This is a pretty good time for kickstarter. Good enough that I regret I didn’t write this up last week, before Dawning Star finished up. But there are still some great outstanding options.

First, we’re down to the wire on Harry Connolly’s The Great Way. It’s funded, but you can still get in before it closes, and it’s going to be a treat. Connolly is a great writer (his 20 Palaces series is one of my favorites) and I’m really excited for this. If you’re on the fence, he’s released a lot of early chapters on the KS page, so you can always take a taste.

Next, I’m intrigued by the Chronos Larp System. I’m not a LARP guy, and it’s possible I may never even use this, but it seems like they’re doing some interesting things with the technology, and I’m always a proponent of that.

I’ve also backed Tianxia. I’m very curious about this – Kung Fu games can very easily go off the rails, but at the same time, this looks like it might be a way to do Jade Empires with Fate, and that is something I woudl dearly like to do.

Speaking of Fate, I’ve also backed Aeon Wave, a cyberpunk setup for Fate, at least in part because the creator has said nice things about me (hey, I’m human). Also because I’m a big cyberpunk nerd, and I’m OK with that.

One kickstarter I haven’t backed yet but am looking very closely at is the latest from Monte Cook Games, The Strange. It’s a new setting using the same system as Numenera (the cypher system) but rather than far future weirdness it seems to be multi-dimensional weirdness. I’m torn on this one. On the plus side, it’s a genre I love, and it’s a good enough match for the Cypher system that it was one of my first thoughts on how I would repurpose it. On the negative side, the Cypher system didn’t really grab me, and this is a pricey kickstarter[1]. MCG is doing something curious with the shipping, basically giving a $10 credit towards shipping as part of the tiers rather than folding it in. That seems like a smart (if bookkeeping intensive) way to address certain shipping concerns, but I admit it adds some uncertainty to my approach, since I don’t know if I’m signing on for extra shipping costs.

There’s no fear of this kickstarter failing – it’s at 200% at a couple days in, and is on track to bring in the same kind of hundreds of thousands of dollars that Numenera did, so I can afford to wait a few weeks and see how the stretch goals pan out to see what kind of value I get. The tiebreaker will probably be whether or not I ever get my Numenera hardcover from the previous kickstarter (which I haven’t).

One last kickstarter has nothing to do with gaming, but it just kind of neat: Set Chopin Free. This is a little nerdy, but the nature of copyright is such that even if a piece of music (like the works of Chopin) are in the public domain, that does not necessarily mean that there are any performances in the public domain. This project (and others like it) use the funding to hire a bunch of musicians and make those public recordings. This is much more of a good cause than something to buy (though, of course, there is swag) but it’s a bucket I was happy to throw a few bucks in.

Anyway, these are the things I have my eye on or my money in at the moment. If you have any other cool ones to call out, go ahead and add them to the comments!

Additions From Comments and Elsewhere

• Baltimore:  A History, Block By Block – photographs and history of Baltimore Buildings.  I would have loved to have this for DFRPG.
• Worlds of Magic – Video game with turn based fantasy battle and procedurally generated maps.  Sweet combination and looks fun, but I admit the pledge levels confuse me a bit.
• Adventures in the East Mark – Honestly, I have no idea how this is as a game, but as a product, it clearly looks *gorgeous*.  And, importantly, its PDF Buy-in level os $10, which is (for me) the perfect “I’m curious but uncertain” price point.