RPG Crowdfunding News 086: Strongholds & Streaming, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, The Pallid Ma

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.

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.


Strongholds & Streaming by Matt Colville
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 11th March 2018; 15:01 UTC)

It’s going to be very difficult to top Strongholds & Streaming this year. The campaign is the biggest tabletop RPG Kickstarter campaign to date, knocking John Wicks’ 7th Sea off the top spot by passing the latter’s $1.3 million funding with sixteen days left to run… and it’s just kept on growing.

The campaigns main goal was to produce a 5th Edition sourcebook for building Strongholds and attracting Followers for your character(s). The book started off at 128 pages but has grown, and is continuing to grow, due to stretch goals.

More than just a set of rules and charts, this book also describes a style of play that assumes your character becomes more interested in influencing the world around them. You’ll still adventure and fight monsters, but this supplement gives you tons of fun things to do during your downtime.

Maybe only one or two players in any group are interested in this sort of thing, but it only takes one character building a stronghold to radically change the nature of a campaign and introduce new narrative opportunities for DM and players alike! Huge new story opportunities arise! This book includes tons of examples for DMs to inspire them.


The book grants new character options and opens the game up to a more political arena where nearby local powers, both good and evil, take an interest in the PCs and what they’re up to. It looks at a number of different types of Strongholds (Keeps; Towers; Temples; Establishments) which will give different benefits including helping you raise armies, generate revenue, or help with research into spells. Characters can also receive special class feature improvements and, of course, attract followers.

The book looks great in its own right but there is a secondary aspect to the campaign – to help raise money to get a lease on studio space to film, and stream, Matt Colville’s next game from character creations onwards, which certainly helped galvanise Matt’s thousands of existing fans on Critical Role, Twitch and Youtube (and elsewhere).

It’s safe to say that Matt can probably afford some really good looking studio space now.


Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea
(Campaign Ends : Saturday 10th March 2018; 00:23 UTC)

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is a book designed to help all of us GMs get more out of our RPGs by preparing less. The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master uses the experiences of thousands of GMs to help us focus on how we prepare our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games. It includes practical steps for focusing our preparation activities on those things that will bring the biggest impact to our game.

Five years ago, the Lazy Dungeon Master offered a simplifed approach for preparing fantasy RPGs with one clear directive: prepare only what most benefits our games. This focus on lightweight preparation and improvisational preparation resonated with many GMs over the past five years.

But during that time and with the release of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the world of fantasy roleplaying has changed and expanded. With five years of new systems and new ideas, all GMs have a wealth of experiences to share and explore to help us prepare and run great RPGs. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Masterbuilds off of the concepts of the well-received GM's guidebook Lazy Dungeon Master, updating that book with five years of new experiences, new approaches, and new observations of the way people prepare and run RPGs. This new book is a completely self-contained work, which does not require anyone to have previously read The Lazy Dungeon Master.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers a new focused approach for preparing and running our roleplaying games. The book includes an eight-step guide for lightweight game preparation and is focused on how we prepare for our games, how we run our games, and how we think about our games.

Based on research involving hundreds of books, videos, articles, and interviews with top Gamemasters, as well as thousands of results from Gamemaster surveys, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master helps us understand the best tips and tricks used by GMs all over the world to bring the most fun to our games.

Prepare what benefits your game.



The Pallid Mask: King in Yellow tiki mug & RPG by Jonathan Chaffin
(Campaign Ends : Tuesday 6th March 2018; 18:15 UTC)

The Pallid Mask is another campaign that only partially consists of a roleplay item. In this case the primary focus of the campaign is to raise money for a King in Yellow inspired 8 inch tiki mug, but there are other items also available such as an enamel pin, replica theatre tickets, coasters, the Shores of Carcosa Mai Tai Glass and, of course, the RPG adventure.

The Pallid Mask: Shores of Carcosa uses the open source D6 system. The module “follows our investigators through a twisted Portland being suborned by the King in Yellow and his cultists. The Module will include story hooks, encounters, custom character sheets, art and handouts and more…including alternate rules to “activate” other ephemera from the collection in-game.”

A preview is currently available on DriveThruRPG.


Vagabonds of Dyfed RPG: OSR meets PbtA by Sigil Stone Publishing
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 8th March 2018; 16:00 UTC)

Vagabonds of Dyfed is designed to emulate the skullduggery and thrill of old-school rpgs with updated mechanics. It takes the hardcore ideals of emergent storytelling and fictional positioning, and slots into an atomically small Powered by the Apocalypse mechanic. It also just has a single pledge level… $10 gets you the PDF and a print on demand ‘at cost’ coupon.

Our design goals were simple: make a game that's mechanically compatible with OSR retroclones (and their mountains of content) while leveraging the compact but non-binary PbtA system.

· A single PbtA "move" core: 2d6 + mod, tiered results
· Player-generated character traits instead of predefined playbooks or attributes
· High character lethality
· Strong GM authority

Vagabonds picks the pockets of greater games: World of Dungeons, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Barbarians of Lemuria, Blades in the Dark, City of Mist, the Black Hack and the White Hack, and of course the grandaddy of them all: Moldvay's venerable Basic.

The game itself is as lean as we can make it, clocking in at around 120 pages jam-packed with rules and examples. It's written and laid out specifically to be easy to comprehend with a single skim or quickly referenced at the table. We've even gone so far as to make distinct layouts for print and PDF to make each format as useful as possible.

People've been rehashing dungeon-crawlers for over forty years; rather than try to reinvent the wheel, Vagabonds takes advantage of all that existing material.

There are literally thousands of adventures and modules that we want to tap into, but there's room for mechanical improvement in both OSR and PbtA. Vagabonds unifies the feel of B/X with the benefit of flexible characters and gradient outcomes.

Basically, Vagabonds is a collection of components from games that fit together well and align with our preference for old-school dungeon crawlers. No fuss, no real innovation, just a game that makes OSR adventures even more enjoyable.

If you liked World of Dungeons but wanted more heft, or you thought Dungeon World was too close to new-school story games, or you wished there was some more variability in characters and outcomes from LotFP, then Vagabonds is designed for you.



A Quest on the edge of extinction in a war between worlds by John Dodd
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 11th March 2018; 12:00 UTC)

Quest is a fantasy RPG set in the aftermath of a centuries old war, between the Viahem and the Mesohem, that has left the world broken. However, as one war ends another begins as alien invaders, who have been watching and waiting for the war to finish, invade so they can finish off a weakened and demoralised people. ”But those who were left were not the ragged remnants of once proud civilisations, they were the chosen of Alenis, Goddess of the Viahem, and they would not yield their hard won lands to the invaders.”

Quest is easy to learn, designed to get the game going without having to spend several hours learning how to play. Character creation can be done within five minutes if players have an idea of what they want to do, and there are no limitations to what a character can do. No character classes, no alignments, a character is the sum total of what they can do, of where they came from.

Of who they are.

Magic is not limited by the lists that we put together when playtesting, but made free for all to build in the way they always imagined. Spells are built using individual components, you can make a fireball if you want, but say you wanted to make a fireball that could travel more than a mile, or one that burned for an hour when it went off? It's all there if you want to do it.

Much of the known world was lost in the world war that came before the days of the invaders. Only now are adventurers venturing forth to discover what was lost in the wars.

And then there's the adventures. I've been running games for more than thirty years, and the games that work best are the ones where there's more to do that just hit things around a maze. In the playtesting of this, we came up with several different scenarios, some of which are in the stretch goals, all of which involve more than just hitting things, from the discovery of the secrets that shaped the world, to the search for the ages before and the technologies that were lost, the forgotten from the world war that all the characters survived.

What's included in the Main Rule book?

An overview of the world, every continent and major city that the characters could come from. This lets the characters make informed decisions on where they wanted to come from, what life they wanted to lead before they became adventurers. What they're likely to want, now that they are adventurers.

The catalogue of creatures that roam the world, presented as they are seen in the wild. I took a different approach to the presentation of monsters, considering that if you found something truly dangerous out in the wild, you wouldn't just sit there with a sketchbook, trying to get all the detail, you'd sketch it from a safe location, or you'd sketch it from what you remembered. Creatures come in several different classifications, the harmless ones are drawn in detail, the dangerous ones may just contain some errors where the person drawing them was a little too nervous to get the detail right.

All the rules you need to take your character from apprentice to master, explained clearly and concisely. A magic system that allows you to craft spells the way you want them, rather than having to choose from things made by other people's imagination. A list of all the equipment and weapons that a character could want, from the mundane to the unique.

A rich and diverse campaign world, with a backstory reaching back through all the different ages that came before it, though none so dangerous as the one the characters are now coming to. The world has been through many ages, and the characters are now living what might be the last age of the Viahem.



The Midgard Audio Collection by Wes Otis
(Campaign Ends : Monday 12th March 2018; 17:19 UTC)

Wes Otis’ Plate Mail Games have teamed up with Kobold Press to bring us The Midgard Audio Collection. The collection is an impressive array of audio tracks covering locations all over Kobold Press’ Midgard setting. The aim is to produce 80 tracks in total, 50 are available straight off the bat, with 30 more becoming unlocked through stretch goals… which the campaign is already going through.

“Each track is a 10-minute long background location that loops seamlessly. When you are preparing your adventure, you can create a playlist on your favorite audio software that plays MP3s, such as iTunes. When the group reaches a location in your game, you start the track on repeat and play out the scene. The tracks add depth to the story without distracting from it. When the players move on to a different location, you simply change tracks.”

In addition to being able to pledge for the Midgard collection, you can also pledge at higher levels to include the Plate Mail Games Environmental Collection, which supplies 40 tracks focusing on common outdoor locations such as forests, mountains, and plains, or the PMG Fantasy Collection that guves you over 250 tracks that will take you on a journey through cities, magical locations, underground domains and more.


The Wyrmwood Adventurer’s Arsenal by Wyrmwood Gaming
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 8th march 2018; 07:00 UTC)

Wyrmwood Gaming are no strangers to *big* Kickstarter campaigns and this campaign is certainly no exception. Originally after $10,000 they have already cleared several hundred thousand dollars in backing for their Adventurer’s Arsenal tabletop RPG companion. The Adventurer’s Arsenal is a storage tray for dice and miniatures, a dice tray and also a pencil, available either as part of the set or individually.

Wyrmwood have developed a reputation for producing some really great quality wooden items but bewarned, the pricing matches the quality… especially when we’re talking about using exotic woods.

The starting prices for the items available are $60 for the Master Vault, $50 for the Wyrmwood Pencil, $60 for the Personal Dice Tray, and $170 for the Full Adventurer’s Arsenal. Those are starting prices though, depending on your wood selection you could be looking at $580 for a Master Vault, $500 for the Personal Tray and $420 for the Wyrmwood Pencil (prices based on Snakewood being chosen).


The Master Vault
The core of the Adventurer's Arsenal is the Master Vault, a hardwood case which houses everything a player needs for their RPG session. The Master Vault can hold a miniature and up to three sets of dice using the specially designed, foam-lined mortises within. Powerful rare-earth magnets make sure the Master Vault closes securely, while a thumb notch allows you to easily open it.


The Personal Tray
The Personal Dice Tray is designed for single-player use, giving you an arena of your very own in which to decide your fate. The solid hardwood walls surround the rolling surface, crafted from stone-oiled water buffalo leather, to keep your rolls contained and on the table.

The Master Vault fits within the Personal Dice Tray when closed, allowing all of the components of the Adventurer's Arsenal to be easily stored and carried.

Pledges that include both a Master Vault and Personal Dice Tray will include a complimentary leather strap for each set.



The Wyrmwood Pencil
Finally, the Wyrmwood Pencil: truly an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Each and every pencil is hand-turned by our craftsmen, resulting in a beautiful finish. A built-in sharpener allows you to easily keep it writing its best. Thoughtful contours complete the design, ensuring that it feels natural in the hand.

Each Wyrmwood Pencil pledged for will include a complimentary high-polymer eraser. Of course, the Wyrmwood Pencil fits securely in any of the three oblong mortises within the Master Vault.



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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
 

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Connorsrpg

Adventurer
I am on board for the Strongholds & Followers. Matt and i seem to share a very similar approach to running games. (If I had to recommend to my players someone to watch on the net, it would definitely be Matt).

Loved the 1st Lazy DM, so backed that too.

As a group (well one of our players) we also backed a 5E Pirate Kickstarter that looks very interesting :)
 

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