Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness are new to me and Kickstarter, but they’ve been publishing for nearly two decades. The group’s first campaign for a rules-medium RPG and a gorgeous book.

Penumbra City has picked up a “Project We Love” badge with well over 800 backers and is racing towards 1,000 and closing in 300% of the $13,000 asking price. You can see progress on the pitch page.

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Games in the setting and with this rule set suit 3t to 6 players with a GM.

Penumbra City uses reputation as currency, as cash isn’t so important. The PCs’ status with gangs and coalitions is what matters in the city with eleven districts and twenty factions.

The game uses classes, and there will be at least nine now, but that number will go up as stretch goals tumble.

The book itself will be (my favourite size) 6×9″ and black-and-white, with a hardcover and foil-stamped.

There’s a black fog that hangs over the city, and it’s not as metaphorical as you might hope. It’s coal dust. Somewhere up through that smoke, there’s a glorious silver city hovering in the sunshine—but don’t concern yourself much with the floating quarter, because only the rich and holy will ever see it. Groundside, orphans dig through rubble and trash to scavenge the parts to fix their motorcycles, street poets sell fungus and brawl over territory, and bureaucrats ride black horses to midnight salons where they plot the death of the god king. The graveyard’s been squatted by immigrants now for longer than you’ve been alive, and there’s a gang of nihilist ex-marines who seem intent on blowing up half of everything.

Welcome to Penumbra City. There’s plenty to do, if you don’t mind the dust. Or the smoke. Or the crime. Or the monsters.

You can support the indie RPG by spreading the word.

Backers at the $10 level get the PDF of Penumbra City, the digital character sheets and a zine bundle too.

The print edition comes with two stickers, and the previous digital content is on offer at $45.

There is a higher tier, and that’s $180 for the “Party Edition”. That’s five copies of the game (with ten stickers) rather than a limited edition intended for the whole group of players.

Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness estimate the Penumbra project will be delivered by February 2024.

New Zealand-based AJ Pickett, who has written for the Rifter and consulted on lore for D&D: Dark Alliance, is crowdfunding tabletop battle mats made from silicone which can be thrown in a washing machine.

The pitch has more than 50 days to run, but it asks for NZ$77,365, about £38K. Can they make it? Progress has been good in the first week with over 200 backers and AJ’s YouTube channel has over 120K followers to point at the campaign. You can see progress on the pitch page.

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A special offer to the Silicone Battlemats’ first 1,200 backers suggests how many people AJ suspects might respond.

That offer is a free combat tracker, also silicone and transparent, so you can scribble combat order, health and other data points on it and have those near the action without obscuring the map.

There’s also a lotto draw for people who go all in, and that’s a generous one but down to chance. It’s a quirky mechanism for the Kickstarter because once the campaign has been funded, it’s not in the backers’ interests to decrease their chances of winning by enticing more gamers into the lottery.

Choose from our colours and print options while taking advantage of our special deals and rewards. Plus, our battlemats offer more than just a gaming surface! Crafted from highly durable and non-toxic silicone, they can withstand baking cookies and pizza. Their non-porous surface is resistant to most crafting paints and glues, making them perfect for sculpting terrain and painting miniatures. You can even bake polymer clay models on them or use them as a protective surface under your 3D printers. Each battlemat is engineered to last a lifetime and be perfect at what it was made to do, all while reducing waste and pollution.

AJ’s HQ in New Zealand seems to bring great postage because many tiers have worldwide shipping included.

Backers who contribute NZ$55/£27 get one silicone battlemat with a square print.

Is the hex print more expensive to produce? It must be because that option does not unlock until backers contribute NZ$63 or more to the project.

After these two tiers, the battlemat crowdfunder leaps up the ladder dramatically.

It’s NZ$207 when the entire set appears, and that’s three full prints, with all three colours to pick from a dice set included.

After that, AJ offers retail tiers with 10 battlemaps in a mix at NZ$484 and, yes, 100 at NZ$4,504. Are any tabletop hobby stores busy enough to store and sell that many?

The estimated fulfilment date is this year and in September.

Haunted Table Games’ first Kickstarter is a knockout success, some of which is due to Carly Monardo’s perfect voice acting in the pitch video.

There are also dice you probably don’t have in your collection, and you will immediately see the point of them. There’s also a free demo. There’s about a month to go, over 1,000 backers, and I think the campaign will hit x10 funding. You can see progress on the pitch page.

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The delta test demo is on Itch, and you can grab it now.

There’s also a text version of the Triangle Agency RPG pitch, which is essential for accessibility.

The campaign, now so successful, funds a core rulebook, a mission book called The Vault, those pyramid dice, a character planner, a gun and a secret project.

The gun is a life-sized replica of the game’s The Ripple Gun.

The contemporary game is about reality-warping powers and corporate bullshit. You decide which is worse. Characters work at the titular Triangle Agency as agents who must investigate and, ideally, capture Anomalies. Anomalies in the Triangle Angel are supernatural problems.

Characters do not need to be human; they could be, for example, 100 tiny aliens operating a human mecha.

In a lovely commentary on today’s life, Triangle Agency has a mechanic called Work-Life Balance.

Backers who can pledge $30 or more to the campaign will be thanked with PDF copies of The Vault mission book and Triangle Agency core rules.

At $60, the core rules are in hardback and PDF with the Agency-Approved dice.

The Complete Set, which means PDFs and hardbacks, with the dice and more dice as stretch goals unlock, is the reward at $90.

True to the symbology of the game, there’s limited Triscendence at $333, which pops your name in the credits and a game with Caleb Zane Huett, the lead designer.

The top, and even more limited, reward tier is $1,665, and that’s the one with the life-sized Ripple Gun.

Despite what some tiers say, Haunted Table is likely estimating a July 2024 delivery for the whole project.

After a stalemate of a battle between the invading aliens and the defending humans, characters in The Last Caravan travel across a transformed America even as signs of war begin to brew again.

The RPG draws on John Harper’s Forged in the Dark and is influenced by No Dice, No Masters. Ted Bushman’s crowdfunder has hit goals, and (at the time of writing) it’s not too late to support on Kickstarter.

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There’s a free and Google Drive-hosted quick start available to download. The 20-page teaser introduces Traveller rules and discusses establishing relationships in the caravan and the core mechanics.

The campaign’s funds will be spent on a high-quality book with art, and both a digital and softcover planned. The final product will be about 170 pages, and, as Bushman’s debut RPG Kickstarter, it is being kept simple.

The aliens came less than a year ago. The war was quick and brutal, but it seems like nobody won. Months have passed in uncertain silence.

The debris of war in the atmosphere has cast a shadow over the Earth; the result is the coldest, deepest winter in hundreds of years.

Conflict still bubbles underneath the surface. Some major highways are blocked with alien barricades where armed defenses take travelers into custody. The pods that vaporized many cities continue rumbling and singing their strange songs. Some say those songs are growing louder, and some towns have been going silent. An alien threat is rising from the ashes.

Backers who can find $20 to support the indie RPG project will be thanked with a PDF copy of the Last Caravan game.

Restricted to USA backers only and pitched at $40, there’s also a tier for the physical book, the PDF map, stretch goals and perhaps an entire music album.

There’s a $100 tier, also restricted to the States only, which lets you suggest a name of a car for the book, while there’s a $250 tier with a community copy.

For most tiers, the Kickstarter for the Last Caravan is slated to deliver in October 2023.

Mythical Vault builds from wood, and in this Kickstarter, that means handcrafted boxes and sculptures to make luxury boxes for your favourite dice.

The crowdfunding campaign has hit its target, attracting dozens of people to invest in at least one of these statement pieces. In some cases, people have backed more than one, as if many of their friends are dice goblins or have extensive collections. You can see the project tally on the pitch page.

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The wood in these boxes is, we’re told, ethically sourced and wisely selected. The pockets are faux leather. The dragon toppers are clay, sculpted by hand and handpainted with metallic-infused paint.

Magnets keep the lid secure, and Mythical Vault pays attention to details so that the edges and surfaces are flat, lining up for the magnetic magic.

Inside the dragon boxes are interchangeable foam inserts; if you’re brave enough, the bottom of the container can be used as a drinks coaster.

There are early bird deals and Kickstarter exclusives.

It was never more evident to us how special and important Role Playing Games is than when we all got stuck at home in Covid lockdowns. Playing RPGs was one of the few things that we were truly excited about and looked forward to each week. We promised that, when the world got back to a new normal, we would make great products for our favourite hobby to make those gaming memories just that little bit more special.

There are some digital tiers first, but at £30, you can secure yourself a resin blank of the dragon sculpture, and if you’re an artist, then I imagine that might be a neat project.

The following are early bird tiers, limited by volume, and have the oak dragon box included as a reward at £81, the maple dragon at £90 and the walnut dragon at £99. These are 10% cheaper than any units sold later.

Backers at the £270 tier get three boxes as a reward with wood and paint colours of their choice.

The digital stuff goes out first, and then this wave of dice boxes is slated for the early date of August 2023.

There are roleplaying board games, and ManaFall, on Kickstarter now, are pushing in the direction of the theatre of the mind style of narrative RPG with board game-like combat mechanics for speed. Whether this is a new and different direction remains in the hands of the team.

There’s also a companion app, which can be checked out in alpha mode and a quickstart early access adventure. Lastly, while you sandbox as usual with ManaFall, there’s a whole suite of official adventures. I know I’ve banged on about this too much in previous years, but I’d suggest ManaFall is one of those projects pushing into the subscription treasure chest that might be in the TTRPG community. It’s on Kickstarter now, and you can see progress on the pitch page.

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ManaFall is a fantasy RPG with classes of adventurers on heroic quests. The crowdfunder raises money for the app, a campaign book called What Lies Within and the core rules.

Nicely, the team have published a design philosophy for ManaFall, and this is something I wish more did. In summary;

• Every action is meaningful.
• Easy and fast to learn rules.
• A transparent complexity level – with classes labelled on how complex they are.
• A best-of-both merger of board and tabletop roleplaying games.

A land recovering from the Collapse of the Stars that ended The Great Mana Wars over 1200 years ago, many of its ancient civilizations perished at the height of the conflict. Helped by Divine Providence, survivors across the realm rebuilt their life with new foundations and beliefs. In this new world, tensions rise between the High Vigil, followers of the Divine Saviours, and the Unbelievers. Meanwhile the revered ManaHunters explore the ruins of the old world in search of lost artifacts and buried mysteries.

Backers who pledge CA$25, which is about £15, unlock rewards and get all the PDFs which means the core rules, the campaign book and the digital stretch goals.

At CA$65, backers also get the hardcover versions of the books, a GM screen, 3 dice, 5 character journals and access codes for the free app.

The Founders Edition Deluxe Core Set Bundle unlocks at CA$140 with the deluxe core rules, a dice bag, and skill and spell cards added.

The ManaFall team estimate a December 2024 delivery for the project.

The Mecha Hack is a 44-page Platinum bestseller based on The Black Hack. As the name implies, Absolute Tabletop’s RPG is that of giant war machines and their pilots.

Aether Nexus takes the world of mecha, the rule set, and layers in high fantasy. It’s a setting inspired by Escaflowne, Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, and Aura Battler Dunbine. The game, also from Absolute Tabletop, has just hit its $18K Kickstarter goal, and there’s still plenty of time to become a backer.

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Aether Nexus is a complete ruleset that adds unique player options for a world of Aetheric knights and their Apparatus. The PCs, aetheric knights, are warrior-mages controlling powerful artefact armour to which they are attached mentally and physically.

The world of Eskhara is broken, full of people like cursed Cloven, amphibious Buforog, elemental Kaldron, and the insectoid Chimru.

Absolute Tabletop include help for GMs and is funding an A5 100-page (ish) physical book as part of the project.

Long ago, Eskhara was whole, and her people prospered. Eskharans pierced the veil of reality, venturing into the Aethereal, and there learned many secrets of matter of magic. Wielding aether, an arcane element flowing with knowledge, Eskharans entered into an age of wonder. Magic was abundant, aether-powered technology lifted life to utopic heights, and a vast commonwealth spanned the world.

Then came the Oghdra.

There are hardship tiers for those who might struggle to pay full price for the game but might sense an improvement in theirs or someone else’s if they had it. No justification is needed; the $10 tier exists.

At $16, backers get access to the playtest updates, and digital stretch goals and will get a PDF of Aether Nexus.

The print version is added to rewards for backers who can contribute $26 or more. There’s worldwide shipping on offer.

The game can be played with The Mecha Hack, although it doesn’t need the parent rule system. The $35 bundle is entirely digital but includes the PDFs for Aether Nexus, The Mecha Hack and the Mission Manual.

$60 supporters get all three books in digital and in print. It’s a popular tier; after that, there’s a USA retailer-only tier.

I was pleased to see Unspoken Tales from Black Lantern Productions smash its Kickstarter goal. It’s a book of dark and dangerous 5e adventures set in Erebos.

I was pleased because the Greek publisher has steadfastly worked on quality content and gained traction. This campaign even has unique loyalty rewards for people who have backed previously. You can see just how far beyond the €15,000 goal the supporters have taken the project.

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There’s a free 5-page sample to check through a Google Drive link. It’s downloadable.

The Soulmist setting is one where the Light does not shine, and Unspoken Tales adds 200+ pages of hardcover for two adventures.

It’s become a familiar phrase, but Black Lantern say, “old-school aesthetics but brought out to a modern standard”. It’s narrative-minded but also deadly.

The funded project means three new dungeons, NPCs, 20 new monsters and a similar number of new magic items. There’s an encounter generator and even rules for a tug of war.

You don’t need anything other than core 5e to use the game, but the backer tiers quickly offer you other Soulmist books.

Backers at €10, about £9 in Brexit money, get the digital stretch goals and Unspoken Tales in PDF.

The next tier up, €30, also adds A Journey from Darkness to Light and Darklands in PDF. That’s you pretty much up to date.

Unspoken Tales becomes hardcover; backers get the physical stretch goals but not the other PDFs at €40.

There are some early bird tiers, but the next standard one is at €80, which gets the hardcover and PDF of Unspoken Tales, the GM screen, Cities of Fyere Maps and a Collector’s Slipcase.

The hardcovers of the previous books, with the slipcase, are added at €110, and then at €180, dice, another GM screen and spell cards are added with the top tier a scary €430 for some of the Collector’s Editions of the book, t-shirts and bookmarks.

Black Lantern estimate delivery of all this before the end of the year, with the PDFs around September and the hardbacks in December.

There’s always the idea of using Kickstarter to support new and emerging talent, so let’s focus on Will Hillard, a student at UCSD, writing RPGs for fun and who has just smashed their funding goal on the platform.

The tabletop RPG is called Stone Punk, designed to be easy to start playing and is set in a prehistory version of this world except with domesticated dinosaurs and other media tropes. The Kickstarter has three weeks left to run.

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The system uses 2d6 and three stats; Health, Speed and Luck. Character creation is simple, with three species, classes and some tribes.

The stretch goals are unlocking, with extra quality added, the potential of an Ice Age expansion and perhaps some mini STLs.

One potential gotcha is that Will has announced free shipping and offers worldwide logistics. It looks like DriveThruRPG is being used for distribution, and it’s not always possible to get their Lightening Source partners to ship worldwide at a low cost. Let’s hope this does not bite Will.

You can support Stone Punk by telling friends about it, offering cash support, or both.

Backers who find $10 to contribute will get a Stone Punk RPG in PDF via DriveThruRPG.

At $25, there’s the physical rulebook added in. We don’t know how many pages or whether that’s softback, a zine or something else, but it’s hard to imagine the game being terribly big given the accessibility goals.

A village art print is added as an extra reward for backers at $35, and then at $45 backers get their name in the credits.

Will estimates Stone Punk will be delivered by December and go up for purchase later.

Let’s hope Will still describes their RPG creation as “for fun” have the wild ride that is a Kickstarter campaign.

The Wikipedia entry on American academic and horror author Brian Evenson outlines the ‘BYU controversy in which his novel Altmann’s Tongue prompted complaints from the restrictive university.

Severed Books, with more than 30 Kickstarters under their belts, have Evenson as the setting author of The Dark Glinting with Metal. The book is a Mork Borg adventure, designed and illustrated by Justin Sirois on Kickstarter.

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Mork Borg is a death metal of an RPG where, typically, the world is doomed. You need the Mork Borg rules for The Dark Glinting with Metal, but they are free to download.

This is Brian Evenson’s first RPG, but Justin Sirois has plenty of experience.

As expected for a Mork Borg project, there’s an aesthetic to The Dark Glinting with Metal and a collector’s edition.

Traverse the The Desiccated Hills to reach The Rocky Barren Land where chance encounters await your party. Beyond the The Necrotic Fields, the The Tablatures glimmer as their Furnishers attend to horrors that can mutilate and morph flesh. To the The Black Gates and beyond — THE EYE.

You can support the project by spreading the word or by offering cash.

Those project supporters who offer $12 or more will get a PDF version of the adventure.

The combo of hardcover and PDF unlock as the reward, with BackerKit for add-ons, with $35 or more pledges. $50 gets the GM screen as well.

The Collector’s Box with limited edition foil hardcover, autographed bookplate, and d2 coin join the PDF and GM screen at pledges of $69. Nearly 100 people have taken that tier at the time of writing.

Some pledges have sold out, which means the next jump up is $225, and that’s for retailers who wish to stock ten copies of the hardcover.

Severed Books estimate the campaign promises will be met by July.