Are We Looking At A New RPG Kickstarter Record?

The current record for an RPG Kickstarter is John Wick's 7th Sea 2nd Edition, which made just over $1.3 million in about a month. Matt Colville looks like he might leave that in the dust with Strongholds & Streaming, however, having raised nearly half a million dollars in about 5 hours at the time of posting this, with a month to go!

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Strongholds & Streaming is a dual Kickstarter - first to produce a 128-page hardcover book about building strongholds and attracting followers for D&D 5th Edition; and then with stretch goals related to Colville's streaming channel.

You can build four stronghold types - keeps, towers, temples, and establishments; these roughly correlate to warriors, arcane casters, divine casters, and rogue-types. The stronghold improves your class abilities, and attracts followers.

Stretch goals include miniatures, more pages, an an adventure (so far - he's blown through all those on there right now already).

You can see this epic Kickstarter here. I've never seen an RPG Kickstarter blow up quite so fast in so short a time!

Matt Colville writes the Critical Role comic, and has worked on various tabletop gaming projects, including the recent Star Trek RPG. He has worked on various mass-combat and starship combat rulesets. In addition, he runs a big YouTube channel about tabletop RPGs (D&D especially).

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[Hussar]

Interesting read. So, yeah, I imagine there's some degree of surprise there.

 

[iamntbatman]

I really, really wanted to back this, but my physical address will be in limbo around the time the physical stuff gets shipped so I'll just wait to buy the book once I have a (vaguely) forever home and can start buying books again without worrying about lugging them across continents.

I'm excited to watch Matt's stream as I've really enjoyed his videos. I think he'll run a really different sort of game from something like Critical Role. More tactical and fiddly, less Hollywood but more strategic play and, well, stuff like we'd expect based on him doing a book like this. The minis are a little bit out of my reach right now as I've only got a single mini to my name and would want to build up a solid collection of basic monsters and NPCs before getting giant dragons, but I'd really like to own the book. While I have little interest in playing in the old AD&D style of hiring enough people to drag the gold out of the dungeon back to town, I do think it would be really cool to build some sort of stronghold and hire certain types of people that could be used in interesting ways.

I'm also generally really excited that someone with Matt Colville's approach to gaming is earning himself such a big following and is able to release content to such impressive fanfare. I think it really does show how much a charismatic (video!) social media presence can do for you. Imagine if the people at Kobold Press or something similar had such a presence! They'd be swimming in money and doing all sorts of neat things with it.

 

[schnee]

Uhh even Matt Coleville didn’t know. So you can say you are on his side but his opinion was that he was shocked at the success of the Kickstarter.

He was shocked at the degree; but, he knows where he's been spending his time, where he's finding his fans, where his other opportunities are coming from, how things are different now than before, where he's spent the most time marketing himself and this Kickstarter, and all the different channels this thing could have reached people through.

So, just because he is shocked at the degree doesn't negate the fact that he has a damn good idea of where it came from - and more importantly, where it didn't come from.

Yeah sure why not. His guess is as good as anyone else.

Nah. The corollary - "anyone else's guess is as good as his" - is laughably stupid.

The guesses of other successful professional publishers and game designers who work in media are worth way more than most.

The guesses of people with no experience at all in publishing, social media, game design, marketing, or the like are worth next to nothing.

What experience backs up your guess?

 

[Shasarak]

Nah. The corollary - "anyone else's guess is as good as his" - is laughably stupid.

The guesses of other successful professional publishers and game designers who work in media are worth way more than most.

The guesses of people with no experience at all in publishing, social media, game design, marketing, or the like are worth next to nothing.

What experience backs up your guess?

Mat is a professional fiction writer so the thought that he could not make up a good story is, as you say, "laughably stoopid".

 

[R_Chance]

Mat is a professional fiction writer so the thought that he could not make up a good story is, as you say, "laughably stoopid".

Matt may be excellent, I don't know. I thought his kickstarter was a good idea. Their are plenty of professional writers who, imho, have a hard time coming up with a good story though

 

[KahlessNestor]

And considering the fact that he hasn't been on these boards, and many didn't even know who he was...yeah, he knows where his support came from, and it wasn't from here. So why call him a liar? Pretty much his ONLY advertising for this KS was through his YouTube channel. He didn't pay for ads on EN World or anywhere else.

And I've read his two novels. They're pretty good. Waiting on the third.

 

[darjr]

[MENTION=6801311]KahlessNestor[/MENTION] awe cmon man. I don’t think anyone is calling him a lier.

 

[R_Chance]

And considering the fact that he hasn't been on these boards, and many didn't even know who he was...yeah, he knows where his support came from, and it wasn't from here. So why call him a liar? Pretty much his ONLY advertising for this KS was through his YouTube channel. He didn't pay for ads on EN World or anywhere else.

And I've read his two novels. They're pretty good. Waiting on the third.

I'm not sure who called him a liar. It helps if you attribute things like that so they can respond. As for his books, I'll try one (Priest I think) and get back to you. Amazon has them, I'll add one to my next order...

 

[Morrus]

And considering the fact that he hasn't been on these boards, and many didn't even know who he was...yeah, he knows where his support came from, and it wasn't from here. So why call him a liar? Pretty much his ONLY advertising for this KS was through his YouTube channel. He didn't pay for ads on EN World or anywhere else.

Strangely aggressive.

Nobody has called him a liar. Are you OK?

 

[darjr]

What’s more is I don’t think anyone in this thread even seems to be implying he’s lied. I certainly haven’t. Dirty pool man.