Putting the Kick in Kickstarter
I haven’t backed many Kickstarters of late. There’s so many other things to spend my monies on. I’m still waiting on the final rewards of the Order of the Stick Kickstarter, but I think I would honestly have Rich Burlew keep advancing the store in the comic than making more side stories. And the product of Reaper’s Bones 3 is slooooowly making its way to the Americas. And there’ Karthun, which was supposed to have been released in late 2015…. But mostly, of late, I’ve been limiting myself to PDFs and smaller products rather than the big stuff. I stayed the hell away from Kingdom Death: Monster (especially with the estimated 2020 delivery date).
But now there’s Kobold Press doing their campaign setting for Midgard with a 5e splatbook. With a fancy shiny cover variant. And I’m suddenly having flashbacks to 2013/2014 when I threw far too much of my money onto Kickstarter because there was cool stuff!
Kickstarter’s an interesting beast. It’s got a lot of epic successes, some really dramatic horror stories, and plenty of entries that have come and gone with neither fanfare nor treachery. I myself have backed OotS and still await those last PDFs, and being an owner of the first printing dove headlong into Kingdom Death Monster (Which isn’t quite as grim as all that: rewards are intended to ship in waves, with the final wave being in 2020. First wave is this year). But most of my kickstarter experience has been with far less dramatic campaigns, mid-sized affairs that will probably deliver thanks to not being fly-by-night affairs, but also don’t blow everything away with their ambition and thus hit astronomical delays.
The “Pay now to maybe get something later” model didn’t appeal to me for some time — OotS was the first Kickstarter I backed and it was also the last for some time, but all the same I feel like it’s done a lot of good for the world of analog games in particular as projects that just would never have seen the light of day. And that’s really cool, the idea that this independant stuff is getting supplied because you’ve got the demand for things you probably didn’t even know you wanted. It’s always a Will Save with Kickstarter….