The Brinkwood Team has announced the cancellation of the Refuge and Despair expansions for the critically acclaimed roleplaying game Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants. Lead designer Erik Bernhardt confirmed in a recent update that a catastrophic hard drive failure destroyed most of the principal author’s progress, rendering completion of the stretch goals impossible.
The announcement, made on 17 April 2026, brings a difficult end to a long-running chapter of the 2021 Kickstarter campaign. While the core game remains a triumph of the “Castle Punk” genre, the loss of the manuscript for the Refuge and Despair supplements has forced the team to begin issuing manual refunds via Backerkit. Bernhardt noted that despite attempts to recover the lost data, the project is no longer feasible.
Erik Bernhardt, Lead Designer at The Brinkwood Team, said in a statement:
A hard drive failure wiped out most of the principal author’s progress on Refuge and Despair. That and other technical issues have prevented further development of this project. We’ve attempted to recover the lost data… but for now, it is no longer feasible to complete the Refuge and Despair stretch goal.”
The situation underscores a recurring vulnerability within the indie roleplaying game scene. While it feels awkward for a contemporary digital project to be derailed by a single hardware failure, the reality of solo or small-team development often lacks the robust redundancies of larger corporations. In light of this news, Geek Native spoke to several anonymous indie developers who collectively utilised a range of backup techniques, from sophisticated RAID hard drive arrays to cloud services such as Google Drive and Backblaze.
While these authors all ensured they backed up their work, most admitted to inherent weaknesses in their systems. A common concern was the “single point of failure,” such as keeping all physical backup drives in one geographic location. At Geek Native, we use Backblaze to mitigate these risks, but for a creator in the midst of a complex project, a sudden technical collapse can still prove insurmountable.
Despite this setback, it is important to remember that Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants is a superb roleplaying game. Its innovative “Forged in the Dark” mechanics and atmospheric setting, where brigands rise up against vampiric overlords, have earned it a loyal following. The failure to deliver the expansions does not diminish the quality of the core book, which remains a high-water mark for indie design.
Refunds are currently being processed, though the team warned that the Backerkit system’s manual nature may mean it takes up to four weeks for transactions to complete. Following the refund window, a web form will be made available for any backers who encounter issues.
(Via Kickstarter).
