I’m not sure if a cottagecore is my thing, but I’ll be buying it sight unseen because Kij Johnson is writing/developing it. She’s one of my favorite authors.
Yes. The Kickstarter was run under Rich Thomas’ account, but that’s because he’s the head of Onyx Path. They started doing Kickstarters when accounts had to be in a person’s name, not a company’s.
I would have loved to have selected five or more games!
My three were:
Ars Magica Definitive Edition
Dolmenwood
The Between
Close runners up were:
Stonetop (I ultimately didn’t choose it because I wasn’t confident it would actually come out this year.)
Curseborne
Coriolis: The Great Dark...
I agree that Apocalypse World does this well. There’s a fantasy/medieval hack of 2nd edition that I played for a while.
Savage Worlds also handles groups of followers well, though it doesn’t really feature in any of its settings.
I would have nominated The Between, but it’s already been nominated. I’ll nominate:
Ars Magica Definitive Edition
https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/atlas-games/ars-magica-5th-edition-definitive
Dolmenwood
https://necroticgnome.com/pages/about-dolmenwood
Yeah, the Book of Vile Darkness was firmly wedged in a 13 year old boy’s idea of what’s vile and dark. My group dubbed it “The Book of Tiddies and Gore”.
I had the same reactions. There’s a lot of marketing fluff on how unique it’s going to be, but nothing about the actual setting. The art's cool, but that only goes so far. It really doesn’t inspire confidence to me. It’s so vague and unfocused that it set of all sorts of red flags.
That’s what more or less guided my choices: Balance/tuning and compatibility with the new versions of the classes.
For example, I really like the Bladesinger, but it was already revised fairly recently in Tasha's, so I didn’t choose it. The Swashbuckler, OTOH, had features that are now...
I’m also happy to buy books I know I will enjoy reading, even if I’m unlikely to use them. A lot of Ars Magica's supplements fall into that category for me.
Even apart from the hypocrisy, the plan makes no sense. It reads like a bunch of tech buzzwords thrown around without reason. A solution in search of a problem, as it were.
It looked really cool, and I chipped in a bit to follow the updates. Do you know if you’ll be offering it as a POD? I don’t like reading lots of setting info in PDFs.