While looking for neat things to pledge for on Kickstarter sometimes I come across…other things.
For instance, there apparently is a need out there to be able to dispense candy or gum from your phone. Maybe you could use it as a gag where you pretend to get candy from playing Candy Crush? I don’t know. I just don’t know what the point of iConGum is.
Continuing the smart phone weirdness is the PhoneDrone which you can use to spy on yourself. With your phone in a drone. I don’t think I would ever want to put my super expensive phone in something that goes up in the air and flies around. Why not just get a normal drone with a camera in it? Maybe I’m just really worried about breaking my phone. And creeped out by drones.
The last item this time isn’t smartphone related, but I can’t even with it so here you go. Ever been curled up in your snuggie next to your loved one in their snuggie, then been overcome with the urge to give them a hand job, but your snuggie is in the way ruining everything and then your entire relationship collapses because you don’t have easy access to each other’s genitals?
Then get the pokie! A snuggie with intimacy holes! And a button up back! And deep pockets? Worried you aren’t hip enough to fuck while wearing a blanket? Don’t worry – it comes with the Pokie Sutra. So yeah.
“INNSMOUTH is ultimately a photography project, the latest of many by renowned Horror photographer JOSHUA HOFFINE. The subject of INNSMOUTH is taken from H. P. LOVECRAFT’s 1931 tale The Shadow over Innsmouth. In this story a young man decides to visit a decrepit seaside town named Innsmouth and is unexpectedly trapped overnight, facing a terrifying encounter with the townsfolk who all belong to an aquatic-god-worshipping cult of mutant fish people.
JOSHUA’s goal is to capture this terror in one stunningly horrifying photograph.
The photograph will be composed of an Innsmouth street with the human protagonist of the story surrounded by transformed mutant townsfolk and Deep Ones. As a special treat, the amazing actor DOUG JONES has signed on to play the part of the human protagonist in this photograph.”
Perilous Journeys
We’re going to start delving into Dungeon World on TRF, and this supplement looks a cool way to add some more options to the campaign.
“After the success of my previous Kickstarter, I polled my backers to see what they wanted me to do next, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of a set of rules, tools, and tips for exploration and adventure in the wilderness. Perilous Journeys is the result of me taking that mandate to heart and seeing how far I can run with it.
Perilous Journeys is my attempt to combine Dungeon World’s approach to collaborative world-building with the old-school RPG reliance on random tables to generate content on the fly, woven together by modifications to the original Dungeon World travel moves. The main differences between the use of tables in Perilous Journeys and their use in older RPGs is an emphasis on exploration and discovery over combat encounters, and the baked-in methodology of using randomized results as prompts rather than facts, to be interpreted during play.”
Snappower
I really love the flat profile of this USB charger. I like not needing to have a converter to plug the USB cable in, but it can be awkward to have them sticking straight out. Plus this one is super easy to install.
“With custom-built components engineered to fit entirely inside the cover plate, it’s the sleekest, most low profile charger around. Its slim design allows furniture to be positioned snug against the wall. The side access to the charging port enables you to plug your USB cables in with no hassle. Unlike plug-in adapters that get shuffled around from room to room (and eventually lost), the SnapPower Charger is securely screwed to the outlet and always there when you need it.”
The Cthulhu Breakfast Club
“The Cthulhu Breakfast Club is a magazine format podcast show from the creators of Yog Radio and The Silver Lodge. We cover all things Lovecraftiana, games and more while in the genteel surroundings of an English Tearoom in Baildon, Yorkshire.
This Kickstarter has been created for the very specific purpose of acquiring three additional wireless mic kits (we already have two of the necessary five – Sennheiser EW 112-P G3 GB systems). These will give the show much more audio clarity for our listeners (to be more easily audible above the general hubbub of a live working environment).”
Death in Chocolate
These chocolates are works of art. I don’t think I could ever bring myself to eat them, not only because they look like skulls and diseased jaws, but because of all the work that was put into making them beautiful.
“What had begun as a fascination with horror, alternative art, the culinary arts, taxidermy and all things odd, has grown multiple heads — and they’re all made of chocolate!
I began working on small, specially cast and hand-painted chocolate bird skulls. Before I knew it, I had branched out into other animal and human skulls. Most recently, I’ve been producing antique anatomical teaching models in chocolate. Each one is hand painted and individually finished and packaged.”
Where’s Cthulhu?
I wasted a lot of time as a kid on the I Spy and Where’s Waldo books. This one has Cthulhu and other Old Ones hiding out waiting for you to roll a high enough Spot Hidden to find them.
“We are building Arkham in retro style, pixel by pixel: everybody is around the Miskanotic river and the University campus to join the Arkham Parade, while the cultists cross the river with the big balloons: the Elder Thing, Cthulhu, Dagon… they are proud of their gods and entities and everybody is coming to join the party! The poster size is 19×27″ – 50x70cm.”
“Spotify meets Tabletop RPGs — Battlebards is the most expansive Tabletop Audio Libraryand Tools ever assembled to make your campaigns simply epic. And, everything is accessible straight through your browser.
Tailor-made background music inspired by fantasy races, voiceover scripts written to bring life to everyday NPC interactions, and a colossal array of bone crushing, spell fire blasting sound effects… this is immersive gaming at its best for the Player and the GM. ”
NerdAche Cakes
I’ve been following NerdAche Cakes on Tumblr for forever and I don’t think I’ve ever seen more gorgeous geeky sweets. She’s looking to open her own bakery and get more people working with her to release these delicacies to the masses, and I hope she can manage it!
“Ever since we started Nerdache Cakes, a tumblr blog running on cake requests in 2011, we’ve been asked where our store is located. Now we are ready to provide our fellow geeks a place of their own.
Nerdache Cakes Bakery + Café, where you can get awesome, level-up inducing treats that are decadent, fun, and a nod to your favorite icons in pop culture nerd-ery!
After 3 years of building Nerdache Cakes- from piping cupcakes in a corner in my kitchen to making 6 tier cakes for geek weddings, I’ve outgrown my tiny space. This bakery would be built from years of work done just by myself, to a team of people ready to make your geekiest sweets come true!”
I spend a lot of time trolling through Kickstarter, and some of what I find tends towards the befuddling instead of the cool.
TASER YOUR CANDLES. That’s pretty much all I see every time I look at this page. The ArcLighter is an electronic way to light your candles, incense, paper, toothpicks, and more. It actually looks like it could be pretty handy, but I can’t get over the fact that you are tasering things to set them on fire.
Pretty much everyone loves chocolate and wine. You can even buy chocolate to pair with your wine. But why stop there! Why not drink your wine out a chocolate glass. Loving Cups has your decadent experience ready to go. All I can think about is this cup melting all over you as you try to drink your wine. And then you have to eat the cup right? Other then the chocolate dissolving into your wine, how else are you going to eat it? Also, chocolate dissolved in my wine sounds gross. I guess they look cool, but it seems like it will make it difficult for you to swirl your wine and comment on its clarity like a snob.
Have you ever been chowing down on your Chobani and thought, “Nooooo, I can’t get every bit of the yogurt out without licking the cup lick an uncivilized barbarian.” Well, never fear, Spoonani is here for you. This spoon is made to get yogurt out of every cranny of your Chobani so you can nom like a gentleman/lady. Bonus – if you pledge at $100 you can get your Spoonani gold-plated. Three people have gold-plated yogurt spoons coming to them. That’s it, I quit.
Hey everyone! We had the chance to talk to the creators of the exciting new BattleBards Kickstarter in the days before it goes live. BattleBards is a new tool for introducing audio into your Table Top games. It comes with an impressive library of sound effects, ambient music, and a way to combine the any files into something new and special for your game. They sent me the Soundboard they created in their last Kickstarter which was really amazing. I enjoyed that they had multiple tabs to keep track of your ambient music, SFX, and other files. You can save your most used files to a side panel, so they’re easy to use over and over, and it’s easy to set something to loop. It’s a much more handy way to handle sound files then fumbling around in iTunes and it looks awesome to boot. We sent our most burning questions to the group behind BattleBards, and here’s what we learned!
Tell us about yourself and how you got into RPGs
We all grew up around gaming and it’s grown from a hobby to a passion. We’ve all come into RPG’s from different angles.
Mike came into RPG’s starting from reading the Dragonlance series of books which primed him for jumping into Dungeons and Dragons. Alex came into RPG’s from video games, namely, the series of Might and Magic games which also, primed him for D&D realizing “Wait, I can run my OWN Might and Magic type stuff with my friends?!” Kyn has always been a hardcore console gamer and RPG fan (Dragon Warrior!!!!). In highschool he was introduced to Spellfire the CCG based on Forgotten Realms and then to AD&D 2nd Edition through his geek friends. He was hooked and began enjoying weekly doses of junk food driven TTRPG Campaigns.
What do you think adding ambient music and SFX brings to a tabletop game?
Sound effects provide evocative accenting to combat and important sequences around the gaming table. Music adds the emotional context for a scene, providing that all important tool to help the GM direct players’ energy as needed. A funny example of just how critical music is to contextualizing a scene, check out this rendition of the Star News A New Hope Ceremony scene at the end without John Williams’ score. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-GZJhfBmI. It’s the same way with gaming.
What do you have planned in the future? Will you continue to develop music/SFX for Battlebards?
The audio library will never stop growing as we continue to work with our talent to continuously release audio for gamers. In the future, once we are confident that we’re offering wonderful content for fantasy gamers, we’ll dive into Sci-Fi, modern, and cyberpunk settings, as directed by the Battlebards Community.
What sets you apart from other RPG sound projects?
This falls into two categories. First, let’s talk about the audio itself. We set the bar exceedingly high for what we allow onto Battlebards. As such, we work with only the best artists who are known for their work on television, video games, and film. Another key difference is that we do not tie up with just one artist to do all the work. We throw every creative brief for the next audio piece we want to create to the entire artist community for auditions before settling on the right match. So, just because one artist can do an amazing Dark Elf Temple, doesn’t mean that they’ll produce an equally awesome Orc War March.
In terms of the tools, we have an almost single minded focus on simplicity. Alex, our Audio Director, has been using a ton of audio in his games for 15 years and if anyone knows the frustrations of needing multiple media players and minimized YouTube windows open every which place, it’s him. Here, the focus is on customization and accessibility. GMs will be able to bring whatever audio they need at their fingertips by creating custom playlists which they can populate anyway they like. With super simple tools which don’t extend in complexity beyond click and drag, Game Masters can crop tracks, layer a mix, adjust different volume settings in such a way that creating a rich multi-level mix can be done in a flash. Despite having so much audio, you’ll always be able to find exactly what you need when you need it.
How does licensing work? For instance, if the SFX are used during a game, can they be released in a podcast episode?
Some audio is purchased by us so there is more flexibility in how we can use them. However, most Battlebards audio will be licensed, not owned by us, and those can only be used through the Battlebards system. When it comes to commercial uses of our licensees outside of Battlebards, such as our audio’s inclusion in video games, podcasts, and the like, that is a case-by-case discussion. However we’re open to it and would be excited to discuss possible collaborations.
What can I get if I pledge for your Battlebards project?
Locked in months of service, the Soundboard & Mixer tools, Battlebards Cloud to integrate your own audio, Offline Mode to use the service without an internet connection, Alpha and Beta access, special Kickstarter only badges to signify that you were what made this happen, and even exclusive Kickstarter-only tracks for download that you get to help decide what they will be! If you want to get in on this, now’s the time.
I imagine ambient music and SFX could bring a lot to board games as well! Do you have plans to do sounds for those too?
Absolutely! Any fantasy based board games as old as Hero Quest to up-and-coming ones like the Orcs Must Die! The Boardgame, would greatly benefit from the immersive nature of Battlebards audio. Heck, we even played a game of MTG with our tracks and it was immensely gratifying to finish off a player with the lightning bolt card coupled with the lightning bolt sound effect!
Do you imagine you will have something to help facilitate online gaming, like a Google Hangouts app?
It’s a total no brainer that we need to provide online tools and even integrate with virtual tabletops to really bring this incredible body of work to those games taking place in cyberspace. As soon as we can find our legs, we’re going to be exploring the best way to take this next step so be on the look out!
What is your favorite game?
Well, that’s a tough one, there’s so much we’re all into but to provide an answer that doesn’t span pages and pages where we point out games we love in different categories, we can say with confidence that on the tabletop side of things, where we draw our inspiration for this whole quest of ours, our heart lies in D&D 3.5 and more and more, warming up to 5E.
Is there anything else we should know about your project?
We hope gamers out there will give us a chance to be part of the epic quests and journeys told over gaming tables everywhere. We truly believe that we have the best tabletop audio in the world. We know the pains of bringing it to the table and we have the tools to make its use seamless. Ultimately, we hope that Battlebards will be a platform that we can all share together. There really would be no better feeling than to successfully introduce the larger gaming community to the wonders of integrating audio into their games. That’s our passion.
You can find BattleBards on Kickstarter, Facebook, or Twitter. Definitely give their project a look, their tracks sound great and the look and usability of the app is fantastic.
Calamityware Dinner Plate 5
I have seen the previous four sets and if I had more money my entire dinnerware set would be from this series. I love the juxtaposition of the art style and the silly scenarios occurring on the plates.
“I like drawings that make me laugh. When I inherited a traditional Willow-pattern plate, I just had to redraw it and add a pterodactyl. As I drew more plates and added more calamities—UFOs, Sasquatch, and volcanoes—folks urged me to produce real dinner plates. A Kickstarter project was born.
My first four Calamityware Kickstarter projects (flying monkey, giant robot, voracious sea monster, and UFO invasion) found sponsors, so here is the fifth project in what might turn out to be a long series. ”
Best Birthday Prank Card Ever
This is so funny. I want a million of them to give out to everyone for every occasion.
“Your card is delivered to you in a “Safe mode”. Here you can start and stop the song as much as you want. After you sign the card with a lovely message, pull the activation tab inside the card which will activate the card. Then slide it into an envelope and deliver!”
Ion: A Compound Building Game
I backed the previous game by this creator – A peptide building game. As a biochemist, I couldn’t resist it. This game is in the same vein, except now you get to build molecules. If you love science and games you should check it out!
“Ion is a quick but explosively fun card game themed accurately around a few fundamental chemistry concepts. More specifically, how ions form some of the most basic compounds we use everyday. But don’t worry, we didn’t leave out the noble gases!”
Phoenix: Dawn Command
This a card game with a lot of RPG drivers behind it. The tagline “A game were death not only makes you stronger, but defines who you are” was what caught my attention as I was browsing. Also, it’s from the people who made Gloom, so it’s probably pretty amazing!
“Phoenix is a story-driven roleplaying game that uses cards to resolve actions. Every player has a deck of cards that represent a character’s abilities. To accomplish an action, a player needs to lay down a set of cards with a total value that equals or exceeds the difficulty of the task. A player can get an extra push by using a trait – a card that describes a unique aspect of a character. If the player can explain how that trait applies to the current challenge, the value of the card is increased. This encourages cinematic storytelling, driving players to describe an action beyond the simple numbers. In addition, each player has Sparks – a pool of mystical energy that can be used to boost the value of an action. This allows a character to succeed at a normally impossible task… but when that pool of energy is exhausted, the character dies.
While Phoenix has a gamemaster who drives the story and controls the challenges the characters face, the card-based system places a significant amount of narrative control in the hands of the players. Success isn’t based on the roll of a die; it’s a question of what a player is willing to sacrifice to make an action succeed. Because death isn’t the end of the story, character survival isn’t the most important part of a mission. Instead, the challenge is to make each death meaningful, and to achieve the objectives the Phoenixes are willing to lay down their lives for.”
Soulfall
Ugh. The art for this is gorgeous. The gameplay sounds simple and fun, and with an estimate of only 10 minutes/player it seems like it would be a great game to play with friends and family.
“Soulfall is a barren land brought back from the edge of destruction by a mysterious group of entities known as the Lords. Preventing the destruction of the land, the Lords gained the devotion of the remaining survivors of Soulfall. Now, various Nomad tribes begin to expand across the land, eking out a new life in the ruins of an old world, establishing outposts and living in the shadow of the powerful – and often unpredictable – Lords of Soulfall.
Soulfall is a board game for 2-4 players designed by John Clowdus and illustrated by Sandro Rybak. Game time is roughly 10 minutes per player. Each player is the leader of a Nomad tribe, leading his Nomads across the barren landscape of Soulfall. Along the way, each player will expand his tribe, build Outposts, try to gain the favor of the Lords, and collect Shards, all while preventing the other players from doing the same. The player with the highest score at the end of the game wins. ”
Knot Dice
These dice/blocks are so cool looking. If you like the design of Celtic knots, you should definitely think about adding this game to your collection. I think I would probably just spend a lot of time playing with the dice, not even playing the game.
“These are Knot Dice – they are games, puzzles, and artistic inspiration. They are a way to get everyone making Celtic knots. They’re not just for monks.
The paths on each die are continuous over all of the faces. By connecting several dice side by side, you form intricate Celtic knot designs. Knot Dice combine some of the best elements of dice and tiles in six games and six puzzles in the printed rulebook.”
Cthulhu Dice Tower
This is incredibly expensive, but so so cool looking.
“Intimidate your friends and game master! Spew forth dice from the slumber god himself. Only he know if you should succeed of fail in your gaming quest. Obey the dice!
Standing 5.5 inches tall, the Cthulhu is cast from the highest quality polymer resin. Includes all the parts need to build 1 Cthulhu horror dice tower. The basic kit dice towers are designed to be easy to assemble OR you can back the pre-painted edition.”
Death by Die
Ever had trouble coming up with ways to dismember your players? Well, these dice will give you all kinds of ideas on how to gorily damage your PCs.
“The first two dice in the Death by Die system are the Death and Dismemberment Dice. These two dice allow any player, game master, or other player-character to decide the fate of their own, or another player’s in-game character.
With these two dice alone you can sever appendages, heads and mash entire bodies, you can kill or be killed by fire, absurd mishap, common trap, random explosion, radiation, acid, electric shock and any other creative interpretation of the depictions of death and mayhem seen each time these dice are rolled. You can choose for the result of the roll to happen generally in an area, or specifically to an individuals body region. You’re in complete control of everything except how the dice land.”
Dice Display Box and Rolling Tray
I keep my dice in either a Ghiradelli box that used to have chocolate or a dice bag I knitted, but having a beautiful box like this to display them would be pretty nice. Dice rolling trays are also surprisingly handy, so having all this awesomeness in one place is pretty great.
“The Box is made with excellent care by hand right at Studio 6d6 in Wisconsin. Made of Solid Red Oak, with very attractive finger joints at the corners, this box is made to last. Finished in a beautiful natural stain and lined with felt.
The bottom section of the Box is divided into 10 sections, each of which will fit 10 16mm dice. This section, all on its own, makes a great display for your dice. The partitions are removable if you need to fit larger dice.”
The top section is removable and makes a great Rolling Tray. The inside is lined with felt in your choice of color selected from those unlocked.
