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This time last week, The Arcane Library’s The Western Reaches for Shadowdark looked set to be the only game in town–so far–for TTRPG million-dollar crowdfunders this year. And it’s still projected to break the top six of all time in the Million Dollar TTRPG Crowdfunder Club, which currently stands at 42 members.
However, two other crowdfunders rallied in their closing days, both squeaking in just past the million dollar mark! While it had always looked close, most people felt these two campaigns would just fall short of that magical–albeit arbitrary–number. However, The Magnus Archives RPG: Tangled in the Web from Monte Cook Games closed at $1015,475; and Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game from Magpie Games crossed the line with $1,028,103.
This means that the total number of million dollar TTRPG crowdfunders this year went from 0 to 3 in the space of a week! You can see the full list here.
It’s noteable that none of these three are D&D 5E projects but this is easily ascribed to the fact that a new edition of D&D has just come out, making 5E crowdfunding creators and backers cautious all throughout 2024 and into 2025. Additionally, from the creator front, there is no official SRD (System Reference Document) available yet for the new edition of D&D, which is the rules document which D&D owner Wizards of the Coast puts out under the Open Game License–or, more recently, Creative Commons–as a developer tool for third parties. While this does not stop publishers making 2024 D&D-compatible products using the older SRDs (after all, WotC has gone to great lengths to point out that this is the same game, and not technically a new edition) it may have caused some to hold tight and wait for ‘official’ word.
Anyhow, after a quiet start, it looks like the million-dollar TTRPG crowdfunders are back again this year! 2024 saw 8 such projects, so it remains to be seen if 2025 will beat that!
