I might have a Kickstarter problem. But hey, the first step is admitting you have a problem, and by posting about it, you can have a Kickstarter problem too!

The ones that I help fund in the past few months include Wrestlenomicon, Traveller 5, Magical Kitties Save the Day, and Cities of Harn… but let’s take a look at the ones that are still going, and that you can still pledge for.

Nordlond Sagas

Written by Douglas Cole, a well-known GURPS writer and blogger, this expands his Nordlond setting for the Dungeon Fantasy line. It’s a nordic setting full of viking-ish barbarians, and a welcome addition to the GURPS ecosystem, which tends to only cater to the most involved GMs and players because it doesn’t have much “ready-to-play” material. I don’t do much dungeon crawling, but I do like GURPS, and this will probably be a nice break in between lengthy horror gaming campaigns.

The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection

This one is from the folks at Golden Goblin Press, and more specifically Oscar Rios, who is known for the Cthulhu Invictus books (Call of Cthulhu in ancient Rome!).

The main book features 6 adventures set in the 1920s, focused around a particular holiday, and starring teenage investigators. It’s probably going to be great fun to run those one-shots at the appropriate times of the year.

Deadly Doodles Expansion

These days, Steve Jackson Games is more well-known for fun tabletop games like Munchkin or Zombie Dice than for their RPGs like GURPS. Their latest game, Deadly Doodles, released last month, is another fun little dungeon-crawling-inspired project, and the first expansion is already underway.

Haunted West

Last but not least, Chris Spivey and Darker Hues Studios are back at it with “Haunted West, a Historical Weird West RPG”. It’s a spaghetti western game of weird-fiction – basically cowboys vs. monsters, aliens, and spirits, as I understand it.

Just like their previous critically acclaimed project Harlem Unbound (which is going to get a second edition from Chaosium, by the way), this game will feature mainly black protagonists, and other people from minorities. And, similar to Harlem Unbound’s historical New-York, I assume there will be some fascinating chapters on the real-world history of the American Wild West, which has been notoriously whitewashed in the general public’s mind through countless Hollywood movies.

If you have to back only one project this fall, that’s probably the one!

I finally got the time to watch Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Crystal Palace, the one-shot adventure by the Critical Role folks.

I think the most impressive thing about this video is that the “critters” community (fans of the main Critical Role shows) is so big and dedicated that after the video aired, they basically flooded the Chaosium website to order the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set en masse. This caused… chaos at Chaosium (yes, I went there), to the point that they issues two apologies (with the second providing coupons to customers affected by delays). Oh well, the good thing is that D&D players are getting interested in horror gaming!

Back to the actual video, I think good points include:

• Production values are through the roof as usual with Critical Role – from the costumes to the set decor (especially shadow displays) and the props, which it seems Taliesin had a lot of fun with.
• There was some good roleplay overall, and it’s always nice to see how involved everybody always is with the action.

Some bad points:

• I don’t see the point of avoid HPL’s name while mentioning his bigotry. People who don’t know him won’t know who you’re talking about, and people who get the Call of Cthulhu books will see his face and name within the first couple pages anyway. Might as well clearly state who that horrible person was.
• There was a lot of fumbling around the rules. It felt like only Ashly had properly read the Quick Start rules. Interestingly enough, almost everybody was reverting to D&D-isms all the time… I wonder how long it takes die-hard D&D players to get used to other systems.

Overall, I really hope they do another game!