Kickstarters Thread

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Wait comments on the internet can get toxic? When did that start happening?!? Someone should start a safe area to get away from that crap!
 
It's because these people don't know that they're putting money on a PROMISE, NOT a PRODUCT. And promises CHANGE.
I'm less inclined to give CMON that consideration. They've pretty much used KS as a pre-order system and set themselves up for the whole stretch goal expectations.

Indie rpg publishers yeah I'm all in agreement with you. Big plastic fest multiple delivery companies like CMON, not so much.
 
It's because these people don't know that they're putting money on a PROMISE, NOT a PRODUCT. And promises CHANGE.

I hate to beat that pulp that used to be a horse, but if it's the Kickstarter I just looked at, then that's a pre-order campaign. There is no way in hell you can tell me that they had to go to Kickstarter for funding for that, that it was anywhere near uncertain what their audience was.

Bunch beat me to it. That makes me feel better. At least I'm not beating the bloody guts that used to be a horse by myself.
 
People (Of ALL kinds) have been using KS as a Pre-Order campaign for as long as KS existed. Notice the ones that do the best are the ones that have already have almost all of the work done, so the people putting money down KNOW what's coming and there's low chances of surprises and changes.
 
It's because these people don't know that they're putting money on a PROMISE, NOT a PRODUCT. And promises CHANGE.
Of course, but the thing is that funding has not finished yet. People are acting so indignantly as if the campaign had ended and CMON started to change things, breaking promises.

I just don't get it.

But yeah they're super toxic. Beware anyone who suggests house rules or using minis from another game (let alone another Zombicide game). Some of the fans get REAL mad if you do that. Like, "how fucking dare you!" mad.
 
ARGH it's just getting worse. The comments are now dominated by messages like "how DARE you CMON for enticing us to this project and betraying our trust". Vote with your wallets you childish imbeciles.
 
Btw, you get crazies on both sides of it. There are crazy defenders as well, which makes it even weirder. On one kickstarter, I left a polite but concerned comment about their decision to use shipnaked as their fulfilment service. I dislike shipnaked because they have historically been absolute balls. They don't properly pack and I've had several games fulfilled by them have damaged boxes.

Fans of the company came in to flame me for it. It was bizarre.
 
There's an obligation when the project is funded, to deliver what is agreed upon when the funding is secured. The extent of this has not been tested in courts (yet), but it's there. But being upset before a project is ever funded is a new one to me... why not just, I don't know... back out?
 
There's an obligation when the project is funded, to deliver what is agreed upon when the funding is secured. The extent of this has not been tested in courts (yet), but it's there. But being upset before a project is ever funded is a new one to me... why not just, I don't know... back out?

Well there was that one case where the AG of Washington state sued the creators of an unfulfilled kickstarter for cards back in 2014. Past that, not much. I know one or two did get involved in Far West (or supposedly did, from comments made over on tbp years ago in a thread about that KS)
 
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There's an obligation when the project is funded, to deliver what is agreed upon when the funding is secured. The extent of this has not been tested in courts (yet), but it's there.
The problem is that lawsuits are expensive, then there's the issue of time. At what point does the customer (the best word I can use at the moment) give up and sue for their money back? I mean, Far West is working on a decade or more, and no one has taken him to task over it. And Skarka isn't the only one, there's several books and video games that are in similar boats.
 
SO despite the shitty comments section, the Zombicide Western Campaign has a pretty solid core pledge of $100 USD.

Besides the core game, you get all of the stretch goal survivors and all of the "daily duel" zombies.

Even if you don't play the game, all of these minis would be FANTASTIC for RPGs like Savage Worlds or Deadlands (or whatever other Western-themed games).
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Notes: the "Great Trickster Spirit" has 3 inter-changeable heads: coyote, raven and hare. And it's huge. And see if you can spot all the pop-culture and film references.
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AND... if they meet their final stretch goal, you will get this badass monster that almost reaches Kingdom Death levels of quality (by adding a few random Renaissance faces into the base and a few phallic tentacles LOL)
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Link again:

 
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Based on a small sample size, the French gaming scene has very high standards for art. Pics I've seen of French editions of CoC are amazing. This looks better than most 3rd party products. I just wish they didn't follow Wizards' lead with the fake parchment look. Variation in color behind the text slows down reading.
 
The problem is that lawsuits are expensive, then there's the issue of time. At what point does the customer (the best word I can use at the moment) give up and sue for their money back? I mean, Far West is working on a decade or more, and no one has taken him to task over it. And Skarka isn't the only one, there's several books and video games that are in similar boats.

All it takes is a few to actually go through and draw the wrong attention. Someone I read recently followed through with a lawsuit against James Wallis (Alas Vegas). Wallis had the misfortune of pissing off a lawyer who could do the thing in his spare time for free. I think this guy was the reason it eventually got published- it still never went to court because Wallis realized it was a losing battle and settled. A couple of people I know served Skarka in the same way, and got their money back. Eventually, with the amount of money these platforms are pulling down, they will draw the attention of a regulating body. That's the point where the wild west will be over in crowdfunding.

And the word you'd probably use is 'backer'. Though customer is apt also for some of these, IMO.
 
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Ah James Wallis and Alas Vegas. That was my first Kickstarter ever. Loved the guy's work on Once Upon a Time. Eventually asked for a refund and got it. Felt kind of bad about it but oh well.
 
This one finishes later today; lots of people have picked up the core book or boxed set of The Fantasy Trip over the last couple of years, and I imagine pretty much all of them would benefit from these collections of NPCs, which are really well produced and cover a lot of ground.

Here's a new Kickstarter for people interested in The Fantasy Trip (if you aren't sure, you are!).



This is from a company that has already published 10 beautifully produced, fun adventures for the game (including both GM-run and Solos). They've recently started a line of collections of characters to be used as NPCs (or, I suppose, you could just grab one as a player character as well). A teaser volume put out a couple of months ago shows the products are going to be great - the characters themselves are creative, really diverse and thoughtfully designed, and the layout and art is great. This winter we're seeing the idea developed into hundreds of NPCs that will cover much of what you would want for most any quasi-medieval fantasy setting.

They are being paired with a line of counters and cards for use at the table, in formats that match all the table-top components in the official SJGames line for the game. This is pretty important for two reasons - 1) TFT is a highly tactile game with lots of fun cards, battle mats, dice, etc. that pump up the engagement with what is going on during play and this KS will provide a bunch of new materials for that; and 2) this is a way to quickly accumulate a sort of rolodex of NPC that can populate your campaign.

When I was a kid and spent part of most days chipping away at my TFT campaign, one of the things I spent time on was creating a stack of recipe cards with an NPC detailed on each (one of the features of the game is that even complicated characters can be recorded on a post-it note. Literally.). That stack of recipe cards was the core resource for my whole campaign; it was how I quickly populated unique encounters, stocked cities, etc. We have perhaps 100-150 professionally produced cards from the SJGames line; these are useful, but spread across so many topics (fighters, wizards, orcs, monsters, etc.) that you really wish you had more. The new Gaming Ballistic KS provides an opportunity to get about 600 new cards, specifically focused on the area where you need the greatest number and diversity (humanoid NPCs). Basically, you get to just buy the kind of resource that takes years of regular work for a GM to write. I think you could probably create an entire fully fleshed out fantasy city by getting this set, grabbing a decent map online, and adding a couple of your own key NPCs.
 
D101 games is running a zine Kickstarter campaign which includes a first look at their upcoming science-fiction D100 game Blasters & Lasers.


Still waiting for Newt to deliver the long overdue stretch goals from Tales from The Sorcerer Under The Mountain from August 2019 so I'll give this a miss.
 
If you play online, but like rolling physical dice, you need to check these out.


 
If you play online, but like rolling physical dice, you need to check these out.



Cool idea but $200 for a set of dice is not cheap. I wonder if an app already exists to look at dice via camera and report the results.
 
So I gave in and backed Warpland. I decided that for now, that's going to be the last rpg KS for awhile. There's some comics I want to back, but I always go digital on those, so a much smaller buy in for me. ZineQuest ended up pulling me in more than I had planned, but thankfully I had more self-control than chuckdee chuckdee had :tongue:
 
So I gave in and backed Warpland. I decided that for now, that's going to be the last rpg KS for awhile. There's some comics I want to back, but I always go digital on those, so a much smaller buy in for me. ZineQuest ended up pulling me in more than I had planned, but thankfully I had more self-control than chuckdee chuckdee had :tongue:

I backed Warpland too. And that was supposed to be the last.

... but then I found out that there a quite a few projects launching in March (Achtung! Cthulhu, Adventure, a couple of others), and I still currently ahve 6 projects going right now. I have a problem. :shock:
 
That's going to be 2d20...

Yeah, I know. I'm not automatically averse like some people. I've been with them since the created it for Mutant Chronicles. It has its problems, but so do most systems. That's what hacking and combining systems is for (which is something I do liberally). I don't think I've ever run a system straight.
 
Yeah, I know. I'm not automatically averse like some people. I've been with them since the created it for Mutant Chronicles. It has its problems, but so do most systems. That's what hacking and combining systems is for (which is something I do liberally). I don't think I've ever run a system straight.
You can still get the CoC/Savage Worlds version.
 
You can still get the CoC/Savage Worlds version.

I have it. And the Fate Version. I like the background and there are different nuances in each from reading, so I want it all.
 

Brazilian Mythras T The Butcher Maybe you know of some other Brazilians.
Nice! Everyone in my group uses English-language books, but I have been known to support translations; I got the CoC6 translation because the art is amazing, and this one I might chip in just for the swag other than the book, and the stretch goals.
 
There's a GOFUNDME underway for a documentary about Hy Eisman, recent recipient of the Milton Caniff Lifetime achievement award and one of y teachers at The Joe Kubert School. Hy has had an astounding career in comics, and is one of the most talented professionals whose work spans nearly a century

 


I'm not very familiar with this pulp game from Onyx Path, although I have heard of it as a pulp staple.
 
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The original version of Storyteller Adventure! was very Pulp Adventure; quite different from the edgy gloom of the WoD stuff.
There was also a D20 OGL version of it as well, which looked like it hit the same beats as the Storyteller version

Adventure! was really good, I think it was only superceeded by the Thrilling Tales books in regards to the pulp adventure rpg genre.
I really liked the original version, it felt very much like Indy Jones or The Mummy films

It was a stand-alone digest-sized core book with all the rules contained in it.
It was part of the Aeon Trinity series, but that was easily ignored - we just played it without even mentioning those connections.

These days I tend to use Fate Core as my pulp adventure rpg, and pull inspiration from Spirit Of The Century, Thrilling Tales, and the original Adventure!.

The new version of Adventure! which is currently being crowd-funded looks much more connected in with the Trinity Continum meta-story, and you have to have the other Trinity Continum core book to use it.
It also has a very different feel to it. Despite the 1930s era of the setting, it kinda feels more modern in presentation, and for me that doesn't capture the classic pulpy flavour that I get when reading the original version.

The original Storyteller game mechanics are probably cleaned up a bit into the Storypath system now, but I think I preferred the art directrion of the original version. I also I liked the fact that the original had almost no emphasis on connection with the Abberant and Trinity books.

The new version is probably still bound to be very good in other ways - although I doubt I will end up backing it.
 

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The original version of Adventure! was very Pulp Adventure, it was really great.
There was also a D20 OGL version of it as well which looked like it hit the same beats as the Storyteller version
I really liked the original version, it felt very much like Indy Jones or The Mummy films
The original version was a stand-alone digest-sized core book with all the rules contained in it.
It was part of the Aeon Trinity series, but that was easily ignored - we just played it without even mentioning those connections.

The new version which is currently being crowd-funded looks more connected in with the Trinity Continum meta-story, and you have to have the other Trinity Continum core book to use it. It also has a very different feel to it, it kinda feels more modern, not as classic pulpy as the original felt.

I think I preferred the art directrion of the original version, it was very 1930s, and I liked the fact that it hardly had any emphasis on connection with the Abberant and Trinity books.. Although the new version is probably still bound to be good in other ways - although I doubt I will end up backing it.
Huhn, I'll have to pass on this one, after all. Thanks Mankcam Mankcam
 
I remember the original version of Adventure. The art and design did a really good job of capturing the flavour of the Pulps like Doc Savage. I seem to recall it was of an atypical size for gamebooks too - 6 x 9? Much different than other White Wolf products on the shelf in thoose days. I can't remember the system itself though - was it just a variation of White Wolf's Storyteller system? If so, that may be why it never stuck in my mind.
 
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