Seriously. They picked a goal of $50,000: it’s now at $2.161* million. And note that the Avatar Legends RPG Kickstarter dropped yesterday.
I’m just going to wait until the last 48 hours, then see what goodies are available then. It seems the most efficient use of my resources.
Moe Lane
*It went to 2.165M while I was writing this. And 2.166M when I went to go check again. This is one of the monster Kickstarters.
This piques my interest. Where are they printing? I couldn’t find that in my cursory look through.
Aw, crap, I don’t know.
Just got an email back: no worries, it’s clean (printed in the USA). I didn’t ask about the widgets, because that’s a whole other can o’worms and I have my own problems with keeping to a high enough standard, but the book itself will be printed in the USA.
I had noted that the shipping looks like it’s US-centric.
My watermelons!
It was a really good show.
That said, I don’t really see it as a promising setting for an expanded world RPG.
(And if they try to keep Korra in the canon, the bloody thing falls apart from internal contradictions.)
They are presenting five different available eras (all specifically picked to not be during any of the times covered by the shows/comics), and only one of those is post-Korra. If you don’t like Korra, all you have to do is pick one of the other four. What do you mean about it not being a promising setting?
The setting is thin.
They sketched out a map with a few main features and themes supporting them, and then backfilled to meet beats as the story developed.
e.g. Sokka needs confidence. Let’s introduce a Water Tribe warrior he knows, and a coming-of-age ceremony we’ve never mentioned before.
Why is the warrior there? And where is there, anyway?
Ummm. He’s there because he was wounded, and left behind to heal. So someplace like that, with innocents that are threatened because they harbored a fugitive.
Great! And we can use the encounter to play on Aang’s fear of being alone.
And we can give Aang the message recalling the warrior to heighten that and develop his character!
That’s great! But we’ll have to use a different threat than just Fire Nation troops. We need a threat they can defeat if they work together, not an overwhelming force that will force them to flee. Maybe a bounty hunter?
One that can track by smell to follow the avatar, the warrior, and the missive. OK, not the hunter herself, but her freaky mount. That way, she’s not entirely certain how the trails she’s following interact, but she’ll drive them into contact…
Here’s the thing: I can tell you the warrior’s name was Balto, and quite a bit about him. But I could not tell you anything about the location beyond “a place of healing, near the sea”.
I generally GM this way.
Settings developed like this aren’t reusable. (And I plead the 5th on having that type of discussion with myself.)
With respect to Korra specifically, you can’t make the jump from hereditary magic as the basis for imperial/feudalism (with some anachronistic steam tech because magic) to early 20th century tech and urban social unrest in one generation. It can only be covered by handwavium and refusing to look at the problem. Trying to draw a straight line from A to B will bludgeon your willing suspension of disbelief to a red smear on the carpet.
Okay, but it’s PbtA. That means that they can basically just keep doing what they were doing. It means that previously established canon is more of a soup-pot to reach into for cool references and backstory bits, rather than an actual map to build things on, but that’s an entirely reasonable basis to build an RPG on anyway. PbtA games are pretty much designed for “the setting is a bunch of interesting assumptions that we mess with and explore and expand on in play” *already*.
I’m noticing… well, they’ve already beat their initial goal by a factor of *50*. Now, it does look like they have plans in place for stretch goals going out at least this far (500K, 1M, 1.375M, 2.2M, and 3M are pretty clearly part of a pre-planned 5-book cycle, but italso looks like they’re running out the end of that pre-planned rope (the first four in that cycle seem to have been rather further along in development than the fifth)
I note that they make no predictions as to when the thing is likely to ship, and I suspect that the better they do, the longer it’s going to take. I mostly hope that they don’t choke on it to the degree that they have real problems with the follow-through. The combination of “stretch goals means that everyone gets more stuff” and “space between stretch goals really isn’t increasing all that quickly” concerns me, a bit.
Not that those worries are in any way stopping me from backing it.
I notice that after a certain point, they just… stopped adding stretch goals. That’s comforting, really. It suggests that all of the stretch goals they had posted were planned for and/or in the can when they started, and that the money is a lot more likely to work out.