Anthropos Games is soliciting
funding on Kickstarter to print of their new game Early Dark. DivNull
makes a point of backing any
tabletop RPG that shows up on Kickstarter, especially if the result will
be open source or a cut above your average game. Early Dark seems like
it has a chance to be the latter, which is why it’s being mentioned
here. Its goals are certainly interesting: “Treat gender, race, and
human consciousness as progressively as possible; Forge a world indebted
to non-European myth and story in addition to common Western fantasy
tropes; and Create a dynamic game engine that drives dramatic narrative
while reproducing realistic conflict and human limitations”.
This is also a decent opportunity to praise Kickstarter for a feature: making the amount pledged independent of the “pledge tiers”. That is, you can choose the benefit of, say, the $20 tier, but still pledge $100 if you want. Often, I want to pledge a certain amount, but am totally uninterested in the extra crap thrown into that tier.
One the other hand, Kickstarter’s search feature is horrible. It
should not be difficult to build a search like
role-playing and rpg, but that fails totally. Also,
role-playing and roleplaying return totally
different results. That could be considered desirable, but only if you
also allow role-playing and roleplaying (or, better yet,
role*playing) searches. Kickstarter has informed me they
intend to fix this, but nothing has happened as yet.