How I launched a tabletop kickstarter campaign (2021)

I’m an Industrial Designer based out of Tasmania Australia who plays a lot of tabletop RPGs. When creating content for my own games I have found myself with a backlog of designs, drawings and stories that I’m working to build into available content.

Some would say I have been obsessed with Kickstarter for a long time. Is it the style of content that is produced on there, or is it the crowd funding ideology as a whole that drew me to it. I think its certainly a bit of both.
For many years, before launching my Kickstarter I had backed projects here and there and always wondered about the possibilities if I was to produce something and what it may be. Finally the time came for me to take the leap and begin the process of creating my campaign. My initial concepts and designs changed over time and much of the core design and writing had been completed during my own gaming sessions. This was important to me as I could then be sure I was ready to produce the project in the time frame I had planned for.

The idea

Oakenrest Keep came from my own personal game table and continued to grow and build into its own setting. Built over many gaming sessions I developed the skeleton of what would become my kickstarter campaign. www.kickstarter.com/projects/churlthomp/oakenrest-keep

Setup

Setting up the campaign and creating the assets for the page was fun and rewarding as I could see the product coming together. Kickstarter pages vary widely, from pure text to loads of visual content. I chose to go down the visual content route. This for me is the best course of action as showing content from the product is a great way to garner more confidence from your backers in that this thing is really something they want to get behind.

Launching

This was a scary time. I chose a reasonable goal that would cover my print costs but wasn’t anything too crazy that I would risk not hitting. This is something that was possible due to the nature of my project (a small scale print book). For larger product design campaigns this is probably not an option as covering costs of production at its baseline is significantly more expensive.

The Campaign

After hitting the initial funding goal in the first few hours the challenge became maintaining momentum for the remainder of the campaign. For me this was another 2 weeks of project updates, social posts and continued work on the final product. The important thing is to remember that during projects, backers come in the first and last day of the project. This doesn’t mean the middle is a waste though, because this is where you need to build up project followers that will be notified in the final 24 hours of the project and will hopefully make up a portion of those final day backers.

Funded

This is the interesting part of Kickstarter. Congratulations, your project is funded the money will come through from Kickstarter in an average of 2 weeks. Thats not the end though. Now its time to complete, produce and ship all the content to both digital and physical backers. Setting the delivery deadline 2 months after the campaign finished, I was pretty confident that I could get everything together in that timeframe and thankfully apart from some slight shipping delays being felt all across the world at this point, I was able to deliver.

Shipping

Shipping prices can change at a moments notice, especially at the moment. (Aus post online pre pay and print was a lifesaver) Thankfully I had planned and factored in shipping price changes, however even then the changes I saw from quote to fulfilment ate in decently to profits. For me in my small 180 person kickstarter this risk could be minimised but I can now see more closely how some shipping price changes can and will have massive impacts on profitability for larger projects.

Being based out of Hobart, Australia, and most of my backers being from the US/EU, it meant that for me the shipping was always going to be a bigger hit than for someone based out of a central area in either of those 2 places. This meant that I had to go into the project taking into account that postage would be larger expenditure. It has become the norm within crowd funding that the shipping details and price are completed and paid for in the post campaign backer survey (Generally done through Backerkit or similar) This allows creators to better evaluate and price shipping as it can be charged closer to the distribution date, rather than charging during the campaign and risking that 2–6 months later the prices have change quite drastically as seen throughout the last few years.

Conclusion

It was overall an exciting time, and I learnt an incredible amount not just within the Kickstarter space but also just the project management and logistical space. Kickstarter is running ZineQuest 2023 in February and my next kickstarter campaign in the RPG space is underway. It will once again be a chance for me to learn a lot and build some interesting and cool content within the RPG space.

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