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!

​

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).

[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

 

[pehaimi]

FWIW, I backed the Cytosis Board game from Genius Games (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/geniusgames/subatomic-an-atom-building-board-game). The project was "EU friendly", whatever that means. Generally, the process went smoothly and I think the total postage fee was about 16 euros to Lithuania. No other fees or taxes were added. BTW, why is Lithuania not in the list of countries for your kickstarter? Lithuania is in EU and Eurozone, so the currency and regulations are the same as in Germany or Finland.

 

[dalisprime]

I'm actually surprised Usus would be paying a customs fee on the book - I've ordered books from the US before and the only time I got slapped with a customs fee was when the book got incorrectly marked down as a game rather than a book. Normally, no issue with that, though I guess that depends on the individual country.
That said... Establishing a contract with a shipping company within the EU would alleviate any customs fee charges from your European backers. Take Gloomhaven as example - with a cost of almost 100 bucks on its own, after customs and handling fees it would have easily ended up costing in excess of 150 dollars to get the game, but Isaac had the good sense of getting a Germany based company to handle European shipment for him from their warehouse which helped avoid that extra cost.

 

[Shasarak]

Good luck to Matt with the kickstarter.

However, it is a good example of what frustrates me, when it comes to RPG kickstarters. Being in Europe, shipping is 22 dollars, and since the projekt (afaik) is not EU friendly, I can expect a tax (and service) for an additional 20 dollars. The pledge at 30 dollars easily becomes a total of more than 70 dollars.
Matt's project is far from the only RPG kickstarter not to consider shipping and taxes outside of the States. However, when it comes to board game kickstarters most them do consider this, and strive to at least be EU friendly.
I don't know why one group of projects generally consider this, and the other group does not, but it is frustrating.

Personally I think that $22 for shipping is much better then many other Kickstarters that I have backed in the past. Some of them wanted to charge over $50 for shipping to NZ.

 

[Morrus]

Some of them wanted to charge over $50 for shipping to NZ.

Nobody, but nobody wants to charge shipping. Shipping costs are imposed by the postal services, not by creators on Kickstarter. Every Kickstarter creator hates the shipping issue.

 

[Shasarak]

Nobody, but nobody wants to charge shipping. Shipping costs are imposed by the postal services, not by creators on Kickstarter. Every Kickstarter creator hates the shipping issue.

It appears that some kickstarters can get a better deal on shipping then other kickstarters.

So good on ya, Matt.

 

[Morrus]

What mean is, when the package reaches the Denmark, there is added a customs tax and assessing fee, and I have to pay that to authorities, before I can receive the package.

If the package is send from within EU, then there is no such custom taxes and fee. That is what is termed EU friendly by kickstarters. There are several board game kickstarters, that have a specific logo on their projects.

I hope that clarified it

Sent from my [device_name] using EN World mobile app

I've never had that with books. I did with some dice once (£19 customs charge for a wooden die - I let the post office keep the die; no die is worth £19 to me!), but books have never had a customs fee attached.

[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

 

[Rhineglade]

Never underestimate the amazing talent of these folks and for the fans who love them!

 

[Usus]

I've never had that with books. I did with some dice once (£19 customs charge for a wooden die - I let the post office keep the die; no die is worth £19 to me!), but books have never had a customs fee attached.

[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

At least in Denmark it applies to books. So ordering books from US is easily quite expensive, so one usually tries to a British seller.

Sent from my [device_name] using EN World mobile app

 

[Usus]

I'm actually surprised Usus would be paying a customs fee on the book - I've ordered books from the US before and the only time I got slapped with a customs fee was when the book got incorrectly marked down as a game rather than a book. Normally, no issue with that, though I guess that depends on the individual country.
That said... Establishing a contract with a shipping company within the EU would alleviate any customs fee charges from your European backers. Take Gloomhaven as example - with a cost of almost 100 bucks on its own, after customs and handling fees it would have easily ended up costing in excess of 150 dollars to get the game, but Isaac had the good sense of getting a Germany based company to handle European shipment for him from their warehouse which helped avoid that extra cost.

It might be a Danish thing with the customs for books.

Sent from my [device_name] using EN World mobile app

 

[Morrus]

Approaching $700K. This is quite amazing!