Welcome back to our weekly look at tabletop roleplaying game, and accessories, crowdfunding roundup! Each week we’ll be looking at a few campaigns currently running that have caught our eye as well as occasionally speaking to some of the creators about their campaigns, or looking at some of the ‘behind the scenes’ business aspects of putting together, launching, operating and then delivering a crowdfunded project. If you have anything you’d like us to cover, or questions about anything we talk about, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me directly.
Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse by Derek A. Kamal
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 2nd November 2017; 15:22 UTC)
Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse is a FATE based RPG set in Thunder City. USA, and tells the stories of the city mice and motorcycle clubs.
For small creatures existing in a place which doesn’t belong to them, these stories will be filled with the drama of their lives, and the trouble, both inside and outside, of a biker gang. Will your gang be Robin Hood-like doers of good, springing cheese from unwatched refrigerators and delivering it to needy widows, or will you be thugs and thieves exploiting the weak? Your mouse, your bike, and your gang all belong to you and the stories you tell at your table.
Thunder City is home to the only mice in the world who have figured out combustion engines. Since that time they've organized themselves into clubs and gone about their business, often bumping into one another in conflicts over cheese and territory. There are:
· The Spanner Murine Motorcycle Club: The finest mechanics and the most arrogant gang in the city. They're snooty little mice but they can back it up, or so they say.
· The Asphalt Avengers: If speed had a fan club it would be these crazed rodents. Their whole club life is based around the next incredible kick, and not much else. It's a high-velocity life for them.
· The Bardlings: Not all clubs are about territory and "business"; some simply want freedom from the usual mouse's life of scrounging and fretting. So the Bardlings are just that, strumming their matchbox guitars and beating thimble-sized bongos late into the night.
· Plus the Ocho Necro, The Wailing Sisters, and more!
Besides the mice, there are territorial felines, chipmunk toughs, crabby crabs, Old Jerry (the graying German Shepherd who guards the ever-important docks), and a whole city full of colorful critters ready to add drama to your stories. With these wheels in motion there is no choice but fun and adventure and gang life.
Alongside the digest (6” x 9”) sized, 150-ish page book and PDF you can also get a set of buttons representing the badges of four of the clubs featured in the game, as well as prints of the gorgeous artwork. Stretch goals are opening up additional settings such as, the already unlocked, Rock ‘n’ Roll Sock Hop Mouse by Craig Campbell which mashes up Grease, The Dukes of Hazzard and Happy Days!
Dragon Drop Adventures 5e Vol. 3 by Dragon Turtle Games
(Campaign Ends : Tuesday 31st October 2017; 18:00 UTC)
Dragon Turtle Games return with the latest instalment of their Dragon Drop Adventures for 5th Edition. Dragon Drop Adventures are designed to be played in one or two sessions and easily dropped into existing campaigns and settings. The adventures are for a variety of levels (in this case for Levels 9 to 12) and suitable for 3 to 5 players.
Each adventure includes a backstory, how to customize or adapt the adventure to your own campaign and/or setting, the adventure itself, players and DM maps, info on how to expand the adventure if you want to turn it into a longer campaign, or use some of the plot hooks in future games, and appendices of the custom NPCs, monsters and magic items featured in the adventure.
The four adventures included in this third volume are as follows:
The Merchant’s Daughter (Level 9): Everybody knows that the famous merchant Sim Sparrowcroft's daughter, Gold, is due to be wed in under 10 days. It's the biggest event of the year!
However, Sim has had a message sent to the party to meet with him immediately. Gold has been kidnapped by Dingeldein's famously violent band of bandits, and he wants you to retrieve her, unharmed.
Unknown to Sim, Gold has not been kidnapped, and after falling in love with Dingeldein, has run off with the bandits of her own accord. How will the party react when they uncover this difficult moral decision?
Dreams of a Baron (Level 10): Baron Julian has fallen into a magical coma, and his personal wizard Strabad is nowhere to be found! The party's reputation precedes them, and the Steward has asked them to assist.
A group of local wizards have devised a way for people to enter into the Baron's dreams, and rescue him from within.
Your party will uncover a story of greed, power, and family conflict once they enter the dreamworld. Do they have what it takes to survive the unpredictable environment, and rescue the Baron?
Return from Nostos Island (Level 11): The legendary island of Nostos has reappeared in the ocean, hundreds of years after it disappeared! Tales tell of grand treasures guarded by horrible beasts lurking on the Island, and a great curse that befalls all those who step onto it's shores. Have your party face off against terrible monsters, and rival adventurers, to claim the vast treasures the island promises!
Murder in the Stormwinds (Level 12): The village of Runnemede is famous for its violent storms, and today is no exception. The party has been caught in a particularly rough storm and has taken refuge, along with the rest of the village, in the stormwind shelter.
Part way through the night, village mayor Cardul is murdered, and all evidence points towards the newcomers, the party. Will the party be able to clear their name, and find the murderer before the storm ends? Or will the real murderer escape justice?
Gobblin’: The Goblin RPG by Drunk and Ugly Games LLC
(Campaign Ends : Friday 10th November 2017; 16:00 UTC)
Gobblin’ is a post-apocalyptic RPG where players take on the roles of… well, goblins. Powered using a d12-based system the game certainly sounds like it should be a lot of fun and well worth checking out.
Everyone knows about goblins. They’re violent and stupid little green guys who with just enough brain cells to know what they’re doing and black enough hearts not to care. They live in fantastic worlds where wizards battle dragons, kingdoms rise and fall, and armies of swordsmen clash to save the world from evil. All the while, there’s always goblins looting corpses and stealing cabbages.
When the higher races grew tired of the chaotic creatures so obnoxious that even the forces of evil didn’t want them around, they banded together to form a spell so powerful that it would reach across the entire realm. With what was essentially a magical, interdimensional eviction notice, every single goblin was hurled through time and space until they landed in what they would come to know as their new home. There were no humans or elves there, but those that had lived there before had left behind a strange world ravaged by war. The least cowardly of the goblins started to prod at the mysterious devices until they roared to life and the goblins cheered to realize their fate!
This world had guns and cars, bazookas and robots! Things that exploded if you poked them enough! Exciting mutants and bombed out apartments that were MUCH cozier than any goblin hut. The goblins had a whole world of abandoned toys to discover, many of which could kill their fellow goblin from twenty paces away. The goblins ran wholeheartedly into their new world, wanting to be the first to discover the strangest mysteries, deadliest weapons and tastiest expired snack cakes of the world they would call Goblin House. The humans were gone from this place. The goblins would thrive in their ruins.
The story of Gobblin’ is about entering a generic post-apocalypse after living in a generic fantasy world for countless generations (it’s only countless because goblins are terrible at history and counting). Goblins adapt surprisingly well to their new home. Their twisted anatomy helps them deal with radiation, spoiled food, and their natural disregard for common safety practices. Their sheer numbers allow them to last long enough to figure out what explodes and what shoots what out of where. It doesn’t take long for them to scatter around the globe, hunkering down in salvaged homes, restaurants and shopping malls and starting to call dibs on all they can find.
Goblins don’t understand what happened to Earth in the slightest. Some have a passing curiosity, but they quickly forget about it when they find a power drill or something that glows in the dark. Goblins have their priorities straight, and that priority is greed. They want shiny valuables, sharp tools, tasty food, weapons of great and confusing power, and the means to lord over their fellow goblins. If they’re lucky, they can find something that gives them all of the above. After all, this high tech world generated a lot of strange things in a desperate arms race before their end. Dibis found a tool that fires beams of light to burn your foes! Kep tells stories of a magical armored vehicle that speaks to you when you approach. The shamans warn young goblins against going into the caves of Deepdown, since giant serpentine creatures slither in the dark protecting shiny and tasty treasures.Any goblin that looks long and hard enough will find something of interest, even if finding loot also means finding trouble.
Frozen Skies RPG for Savage Worlds by Ian Liddle
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 1st November 2017; 16:00 UTC)
Frozen Skies is an interesting “post war diesel-punk” setting of aviators and sky pirates that I first heard about a few years ago when Stephen Hughes, the author, contacted me for some advice. The 120-page book has been written and the campaign is primarily to raise money for artwork.
The setting of Frozen Skies is the continent of Alyeska, the most northern landmass of the world of Darmonica and is often referred to as either the ‘rooftop of the world’ or ‘Darmonica’s Crown’. It is an icy frontier plagued by savage beasts, cut-throat sky pirates, harsh weather and eons old dark secrets. It is a barely tamed land where the most basic of utilities are hard to come by and tend to lie on the good side of unreliable at best. But despite all this there are opportunities for a man to make a name and, more ideally, coin for himself.
Alyeska itself is dominated by savage beasts known as Wulvers, wolf like creatures that’ve plagued Alyeska since its earliest Colonial days. The Commonwealth had troops stationed in Alyeska to defend its fledging colony against the beasts, though they were steadily whittled away to satisfy the Commonwealth’s war efforts. As the defenses were weakened the Wulvers gradually overran more and more territory, in the end the Alyeskans were forced to hide behind fortified walls and increasingly rely on air travel to maintain contact with far-flung outposts.
Despite the Wulvers the other great powers of Darmonica have their own interest in Alyeska, chiefly for the ruins and artefacts of the Ancient Terrans buried beneath the ice and for a mineral by-product of the Blast known as Glimmer Rock. Until it was altered by the energies released in the explosion it was a previously unremarkable mineral, now it is the fuel for a new Industrial Revolution that the world finds itself on the cusp of....but only if the new technology can be made viable.
The book not only includes the setting, extra Savage Worlds Hindrances, Edges, two new races, an adventure generator, aircraft creation rules and more - but also several adventures, including a multi-part campaign called Fool’s Errand.
Undead – A Sourcebook for Chill 3rd Edition horror RPG by Matthew McFarland
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 1st November 2017; 02:00 UTC)
Undead is the third sourcebook for Chill 3rd Edition. This 120-page, full-color antagonist sourcebook, explores the creatures of the Unknown that animate the bodies of the dead. These creatures aren't the mindless, hungry, infectious zombies of cinema. They are the spurned and jilted lovers who come back from the grave seeking a mouldering kiss. They are the wronged dead, the unhallowed dead, murdered and shoved into shallow graves or buried without ceremony and longing for the respect they are due. They are the innocent dead, killed before their time and wanting only to taste the life they never really knew.
Like Monsters, our preceding release, it is partially written "in character" by a SAVE researcher attempting to categorize and understand the living dead, and partially written for players and Chill Masters to allow them make full use of this horrifying class of creatures.
Undead includes:
· Further insight into the history and workings of SAVE (the Eternal Society of the Silver way, dedicated to investigating and combatting the Unknown)
· 10 (or more!) new undead creatures, including the grotesque penangallen and the fearsome lich
· An in-depth look at how different undead creatures come to be, including discussion of the role these beings occupy in different cultures
· New pregenerated characters to be use as support or as PCs
· A new campaign-length case written by Morgan A. McLaughlin McFarland, one of the contributors to all of the Chill 3rd Ed line
· A brand-new comic by Leonard O'Grady
· New Edges & Drawbacks
Lovecraft’s The Dreamlands Christmas Cards and Gift Paper by Studio WonderCabinet
(Campaign Ends : Friday 3rd November 2017; 03:00 UTC)
This is the third Kickstarter from Studio WonderCabinet creating Mythos themed Christmas cards. I’ve backed the last two campaigns and have been very happy with the cards. Needless to say, as soon as they launched this years selection, I joined in the festivities again.
This years selection comes in the form of two packs of cards – each including four different designs plus the Cats of Ulthar design in each – as well as Cthulhu Christmas Wrapping Paper for the first time. This years’ theme is the Dreamlands, with earlier sets King in Yellow and Cthulhu also available to backers. All the art is by illustrator Heather Hudson, who some may recognise from her Magic: The Gathering and Delta Green work.
In addition to the cards and wrapping paper four Gift Tags are now being sent free to all physical backers, with electronic versions being including in the digital reward levels, courtesy of being unlock as a stretch goal.
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If you like what we do here at EN World (the Forums, Columns, News, ENnies, etc) and would like to help support us to bring you MORE please consider supporting our Patreon. Even a single dollar helps Thanks!
**********
If you have a forthcoming Kickstarter, or see one that excites you, please feel free to drop me an email on angus.abranson@gmail.com You can follow me on Twitter @ Angus_A or on Facebook where I often post about gaming.
Until next week, have fun and happy gaming!
Angus Abranson
Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse by Derek A. Kamal
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 2nd November 2017; 15:22 UTC)
Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse is a FATE based RPG set in Thunder City. USA, and tells the stories of the city mice and motorcycle clubs.
For small creatures existing in a place which doesn’t belong to them, these stories will be filled with the drama of their lives, and the trouble, both inside and outside, of a biker gang. Will your gang be Robin Hood-like doers of good, springing cheese from unwatched refrigerators and delivering it to needy widows, or will you be thugs and thieves exploiting the weak? Your mouse, your bike, and your gang all belong to you and the stories you tell at your table.
Thunder City is home to the only mice in the world who have figured out combustion engines. Since that time they've organized themselves into clubs and gone about their business, often bumping into one another in conflicts over cheese and territory. There are:
· The Spanner Murine Motorcycle Club: The finest mechanics and the most arrogant gang in the city. They're snooty little mice but they can back it up, or so they say.
· The Asphalt Avengers: If speed had a fan club it would be these crazed rodents. Their whole club life is based around the next incredible kick, and not much else. It's a high-velocity life for them.
· The Bardlings: Not all clubs are about territory and "business"; some simply want freedom from the usual mouse's life of scrounging and fretting. So the Bardlings are just that, strumming their matchbox guitars and beating thimble-sized bongos late into the night.
· Plus the Ocho Necro, The Wailing Sisters, and more!
Besides the mice, there are territorial felines, chipmunk toughs, crabby crabs, Old Jerry (the graying German Shepherd who guards the ever-important docks), and a whole city full of colorful critters ready to add drama to your stories. With these wheels in motion there is no choice but fun and adventure and gang life.
Alongside the digest (6” x 9”) sized, 150-ish page book and PDF you can also get a set of buttons representing the badges of four of the clubs featured in the game, as well as prints of the gorgeous artwork. Stretch goals are opening up additional settings such as, the already unlocked, Rock ‘n’ Roll Sock Hop Mouse by Craig Campbell which mashes up Grease, The Dukes of Hazzard and Happy Days!
Dragon Drop Adventures 5e Vol. 3 by Dragon Turtle Games
(Campaign Ends : Tuesday 31st October 2017; 18:00 UTC)
Dragon Turtle Games return with the latest instalment of their Dragon Drop Adventures for 5th Edition. Dragon Drop Adventures are designed to be played in one or two sessions and easily dropped into existing campaigns and settings. The adventures are for a variety of levels (in this case for Levels 9 to 12) and suitable for 3 to 5 players.
Each adventure includes a backstory, how to customize or adapt the adventure to your own campaign and/or setting, the adventure itself, players and DM maps, info on how to expand the adventure if you want to turn it into a longer campaign, or use some of the plot hooks in future games, and appendices of the custom NPCs, monsters and magic items featured in the adventure.
The four adventures included in this third volume are as follows:
The Merchant’s Daughter (Level 9): Everybody knows that the famous merchant Sim Sparrowcroft's daughter, Gold, is due to be wed in under 10 days. It's the biggest event of the year!
However, Sim has had a message sent to the party to meet with him immediately. Gold has been kidnapped by Dingeldein's famously violent band of bandits, and he wants you to retrieve her, unharmed.
Unknown to Sim, Gold has not been kidnapped, and after falling in love with Dingeldein, has run off with the bandits of her own accord. How will the party react when they uncover this difficult moral decision?
Dreams of a Baron (Level 10): Baron Julian has fallen into a magical coma, and his personal wizard Strabad is nowhere to be found! The party's reputation precedes them, and the Steward has asked them to assist.
A group of local wizards have devised a way for people to enter into the Baron's dreams, and rescue him from within.
Your party will uncover a story of greed, power, and family conflict once they enter the dreamworld. Do they have what it takes to survive the unpredictable environment, and rescue the Baron?
Return from Nostos Island (Level 11): The legendary island of Nostos has reappeared in the ocean, hundreds of years after it disappeared! Tales tell of grand treasures guarded by horrible beasts lurking on the Island, and a great curse that befalls all those who step onto it's shores. Have your party face off against terrible monsters, and rival adventurers, to claim the vast treasures the island promises!
Murder in the Stormwinds (Level 12): The village of Runnemede is famous for its violent storms, and today is no exception. The party has been caught in a particularly rough storm and has taken refuge, along with the rest of the village, in the stormwind shelter.
Part way through the night, village mayor Cardul is murdered, and all evidence points towards the newcomers, the party. Will the party be able to clear their name, and find the murderer before the storm ends? Or will the real murderer escape justice?
Gobblin’: The Goblin RPG by Drunk and Ugly Games LLC
(Campaign Ends : Friday 10th November 2017; 16:00 UTC)
Gobblin’ is a post-apocalyptic RPG where players take on the roles of… well, goblins. Powered using a d12-based system the game certainly sounds like it should be a lot of fun and well worth checking out.
Everyone knows about goblins. They’re violent and stupid little green guys who with just enough brain cells to know what they’re doing and black enough hearts not to care. They live in fantastic worlds where wizards battle dragons, kingdoms rise and fall, and armies of swordsmen clash to save the world from evil. All the while, there’s always goblins looting corpses and stealing cabbages.
When the higher races grew tired of the chaotic creatures so obnoxious that even the forces of evil didn’t want them around, they banded together to form a spell so powerful that it would reach across the entire realm. With what was essentially a magical, interdimensional eviction notice, every single goblin was hurled through time and space until they landed in what they would come to know as their new home. There were no humans or elves there, but those that had lived there before had left behind a strange world ravaged by war. The least cowardly of the goblins started to prod at the mysterious devices until they roared to life and the goblins cheered to realize their fate!
This world had guns and cars, bazookas and robots! Things that exploded if you poked them enough! Exciting mutants and bombed out apartments that were MUCH cozier than any goblin hut. The goblins had a whole world of abandoned toys to discover, many of which could kill their fellow goblin from twenty paces away. The goblins ran wholeheartedly into their new world, wanting to be the first to discover the strangest mysteries, deadliest weapons and tastiest expired snack cakes of the world they would call Goblin House. The humans were gone from this place. The goblins would thrive in their ruins.
The story of Gobblin’ is about entering a generic post-apocalypse after living in a generic fantasy world for countless generations (it’s only countless because goblins are terrible at history and counting). Goblins adapt surprisingly well to their new home. Their twisted anatomy helps them deal with radiation, spoiled food, and their natural disregard for common safety practices. Their sheer numbers allow them to last long enough to figure out what explodes and what shoots what out of where. It doesn’t take long for them to scatter around the globe, hunkering down in salvaged homes, restaurants and shopping malls and starting to call dibs on all they can find.
Goblins don’t understand what happened to Earth in the slightest. Some have a passing curiosity, but they quickly forget about it when they find a power drill or something that glows in the dark. Goblins have their priorities straight, and that priority is greed. They want shiny valuables, sharp tools, tasty food, weapons of great and confusing power, and the means to lord over their fellow goblins. If they’re lucky, they can find something that gives them all of the above. After all, this high tech world generated a lot of strange things in a desperate arms race before their end. Dibis found a tool that fires beams of light to burn your foes! Kep tells stories of a magical armored vehicle that speaks to you when you approach. The shamans warn young goblins against going into the caves of Deepdown, since giant serpentine creatures slither in the dark protecting shiny and tasty treasures.Any goblin that looks long and hard enough will find something of interest, even if finding loot also means finding trouble.
Frozen Skies RPG for Savage Worlds by Ian Liddle
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 1st November 2017; 16:00 UTC)
Frozen Skies is an interesting “post war diesel-punk” setting of aviators and sky pirates that I first heard about a few years ago when Stephen Hughes, the author, contacted me for some advice. The 120-page book has been written and the campaign is primarily to raise money for artwork.
The setting of Frozen Skies is the continent of Alyeska, the most northern landmass of the world of Darmonica and is often referred to as either the ‘rooftop of the world’ or ‘Darmonica’s Crown’. It is an icy frontier plagued by savage beasts, cut-throat sky pirates, harsh weather and eons old dark secrets. It is a barely tamed land where the most basic of utilities are hard to come by and tend to lie on the good side of unreliable at best. But despite all this there are opportunities for a man to make a name and, more ideally, coin for himself.
Alyeska itself is dominated by savage beasts known as Wulvers, wolf like creatures that’ve plagued Alyeska since its earliest Colonial days. The Commonwealth had troops stationed in Alyeska to defend its fledging colony against the beasts, though they were steadily whittled away to satisfy the Commonwealth’s war efforts. As the defenses were weakened the Wulvers gradually overran more and more territory, in the end the Alyeskans were forced to hide behind fortified walls and increasingly rely on air travel to maintain contact with far-flung outposts.
Despite the Wulvers the other great powers of Darmonica have their own interest in Alyeska, chiefly for the ruins and artefacts of the Ancient Terrans buried beneath the ice and for a mineral by-product of the Blast known as Glimmer Rock. Until it was altered by the energies released in the explosion it was a previously unremarkable mineral, now it is the fuel for a new Industrial Revolution that the world finds itself on the cusp of....but only if the new technology can be made viable.
The book not only includes the setting, extra Savage Worlds Hindrances, Edges, two new races, an adventure generator, aircraft creation rules and more - but also several adventures, including a multi-part campaign called Fool’s Errand.
Undead – A Sourcebook for Chill 3rd Edition horror RPG by Matthew McFarland
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 1st November 2017; 02:00 UTC)
Undead is the third sourcebook for Chill 3rd Edition. This 120-page, full-color antagonist sourcebook, explores the creatures of the Unknown that animate the bodies of the dead. These creatures aren't the mindless, hungry, infectious zombies of cinema. They are the spurned and jilted lovers who come back from the grave seeking a mouldering kiss. They are the wronged dead, the unhallowed dead, murdered and shoved into shallow graves or buried without ceremony and longing for the respect they are due. They are the innocent dead, killed before their time and wanting only to taste the life they never really knew.
Like Monsters, our preceding release, it is partially written "in character" by a SAVE researcher attempting to categorize and understand the living dead, and partially written for players and Chill Masters to allow them make full use of this horrifying class of creatures.
Undead includes:
· Further insight into the history and workings of SAVE (the Eternal Society of the Silver way, dedicated to investigating and combatting the Unknown)
· 10 (or more!) new undead creatures, including the grotesque penangallen and the fearsome lich
· An in-depth look at how different undead creatures come to be, including discussion of the role these beings occupy in different cultures
· New pregenerated characters to be use as support or as PCs
· A new campaign-length case written by Morgan A. McLaughlin McFarland, one of the contributors to all of the Chill 3rd Ed line
· A brand-new comic by Leonard O'Grady
· New Edges & Drawbacks
Lovecraft’s The Dreamlands Christmas Cards and Gift Paper by Studio WonderCabinet
(Campaign Ends : Friday 3rd November 2017; 03:00 UTC)
This is the third Kickstarter from Studio WonderCabinet creating Mythos themed Christmas cards. I’ve backed the last two campaigns and have been very happy with the cards. Needless to say, as soon as they launched this years selection, I joined in the festivities again.
This years selection comes in the form of two packs of cards – each including four different designs plus the Cats of Ulthar design in each – as well as Cthulhu Christmas Wrapping Paper for the first time. This years’ theme is the Dreamlands, with earlier sets King in Yellow and Cthulhu also available to backers. All the art is by illustrator Heather Hudson, who some may recognise from her Magic: The Gathering and Delta Green work.
In addition to the cards and wrapping paper four Gift Tags are now being sent free to all physical backers, with electronic versions being including in the digital reward levels, courtesy of being unlock as a stretch goal.
**********
If you like what we do here at EN World (the Forums, Columns, News, ENnies, etc) and would like to help support us to bring you MORE please consider supporting our Patreon. Even a single dollar helps Thanks!
**********
If you have a forthcoming Kickstarter, or see one that excites you, please feel free to drop me an email on angus.abranson@gmail.com You can follow me on Twitter @ Angus_A or on Facebook where I often post about gaming.
Until next week, have fun and happy gaming!
Angus Abranson
