7th Sea Returns

If anyone remembers the old RPG 7th Sea by John Wick and published by Alderac Entertainment, you may be please to know that it's coming back.

Go and check out the Kickstarter for the project. It fully funded in only 7th minutes, and has already blasted through $100,000.

Designers and Dragons - Shout Out

As some of you already know I'm a big fan of the roleplaying hobby, not just as the games but the entire industry as a subset of larger industries. As a result I'm extremely happy that the Kickstarter has finally gone live for a set of books I've been waiting years for. Designers and Dragons.

For those of you not in the know, Designers and Dragons is written by the RPG industries authority on the history of the industry, Shannon Appelcline. Originally produced as a single volume by Mongoose Publishing several years ago the publication never saw much of a distribution and as a result many in the hobby are unaware of its existence. Never mind that, Evil Hat is now publishing not 1 but a 4 volume set written by Shannon detailing the hobby from its infancy to near the modern day.

The new versions are hugely expanded over the original volume covering new details, new lines from the companies that are still around and new companies that weren't in the original version.

The books are organized by decade, with each book covering a decade, starting in the 1970s. The inclusion of a company in a particular book is based on when the company was founded, so even though Chaosium didn't published Call of Cthulhu until 1981, it is included in the 1970s book as Chaosium was founded in 1975.

All four books are going to be published at the same time and will represent several hundred pages each (I'm currently reading the 1970s one and it alone is 400 pages) making over a thousand pages of vital RPG history.

The Kickstarter provided the PDF of the completed 1970s volume (sans cover art) for immediate download upon pledging so you can get into it immediately. For the low price of $15 you can net all the PDF copies, and for $85 hard copy versions of all the books when they are printed and the PDFs once they are finished.

So if the history of the hobby is of any interest to you, you owe it to yourself to get in at the start on this one. So go ahead and check out Designers and Dragons.

Kickstarter - The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits

Some of you may recall my review of The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, a book on Japanese yokai and it's use in Legend of the Five Rings games. Well I'd just like to give a shout out to Matthew Meyer and his new Kickstarter, a follow up volume entitled The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits.

If the product is anything like the original volume, it'll be a delight with great inspiration for any fantasy game, especially an eastern themed game. So go on, pitch in a dig deep. Matthew is a very talented individual (no I've never met him but I really like his work.)

Kickstarter: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

This is just a heads up that the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter has 67 hours to go (at time of writing.) They've more then exceeded their original goal of $40,000 and are closing rapidly on $400,000. In that time they've added a huge array of stretch goals that makes some of the packages phenomenal value.

Currently the two most popular are the Slobbering Shoggoth level for $100 plus postage which gets you the hardcovers of both rulebooks plus a load of extra books and items (it's insanely good value especially with the insanely low postage costs which makes me think Chaosium isn't going to make anything on this Kickstarter once everything is fulfilled) and the Nictitating Nyarlathotep level for $333 which has limited edition leatherette bound copies along with soft cover versions and a shed load of extras.

So head over to the Kickstarter and pledge. You can check the graphics on the main page for a good overview of what is in each of the pledge levels.

Kickstarter: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

The Kickstarter for the 7th edition of Call of Cthulhu is now live. If you're interested in pushing the game to print and getting in on the books, or just supporting the game line, then head over to the Kickstarter and pledge your shoggoths.

Kickstarter: Fate Core

Just for those who don't already know, a Kickstarter is underway for Fate Core, the new version of the Fate popular rule system.

It's been up just over 24 hours now, and already exceeded its original goal of $3,000 by a huge margin (currently at $71,802 at time of writing.) It's rising fast so could be a contender for one of the larger RPG Kickstarters (Numenera still holds the goal with $517K and Traveller 5 in a far second at $294K.)

So if the Fate system floats your boat, head on over and pledge. Even for just $10 you get a lot of bang for your buck with the number of stretch goals being hit and everything being released to the $10 level in PDF format.

Call of Kickstarter

So in the last couple of days a couple of Cthulhu related Kickstarters have finished, and one is still going with 9 days to go at time of writing.

First up we have the reprint of Horror on the Orient Express. This was a Kickstarter by Chaosium to raise funds for a new edition of the classic campaign. Chaosium originally asked for $20,000, and ended up getting over 1000% funding at $207,804. I'm ashamed to say I ended up in for more than I initially planned at $150 (Conductor, Canada for those interested.) There was a lot of confusion originally with the shipping charges being messed up, descriptions not being clear and stretch goals that were incomprehensible to some. Things did get ironed out slowly over time and it ended as a huge success for them. Note to RPG companies in the future though, never start a Kickstarter during GenCon, you won't have the time to devote to it that you'll need.

Next up was Tremulus. Not related to Call of Cthulhu but a Lovecraftian hack over the Apocalypse World engine. Not something I'm hugely familiar with but it sounded interesting to me. Generate your games as you go, different game each time and it becomes more of a storytelling game than a traditional RPG with less work on the gamemaster. Originally asking for $5,000, they came in at 1254% funded with $62,723. Only $20 from me this time, PDFs only. Seemed a lot to add $40 more to get a paper copy shipped to Canada and it may be something I don't play, just read and go "hey this is cool, I should run this some day."

Lastly is the Cthulhu Playing Cards. A Cthulhu themed set of Bicycle playing cards. Traditional, interesting and with some decent art. They were asking for $7,500 and at time of writing had $66,302 with 9 days left. They'll do fine. Not even a little bit of wrangling with Chaosium over trademarks could slow them down.

Kickstarter: A New RPG Record

So a new RPG record was set on Kickstarter. Numenera, a Kickstarter for the new game by one of the icons of the industry, Monte Cook. Numenera is a post-apocalyptic far future science fiction RPG. I must say I didn't know a huge amount about it and a quick glance through didn't particularly intrigue me.

However sometimes temptation just jumps in there, and I suddenly found myself in for the core rulebook and the PDFs of everything. The art looks pretty, there is a lot of stuff coming with the stretch rewards and I just can't resist value for money at times.

Over 4,600 RPG fans were definitely interested with 3 interested retail stores putting in a whopping $1,500 each (to be fair that reward level also got Monte Cook coming to the store to do a signing session anywhere in North America which has got to be good for business.) Someone even managed to put their hands into his (or her) pockets and come up with $2,000 to have a one on one with Monte on game design.

At $517,256 (plus PayPal pledges) it beat the previous record holder Traveller 5 by over $220k (not quite doubling it, but giving it a damned good try.)

Kickstarter is definitely becoming the go to place for exclusive RPG goodies and pre-orders, and this proves that Monte Cook is still bankable even after the failure of his Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure to make funding. It seems Indiegogo isn't as popular with RPG fans as Kickstarter.

Kickstarter and RPGs

So I'm assuming that most readers are by now familiar with Kickstarter, the site that allows people trying to get projects off the drawing board and into reality by relying on the contributions and supports of the anonymous internet masses. Early after its inception there were a couple of role-playing projects put on it to varying degrees of success, but not a lot of money in it at the time. Over the last six months the amount of money going through Kickstarter seems to have exploded and suddenly every RPG company, person trying to get their homebrew setting published, accessory manufacturer etc has jumped on the bandwagon to the extent that Kickstarter seems to have become more of a pre-order and fund my print run than a true investment contribution site.

A lot of names in the RPG industry have been putting projects on the site and records are continually broken by RPGs in the Gaming category. To give you some sort of idea as to the money we're talking about here is a brief history of significant players in the RPG Kickstarters over the last year.

Far West: The Wuxia/Western RPG from Adamant Entertainment asked for $5,000 to help get it to market. They received $49,325 in the end setting the record at the time.

Vampire 20th Anniversary Companion (or V20 Companion) from White Wolf then came along asking for the huge sum of $50,000 to get it to print. They ended up getting $96,327 firmly beating the record set by Far West.

The next big battle was a real clash of the titans. A reprint of the classic dungeon Rappan Athuk by Frog God Games asked for $25,000 while starting four weeks later but ending at the same time Traveller 5 by Far Future asked for $24,000. Rappan Athuk took off fast and just kept growing but once Traveller 5 was on the site it quickly became clear that a new record was going to be set, but by who? They finished within a day of each other with Rappan Athuk bringing in an incredible $246,541. Traveller 5 however managed to take the crown, even with slightly confusing options, at an incredible $294,628.

It goes to show, word is out there that Kickstarter is where it's coming from, and is a great way to test the waters on new products.

I would be completely remiss not to mention two projects related to the hobby that also made splashes.

Shadowrun Returns by  was proposing a modern remake/sequel to the classic Nintendo Shadowrun game. They came out asking for an ambitious $400K, but that was okay as they came away with $1,836,447.

And the biggest surprise of all finished just a matter of days ago. Reaper Miniatures was looking for some cash flow to be able to produce molds to add new miniatures to their popular Bones line. To this end they were asking for a reasonable $30K to be able to get these molds done up and in return the backers could get some of the new miniatures. In the end they blew past their $30K target, zoomed past the hundreds of thousands, clobbered the $1M dollar mark and ended up with an absolutely astonishing $3,429,236. Yes you read that correctly, almost 3.5 million dollars, making it the number 3 Kickstarter of all time (after a watch that can connect to your iPhone and an Android based games console.) 

And who says the hobby industry is dead?

Horror on the Orient Express

So I find myself contributing (probably too heavily) to Chaosium's Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter (more on Kickstarter at a later point.) I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I own the original, which has become a real collectors item, but never done more than read through the first 20 pages or so of the adventure. I love Call of Cthulhu, but for some reason I've never read the campaign despite owning it. No idea why, I think perhaps I thought it seemed rather railroady (no that wasn't a pun.) It was about 15 years ago that I last tried so maybe I should ease it out of its box and have another look.

The Kickstarter is well past its funding stages (at the time of writing it had just passed $70,000), despite some initial hiccups with the levels and uncertainty as to what backers received for each level and now unclear and sometimes inconsistent shipping costs seem to be causing a lot of strife on the project. We all know Chaosium has had issues in the past keeping to deadlines, paying its writers and issuing product, but this Kickstarter shows despite that the company and the product are still held in relatively high regard by the community.

Anyway, if you are a Cthulhu fan and you've always wanted a copy of what is considered a classic but don't want to pay Ebay prices, then head over to the Kickstarter linked above. If you do want to pay Ebay prices, then let me know as I'm now willing to let my original classic copy go for the right price :)