The artists at Wizards of the Coast knew what they were doing when they designed Oko in Throne of Eldraine. It’s not just his fine facial features and the fact that he’s always depicted as being bare-chested, though those things certainly help. It’s the blue face and body paint, the tight trousers, the feathers on the cropped jacket and mop of dark, unruly hair. All of these factors have made Oko one of the most attractive characters in Magic: The Gathering, in my humble opinion.

With Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Oko has only become more attractive. The character appears on multiple cards for the set, this time trading in his woodland nymphish look for a western rake style. This offers a different and equally excellent interpretation of the faerie ne’er-do-well, with his cropped jacket becoming even more elaborate – thanks to the addition of a sweeping cape, a huge collar and even more feathers – his tight trousers gaining a big, buckled belt and, of course, a cowboy hat that still retains aspects of Oko’s Eldraine bone crown.

Though Oko has always been depicted as a trickster who has a history of doing misdeeds, Magic: The Gathering is leaning harder into the character’s more villainous side in Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Oko is an outlaw in this set, someone who is willing to mix with the wrong sorts of people in order to perform some serious larceny. This new propensity to commit crimes only further solidifies Oko’s role as an antihero, thereby making him that much more appealing. There is nothing sexier than stealing from rich people.

Whether it was intentional or not, Oko is a sexy character who feels designed for a gender and/or sexual minority audience.

It’s unsure how much of this was intentional, but Wizards has created a character who is unmistakably camp in all the best ways. Oko could have easily fallen into the trap of becoming just another Zack Synder-esque ‘cool’ dude for the straight cis guys to fantasise about being, if not for the elaborate outfit, the makeup and the immaculate female and queer gaze of the Magic: The Gathering cards the character is featured on.

Tabletop gaming, particularly trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, has a long history of doing things that are off-putting – whether deliberately or not – to people with minority gender and/or sexual identities, who might otherwise enjoy the hobby. One of these things is utilising imagery designed to only appeal to straight cis men – namely dead-eyed women with huge breasts, conventionally attractive features and skimpy, yet dreadfully uninspiring, outfits. Alternatively, there are the ultra-muscular, hyper-masculine visages of men that the players are supposed to imagine they are.

Oko is the kind of sexy character who – probably – doesn’t make people like myself feel unwelcome or gross.

There are undoubtedly people who aren’t straight cis men who do enjoy this kind of character design; more power to them. Nevertheless, they are unlikely to be the initial target audience Wizards had in mind when creating these characters. This is why it’s fantastic to see characters like Oko in Magic: The Gathering. Whether it was intentional or not, Oko is a sexy character who feels designed for a gender and/or sexual minority audience, which is extremely refreshing to see from a 30-year-old trading card game that itself has previously banned racist and culturally offensive cards.

Oko occupies a happy medium between the two potential approaches towards including sexy stuff in your tabletop game. He certainly isn’t in line with the exploitative, uncomfortable approach that people who back Kickstarter campaigns for nude female D&D miniatures enjoy. But he’s also not the kind of sexless, Action Man character you might see in a current major motion picture starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Oko is the kind of sexy character who – probably – doesn’t make people like myself feel unwelcome or gross. If he makes straight cis men feel gross, then I feel like he’s only doing a better job of occupying that happy medium space that I want to see more characters sitting in.

If Wizards has any more plans to put Oko into other highly thematic sets where he’s committing more crimes against the wealthy in another camp and sexy outfit, they can count on my absolute support.

Hobby game sales eked out a nominal 1% increase in 2023, against the tough comparison to a third great year of Covid-fueled sales in 2022.  Increases in collectible game and miniatures sales offset declines in board, card, and RPG sales.

We define “hobby games” as those games produced for a “gamer” market, generally (although not always) sold primarily in the hobby channel of game and card specialty stores.  We define the “hobby games market” as the market for those games regardless of whether they’re sold in the hobby channel or other channels.  Our estimates include sales in the U.S. and Canada.

The total hobby games market estimate is derived from estimates for five individual categories: collectible games (which include Trading/Collectible Card Games, Collectible Miniatures, and other collectible formats), miniatures (non-collectible), board games, card and dice games, and roleplaying games.

Our primary means of collecting data about hobby games sales is interviews with key industry figures with good visibility to sales in various subcategories and channels.  We also review data released by publicly traded companies, publicly available Circana data, and crowdfunding data and analysis.

For the full ICv2 White Paper presentation which first presented these trends, see “ICv2 Hobby Games White Paper 2024.”  For last year’s report, see “Hobby Game Sales Up 7% in 2022.”

2023 Trends
We estimate hobby game sales in the U.S. and Canada at around $2.885 billion for 2023, up around 1% from sales in 2022.  While the nominal increase was less than the rate of inflation, holding at the previous year’s sales levels was an impressive performance for a market that had gone up a total of over 70% in the previous three years.  The feat was accomplished despite declines in three of five hobby game categories.

There were contributions from impactful difficult-to-replicate events, including the release of The Lord of the Rings Magic: The Gathering set, and significant shifts in consumer behavior, but a win is a win.

Consumers
Consumers continued to buy despite the absence of government stimulus, prices that had gone up pretty dramatically over the previous two years, surging out-of-home dining and entertainment, and revenge travel on an impressive scale.  But then, as we’ve noted in the past, the American consumer is a tough beast to bring down.

Publishers
Product proliferation was the name of the game at the publisher level, as the shortening of development and manufacturing pipelines brought delayed products into the market and allowed new products to flow relatively smoothly.

Retailers
The second year since the release of effective Covid vaccines and treatments brought store traffic fully back to pre-Covid levels or above, but retailers had to navigate costs that were markedly higher than the year before, especially for labor and rent.  Despite these challenges, hobby game retailers ended the year in relatively healthy shape, distributors told us.  Store counts were reported as flat to up.

Sales in the hobby channel were up a modest 2%, despite declines in some categories.  This made 2024 the 15th consecutive year of growth in the channel, with a huge surge in the 20s.

A Look by Category
Collectibles and miniatures were the only two 2023 growth categories; board games, card games, and roleplaying games were all down.  Although there were differences by product, sales of lifestyle gamer products generally held up better than those appealing to more casual consumers.

The dominance of collectible games as a category continued in 2023; it is over half of hobby game sales, larger than the other four categories combined.

Watch for our category-by-category trend analyses over the coming days.

We have an in-depth analysis of the trends above on the ICv2 Pro site (see “Hobby Game Sales Eke Out a Tough Win in 2023 – In Depth“).

Click Gallery below for full-size charts and graphs!

The design team at Pandion Games describe their newest RPG as an entry in the Deep Delving Mystery genre, joining atmospheric video games such as Subnautica and In Other Waters. Like those games, Substratum Protocol encourages players to amass knowledge about their surroundings in order to better navigate the alien ecology deep below the surface. Unnamed horrors lurk here and will need to be faced down or craftily avoided to gather clues and solve the mysteries facing humanity.

Substratum Protocol’s rules are based on the Breathless system designed by Fari RPGs and uses a combination of polyhedral dice and a deck of regular playing cards. Players will assign different dice ranging between d4 and d10 to their skill loadout during character creation. When acting under stress or risky situations, players choose two skills, draw two cards from the deck and then roll those skills’ dice. The combined result is compared to the card – beating it earns a success and grants them the card as a resource to be spent later.

Learn and play Edwardian, steampunk apocalypse TTRPG, Our Brilliant Ruin (sponsored)

Once a skill has been used in a check it “steps down” in value, making over-reliance on a single strength pretty disadvantageous. Luckily, cards earned during contests offset this degradation by powering various abilities within each scientist’s exosuit. Some will allow them to heal or create items, while others grant level-ups or even more powerful abilities.

The core rulebook contains a bestiary of 20 creatures ranging from the curiously similar to truly alien that players might discover during their slow, gruelling descent. But the real reason for tunnelling further than humanity ever has before is to seek an answer – or as Substratum Protocol puts it, assemble the final hypothesis. The group will encounter and record clues during the length of the mission and must synthesise them into a plan to close, control or otherwise neutralise the reality rending portal threatening all life on earth. The last phase of the game is all about this final hypothesis and learning whether or not these scientists learned enough to save humanity.

Ultimately designed to handle a collaborative group of scientists, Substratum Protocol will ship with special rules that handle two different modes of solo tabletop RPG play. The Hints and Hijinx system at the beating heart of this game was initially designed with solo play in mind, according to the designers. So, returning to that style simplifies the flow of play but loses out on the complexity of multiplayer. That’s why the designers included tools for achieving multi-scientist stories even when the group’s human contribution is a single player.

Pandion Games’ Andy Boyd is joined on the design team by editor Eric Lazure, illustrator Galen Pejeau, layout director Tony Tran and developmental editor René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas. A free preview PDF provides a clear look at the direction these folks have taken the game, including some delicious retro-future graphic design and secondary footnotes, asides and commentary from an unknown reader whose comments deliver flavour and worldbuilding.

Substratum Protocol’s Backerkit campaign will run through April 25th and is crowdfunding both a physical and digital PDF version of the game, which the publisher expects to ship by June of this year – an ambitious goal but one Pandion Games seems confident in nailing.

Don’t Starve has been begging players to keep themselves satiated for over 10 years. But now, thanks to Glass Cannon Unplugged, in collaboration with Klei Entertainment, Don’t Starve is coming to tabletops through their Kickstarter campaign.

Don’t Starve: The Board Game Overview

In this roguelike-ish cooperative survival game, players are dropped into a randomly generated world where magic and science intertwine. They’ll have to rely on their wits to outsmart fate and stay alive. The game emphasizes player choice, dynamic combat, and open-world exploration with a day/night cycle. The iconic visual design adds to the allure of this bizarre and strange land.

Don’t Starve has always been a game about immersion. When you start a new game, you’re dropped into this world with nothing and expected to survive with nothing but sticks and rocks. But by the end, you’re a fully realized survival adventurer. The video game has tens of thousands of 5-star reviews and a solid 10/10 track record.

By Glass Cannon Unplugged

The game will be available through Kickstarter. Expansions, add-ons, and a retail release are expected later down the line. Stay up to date with everything regarding Don’t Starve: The Board Game by following Glass Cannon Unplugged on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and their official website. 

Glass Cannon Unplugged is also behind the upcoming Apex Legends board game, the soon-to-be-released Dying Light board game, and Forstpunk, based on This War of Mine. So they know their way around a video game adaptation. Don’t Starve: The Board Game is designed by Rafał Pieczyński, who was the lead developer for Forstpunk. Jakub Wiśniewski, best known for his work in Frostpunk and This War of Mine, and Natanel Vo-Apfel of Into The Outside: Prelude fame, both provided narrative direction.

Warsaw, Poland (March 27, 2024) —Glass Cannon Unplugged is pleased to announce that they will be responsible for bringing to the world the official board game adaptation of the award-winning video game Don’t Starve as part of a long-term licensing partnership with Klei Entertainment.

Designed by Rafał Pieczyński – lead developer of the highly acclaimed and multi-award-winning Frostpunk: The Board Game, with narrative direction by Jakub Wiśniewski – known for his work on This War Of Mine and Frostpunk: The Board Game – and Natanel Vo-Apfel of Into The Outside: Prelude fame, Don’t Starve: The Board Game transports 1-4 players into the unrelenting, randomly generated nightmare world of the Constant, a distant and ominous realm where magic and science intertwine in ways better left unspoken. Pitched against the elements and a grim pantheon of baddies, the players assume the roles of iconic characters from the video game, having to work closely together and use their wits to outsmart fate, strive for subsistence, and simply stay alive.

With its mechanics highlighting player choice, dynamic combat, and open-world exploration in night and day conditions, Don’t Starve: The Board Game is bound to transcend to unexplored levels of immersion, with its visual design fully embracing the unique, whimsical art style long cherished by fans of the series.The game will be made available through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that is expected to fully utilize the creative potential of the source material, with a wealth of content offered via expansions, add-ons, and future retail releases. The Kickstarter campaign will launch near the end of the 3rd quarter of 2024.

Matt has loved games of all kinds his whole life: board, video, war, roleplaying. He’s worked as a writer for BoLS since 2017. He’s worked as freelance editor for board game rulebooks and has designed many of his own games as well.

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Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Adventures in the Household transmutes the Ennie Award-nominated Household RPG into 5E rules but keeps the regency eraed-flavoured world of the House, an abandoned mansion in the woods full of wee people called Littlings. Cities and entire cultures have developed around the crumbling walls and overgrown gardens, and players’ adventures revolve around exploring its borders, interacting with different Littling societies and fending off threats such as rats, spiders and (relatively) huge geese.

Original designers Riccardo Sirignano and Simone Formicola will publish the 5E translation via their Italian studio Two Little Mice, and they’ve brought on Jacob Rodgers as their conversion ringer – he was responsible for adapting Ruins of Symbaroum and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying for Free League, so he knows his way around Dungeons & Dragons’ modern ruleset.

Player characters will hail from one of four Littling backgrounds that compose the various communities inhabiting the House and its environs. The Faeries bear both dragonfly wings and a courtly nobility, while the Boggarts represent strong communal ties and strong physiques. The Slaugh hail from the Farbeyond and boast incredible regenerative abilities, while Sprites draw their power from ancestral connections to Fire, Air and Water elements within the House.

Classes are redefined as professions and sub-categorical vocations, and the core book offers six of each: burly Soldiers, academic-minded Scholars, Hunters who protect towns from carnivorous beats, opportunistic Criminals, Duelists who view warfare through a romantic lens and Animal Handlers who specialise in the domestication of helpful fauna. You can see clear parallels to the well known 5E classes here, but there’s a fun and flavourful tie to how the Littlings navigate the House that feels like a high fantasy recasting of Mary Norton’s book, The Borrowers.

Since this is a 5E tabletop RPG, players should expect to encounter no end of traps, challenges and potentially deadly combat as they push through the walls and carpets of the House. The core rulebook details five different rooms of the House – the Living Room, Bedroom, Basement, Bathroom and Dining Hall – each with different cities, characters and storylines to pursue. What’s not included are the previous full-sized residents, as they have vanished and not returned in living memory.

The 300-page core rulebook will be accompanied by a slightly smaller Household Guide that expands the house, offers more character options and new mysteries that form the foundations of campaign-long questlines. Such Small Matters provides game masters with 24 pregenerated Littlings and six authored adventures, along with quest hooks and other material to support homebrewed material.

The Kickstarter campaign for Adventures in the Household runs through April 4th to crowdfund both a digital and physical edition of the three sourcebooks. There’s also a reprint of the original RPG on offer. The development team includes Two Little Mice and Rodgers, artist Daniela Giubellini. Shipping to backers should begin in September of this year. If you’re interested in peeking at the rules before buying, there’s a free quickstart PDF on DrivethruRPG.

What Is Where Evil Lives?

When Flee, Mortals came out in crowdfunding, MCDM had the plan to fit way too much stuff in their book and wasn’t planning for it to be such a whooping success. So, they added way too much stuff into their book, but had to make a decision: Would they shorten the book, or print a gigantic book, that could easily break apart? The answer was plan C: none of the above. Make a monster book, and a shorter lair book. However, the lair book ended up being so good that people wanted it not to be just a PDF as it was originally intended, but a physical product as well. New crowdfunding, instant success as well.

So, is it worth it?

Yeah. End of review.

Ok, let’s be serious for once. With MCDM you expect great quality work from greatly paid amazing designers and writers. It’s an incredible formula for success. Now with that said, I do have some nitpicking just because with it being such a great product I know they can easily make this better. Still, overall, amazing work as usual.

I only have a PDF copy from backing Flee, Mortals, and James Introcaso also sent me a review copy. Thus, I can not judge the physical version of this product. I have not found images of copies yet, and from what I have researched those copies are just starting to arrive.

The best dungeons have fun boss battles, exciting hazards, and, of course, awesome treasure. Where Evil Lives: The MCDM Book of Boss Battles has all that plus everything you need to run a lair out of the book in a moment’s notice. Use a dungeon when you have nothing else planned, or build an entire campaign that leads up to a climactic encounter in a lair!

Lairs, not dungeons

The book markets itself as a book of lairs, and never states it is a book of dungeons. Yeah, it consists of 22 locations that are pretty much what we associate with dungeons, but these are short, made to be run within a single session, and they all are the lair of some powerful monster from the Flee, Mortals! book. The fact that James Introcaso, Mike Shea, and Scott Fitzgerald worked on this lair book, just as they did with the Fantastic Lairs :23 Boss Battles for your 5e RPG  (which is another amazing product of lairs) meant that this product was destined to success.

Below you can see a list of the 23 lairs. Weird they didn’t add a lvl 1 lair, but at the same time I feel that it doesn’t make much sense to add one. Going through a lair against a boss monster is either suicidal, or you have to make the boss monster quite boring/nonsensical for it to work. You have lairs going up to lvl 20. Tiers 3 and 4 of play in D&D have such a low amount of content and is so ridiculously varied that it was really interesting getting to analyze the design behind them.

The Monsters

The monsters you will find in this book are some of the ones that appear on Flee, Mortals! However, you don’t need that book in order to ue this one. All monsters you will need are reprinted in this book to make it an excellent standalone. That meant that a few things I considered unnecessary were reprinted as well. For example, this goblins sidebox while it works excellently for the monster book, it is useless for a cavern lair that already indicates how they will behave. Maybe re-adapting this text to how they behave in the lair could have worked better.

The monsters being copies from the monster book, they have sublime design, and the boss monsters work excellently with these environments. I would not be surprised if the monsters were originally created just for this lair, and then re-adapted for the monster book.

One thing I was surprised with from this book were roaming monsters. These appear in a lot of dungeons, but I was expecting to not have monsters materialize to roam the corridors and encounter the PCs, but have these monsters be part of the ones that were in other rooms. That way, if you battle the roaming monsters you get a benefit from doing so: you will encounter less later. This, however, may overcomplicate the design of the dungeon, but I somehow wish there was a way to simply accomplish this.

Lastly, I wanted to point out that while there were no Lair Actions in the Flee, Mortals! book to be found these were all in this book as they work with these specific lairs. Some of the lair actions create very unique sort of battles, which can only be done by creating these actions specifically for the lair they are in.

Lairs

Now this is what the book is all about. Having talked with some of the designers from both books, I know that designers who were tasked with certain monsters also designed the lair for them if there was one. Examples like this are Kat Kruger’s amazing hobgoblins with a lair that plays a lot with their now infernal heritage. Among some of my favorite lairs are the following:

• The Hanging Tree features an orc mercenary band that uses a tavern as the place to recruit them. There’s also the fact that the environment was made so you or the orcs can throw anything in it to attack. Excellent and hilarious game design!
•  Camp Firefield is a hobgoblin camp set inside a pocket dimension. This means that from room to room you are teleporting to different nodes within the lair, which is just incredible.
• Eight City Advocacy Services is a place of business in which the supreme devil reigns. You are pretty much infiltrating an office filled with devils. It’s so wacky I love it.
• Boughs of Eternity is the lair of a lich, located inside a giant tree, which you must go through learning the past of this entity to continue. I love great environmental storytelling.

There are some things I wanted to nitpick about these lairs as well, cause I feel this could be a tiny bit better. Many lairs are separated into different sections or levels. For some reason, this is not specified in the maps, which by the way are beautiful and fantastic for VTTs. Additionally, the table I showed above with all the lairs (which works greatly as a second index) does not lead you to the lair page when clicked. I believe this could be solved extremely easily, and it’s a cool accessibility thing to have.

Now, lastly, I want to point out some things I don’t see often in lairs or dungeons from other products. All lairs have NPCs with names and personalities that make them stand out from regular guards or minions. Often, they have information of use, or want to rebel against their boss, meaning you can possibly recruit them, using the retainer’s rules. Additionally, as indicated with the lich above, many monsters and bosses have a story that you can learn by going through the lair, be it by interrogating minions, reading books on the way, or seeing details on the environment. That is a stellar work from MCDM, I love seeing it. MCDM also seems to have given enough liberty to their designers to do wacky stuff with the design, such as draining Hit Dice from the PCs, which is something I love! Please do more things like this in the future! (if you ever design for D&D again). As a last thing, the product comes with a custom character sheet, which is just so much better looking than the original one! I’ll be using it for my future D&D games!

Final Thoughts

You guessed it! Another banger from MCDM… However, this is their last 5e one before doing solely their own stuff. Their upcoming setting book seems to be system neutral I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went with making it mostly for their own game. So, after all this time, we are seeing a shift in MCDM’s (and Matt Colville’s channel I suppose) direction. I am excited to see what that means for the future of TTRPG. It certainly is showing off how a great TTRPG company should work like.

GET WHERE EVIL LIVES

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This TTRPG crowdfunding sampler covers projects that end between April 3 to 10. You’ll find the latest version of Zweihänder, a 5e version of Adventures in the Household, the second edition of Low Fantasy Gaming, a digital TTRPG, B/X, and OSE offerings.

ZWEIHANDER RPG Reforged Edition from World of Game Design

• END DATE: Sun, April 7 2024 10:00 AM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): Zweihänder
• PROJECT TYPE: Core rulebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: $48 + S/H for the PDF and print versions of the book, character sheets, and STL files
• ADDITIONAL REPORTING: Read “ZWEIHÄNDER Reforged: Talking With Daniel D. Fox (World of Game Design)”
• TRY BEFORE YOU BUY: ZWEIHANDER RPG Reforged Edition: Session Zero is free at DriveThruRPG
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? A new version of the award winning Zweihänder RPG is live on Kickstarter. This project is backwards compatible with Grim & Perilous RPG, Revised, and the Starter Kit rulesets for Zweihänder. Using a d100 variant, this project is a dark fantasy world of “gothic horror, low magic, survival, and a dose of the eldritch.” In the Reforged Edition, you’ll get the full ruleset including faster combat and easier damage tracking than the prior versions. As well, the book includes a world of violence, heresy, and lost ancestries. When talking about Zweihänder, a frequent topic of conversation is the game’s inspiration, Warhammer Fantasy. To that subject, the campaign page states: “That’s where our roots are, and even though we’ve moved a lot of the mechanics into new territory, the atmosphere will be very similar, with plenty of nods to one of the greatest games ever made.” The Reforged Edition rules take the project further from its inspiration. Designed to make the game clearer and more accessible to new fans, this version promises a cleaner ruleset than prior versions. On top of that, if you’re a designer interested in creating third party Zweihänder content, there’s a license linked on the campaign page.

Adventures in the Household 5E from Two Little Mice

• END DATE: Thu, April 4 2024 5:59 PM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition
• PROJECT TYPE: Sourcebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: €29 for all three PDFs and the soundtrack
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? The whole world is a large, abandoned regency-era house, and you play as the Littlings, the tiny folk that live there. Taking the ENNIE Award nominated Household RPG, this campaign converts the game to a 5e sourcebook. It’s a little like The Secret of NIMH, but without mice. How small are your characters? Imagine your city is in a bathroom, your whole city; that’s how tiny they are. That means spiders and snakes are mighty giants of destruction. You’re living in a mystery house that begs the question: Where did the “bigs” go? If this interests you, on the campaign page there’s a link to the free quickstart rules.

Tales of Argosa from Pickpocket Press

• END DATE: Sun, April 7 2024 5:40 AM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): “Familiar d20 based system”
• PROJECT TYPE: Core rulebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: AU$136 + S/H for the PDF and print versions of the book, cards, and dice
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? This is Low Fantasy Gaming 2e with new rules and an original title, Tales of Argosa. Described as “Sword & Sorcery inspired Emergent Play Adventure Game, for groups or solo,” this is over 270 pages of rules monsters, and GM tools. Gameplay includes using a Deck of Signs, oracle dice, and activity dice to keep the story and results unique to your experience. This game takes the basics of a d20 system and focuses on keeping the power curve under control with limited levels, fewer HP, roll under stat checks, roll over combat, and more. If you’re looking for a d20 feel without the higher level distractions, this TTRPG might be a good fit for your gaming table.

The Contract RPG from Sapient Snake LLC

• END DATE: Wed, April 10 2024 10:46 AM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): An original system
• PROJECT TYPE: Core rulebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: $34 for the PDF and POD discount coupon for the core game plus 4 scenarios
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? This “digital Tabletop RPG” exists as a fully realized game with a website and tools right now. This campaign takes the digital rules and tools and makes them available as a core rulebook. You play as a contractor brought together with other freelancers to defeat a supernatural adversary. The game allows for easy player entry and exits, including rotating GM duties. If the idea of a digital toolset and a book for your table of supernatural investigators sounds fun, this campaign is worth checking out.

BX Advanced Bestiary, Vol. 2 from Third Kingdom Games

• END DATE: Wed, April 10 2024 11:23 AM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): Old-School Essentials
• PROJECT TYPE: Sourcebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: $15 for the PDF and POD discount coupon for the book
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? This project expands on the monsters from the classic B/X roleplaying game. With the second volume in this series, you’ll get monsters starting with letters E to K, each given more details and lore for use with any B/X or OSE project. In terms of monsters, you can look up the exact list, but if you want to get an idea of what the content will be like, check out the preview of Volume 1, which is available for free at DriveThruRPG.

The Village of Bray from MDNTWVLF

• END DATE: Fri, April 5 2024 1:00 PM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and Old-School Essentials
• PROJECT TYPE: Adventure
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: $15 + S/H for the PDF and print versions of the book plus additional PDFs
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? This OSE (or 5e) adventure brings a cryptid to a strange fantasy setting, one with moon fruits, a dry mine cave-in, and unusual monsters. This is a 44-page adventure with 5 new monsters and 2 NPCs. It leans into the idea of a detailed, not quite run-of-the-mill fantasy setting where unusual deaths are occurring, and you have to solve the crime. If you’re interested in more clues, check out the campaign page.

The Long Road Home from Plane Sailing Games

• END DATE: Wed, April 3 2024 3:00 PM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): An original system
• PROJECT TYPE: Core rulebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: £25 + S/H for the PDF and print versions of the book
• ADDITIONAL REPORTING: tabletopjess talked this project on her podcast: “Not DnD | The Long Road Home”
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? This project is about the epilogue to the epic adventure your character is returning from. You’ll journey home, tell the tale of your amazing deeds, and hope that when you get home, life is as you remember it. This book gives you the rules to create the setting and decide what grand adventure you undertook. But the point is going home; will you find happiness or miss the thrill of adventure? Will there be triumph or tragedy? If your campaigns never reach the final scene, this may be a good way to tell that last trek as the heroes head home to find what comes next.

Planestrider’s Journal for Level Up A5E and D&D 5E from EN Publishing

• END DATE: Thu, April 4 2024 6:00 PM EDT.
• SYSTEM(S): Level Up! Advanced 5th Edition and Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition
• PROJECT TYPE: Sourcebook
• MOST POPULAR PLEDGE: £40 for 3 PDFs and VTTs
• DISCLAIMER: EN World is a subsidiary of EN Publishing
• WHY SPOTLIGHT THIS CAMPAIGN? Level Up! Advanced Fifth Edition has a new sourcebook that opens up other planes of existence for your gaming table. 30 planes to adventure through with details covered in the 260-page Planestrider’s Journal and the 50-page Captain Cobalt’s Codicil. Does your gaming table want to travel to another plane? Then this project is for you.

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Egg Embry

OFF/FACE TRIBUTE RPG, a Lasers & Feelings sci-fi action duet roleplaying pamphlet, is free at DriveThruRPG and Itch.io.

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Egg Embry is part of EN World’s Columnist (ENWC) program as well as a columnist for Knights of the Dinner Table, d20 Radio, High Level Games, the Open Gaming Network, the Tessera Guild, and GAMA’s magazine, Around the Table. His area of focus is tabletop RPG crowdfunding campaigns. In addition, he blogs about Ghostfire Gaming’s Grim Hollow setting. His RPGs can be found through Egg Embry Publishing at DriveThruRPG (PDF) and Itch (PDF/Print).
If you enjoy the articles on EN World, please consider backing the EN World Patreon. Every dollar helps to make these articles possible.

WE DIE YOUNG – Supernatural Retro Roleplaying in the 1990s

A spiritual sequel to Bloat Game’s 1980s-based RPG, DARK PLACES & DEMOGORGONS, WE DIE YOUNG is set in Seattle in the 1990s during the grunge and alternative music counter-culture movements. Seattle became the epicenter of popular culture and began attracting musicians, artists, and supernatural creatures from all over. This game is heavily inspired by the music of Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and many more.

In WE DIE YOUNG, you play as 20-something humans, Vampires, Werebeasts, Mummies, Fey and Fairies, and multiple other types of supernatural creatures and character classes. Each creature and character class has its unique history and abilities.

WotC’s attitude towards 3rd party publishers seems to have come a long way from where it was at this time last year. Cast your mind back to the start of 2023, when WotC was on the verge of “deauthorizing” the Open Gaming License and demanding royalties from 3rd party publishers who made over a certain amount. As the D&D maker put it then, its thinking was that the OGL was intended “for fans only” and not as a license to be used by their competition.

“Competition” here means any 3rd party publisher, from Paizo to folks like Griffon’s Saddlebag, or Ghostfire Gaming, whom you might recognize as one of the publishers behind the recent 3rd party additions to D&D Beyond, Lairs of Etharis, and Dungeons of Drakkenheim.

Today, Ghostfire Gaming’s latest Kickstarter, Monsters of Drakkenheim a sourcebook of more than 150 new 5E monsters, including “epic boss fights” and lairs, illustrates the stark reversal in policy. Because Monsters of Drakkenheim will launch with support for D&D Beyond, as well as other virtual tabletops. This marks a first for WotC; giving support for D&D Beyond to a product in active crowdfunding is not typically how the company has acted in the past. But given the plethora of 3rd party products coming to D&D Beyond, as WotC looks to cement the foundation of their own virtual tabletop (which is still very much in the works), this likely won’t be the last either.

Monsters of Drakkenheim 5E – Eldritch Horrors and Virtual Tabletops

Monsters of Drakkenheim is a 300-page expansion of the world of Drakkenheim, featuring more than 150 new eldritch horror-themed creatures. But it’s not just a catalog of creatures. Monsters of Drakkenheim also includes new sets of lairs, complete with tactical battle maps, harvesting rules for crafting items out of the parts of the monsters you find, and the setpiece of the book: Epic Bosses.

Boss fights in D&D are notoriously difficult. But Monsters of Drakkenheim certainly seems hellbent on trying with their new take on Legendary Actions:

Epic Actions. Epic Bosses take an action after each player characters’ turn. This means their action economy is always evenly matched against the party, no matter how large PLUS their hit points scale based on the number of player characters facing them. This dynamic scaling means an Epic Boss doesn’t need help from minions or lackeys – they’re a threat to an entire adventuring party all on their own.

All this, plus new conditions like burning, freezing, or shock, as well as bewildered or staggered add new layers of crunch to 5E’s rules. If you’re looking for a little more heft to your encounters, this campaign seems well worth checking out.

Seems like the start of a new era for D&D. What do you think?

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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