game to do. I am excited to see this coming out and I will probably back it at some level and I will try running it for my crew with whatever version of the rules I can get ahold of. It looks like a lot of fun and I hope the whole thing goes well and in a year I can say "wow what a great effort  and a great game.

Mutants & Masterminds Campaign Catch-Up

 

The M&M campaign is still going, I have just been slow to post about it here. We have six sessions in the books and are about halfway through the Time of Crisis. I will say the system familiarity does start to come back faster as we play more so I'm feeling way less rusty in sessions 5 & 6 than I was in the first few. I am really enjoying it and I think my players are too.

I am also feeling way more proficient with Hero Lab. This has been helpful with both running the game and with helping my players tune up their characters and spend their power points. This is the only game where I use Hero Lab since the demise of our Pathfinder campaigns years ago so if we are not playing M&M the rust accumulates. Coming at it with fresher eyes I do see where some of the complaints about it come from as it is not a modern "app" - the way powers are listed is not really intuitive in-play and sussing out what a power actually does can be a little tricky if you have no descriptive text. I will also say the tool tips help in some circumstances yet add very little in others. A lot of these issues come from them presenting generic, standard game information not a customized description based on the powers and modifiers particular to this character, but I suspect that kind of dynamic information would have been tough to do when this version of Hero Lab was created. Regardless, I can work with it and it does help me run the game better than if I did not have it.

We have had to miss a few weekends so beyond a massive 40K effort (I'll discuss it in a separate post) I have been trying to catch up on other RPG books that have piled up over the last six months or so. It's a weird habit but I do tend to pick up multiple large rulebooks at once and then let them sit on the shelf for months while I read other things. Then I look at the shelf full of unread rules for different systems and decide I need to read them all at once. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I do not as the drive to dive into a game I am not running, especially a dedicated rulebook and not an adventure, dwindles. I've added the Tales of the Valiant Player Core 2, some of the D&D 5.5 books, a couple of Pathfinder 2E books, some stuff from Savage Worlds, and then various Kickstarter tomes. What I need to be doing is going back through some of my M&M 3E books to brush up on those - since that's what we are actually playing - and I have been ... some. At times I do feel pulled in so many directions that it's tough to focus in on something long enough to knock it out but I am working on them. 

On a final note the M&M 4th Edition Kickstarter did wrap up with over $300,000 taken in. I'd say that's an encouraging number. It is a reminder of how niche the whole superhero RPG market is - the million dollar kickstarters are big D&D-related projects or have a well-known author behind them. The Deadlands kickstarter running at the same time took in a similar amount so I suppose I like the niche games. M&M had twice as many backers for a very similar amount of money which is interesting. Maybe I can take a look at that in a future post. I'm happy these both funded. The downside is that I don't want to look at any more 4th edition M&M rules stuff as it causes edition bleed for me as I try to "expert up" on 3rd edition. When the physical books come out months from now and we are well into our campaign then it might be time to look again. 

Campaign reports will resume soon ...

Mutants & Masterminds - Converting Between Editions

 

A lot of the stretch goals with the new M&M Kickstarter are 4th edition conversions of 3rd edition adventures. I get why they are doing this - it's easy to do and they're already written so, sure, and you're getting them for free but they're only 6$ PDFs anyway so ... I don't know. 

Back to that "easy" part - how easy is it to convert something between editions of this game? Well ... most of the time it's pretty straightforward. One key item: the difficulty chart is the same for every edition of the game!

This one is taken from the 4th edition playtest document but it is the same for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and now 4th edition:

• 1st edition: Page 147
• 2nd edition: Page 7
• 3rd edition: Page 13 (Deluxe Hero's Handbook)
• 4th edition: Page 15 (Playtest Origin Edition)

Outside of combat and individual character powers that chart up there has the numbers you need and the amazing thing is that regardless of edition you don't have to update them! 

So you might go through the text, find anywhere that "DC" is mentioned, and check what it's referring to - typically a skill, possibly an ability. These do change from edition to edition but most of the time it's pretty obvious what you need to change to. A DC25 "Computers" check in a 2E adventure becomes a DC 25 "Technology" check in 3E or 4E. In 1E it would likely have been a Computers or Repair. In some editions the right "Expertise" skill is a good substitute, at least when I'm running. 

The abilities do change with every edition but they are always centered around the six D&D type abilities and they are on the standard d20 scale that we've been using for the last 25+ years, sometimes with a score, sometimes with just the modifier, but an 18 in 1st edition is still a +4 in 4th. 

Attacks and Damage work pretty consistently across editions so there's not usually much to worry about there.  

The area with the most effort required should be translating characters. Assuming we are talking about the NPCs from an adventure or some setting guide then it's not really that bad. The biggest thing here is the Powers - those change every edition, sometimes dramatically, from how they are built to how they work in-game. You might get a character with a complicated build that relies on mechanical tricks that don't translate to a different edition. If you want to stay consistent with what the character used to do then you may have to rebuild it from the ground up, possibly using a completely different power to achieve a similar effect. If you run into this a lot it could eat up some time but there are alternatives:

• Assuming it's an NPC villain of some kind, well, despite the edition change this guy's powers work like they did in the other version - here's his hit bonus with it, here's the target # to resist it, have at it! It's not the most elegant solution but sometimes it's the best solution and since the mechanics of the game system are so similar across editions it can still work. 
• Look at the general effect of what the character does in that edition - don't worry about all the tricky details and add-ons, just look at the main impact it has on the game. Find a power in your edition of choice that does something similar - it may not be as complicated, it may not be as flashy as the old version, but if it let's Think Tank mind control innocent bystanders then you're good even if it doesn't specifically account for some of those details. As you work through it in the new version you might find some new tricks that are still cool and fun for the GM to impose.
• Archetypes: I see Chimpanzoom has a writeup in 1st edition Time of Crisis. I see he has one in 2nd edition ToC. To run it in 3rd I could go back through one or both of those and try to re-create him as closely as possible ... or I could just grab the Speedster Archetype, maybe tweak it a little in some way to make him a little different, and run that instead. Remember that the mechanics give you the numbers but the way the character acts, speaks, and reacts are largely outside of those. You were going to have to decide on those anyway regardless of edition. Whether he has a 14 or a 15 Dodge isn't nearly as important as the personality and the look. 

These guys know ...

When translating also keep in mind that the points don't matter. It's good to have a Power Level in mind for your character - maybe it's the same as the other version, maybe it's not depending on what you want to do - but the points are more for PC's than NPCs. Archetypes are an incredibly useful tool for anything like this. 

So yes, it's not difficult to modify things to work in different editions with this game. That's part of why I'm a little disappointed with this part of the Kickstarter. The first four were all this kind of thing and there are two more down the road if it keeps going. The latest achieved goal is the Earth Prime Gazetteer which is at least not a simple update of an existing thing ... wait ...

Ah ... right. Now Steve Kenson has said they are revising the setting with this edition - the Freedom City setting specifically. That's probably smart after 20+ years of building it out and advancing the timeline so I don't have a problem with that plan and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. Buuuut ... this is still an intro type document for the world, not a new version of the complete thing. So it's better than the adventures at least, to me, because it is going to cover some new ground. 

The next goal is a new character record folio. It's a big character sheet. Once a new builder is out these won't see much use and let's be honest here, "Character Sheet" as a crowdfunding stretch goal is ... well it might be a new low as far as effort required. These are things that are typically a free download on the company website or at DTRPG. No one should be particularly excited about this.

The final other type of stretch goal that we know about right now are Alternate Archetypes. Now I was excited about this when I saw the name as I was a huge fan of the Archetype Archives and Instant Superheroes in 2nd Edition that added new archetypes and more options to the existing ones. They were great for GMs and for players too. Well, it's not that. It's the archetypes in the game at PL8 and the other one is at PL12. I am assuming there will not be radical re-conceptualizing of each concept and that this will mainly be a math exercise. Well ... OK. I mean I can use them - the PL12 versions will make for handy drop-in villains but in Hero Lab for 3rd edition that's two clicks on "Scale Up" or "Scale Down" for the basics and then some tweaking on what else I want to enhance or downgrade. It's not a whole lot of effort if that's all that it is. 

So yeah, I love Mutants & Masterminds - I'm running it right now! I think the people working on it are good at what they do and I hope the KS hits a million dollars. I know there are constraints on what they can do right now with the Diamond situation. I'm just a little disappointed at the low effort on the stretch goals for this one. That said I am looking forward to the new edition even if I'm not going to run it until next year at least, after we get through a nice long run with 3rd which will no doubt end with another Crisis of some kind and turn things upside down for a new era and edition.

Mutants & Masterminds - New Edition Ups and Downs

 The Kickstarter appears to be going very well (over 1,000 backers, over 100K $ as I write this) which is a good thing for the game and its future and I am glad for that. 

It's a little weird that there are a fair number of questions that are asking if one can do various things in the game or will be included in the game that are already in 3E M&M so yes, I think it's safe to assume powers and options included in the current edition will be included in the new one. I'm guessing a lot of the people asking don't play the current game but I don't know. Since they announced the new edition a few months ago there have been all kinds of helpful suggestions made including things like "you should add in a hit point system" which ... yeah, I don't know. How has no one thought of that in the prior 20+ years of the system? "No hit points" is a feature of the game, not a miss that needs to be corrected.

That does lead into another point I see made: "It's easy for D&D players to learn because it uses a d20 for everything like combat and skill checks". That is, in my experience, really not the case. Sure, the Abilities are mostly similar, skill checks and hit rolls are familiar, but for people coming over from D&D 5E there are 3 massive hills to climb:

• Power Level in M&M is not the same as Levels in D&D. They're just not, experience points do not work the same way and "levelling" is just not a thing here, or in most superhero games. This is a pretty big shift. I wouldn't change it, it's just a thing new players have to work through.
• Powers and the construction thereof just blow people's minds. It's not intuitive if you're coming over from D&D. Explaining effects-based power design is a challenge and while many people can pick it up quickly once you've walked them through it using known examples of superheroes there are a lot of people that have a really hard time making that jump. A lot of combat ability comes from either the "Damage" effect or the "Affliction" effect and while they are extremely flexible getting this through to a new player is a lot tougher than sword/bow/axe/magic missile. 
• Finally there is the damage system: it's a huge change from any version of D&D and a lot of D&D-only players hate it as soon as they see it. Some will come around if you can get them to persevere, but in my experience it is the single biggest deal-breaker for new recruits. I would never want them to change it, but it is the biggest obstacle I see. Sometimes that's just the way it is. It's a different game, parts of it are going to work differently, and that's a good thing, not a negative. Not everything needs to use the same mechanics. 
  (It's also very similar to Savage Worlds' damage system and between the two I've played enough that I like them better than hit points for a lot of games but it's an issue for new players there too.)

Other regular requests include a new character creator and a VTT. I agree on the character creator - it makes things a lot easier for the GM to track, build, and update. The VTT ... well, sure, but while maps are still useful in a superhero game tactical grid maps are ... less so. I am using the combat manager option from Hero Lab quite a bit in our game but that's mainly because I can see all the opposition's powers and drop conditions on everyone with a click here and a click there. If a VTT module includes something like that then I'm more interested. If someone thinks they're going to get special effects like visuals and sound effects for everything you can think up for a superhero game I just don't see that happening quickly and a partial effort is just going to be frustrating. 

How about we let them get the core book out the door before we start piling on the requests? I mean I am not really looking forward to having all of those wonderful 3E books (and Hero Lab files) pushed into the "old category" anytime soon so no need to rush this. Take your time, make it good, minimize the errata, get it out, and I'm sure the support and the tools will come.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Kickstarter is Up and Running

 

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.

Kickstarter Catch-Up: 2023

 

I made a post in April that talked about Kickstarters I had backed in 2023 and how those had gone. Now that we are nearing the end of 2025 I thought I ought to follow up on that and share some updates. Here is the list from that earlier post:

For 2023 here's what I backed in rough chronological order:

• Cities Without Number - Sine Nomine cyberpunk (Hardcover Book)
• Battletech Mercenaries - Their third big boxed set (Boxed Set)
• Pew Pew No Disintigrations - Fainting Goat's light RPG of space bounty hunters (Softcover Book)
• Stickman Battlegrounds - a card game of fighting stick figures (Card Game)
• Tome of Essential Horrors - OSE monster book from Necromancer Games (Hardcover Book)
• Comic Crawl Classics - superhero game based on DCC (Softcover Book)
• Tales of the Valiant - alternate 5E rules (Hardcover Book x2)
• Dolmenwood - OSR game and setting from the OSE people (Boxed Set)
• Dragonslayer - OSR game from Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze, etc. (Hardcover Book)
• Worlds Without Number (Reprint) - Sine Nomine fantasy (Hardcover Book)
• Deadlands Night Train - An update of a classic Deadlands adventure (Boxed Set)
• MicroDungeons Halloween - a set of small 5E adventures (PDF only)
• Necessary Evil - an update to the classic campaign run through Pinnacle's "Game Changer" (Boxed Set)
• Old School Tactical Vol IV Italian Theater - An expansion for one of my favorite wargames
• Fever Swamp - An OSR big adventure (Boxed Set)
• Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6 - An ongoing supplement series for MCC (Softcover Book)
• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E - An update of an OSR game I liked a lot (Hardcover Books)
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers - Reaper Miniatures' OSR RPG rules (Boxed Set)
• How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox - A supplement on D&D style fantasy campaign building (Softcover Book)
• Dungeon Domains Riven Catacombs - another set of small adventures (PDF only)

Bold means I had received it when I posted, italics means I had not. Progress since that post?

• Dolmenwood 
• Fever Swamp
• Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6
• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E 
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers 

So out of 20 projects I backed that year 15 had come in when I posted about them. Out of the remaining 5 ... 2 have come in since: 

• ACK 2E arrived pretty quickly after that post so it was about six months later than its Estimated Delivery of November 2024. 
• Dolmenwood arrived ... last week. So more than a year after its Estimated Delivery of September 2024. Beware KS campaigns for games with a lot of extra trinkets added on that have nothing to do with the game - they do not help with completion.

What about the other three?

Fever Swamp - This has just been a fulfillment disaster netting out to "I have received nothing" when it was supposed to deliver in March 2024. I have zero trust in the Melsonian Arts team now and I doubt I will ever see what I pledged for with them.

I mean, it looked like fun ...

Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6 - Originally supposed to deliver in February 2024. Yeah. Here is a screenshot of one of the three most recent Updates:

So in April it was, in the creator's words in this update, "99.5% complete".

In May we got an update that Tariffs were not going to be an issue for this campaign, dispelling one of 2025's great Kickstarter bugaboos for this effort at least. Of course if it had fulfilled anywhere close to it's original promise, say within a year, they wouldn't have been an issue anyway.

In September we got an update - the most recent update as of this writing - that the creator had a health issue that started back around the time fulfillment was originally supposed to begin and this was why he had a) been unable to finish the work and b) gone silent for 4 months. He did mention that he was on the mend and had returned to part-time work. 

Since September we have heard nothing.  It's incredibly disappointing as I have multiple Jim Wampler books on my shelf and this was the sixth issue of an ongoing product line so I figured there was no real risk here. Having missed the prior issues I went ahead and jumped in for the first 5 as well and even though those 5 exist and some of us signed up for Print & PDF versions of all of them none of them have been sent out, not even PDF's of the first 5 issues.

Once it finally fulfills - if it ever does - I won't be doing any more Kickstarter/BackerKit/Pre-Ordering from Jim and Mudpuppy Games.

Title does not lie ...

Reaper Dungeon Dwellers - Estimated delivery July 2024. The campaign mentioned their experience and success on prior Kickstarters and seemed legit because I was very aware of those and while there were some delays they did seem to come through in the end. I knew that delivery date was probably too optimistic but how off would it be? Well ... we still don't know. At least 18 months now and this is from people who know what they are doing!

I wrote about the major issues on the prior post. Since then they have been posting updates at least monthly, so that's something, The content of those updates has been debatable. An update in September: At this point, all books are near the finish line, with tables of contents to be added and just some cleaning up to do. All books will be printer-ready within the next 1-2 weeks at the most. An update at the end of November: Books are at the printer! Just waiting on a file check from them to see if we have any problems (fingers crossed).
In between we had updates about ReaperCon and how they would have pre-print samples to see if you were going to their in-house convention. They also hoped to have the books at the printer by the end of August which clearly didn't happen.

The miniatures do appear to be on track so that's a plus. I mean they're still way late but Reaper is a miniature company so I would expect them to have a handle on that part at least. The major stumbling block here appears to be the rules/books themselves.

As you may have picked up I have really soured on this one. Reaper is a local company to DFW, they've been around for a long time now and have had a fairly decent reputation but this whole effort has been just so poorly executed that I have zero interest in any future crowdfunding/pre-order efforts from them. 

Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter for Player's Guide 2

 

Well they have finally gotten around to a new book of major interest. I know monster books are a Kobold Press signature but I was hoping the first add-on to the line would be a character supplement, not a monster book, but at least now that is being corrected.

The preview PDF looks pretty interesting:

• More subclasses - I mean, this was pretty much a given and I would say necessary given the ridiculous number of subclasses in 5E. It looks like we are getting at least 3 new ones per class giving everyone 5 subs per class which should be enough variety to keep multiple campaigns fresh for a long time. Good.
• More Talents - good, they need to expand this area to some degree
• More Boons - this is an area I assumed they would expand in my initial review and I am glad to see it happening.
• Base building - My players are specifically interested in this as they are contemplating building a base in or near Hommlet (yes possibly pushing Rufus and Burne aside) and so this has direct relevance to what they are doing in-game. This is also a potential good outlet for all of the gold coming out of their temple-trashing expeditions so yes, please - bring it on.
•  New Classes: looks like we are getting the Theurge, the Vanguard, and the Witch. I haven't seen much about the Theurge yet but from one of their other 5E magic books:
•  "... the new Theurge class, an Intelligence-based spellcasting class capable of casting both cleric and wizard spells!" and I believe that was the point of the class going back to the 3E Mystic Theurge so sure, OK. Will this mean it gets to pick from both the Arcane and Divine lists? That's a lot of flexibility if so.
• Looks like the Witch is going to be the new second Wyrd caster which is fine - might as well even that out. I don't have a Warlock in my campaign so I don't have much experience with those spells.
• The Vanguard is the most interesting to me - a ToV take on the 4E Warlord, a martial leader/support type character. I had one of these in my 4E campaign and it was a real eye-opener. I've hoped we would get one of these for some newer version of D&D and it looks like we finally might be there. There was a lot of granting another character a free move or a free attack with the 4E version and it looks like that is continuing here. The banner thing also feels a lot like the Pathfinder 1E Cavalier which had a similar ability so this is definitely one I will be watching.

So yes I'll be backing this one and hoping for an early draft of the thing so we can use it in the campaign this year. We might finish out the Temple with just the existing material then if we move onto a new adventure open it up to the new stuff. Not sure and it doesn't really matter until it's available in some form anyway but we will be crossing our fingers here.

Kickstarters These Days - The 2023 Report

 

In 2023 I backed 20 Kickstarters/BackerKit efforts by game companies. Some were bigger, some were smaller, but all of them were things I was interested in enough to lay some money down in advance. Most of the time it works out. In fact it almost always works out ... eventually. There are hazards however and some red flags that can inform decisions in advance. I've been doing Kickstarters since 2013 so I've seen some ups and some downs. Since it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon I thought I would walk through these last two years and present my thoughts on how my tabletop game crowdfunding experience has gone lately. 

For 2023 here's what I backed in rough chronological order:

• Cities Without Number - Sine Nomine cyberpunk (Hardcover Book)
• Battletech Mercenaries - Their third big boxed set (Boxed Set)
• Pew Pew No Disintigrations - Fainting Goat's light RPG of space bounty hunters (Softcover Book)
• Stickman Battlegrounds - a card game of fighting stick figures (Card Game)
• Tome of Essential Horrors - OSE monster book from Necromancer Games (Hardcover Book)
• Comic Crawl Classics - superhero game based on DCC (Softcover Book)
• Tales of the Valiant - alternate 5E rules (Hardcover Book x2)
• Dolmenwood - OSR game and setting from the OSE people (Boxed Set)
• Dragonslayer - OSR game from Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze, etc. (Hardcover Book)
• Worlds Without Number (Reprint) - Sine Nomine fantasy (Hardcover Book)
• Deadlands Night Train - An update of a classic Deadlands adventure (Boxed Set)
• MicroDungeons Halloween - a set of small 5E adventures (PDF only)
• Necessary Evil - an update to the classic campaign run through Pinnacle's "Game Changer" (Boxed Set)
• Old School Tactical Vol IV Italian Theater - An expansion for one of my favorite wargames
• Fever Swamp - An OSR big adventure (Boxed Set)
• Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6 - An ongoing supplement series for MCC (Softcover Book)
• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E - An update of an OSR game I liked a lot (Hardcover Books)
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers - Reaper Miniatures' OSR RPG rules (Boxed Set)
• How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox - A supplement on D&D style fantasy campaign building (Softcover Book)
• Dungeon Domains Riven Catacombs - another set of small adventures (PDF only)

I included some non-RPG games in there to show how some other options have gone in comparison. Bold means I have it in hand. Italics means I do not have it yet. More on that in a minute.

First up a few things about me we can draw from this:

1. I have 7 of these that are directly related to some kind of D&D style game. Sure. That's a lot of what we play here.
2. I do tend to be more interested in new things from people I already know. Two of them are Sine Nomine, 1 Necromancer, 1 Greg Gillespie, ACKS 2E, OST v4, 2 Pinnacle, 1 from Fainting Goat, 1 from Jim Wampler for MCC - these are all things I have some version of already or companies/people I have done business with before and I am confident they will deliver. There is a risk in any crowdfunding endeavor and track record matters.
3. Some of these were fairly pricey as far as gaming items. ACKS, Dolmenwood, and OST v4 were all up there in the $200 range with 3 others in the $100 and while I get the "it's not a preorder" clause I am expecting to get something for my money - these aren't charities and I am not making a donation.

A couple of kudos:

• Kevin Crawford's Sine Nomine campaigns are the gold standard for RPG Kickstarters. he delivers on-time-every-time and the books are great games and tool kits for running a campaign in a given genre even if you use a different set of rules.  One of the ways he does this is by limiting stretch goals. His runs are typically one nice hardcover book with maybe a supplement of some kind - one supplement. No miniatures, no bags or t-shirts or mousepads, no multitude of adventures that need to be written by freelancers ... he is a one-man operation who runs focused consistently successful crowdfunding campaigns and more people running their own should look to his as an example. He is in the "I will back anything he starts up" club and that's a pretty small group for me.
• Pinnacle - the Savage Worlds people - continue to knock them out like clockwork. I admit I am not really a fan of crowdfunding almost every book they release but they do get them out consistently and without drama so they are doing a good job. I don't back everything they do because they do some licenses or genres I don't care about but if it looks interesting I am in.
• If you're interested in board wargames the Old School Tactical team (Flying Pig Games) gets these out as promised and pretty much on-time and also drama free. They make big, nice games and have several lines going from WW2 to Vietnam to ACW to an occasional foray into SF or alternate history. 

The less happy stories:

• Dolmenwood: Estimated delivery date Sept 2024. Considering it funded in Sept 2023 that was a year to get this one out. Exalted Funeral, the creator, had been doing Kickstarters for 4 years and had at least ten prior projects under their belts including Old School Essentials which is one of the big dogs of the OSR scene. So this is not a case of someone new to the process being overwhelmed by success. No, this is a case of too many add-ons. Extra books. Maps.  Dice. Miniatures. A record album. Some of the main books were described as 99.9% complete in March of 2024. They didn't even start printing the books until November of 2024. 
  
  Now sure, the PDFs have been available in draft from since early on and final - as much as an RPG PDF gets to be final - since late last year. But I didn't pay what I paid for PDFs - I paid for books and those are still not here 6 months after the projected date. 
  
  The good news is that according to the latest update they are shipping the things to the U.S. now - the containers are on their way at least. So maybe by June we will have this stuff in hand. So yes, many of those "estimated dates" are simply anchors of potential disappointment. People have to keep waiting, updates become less frequent, people get frustrated, companies start to get defensive - it's a fairly common story. This team has done a good job of keeping their cool but it has still dragged out a long time.
  
  
  

• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E: Estimated Delivery November 2024. I am not as upset with this one as shipping has begun on it and so it will not be as late as Dolmenwood. There were not a lot of add-ons here though the one obvious indulgence - a wooden slipcase at the higher pledge levels - did hit a snag late when it was cut to the wrong size. Extras that add nothing to the actual game are just a hazard waiting to be tripped. This one still took too long.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers: Funded November 2023. Estimated delivery July 2024. That was probably way too ambitious but a) it was implied that the rules were already written in some form as they were showing beta playtest videos and b) IT'S REAPER! They do huge miniatures kick starters every year! Well even if they've gone well in the past these things can fail. Let's play Kickstarter Bingo:
• Illnesses? Check.
• Death in the family? Check.
• Facilities change? (Warehouse or factory or something)Check.
• Other obligations? (ReaperCon) Check.
• Prior Kickstarter Entanglements? (Had to finish shipping Bones 6) Check.
• Had too much material so the books got bigger? Check.
  
  The only thing missing there is "Depression" which comes up on a remarkably high number of Kickstarters. Thank goodness for that at least. 

 The March 21st, 2025 update declares the Players Book "done". That's good. Considering that July 2024 original date it really should be. 

Then it mentions work to be done on the adventure(s), the GM Book, the Monster Book, some other text they want to include ... and then they mention hoping to get it all out the door by the end of the month. March, presumably. 

At some point you need to stop digging. Stop writing new material, stop expanding the adventure, stop the proofreading cycle and ship it! 

Anyway that's probably enough for today. We can take a look at 2024 in another post. Please feel free to share your KS war stories if you're so inclined.

One of the winners!

 

 

Kickstarter for D6 System Second Edition

 

Link is here if you're interested. I'm a fan of these mechanics and have been for a long time. It's been a while since I ran it but it's always on the list. Primarily this is because of Star Wars for me and I suspect for most other people that would care about a new edition of these rules but I can totally see it usable for a variety of campaigns. Any pulp-ish type game would be a decent enough fit. Savage Worlds fills a lot of this niche for me but a cleaned up and refreshed set of rules could mix in nicely.

As far as that Second Edition part I'll let their own words cover it:

Why "2e"?

Wow, that's a good question. When we were talking with WEG regarding this project, for a long time, we struggled with the name. D6 System books often were just defined by "eras" or the systems they supported. 

Finally, we realized that even though numerous iterations and previous publications had existed, few (or none, really) of them had consistently presented themselves as an "edition", but more as an evolution or iteration on previous releases. 

Together, the teams felt that calling this corebook "2e" would mark a new era in the game's publishing line, and would help to codify and communicate clearly where we are aiming to take the game line in the future, while also using language that existed in the tabletop rpg spaces common vernacular. 

Works for me!

There is about a week left for the KS as I post this so if you're interested give it a look! I have no vested interest or connection to these people - I just like the prior versions of the game in its best-known incarnation.

Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter - Atlantis!

 

Well it's time for another Savage Worlds Kickstarter, in fact another Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter. The first run was in 2016, then another one in 2019 to expand the books with Magic, Coalition, and regional stuff books, plus an upgrade of the original to the new Adventure edition of Savage Worlds. 

This time it's for Atlantis for this version of Rifts. I always thought Atlantis was one of the cooler areas of Rifts and one of the cooler books for it as well - magic items, races, tattoo magic, plus all of the worldbuilding and backstory that came along with it ... it was a very strong early entry in making Rifts Rifts. 

Now I never did much with it in my games as far as the region. It seemed horrifically dangerous for most characters to approach, much less enter, sort of like going to the Nine Hells in a D&D game. It was more an "aspirational" destination than a likely one at low to medium levels. With the Savage Worlds version of the game levelling the playing field a bit I can see where it might actually get used at some point. 

The short version is that the original Atlanteans look very much like humans but they were driven out or enslaved when the Splugorth invaded a long time ago.  The city magically TARDIS-d out when magic diminshed on Earth but it returned when the rifts opened up and magic flooded the world again. This is one of the major evil powers of the setting so it's a dangerous place but there is a sort of underground rebellion of True Atlanteans active there as well. Oh and it's also full of dragons. 

It's awesome but deadly. I've used Atlantean slavers several times as a campaign opener so maybe next time they won't go somewhere else - maybe they will go back to the big island.

The good news is that Pinnacle knows how to run a Kickstarter and I am absolutely sure this one will run smoothly and deliver what it promises pretty much on time. 

The part that bothers me a bit is that Pinnacle has a ridiculous amount of KS experience because pretty much everything they publish these days is done via Kickstarter. I know I know, it's rough for small publishers out there these days and doing it this way makes sense. Doesn't it seem like today, though, with 5E doing this record business for several years now, that the RPG market should be better? There were a ton of smaller publishers in the 80's and 90's and early 2000's who supported game lines for years before crowdfunding ... shouldn't it be easier now? Shouldn't an experienced, respected, well-liked company be able to sustain their main game line without having to crowdfund?

Who knows, maybe they could but they know this is just better - more predictable at least. 

The downside of doing it this way is that you can't just buy a $30 book like you can with many other games. No, you are going to get the book, some character cards, and a poster map. Now the basic digital-only version is pretty reasonable but if you just want a printed Savage Rifts Atlantis Book you're in for the $45 package. If that's all you want your best bet is to wait until after the campaign, whenever it's printed and shipped and you can buy it at the FLGS or online for the cover price or less. 

The other stuff in this campaign include a set of cardboard stand-up pawns, like Pathfinder pawns apparently, and a couple of map packs along with the book and the cards and the poster map. It's all cool stuff, it's just the forced bundling that itches just a bit and granted that is a temporary state that will only last until it's all released separately, likely early next year given what they are saying on the KS page.  

So yes, I will probably back it at some level - Rifts is a great setting and Savage Worlds is a great set of rules that works well for it. I like a ton of what Pinnacle does so I try to support them directly like this when they make something I like. If you have some similar inclinations then go check this one out.