Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for December 21st, and the episode title is “Fatigue”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #267]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
The World Anvil won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
The interview with Tommaso is up. Given that two World Anvils are in the TTRPG industry, were you confident you knew which Geek Native patrons had voted for?
They voted for the Italian maker of RPGs like Broken Tales and Dead Air. The other is a world-building site. Except, I learned this while talking to Tommaso; he’s not in Italy. Oh sure, the rest of the team is, but he’s in Finland.
The logistics of the operation behind such high-quality tabletop RPG products impresses me.
A topic we both agree on is that there seems to be a slowing of backer interest in crowdfunding. No doubt some high-paid consultancy will release some stats to back this up.
Tommaso calls this fatigue, noting that it’s impossible to keep up, even within your community. Not only can you not back everything; you can’t play everything.
Over on Kobold Press, CEO Wolfgang Baur touches on this, too. Kobold, by many measures, has had a great year and impressed many people, but their total revenue from Kickstarter in 2024 was just over $1m. That sounds a lot but it’s down by 50% from the record-breaking 2023.
Wolfgang points out that money from hobby stores and VTTS are also down, while the overall company coffers are in good shape.
I’m part of the problem. I’ve bought a lot fewer games because I’ve not had either the money or the time. How about you?
However, turnarounds are possible. Bronwen has a good example ,and that’s the shining beacon of hope many people are talking about – James Gunn’s Superman trailer.
Doesn’t it feel right to you? It’s packed with loads of superheroes, although some of them seem to be blasting at civvies or even fighting Superman. There’s Nathan Fillon as Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer not to mention Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, who certianly isn’t a hero.
Gunn said he was miserable shooting the film because of the pressure. Imagine what he’s feeling now.
Bad news. We’ve 7 months of waiting. The movie isn’t due until July. I guess we’ll find out whether there’s a future for the DCU then.
Another Bronwen spot is Attack on Titan: The Last Attack. I suspect Scout Regiment vets would have been impressed with her tracking skills here. We now know that this merged together final two episodes will hit theatres in the USA and Canada on the 10th of Feburary. That’s it. One day. Here in the UK, we wait longer, but get longer as it’ll air in cinemas on the 26th and 27th of February.
I’ve not been entirely idle this week, and on Monday, when the workload looked manageable, I went to see The Lord of the Rings – The War of the Rohirrim. There’s a full and largely positive review on the blog.
One of my few gripes with the animation was some of the voices. This should not be the case in the UK, but some accents are associated with tropes and roles. There’s a typical farmer accent. A typical likelylad accent and so forth.
I’m sorry to say that to my Scottish ears some of the formidable Rohirrim warriors sounded soft and Southern. That’s not at all what I expected.
I was also surprised to see The Whispering Vault in DriveThruRPG. I thought it was a really obscure horror game, so I blogged about it as such, but loads of people on social media spoke up with fond memories.
You play, well, a sort of haunting entity that builds bodies for missions and goes off to deal with cosmic threats in a spooky, chiller way. It’s been re-released by the current owner, Philip J Reed. Not a Christmas one-shot, not unless you want to get out of the festive spirit and into the freaky spirit.
There are two freebie stories to finish up since I didn’t get around to any bundles but perhaps the biggest surprise of the week is coming.
Firstly, the quickstart to Jesse Harlin’s Arrhenius is out. That’s set 100,000 years in the future and described as icecore. I asked, ‘Why not Frostpunk’ and got a response. Frostpunk has some trademark protection around it and icecore is a homage to EDM. Well. There you go.
Ready for the surprise?
The official Batman TTRPG quickstart is also out.
The publisher is the French board game maker Monolith. The RPG was crowdfunded alongside part three of the Batman board game. It couldn’t have been the priority but they are doing it.
You can get the quickstart from DriveThruRPG. Oh, and did you know Santa and Batman have teamed up in a comic book series to fight Krampus and vampires.
On that note, keep safe, beware of Christmas vampires, aka toddlers and see you next week.
Join the site discussions by leaving a comment below.
