Make Me Design a Game

My pals over at Calliope Games (including, especially, my old friend Ray Wehrs) have been running a Kickstarter for nearly two months now, called the Titans Series, and it’s about to come to a thundering close. The project is fully funded (which means IT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING!), and it shattered its first stretch goal. It’s an ambitious project for which they’ve lined …

The Shotguns & Sorcery RPG Kickstarter Is Here!

As I mentioned last week, Outland Entertainment launched a Kickstarter drive for a tabletop roleplaying game based upon my Shotguns & Sorcery stories. It got off to a fantastic start, and as I write this, it’s over 90% funded. First off, thanks to everyone who went over and backed the drive already. Kickstarters can live or die based on their momentum, …

Shotguns & Sorcery for the CORE RPG

Among his many other talents, my pal Lester Smith is a crackerjack game designer. If you’re a longtime tabletop gamer, you probably played some of his creations, including Dark Conspiracy and Dragon Dice. He’s been working on a new tabletop roleplaying game for a while now, and I had the honor of playing it at the Nexus Game Fair a few weeks …

The InSpectres Movie Kickstarter

A few years back, my pals at Reactor 88 Studios asked me to lend them a hand with their latest project, a horror-comedy film based upon InSpectres, a brilliant indie roleplaying game by my friend Jared Sorensen. I came in and wrote a new draft of Jeff Dohm’s original screenplay and served as one of the film’s producers, and I even played a …

Kickstarter: Figuring Your Costs

One of the first things you need to do if you’re running a Kickstarter is figure out what you want to produce and how much it’s going to cost. For my 12 for ’12 Kickstarters, this turned out to be pretty simple. The things you need to think about include: Production of the files for both the ebook edition and …

Kickstarter: Gauging Your Novel’s Chances

I’ve seen a lot of Kickstarters succeed, but even more of them fail. One of the reasons is that the people running them don’t bother to do basic research about the category in which their project belongs. If you’ve never run a project before and you set a goal that would require you to break all records in that category, …

Top Ten Tabletop Kickstarters: How They Do It

Over at ICv2, they’ve posted a list of the top ten tabletop gaming Kickstarters of all time (um, four years now, in Kickstarter terms). They don’t offer up much in the way of analysis there, though, other than to say “tabletop game projects are among Kickstarter’s most successful categories, with five projects at over $1 million, and three over $2 million.” …

Kickstarter Tally

With the announcement earlier today that I may (and hope to) write an Exalted novel as a stretch goal for the Exalted Third Edition Kickstarter, it’s time to tally up the list that shows I’m becoming the unofficial king of stretch goals (a title I never aspired to as a child). So far, the following full dozen Kickstarter drives have successfully added …