Does your inbox fill up every Tuesday with Kickstarter emails? Well, mine does - so I decided to start writing my thoughts on new tabletop gaming Kickstarters every week. Keep in mind, most of these thoughts are based on initial impressions and looking at the Kickstarter video.

From Crazy Crawfish to making great gaming movies, there’s a lot going on this week in crowdfunding. Just in case “Pass the Box” doesn’t seem appealing to you this week, here’s 5 other campaigns you should check out:

Mystic Bonds: Enhancing Your Familiar

This week we will be a bit more RPG heavy, but how can I not pick this campaign when it’s got the cutest demon dog on the front of it? “Who’s a little cursed one….you are!” For $5, you can get the PDF of this supplement, which aims to flesh out the familiar rules for D&D 5th edition. In addition to just offering more options than in the core books, Mystic Bonds offers more rules for customizing your familiar and even giving them a progression system so those little allies can grow and advance and get even more cool abilities. It’s been awhile since I’ve run a character in D&D that had a familiar, but now I want to! Heck, for $20 you can give them ideas for new familiars to include in the book. Time for a mecha-squirrel!

DC20

The marketing budget on this next campaign must be incredible, as I’ve been seeing ads on Facebook for DC20 for the past 2 months it seems. DC20 is a new RPG system created by “The Dungeon Coach,” who based on the success of this campaign so far probably already has a decent sized community. The artwork and graphic design is definitely pretty cool looking, and $30 for the PDF seems about on par for what you get.

From watching the video, my biggest comment is that it seems to be marketed to people who have only ever played D&D5e and no other RPGs. The video has quotes from people calling it a “mixture of D&D and Pathfinder”. It says it offers innovative mechanics like “open character creation” and “endless customization”, which if you’ve played Pathfinder you know that already exists. When the creator says you can use “action points” to make fighting more dynamic, I was like “yeah, that’s also Pathfinder”. Then he describes how the numbers on the dice matter, as you get more buffs the higher the number is above what you need. “Okay, that’s just degrees of success…”. When he talks about how instead of spell slots you can use your mana pool to make spells more powerful, I said “Yeah, but you can do that in D&D by just casting it higher…”

Honestly the two “unique” pieces I heard where the martial points systems, where characters like barbarians and rogues get extra effects depending on how they attack, and the ancestry system, where you can pick different ancestries (races in other games) for each of your parents and customize which benefits you get passed down from each parent. I read a lot of RPGs, and I end up pulling mechanics from different games to use when I run other games like D&D. DC20 just seems like that same type of homebrewing bundled up in one system. If these types of mechanics excite you, then I would suggest maybe (also) taking a look at some indie RPGs.

GAMERS 4: DORKNESS FALLS

Oh boy… I have a long history with this next campaign. Way back when I graduated college and started getting my new Maryland friends interested in RPGs, someone told me about “The Gamers: Dorkness Rising”. We sat down and watched it, and it was the greatest thing I had seen in awhile. To this day, my RPG group will quote the movie in various circumstances “Who takes improved initiative??”

The Gamers is a series of movies focusing on tabletop gamers and their mis/adventures created by Matt Vancil. The first movie was done back in 2002 and is really showing its age at this point. Dorkness Rising was the second entry and is definitely the better place to start if you’ve never watched any of them. If you’ve ever played a RPG before, you will immediately recognize all the various tropes that are at play in the movie. The third movie, Hands of Fate, veers away from RPGs and more into the CCG aspect of gaming, but it is very well produced and is probably the best of the series so far.

The problem is that Hands of Fate leaves off on a cliffhanger. Now, I know that there has been a series and other videos, but sadly that is an aspect I haven’t had the chance to catch up on…at least I hadn’t until The Gamers: Dorkness Falls was announced. The fourth movie promises to wrap up the story with all the cast back together to create more hilarious failures…uh…stories! They need $500,000, but that seems about right because we are talking about a film budget here. Right now they are on track to fund and I hope that they do so! If this sounds interesting to go, go find Dorkness Rising on YouTube and watch it - I know I’ll be getting caught up on all The Gamers content I’ve missed!

Crackin' Crazy Crawfish 1$ One Shot

I’m from the South enough to know that Crawfish is a huge thing, but not Southern enough to actually have been a part of the Crawfish lifestyle. Still, the idea of a D&D5e one off adventure that is based around crawfish is just goofy enough to get me interested. Throw in the fact that it’s only $1, and I’m already hovering over the “Pledge” button. I really appreciate that below the first couple of paragraphs, there’s a giant “What is it?” box to give you the elevator pitch on the adventure. Since one of the magic items included in the game is “Severa’s Sweet Tea”, I’m even more inclined to purchase this just so I can include that magic item in my next D&D game - it’ll drive our one British player NUTS! If you also are interested in deep South/Bayou-style items and adventures, there are previous rewards available at higher tier levels.

Sovereign: Fall of Wormwood

One of two “wormwood/wyrmwood” campaigns going on right now*, Sovereign is a scifi card game that proclaims to try and take the best aspects of TCGs while leaving out the worst - the cost of buying hundreds of booster packs. The artwork of this game looks phenomenal, and $55 is pretty good for this type of game. There’s tons of factions to play, and apparently not only can you fight your opponent, but you can bluff/negotiate with them as well.

*Random fact: according to the campaign page, the game was originally called “Wormwood”, but since Wyrmwood exists and the name couldn’t be trademarked so it had to change. Kind of ironic that the campaign goes up at the same time as the Wyrmwood Dice campaign.

I say “apparently”, because most of the campaign page is teasing the vastness of the world, the amount of cards you get, and all the various factions there’s only a small bit on how the game actually plays. The bits that do talk about the gameplay are more of the “typical” nature of head to head card games where you need to build up your resources and attack your opponents. If I was regularly playing card games like I was about 5 years ago, I’d probably back this for at least the core set to try it out. Nowadays, it has me intrigued, but is the type of game I’d want to try at a convention first before I get a set for myself.

Note: I generally assume I know nothing. So if I've missed something, let me know in the comments. Or let me know on Twitter or Facebook. If you like these types of posts, consider subscribing to our patreon.