Back to Back: indie RPGs to fund

Hello everyone! I’m back from my self-imposed exile and ready to start posting news about the world of indie RPGs once more.

As you all (probably) know, I’ve had a long-standing policy of not posting stand-alone articles about crowdfunding projects. My reasoning for this is that these projects are oftentimes speculative, and I don’t want to waste peoples’ time posting about games that haven’t even been formally announced yet.

However, I’ve decided to reverse that policy and start running round-ups of current RPG crowdfunding campaigns in a new feature I’m calling “Back to Back.” There are a few reasons for this:

1. Most of these projects, in my experience, are labors of love that are going to be completed one way or another, with the real question being “How polished and feature-filled are they going to have the budget to become?”
2. Crowdfunding is an inescapable reality of the indie space right now. It is, quite simply, just about the only viable way to scrape together a budget without finding a publisher (and thus, becoming not-indie).
3. Because these are so prevalent, and because RPGs whose campaigns fail tend to get made anyway, the announcement of a crowdfunding campaign has largely become equivalent to announcing the game itself.
4. I created this site to help indie RPG developers. Given factor 2 above, I’ve decided that I really ought to be covering these campaigns. (Also, my own experience running such a campaign has given me a special sympathy for the difficulties of conducting one without media coverage.)

So I’m going to start covering these. However, I don’t want to run an individualized story for every campaign that comes up, as that will quickly turn this from an indie RPG site into an indie RPG Kickstarter site. (Seriously, there are a lot of these campaigns.) Hence, the round-up format.

Finally, a quick disclaimer: unless otherwise noted, I have not played any of these games, and therefore cannot endorse them–I leave it to your discretion which you think are worth backing. Without further ado, here are a bunch of campaigns running right now for you to look into!

• Anima: Gate of Memories — 3D third person action RPG modeled partially on Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts.
• Antharion — 2D isometric fantasy wRPG (previously covered here).
• Caravaneer 2 — 2D isometric post-apocalyptic survival wRPG / economic sim (previously covered here).
• Days of Dawn — 3D top-down jRPG with a painterly aesthetic.
• Hartacon Tactics — 2D isometric tactical RPG (previously covered here).
• Legends of Dawn — 3D top-down open world RPG with the ability to swap classes during play.
• Meriwether: An American Epic — 3D historical RPG in which you recreate the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I encourage you to back any campaign that seems worthwhile to you without regard to whether you think it’ll make its goals. You won’t get charged if a campaign fails, after all, and it’ll help the creator by giving them more momentum and an easy way to contact you if they decide to try again.

(Note: Indiegogo’s flexible funding campaigns can’t “fail,” so you’ll be charged no matter what if you give to those!)