Summer of Kickstarters

O.K.  so the kickstarter bug has bit me again. I am in on Dungeon a Day. Still 32 hours to go so you can be in on it too! I am not in on Bones although I still have 9 hours to change my mind. As such I thought this was an apropos time for some good old groginardian angst on the subject. As a rocket scientist I am sufficiently well paid (although not lawyer/doctor rich) that dropping $50 to $100 a month is not going to put a dent in either the grocery or rent money. However, my frugal upbringing (and she-who-must-be-obeyed) does not allow me to tie up large quantities of cash on projects with no quick return on investment. So,as I stated on my previous kickstarter post I am looking for kickstarters from people with a proven track record, whose stuff I have bought and liked before. I also seem to be tending to jump in on projects already funded with lots of swag. That being said, both these kickstarters meet all of the stated criteria.

I am signed up Dungeon a Day in hopes of picking up a complete .pdf of the Mega-Dungeon Monty Cook put together. I already have through level 8 saved on my hard drive from the years subscription I purchased when it first came out. However since I found downloading a dungeon one itty, bitty piece at a time damn annoying, so I let my subscription lapse (WoTC the same is true of Dungeon and Dragon Magazine as well, I mean how much would it cost to hire some intern to spend a half hour a month combining all the little .pdfs into one big .pdf?). Unfortunately the lack of closure in owning half a dungeon gnaws at my soul (it does not apparently bother Monty, since he jumped ship and past the completion to lesser mortals sometime after I left the project [probably more on bait-and-switch authoring in a future blog]). Given the above conditions, the chance to pick up the complete edition for $50 was irresistible. I mean the original subscription was $87 a year! So I am in.

On the surface Bones looks like something I would jump at as well. I mean I like Reaper Miniatures, they have some totally fantastic sculpts. As others on the web have pointed out the $100 pledge gets you an insane amount of miniatures. I also think that the Reaper plan to raise the capital needed to convert their production over to a new process is a perfect fit for Kickstarter. However I am not fond of hard resin models, having had troubles with them in the past (difficult to glue, break easily [many of my miniatures have been subject to the nose-dive from the table], and bubbles in all the wrong places). I cannot tell from the information on the Reaper web site exactly what kind of resin they are using (it might even be something soft like thermoplastic, although fine detail seems to rule this out), but am leery of it (the fact that they are using superglue to reposition is a tip-off its not my favorite plastic polystyrene, the stated objective of cheap is not promising either). I am also concerned that although it is a vast quantity miniatures, many are genres I would not use in my game and would end up siting around unpainted taking up storage space in a house already bursting at the seams with miniatures. March 2013 is also way too long for my impatient soul to wait for something. Getting everything out to  the currently 14,869 backers will be a logistics nightmare (as they say in new product development, the second worst thing that happens to you product is that it succeeds). I wish Reaper luck, I certainly will buy the specific models I want at the gamestore (although with 14,869 orders to fill new Reaper stuff may not ship to the game stores for a while). Besides this looks like direct competition for my evil plan involving 3D printers, polystyrene, and a print-on-demand website. Go ahead and check it out for yourself (my resolve weakens every time I peek at the kickstarter website), but I am out.