The largest project on BackerKit this month is MCDM’s The MDCDM RPG. It may be the largest yet, beating Restoration Games’s $2m Return to Dark Tower from last year.
The pitch is straightforward; it’s a tabletop RPG from Matt Coville’s company, it’s not D&D, it’s fun, and it’s part of the community. You can see a recorded live stream below or dive in pledge.
Ruffling some OSR feathers, MCDM dives in by disregarding the scared cows from the 70s. It is a game with, but not about dungeoncrawling, with a system which PCs cannot miss.
Funding for the MCDM project is two books, not one, the first about Heroes and the second about Monsters. Heroes has about 400 pages of rules, and the second features most of the 5e monsters.
The rules, which use 2d6, are already in playtesting, and you can talk to people who have taken part on the official Discord.
We love fighting monsters! But there’s more to the game than that!
Certain NPCs can be negotiated with to get them to change their allegiance or reconsider their actions. (Technically, ANY npc can be negotiated with but there’s usually only one per adventure) These NPCs have stats like Patience and Interest.
MCDM says they’ll publish the game under an open license if successful.
The publisher also said they’ll custom build a new virutal tabletop. That could be even more disruptive and interesting to the RPG market than a popular new core rule set.
We think a Virtual Tabletop that lets you play this game with folks remotely, especially in this day and age, is critical to letting people play how and when they want. We believe very strongly that a custom-designed VTT built from the ground up to work with our game is the best solution because it means we can custom tailor the user experience for our community.
Therefore, should we hit $1.5m, we will pay someone to work on this. We can’t promise it will exist! Software development is risky and fraught with perils, but we already have a working prototype! Now all we want to do is spend some money to get it done.
Backers at the $40 level get the Heroes book in PDF, and at $65 get both books, and it’s not possible to only get the Monster tome. Not at this stage, anyway.
Those MCDM supporters who pledge $70 pick up the hardcover as a reward, and those who stretch to $125 get the limited edition of the same rules, which means a gold-embossed cover and dustjacket.
There’s a small discount for those who can hit $135, as they’ll get both Heroes and Monsters in hardcover. Then, lastly, at $250, backers get both books in limited editions.
A playtest edition is due out before the second half of 2024 and the BackerKit crowdfunding campaign concludes on the 5th of January.
