MCDM Joins Million Dollar Crowdfunder Club... For The 5th Time!

Matt Colville's MCDM was the first TTRPG crowdfunder to break $2M back in 2018 with Strongholds & Streaming, a supplement for D&D along with a livestream of a D&D campaign. That wasn't the end of the company's record-breaking run, though!

Draw Steel: Crack the Sun finished its crowdfunding run this week with a funding total of $2,617,323, making it the 5th million-dollar Kickstarter from MCDM. Crack the Sun is an official adventure path for the company's Draw Steel TTRPG, which raised $4.6M in 2024.

• Strongholds & Streaming (March 2018) raised $2,121,465.
• Kingdoms, Warfare & More Minis! (November 2019) raised $1,372,685.
• "Flee, Mortals!" - The MCDM Monster Book for 5e (May 2022) raised $2,084,117.
• The MCDM RPG (January 2024) raised $4,600,539.
• Draw Steel: Crack the Sun (January 2026) raised $2,617,323.

Not only does this make MCDM the most prolific member of the Million Dollar Kickstarter Club with a record-breaking 5 entries (closely followed by Hit Point Press and Free League with 4 entries apiece), it is also the second most successful TTRPG crowdfunding creator ever with a combined total of $12,796,129! This whopping total is surpassed only by Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG which raised an eye-watering $14,557,439 in just one single campaign.

2025 saw a slight decline in million-dollar crowdfunders with 7 in total (compared to a high of 11, mid-pandemic in 2021).

 

[Staffan]

But if your core RPG memories are closely tied to the game store experience, you don't care about the value proposition, you start with your conclusion. "It is a good thing for game stores to stock RPGs I am not going to buy or play. I might buy and play them, so they should stock them." Great if you're a library. Not a great plan if you're a business.

The customer side of this is that the whole point of an FLGS is that I can walk in and buy something off the shelf, and then go home and read/play it. That's something I, at least, am willing to pay for. But if the FLGS doesn't have the thing I'm looking for on the shelf and have to special order it... well, then I might as well buy it by mail order direct from the creator, or from a store that does have a copy, or even Amazon. Then the store isn't providing the service I'd like them to provide.

So does that mean that I and the store have mutually incompatible needs? Quite possibly. And I don't really know how to solve that, other than the store charging enough for the things they do sell that it covers the things that don't.

 

[HatWearingFool]

We're currently noodling on a high-quality, expensive, print version of the Delian Tomb starter. It probably won't be labeled as a starter though, it'll be presented as a self-contained game. Because that's what the Delian Tomb is. It includes all the rules you need to play for at least many weeks and probably months. It's a mini campaign. It comes with pregens and has, according to our customers, the best onboarding of any RPG product they've seen.

That product might be a better value proposition for more stores. We'll see!

Personally I think this is the direction the industry should head in. Self contained box sets with pre generated characters that act as basic versions of the game. Release future box sets that are meant to follow the early ones.

Then have the full rules books as an “advanced version” of the game. Create your own characters, build scenarios like the box sets, etc.

 

[...m...]

The customer side of this is that the whole point of an FLGS is that I can walk in and buy something off the shelf, and then go home and read/play it. That's something I, at least, am willing to pay for. But if the FLGS doesn't have the thing I'm looking for on the shelf and have to special order it... well, then I might as well buy it by mail order direct from the creator, or from a store that does have a copy, or even Amazon. Then the store isn't providing the service I'd like them to provide.

So does that mean that I and the store have mutually incompatible needs? Quite possibly. And I don't really know how to solve that, other than the store charging enough for the things they do sell that it covers the things that don't.

...it only takes a couple of times not finding what i'm looking for, or buying something off the shelf and then getting home only to discover that it's incomplete, to dissuade going out of my way for future visits to a retail shop...

...if i have to spend the better part of an hour researching in advance whether something is in stock and whether it's the same complete package i can buy online, i may as well order it online anyway...

 

[mearls]

We're currently noodling on a high-quality, expensive, print version of the Delian Tomb starter. It probably won't be labeled as a starter though, it'll be presented as a self-contained game. Because that's what the Delian Tomb is. It includes all the rules you need to play for at least many weeks and probably months. It's a mini campaign. It comes with pregens and has, according to our customers, the best onboarding of any RPG product they've seen.

That product might be a better value proposition for more stores. We'll see!

Oh man I love this plan. I love not labeling it a starter game. This isn't a trading card game! It's just a game.

Your post rearranged my brain a bit in a good way. One thing I realized is that up until I graduated from college, I never bought an RPG that was just a book (vs a box) unless I had already played it or read chunks of it.

• AD&D: Read a friend's a copy, then bought
• Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun: Read an adventure in White Wolf magazine, then bought
• Warhammer 40k: I was obsessed with saving up to buy the rulebook. When I went to the store and saw they had this new boxed game called Space Hulk that had all the minis and terrain you needed to play, I went home with Space Hulk

I vividly remember flipping through the Star Wars RPG, Champions, and others at Waldenbooks, then putting them back to buy the MERP boxed set. Champions in particular was such an enigma to me. It looked fascinating, but I could never justify risking my money on it when I could buy another D&D book or go across the mall and buy a video game at Electronics Boutique.

 

[...m...]

Your post rearranged my brain a bit in a good way. One thing I realized is that up until I graduated from college, I never bought an RPG that was just a book (vs a box) unless I had already played it or read chunks of it.

I vividly remember flipping through the Star Wars RPG, Champions, and others at Waldenbooks, then putting them back to buy the MERP boxed set. Champions in particular was such an enigma to me. It looked fascinating, but I could never justify risking my money on it when I could buy another D&D book or go across the mall and buy a video game at Electronics Boutique.

...electronics boutique was after my time, but my early experiences were much the same: core games came in boxes, optional supplements were published as books, and i never even considered supplements for which i didn't already own the core game...i'm not sure whether that was an artifact of the established retail market or TSR simply trained us thusly (probably a bit of both) but it was an unarticulated axiom we all simply carried internally through that era...