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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[Morrus]

On his Instagram, Sanderson said that they are genuinely shocked, as they were internally projecting that this would be a couple million, maybe, similar to the Cosmere miniatures Kickstarter Brotherwise ran a few years ago.

Interesting, as nobody else was! Literally everybody I spoke to predicted this.

 

[Parmandur]

Interesting, as nobody else was! Literally everybody I spoke to predicted this.

Yeah, I agree, it is pretty funny: though it makes a bit more sense if they were figuring the average per backer would be way lower (the Stormlight minis averaged $186.80 from 21,966 people), as this really popped because the majority of backers are going for the all-in tiers.

Source:

Brandon Sanderson on Instagram: "The Cosmere® RPG with @brotherwisegames is now the #1 TTRPG Kickstarter of all time! As always, thank you. You guys are awesome. #CosmereRPG #TTRPG #BrandonSanderson"

13K likes, 175 comments - brandsanderson on August 23, 2024: "The Cosmere® RPG with @brotherwisegames is now the #1 TTRPG Kickstarter of all time! As always, thank you. You guys are awesome. #CosmereRPG #TTRPG #BrandonSanderson".

www.instagram.com

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, I agree, it is pretty funny: though it makes a bit more sense if they were figuring the average per backer would be way lower (the Stormlight minis averaged $186.80 from 21,966 people), as this really popped because the majority of backers are going for the all-in tiers.

Source:

Brandon Sanderson on Instagram: "The Cosmere® RPG with @brotherwisegames is now the #1 TTRPG Kickstarter of all time! As always, thank you. You guys are awesome. #CosmereRPG #TTRPG #BrandonSanderson"

13K likes, 175 comments - brandsanderson on August 23, 2024: "The Cosmere® RPG with @brotherwisegames is now the #1 TTRPG Kickstarter of all time! As always, thank you. You guys are awesome. #CosmereRPG #TTRPG #BrandonSanderson".

www.instagram.com

Maybe a spot of diplomatic modesty.

 

[Parmandur]

Maybe a spot of diplomatic modesty.

Possibly, this does happen all the time with Dragonsteel, though: they had pretty significant logistical problems with the big novel Kickstarter as they had to print half a million more novels than their high end plans.

 

[mamba]

Sanderson & Co. actually tend to be pretty sober and down to Earth with business projections, as a rule. They expected to get maybe 25k backers for the 4 Secret Novels project, and had to go to the book binders with an order of 185,000 books after getting a top estimate for 30k....

if your estimates are consistently around 1/5th of where you actually end up, it is time to rethink your estimation process

 

[Parmandur]

if your estimates are consistently around 1/5th of where you actually end up, it is time to rethink your estimation process

Better than the other way around, I suppose?

I think if this campaign ended up with 25,000 backers averaging about $200 each, so $5 million, that they would have been genuinely happy with the result. Hard to predict massive overperformance, and best not to assume it.

Benefit of a small, closely held company.

 

[Morrus]

Hard to predict massive overperformance, and best not to assume it.

And yet we all managed to--so maybe not that hard? Of course, I wouldn't describe this as 'massive overperformance'; I'd describe it as 'performing as expected'. I predicted $12M before it even launched. Looks like I'll be pretty darn close!

 

[Parmandur]

And yet we all managed to--so maybe not that hard? Of course, I wouldn't describe this as 'massive overperformance'; I'd describe it as 'performing as expected'. I predicted $12M before it even launched. Looks like I'll be pretty darn close!

Same, but honestly, you probably know more about the topic of RPG Kickstarters than they do, even Brotherwise.

 

[Parmandur]

One reason to believe they are honestly surprised...they appear to have hit all their stretch goal milestone by day 2, so switched stretch goal announcements to a daily Raye instead if tying them to anything else: they have all been unlocked.

 

[Aldarc]

And yet we all managed to--so maybe not that hard? Of course, I wouldn't describe this as 'massive overperformance'; I'd describe it as 'performing as expected'. I predicted $12M before it even launched. Looks like I'll be pretty darn close!

Now predict how large its active play community will be in five years!