#RPGaDay2015: Day 2

rpg-a-day-2015Here we are with Day 2 of #RPGaDay2015. Today’s topic is: Kickstarter Game You’re Most Pleased You Backed. Its been really interesting to see how much Kickstarter has become an accepted part of the tabletop games business over the past 5 years. Now, it seems like a game is unusual if it gets released without having first been kickstarted — and a lot of companies who probably don’t actually need to crowdfund are using it too, primarily as a marketing effort, and a way to defray development costs.

Here’s Dave Chapman’s video entry for the day, with special guest James Holloway, from Gonzo History Gaming:

For me, I have a couple of projects that I’ve backed that I’m really pleased about, and no matter how much I mulled them over, I couldn’t come up with one that I was most pleased with — so I’m going to fudge a bit here and list two.

KS-logo-3The first project is The Dracula Dossier by Pelgrane Press. The physical copies haven’t shipped yet, but I’ve gotten the PDFs, and they’re every bit as brilliant as I was expecting from the team of Kenneth Hite, Gareth Hanrahan, et. al. A two book set — the first, The Dracula Dossier is a campaign sourcebook for running a game of Ken’s spies-vs-vampires game Night’s Black Agents, centered around the most powerful vampire of them all. The second book, Dracula Unredacted, is an expanded and annotated version of the original Bram Stoker novel — the conceit is that what we think is a novel was actually a heavily-edited after-action report of an encounter between British Intelligence and the Count, released as a smoke-screen. The Unredacted version adds sections (and characters) who had been edited out for security reasons, as well as adding annotation notes from the next several encounters between the Intelligence services and Dracula — in World War 2, in the 1970s, and in the War on Terror. It is, quite frankly, brilliant.

BloodSilkAndJadeCoverPromo3The second project is Tianxia: Blood, Silk, & Jade”, a wuxia fantasy setting for FATE by Jack Norris. Wuxia is one of my greatest loves, and Jack knows the genre really well, and has produced a great fantasy setting based on it. Not only that, but it’s one of the best expansions of FATE that I’ve ever seen — including a fantastic modular system for Kung Fu which made me exceedingly jealous the moment that I read it. The kickstarter also included Tianxia Accelerated, adapting the setting for the FATE Accelerated rules system, and Path of Destiny, a full Lifepath generator for creating characters — and I absolutely eat up random-generation systems as idea-sparkers, so this was right up my alley. The production values on Tianxia are also phenomenal — especially the artwork by Denise Jones, which perfectly captures the genre, while also maintaining a unique look.

Both of the projects I mentioned here began as Kickstarters, but are currently commercially available — and you absolutely should track them down and pick them up.

So those are my answers to the topic — what’s yours?

 
 

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