What KICKSTARTER(S) are you BACKING and WHY?

The recent CMON Marvel game may get me, if only for the chibi Marvel figures. The gameplay seems pretty light, although that may work for a quick lunchtime game here in the office. I'm still not sure why they felt they needed to go KS for this. people would have bought the base game and then they could have churned out the expansion characters/villains until doomsday.

We'll see how may figs get unlocked. That will end up determining if I continue to back it. I have a feeling that I could flip a second copy pretty easily....

the_jake_1973 wrote: I'm still not sure why they felt they needed to go KS for this..

CMON treats KS like a 10% advertising budget. I guess it must work for them or they would quit doing it.

I may have to jump ship and back Arena instead. That looks great.

hotseatgames wrote: I did jump in for Arena: The Contest. I have read the rule book and it seems like a really fun game. There is a metric ton of content, which is both a plus and a minus, but this looks promising.

I came over here hoping that people would extinguish my smouldering interest in Arena: The Contest (to save me a visit to my bank manager) … now I have to hope Charlie posts dumping a tanker load of water over this inferno

I managed to sell a bunch of shelf toads to finance it.

I failed my resistance roll against TROPHY and a couple of the zines that support it. I really liked the look of SUNKEN, about crew members of a cursed ship encountering weirdness on the foggy seas.

Did you go for Gold, dark, or both? I think I’m more interested in Dark.

I just failed my save on Beak, Feather, and Bone.

The whole fucking shebang including the custom dice. I am a weak and bad man.

I will eBay half my collection as penance.

It must be the lateness of the hour, but I am all in on the Tanares train. I need my Eldar to sell on ebay now to finance this foolishness.

the_jake_1973 wrote: It must be the lateness of the hour, but I am all in on the Tanares train. I need my Eldar to sell on ebay now to finance this foolishness.

I am looking at putting my Arkham Horror 2E + the three big box expansions on eBay to make Tanares look even remotely feasible to my brain.

Has anyone here played Arena The Contest?

I'm not backing because I need another expansion-fest like I need another hole in my head, but everyone seems pretty excited and I can't find much commentary on version 1.0 here.

I have not played it. I was intrigued by it when it was first on Kickstarter, but held off. Now that it has delivered, I have seen a lot of praise, and the fact that they are sending re-worked hero miniatures to original backers that back this new KS tells me that the company cares about doing things right.

I'm debating whether or not to back this Kickstarter for Ptolus:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/montecookga...the-spire?ref=ar4hm1

Ptolus was Monte Cook's playtest campaign setting for D&D 3.0 and 3.5. The basic idea is a densely populated and cosmopolitan fantasy/steampunk city, with an abandoned dwarven city and massive dungeon complex underneath. It's like the gold rush in the old west, only with D&D parties looting dungeons instead of prospectors panning for gold. The various sectors and quarters of the city each have a distinctive style, and there are plot hooks and interesting ideas everywhere. The book comes with more than enough material for a campaign from 1st through 20th level, and additional published adventures for the setting are enough for another full campaign from 1st through 20th level.

The biggest potential problem with Ptolus is that it was written for use with the dense, complex ruleset of D&D 3.5. At lower levels, 3.5 is a meaty system that encourages tactical play. At higher levels, the density of the rules can lead to exceptionally long combats that drag down the pace of the game.

This Ptolus Kickstarter offers the massive Ptolus setting book and all the adventures and accessories, using either D&D 5th edition or Monte Cook's own Cypher System. I haven't tried either system, but both are apparently much more streamlined and accessible than D&D 3.5. The Ptolus setting book is 672 pages long, but it is a marvel of organization and cross-referencing that makes it a highly usable product for a DM. There are also very nice miniature scale maps for several of the adventures, with unofficial free maps for most of the rest that you can find online.

Starting in 2012, I ran a Ptolus campaign for 3.5, initially for a group of 8 players. We played bi-weekly on Saturday afternoons for four years. Rather than invest in 1,200 miniatures that I would never get around to painting, I bought a large quantity of wooden nickels and swiped online art to make tokens for all the players, npcs, and monsters. I also wrote a few original adventures of my own that were tailored to the interests of specific player characters in the group. And I tend to go a little heavy on the prep work, to avoid awkward delays during game. So it was a lot of work running Ptolus, but much of that work was due to the complexity of the 3.5 rules. So I am tempted to back this Kickstarter just to get the $40 pdf versions of the setting for D&D 5e and Cypher, so I can re-run Ptolus for a new group. There are higher levels to this KS campaign, but since I already have the other stuff (albeit in 3.3 format), I just want the PDFs.

Union.

Sagrilarus wrote: Union.

A significant development, but Kickstarter is a minor player all said and done. The big change will be if it inspires unionization at one of the FAANG companies -- that might actually have knock-on effects across the economy as a whole.