Shadowdark looks so good!

[HawaiiSteveO]

Meanwhile, the finest minds in the land pool their intellect, resources, and creativity to come up with iTorch 2.0 that lasts 75 minutes! Adventurers lining up to get them! Then a new one comes out 6 months later that lasts 90 minutes, and is water resistant !

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A lot more stuff delivers on time than is generally believed. It's just that some folks are REALLY bad about it and some backers pick a lot of folks who end up not delivering on time.

If you're one of the majority of people who get things on time, there's no real reason to go around making threads about it, you know?

EDIT: Of my most recent 10 backed campaigns, which were all RPG products, and ranged from a lone person publishing their first product, to big RPG companies releasing new books:

1. one isn't due to be completed until this summer, which it appears they will succeed at,
2. six delivered their products, both digital and physical, on time or even a few weeks early,
3. two delivered their digital products on time but are slipping one to two months on physical rewards (back and forth over printer proofs is the big culprit here),
4. and one isn't due to deliver their product until October, but since they delivered their last one two weeks early, I'm not sweating it.

That said, I drop out of campaigns if I get a whiff that they're too ambitious. I was going to back a very appealing OSR campaign this fall, for instance, until the pile of multiple versions of games, sequels to games, boxed sets, miniatures, music, etc., etc., got to be too many red flags for my taste. They haven't posted a single update since their campaign closed in September.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Meanwhile, the finest minds in the land pool their intellect, resources, and creativity to come up with iTorch 2.0 that lasts 75 minutes! Adventurers lining up to get them! Then a new one comes out 6 months later that lasts 90 minutes, and is water resistant !

New adventure idea: Someone is killing the priesthood of the god of light and bright inventors who keep trying to invent longer-lasting torches and lanterns.

(It's the grues. It's always the grues.)

 

[Sacrosanct]

This doesn’t look like something that’s for me, but I can appreciate that the Kickstarter went live with a finished game ready. Not everyone can be Kevin Crawford and actually deliver on the promised schedule, so more games should do that instead.

All of my KS are done before I launch. I refuse to be like the Ken Whitman and Gareth Skarkas of the world.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think this game is going to make me become a DriveThuRPG publisher. Using the quick start rules, I just wrote up two ancestries, two classes (one of which I will definitely need to playtest a bunch, since it modifies a major system in the game), and a monster.

I can easily see putting together a quickie booklet or two with themed ancestries, classes, magic items, monsters and spells, especially once I get the full PDF and can benchmark things more easily.

Now I just need to find a good source of black and white royalty free art.

 

[darjr]

folks are running sample games in the discord The author is running open games.

 

[darjr]

Live Play Example: Shadowdark RPG

 

[Zaukrie]

I think this game is going to make me become a DriveThuRPG publisher. Using the quick start rules, I just wrote up two ancestries, two classes (one of which I will definitely need to playtest a bunch, since it modifies a major system in the game), and a monster.

I can easily see putting together a quickie booklet or two with themed ancestries, classes, magic items, monsters and spells, especially once I get the full PDF and can benchmark things more easily.

Now I just need to find a good source of black and white royalty free art.

Art is the HARD part for tiny publishers for sure....if you find some, let me know.

I'm unsure if I'll back this or not, but I am intrigued, which is odd, as I want MORE COMPLEX usually....but this screams something to me as a GM (though as a player, I'm not sure).

 

[Zaukrie]

It's just unlikely I'd ever play it.....

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Art is the HARD part for tiny publishers for sure....if you find some, let me know.

I am flabbergasted at there not being a true central clearinghouse for this kind of stuff. There are several sites that clearly want to be that, but are clearly only representing a handful of people.

I guess it makes sense how much of this business works on word of mouth, since there's no other alternative, but this particularly sucks for artists just getting started. Even the comic book industry, which isn't particularly friendly to new voices, is better than this.