Cosmere Overtakes Avatar Legends To Become Biggest TTRPG Kickstarter Ever!

With a full five days left to go, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG has passed Avatar Legends' record of $9.5M to become the highest funding tabletop roleplaying game podcast ever! Just its first-day total of $4.3M put it at #4 in the official Million Dollar Kickstarter Club, and it looks set to comfortably set a lead of at least $2M. Backer Tracker currently projects a total of just under $12M, while Kicktraq predicts $12.3M.

Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarter Club

Avatar Legends leads the pack in an exclusive club -- Kickstarters for tabletop roleplaying game products which have broken the $1M barrier! It is currently the most successful TTRPG Kickstarter in history with a funding total of nearly $10M, and over 80,000 backers. [UPDATE--Backerkit started...

www.enworld.org

While the backer count is under half that of Avatar, the Cosmere dollar total is currently sitting at nearly $9.8M. Brandon Sanderson already holds the Kickstarter record for the most funded project ever--his novel series made over $40M on Kickstarter in 2023!

Published by Brotherwise Games, the game encompasses Brandon Sanderson's entire universe of novels. It includes a world guide, a rulebook, and an adventure called Stormlight Stonewalkers. It's a new game system, based on a d20 mechanic with talent trees and skill-based magic.

It only remains to be seen how far it can go--but one thing is for sure: Brandon Sanderson has yet another world record to his name!

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[pete284]

Definitely will hit $14 million, very pleased for them but I do wonder how many people will be playing it in 12 months time

 

[Parmandur]

Definitely will hit $14 million, very pleased for them but I do wonder how many people will be playing it in 12 months time

Qhelp, apparently they have the budget now to fully fund development for the next 4 years per their Backer comments., so lack of support won't be an issue. Based on what they are laying down, the game itself juat as far as the rules go looks promising: the popularity of the subject matter is only growing.

 

[Parmandur]

50k Backers, past $14 million, licestream starts in 15.

 

[bedir than]

In these final 40 minutes or so Cosmere is going to wind up very close to the sum total of the previous #1 and #2 ttrpg Kickstarters combined. Their final 48 hours have been exceptional.

 

[Parmandur]

Final tally:

52,641 backers pledged $14,555,408 to help bring this project to life.

 

[Cergorach]

Something weird going on with this KS. The time has run out, but you can still back this KS (and people are)...

 

[dbm]

There is a ‘late pledge’ feature which is active. I haven’t seen that before. They must have gotten fed up of people raising another $XXX dollars on backerkit after the initial campaign ended (and missing their cut of that).

 

[Eilathen]

I don't know...I just think it's a bit unfair to count this (and also the Avatar KS) as a TTRPG Kickstarter. Sure, there is a RPG in there, but no RPG that has not a famous novel author or IP behind it will ever raise that kind of money.
With Avatar, the backercount alone shows you that it is an outlier, not even Sanderson could pull off those numbers (over 80000). There were a looooot of backers who were never interested in the Avatar RPG, just in the lore-book aspect for their favorite TV Show.
Same goes for this one. There are a lot of fans of the novels who are mainly interested in the lorebooks and art. Also also, technically, this KS was for 2 RPGs, not just one.

So both of those KS "at the front" of the $$ list were kind of "cheating".

So for me, the most successful pure TTRPG crowdfunder to date is the MCDM one (4.6 Mio, iirc).

Now with that being said, it's still pretty astounding what the Cosmere KS pulled off. And the Avatar one for that matter.

What I would really like to see is how much $$ Critical Role could pull in if they did a TTRPG crowdfunder. Unfortunately (or maybe not), so far they have gone via the traditional publishing route. Which honestly, I like. Not putting all the risk on the consumer, but taking it on themselves.

 

[Morrus]

I don't know...I just think it's a bit unfair to count this (and also the Avatar KS) as a TTRPG Kickstarter.

Unfair to whom?

 

[Parmandur]

There are a lot of fans of the novels who are mainly interested in the lorebooks and art.

Not based on the pledges: most people whether for the all-in pledge tiers, which included all the gaming paraphernalia, so this thesis is clearly off-kilter.