From pledge to print - how crowdfunding rebuilt the hobby

February 2023. Kelsey Dionne, a designer who until then mostly wrote adventures for other people's games, presses a button in Las Vegas. Her own game is called Shadowdark, a grim dungeon crawler in which a torch burns for exactly one real-world hour. She has no publisher, no distributor, no stock. Just a campaign page and a counter sitting at zero.

Within a few hours, her goal is met. When the campaign closes a month later, the counter reads over 1.3 million dollars, raised by more than twelve thousand people. For a book that has yet to be printed.

How it used to work

Anyone who wanted to publish a roleplaying game in the last century needed money first. A printer wants a print run, a print run costs thousands, and those thousands had to exist before a single copy was sold. Only then did the real work begin: convincing a distributor, convincing stores, hoping the boxes would ever leave the warehouse. The risk sat entirely with the maker, and so with the question of whether the maker was rich enough to be allowed to fail.

In 2009, a website went live that turned that model upside down: Kickstarter. The idea was simple. Say what you want to make, name a number, and if enough people pay up front, it happens. The audience took over the risk from the printing press.

The hobby caught on fast. As early as the summer of 2011, designer Gareth-Michael Skarka launched a campaign for Far West, a blend of western and wuxia. He asked for five thousand dollars and received over forty-nine thousand, from 717 backers. It was one of the first big roleplaying campaigns on the platform. Remember that name, we will come back to it.

What opened up

Crowdfunding removed the gatekeeper. You no longer had to convince anyone but your audience, and that audience turned out to be hungry for exactly the games distributors considered too risky: too small, too strange, too dark.

Kickstarter noticed it too. In February 2019, the platform organised Zine Quest, an invitation to creators to launch small, stapled roleplaying zines, in the spirit of the fanzines the hobby once grew out of. It drew 103 projects, 93 percent of which succeeded. Two thirds of the creators had never crowdfunded anything before. An entire generation of designers stepped over the threshold that month.

Meanwhile, the numbers kept climbing. Sweden's Mörk Borg, more art book than rulebook, found its audience through Kickstarter; publisher Free League raised roughly ten million dollars in total between 2015 and 2022 with campaigns for games like The One Ring. Matt Colville broke records with 2.1 million dollars for Strongholds & Followers. And in August 2021, Avatar Legends shattered everything: its fifty-thousand-dollar goal was met after sixteen minutes, and a month later the final count stood at 9.5 million, from over eighty thousand backers.

That Shadowdark could happen a year and a half later, in the aftermath of the OGL conflict, was no longer a coincidence. It was the new normal. Dolmenwood, Gavin Norman's fairy-tale-dark life's work, also began as a campaign in September 2023. The previous chapter ended with makers at their kitchen tables; this is how those kitchen tables found their audience.

The price of the promise

Back to Far West. The promised delivery date was the end of 2011. The PDF arrived on 8 September 2023. Nearly twelve years, filled with dozens of new promises that evaporated one after another. Those early backers learned a painful lesson the whole hobby had to internalise: a pledge is not an order. It is a bet on someone's ability to finish what they start.

Most makers do finish. But waiting is part of the deal, along with shipping costs that rise halfway through, printers that run late, and campaigns that grow bigger than their creators can handle. And there is one more thing, which we as a store should name honestly: crowdfunding routes around the shop. Exclusive editions that never reach retail, games sold out before they exist. The road from maker to table has grown shorter, and not everyone in the old chain was happy about it.

What a backer actually buys

And yet. Whoever presses that button is not buying a book. They are buying the desire for something to exist that does not exist yet. Thousands of people saying together: we want this, go make it. Which may be the purest form of what this hobby has always been, people inventing something together and then moving in.

We know how that feels. Netherbook itself began with a Kickstarter for Morrovion's Guide to Gambling, long before there was a store. And half of what sits on our shelves today, from Mörk Borg to Dolmenwood to Shadowdark, exists because somewhere a counter started running and did not stop.

Right now, somewhere, someone is sitting at a kitchen table again, finger above the button, counter at zero. That is how it starts, every single time.