Announcement: I have some games at the Ennies Emporium for the next 9 days!
Backerkit is trying a little experiment. To celebrate the Ennies this year, they invited Ennies nominees from last year to sell their games via special, 10-day crowdfunding campaigns as part of a bigger "Ennies Emporium".
I decided there was no harm in giving it a try. My game Dawn of the Orcs, which was nominated for a "Best Rules" Ennie in 2025, is now up on a campaign. You can get it here. It will be available there until July 16.
I threw in a couple other games as well, to make it worth looking at for people who already have the game. Free Flight and Cooking with the Orcs are both already available as free PDFs online, but I'm doing limited print runs of both for the Backerkit campaign. I'm also throwing in my modern horror game Fear and Panic.
Free Flight is a game by my wife, who goes by HappyHagfish online. She isn't generally interested in selling her work, but she was kind enough to let me do a print run in order to add a little extra to the catalog for this campaign. It's a GMless solo game, where you play a falconer. You've raised a bird to hunt with you, and now you're flying that bird without restraints for the first time. Will your falcon return when you call? It's a wonderful little game that will teach you a lot about real-world falconry, the risks, the tradeoffs, and the potential heartbreak.
Cooking with the Orcs is a supplement I wrote for Dawn. It started as a joke, but I ended up putting a little too much effort into it. It's a completely playable addition to the base game where you build the first traditional Orc recipe, an improvised stew, by adding an ingredient after each battle. The ingredients are based on the current highest stat of the Orcs and the outcome of the battle. To connect ingredients to stats, I sorted them according to the classical theory of humors. I didn't want to borrow from modern alternative medicine, so I ended up reading Galen's original On the Properties of Foodstuffs, making some lists of ingredients by humor, and then wedging in a few New World ingredients he wouldn't have encountered to help fill out different categories. I chose ingredients that would be healthy and last well in stews. I made my best attempt to make sure at least some valid ingredients will be affordable and available in most of the world - to help with this, the game always gives you a choice between at least three ingredients. The recipe you get at the end will be one that makes sense, from a worldbuilding point of view, as a dish scrounged on the battlefield by Orcs. Plasmophage also put way, way too much effort into the art.
Fear and Panic is my take on a rules-light, modern horror RPG. It's the game I'm always working on, so if you follow this blog you probably know about it already.
It's definitely an odd feeling re-crowdfunding a game two years after the first launch, but I'm always down to try new things. I love every distribution platform. Brick and mortar stores are great for building community, selling at conventions is an incredible chance to interact with customers, and webstores make games available around the world. The strength of crowdfunding is in having extremely efficient logistics. As a creator, I get to keep a much bigger slice of every dollar spent on my game via Backerkit than most other platforms, and without the huge financial risk of paying for a convention booth. Getting a few more sales that way is a nice little prize to come with an Ennie!