Kickstarter: Dicecards

While stumbling around Kickstarter, I noticed one for cards with dice on them. I'm all about reducing the need for carrying thing's around. Other than that, it's pretty self-explanatory.

Kickstarter: V20 Hunters Hunted

After successful campaigns to get the 20th edition of Vampire full support, White Wolf is throwing together a new Hunters Hunted.  The original was a core manual for playing with vampire antagonists, rather than protagonists.  This expands on the concept, bringing modern technology to the hunt, and bringing new hunting grounds -- in particular, the internet.

Kickstarter: Beyond the Gates of Antares

Rick Priestly and a few of the other designers of Warhammer, 40,000 are putting together another tabletop science-fiction wargame in the same vein.  He's put it up on Kickstarter.

Mapping Rome

I've given some thought to running a Roman campaign, but for various reasons, it's been a non-starter.  Courtesy of io9, I discovered Stanford's ORBIS project -- essentially mapping various methods of traveling, or as io9 refers to it: Google Maps for the Roman world.

Traveller Mod: Wounds

Too frequently in games, we see our own characters' life as a numerical statistic.  This runs true from video games to tabletop RPGs.  Despite magical full-body healing, or the ready availability of cybernetics and limb replacements, DMs are hesitant to do anything that makes players feel their characters are "crippled."  Yet this is one of the easiest steps to take to show the lethality of combat, while making players at least simulate damage taken.  Traveller's damage is taken from statistics, which is a good start -- but even then, it doesn't feel particularly real.  I want players to think before they get into combat, and consider whether or not a gunfight is particularly worth it.

Crowdsourcing Development

Among the challenges of crowdfunding, developers should not only be managing your projects within financial constraints, but on manpower constraints. The recent Kingdom Death Kickstarter seemed largely a one-man project, for example, but by enlisting assistants for individual sculptures, he managed to create a wide and varied model range. One of the creative ways Brian Fargo has managed the Wasteland 2 project was by outsourcing the building of assets.

Kickstarter I Missed: Dice Rings

In late December, I was pretty much Kickstarter-ed out. I wasn't checking it regularly, and I missed a rather innovative product - Dice Rings.