My pals at the Onyx Path have had a hell of a run with their Kickstarters. They’re a bunch of ex-White Wolf employees who’ve licensed the White Wolf tabletop roleplaying games from their current owner – CCP of EVE Online fame – and are busy producing new editions of classic games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. For their current Kickstarter drive, they tackled the third edition of Exalted, a fantasy RPG with roots in pulp, classical epics, and modern manga and anime. (They explain it all in this “What Is Exalted?” piece.)
They’ve blown the doors off this one. At the moment, they’ve raised almost $440,000, and they still have 17 days to go. With any luck at all, this should shatter the Kickstarter record for tabletop RPGs that Monte Cook’s Numenera set at $517,255 last summer. As you might imagine, they’ve been adding lots of great stretch goals as they go, and their latest one involves me.
If and when the Exalted Kickstarter reaches $485,000, I’ll write a story for the already unlocked Exalted fiction anthology, and then I’ll write an Exalted novel to go with it. I’ll be following in the footsteps of my friends Richard Dansky, Jess Hartley, Tim Waggoner, and Aaron Rosenberg, all of whom have written Exalted novels in the past.
I’ve been planning to run another Kickstarter for a novel of my own, but I’ve didn’t want to do that before I got all the 12 for ’12 books into my backers’ hands. If this Exalted novel goes through (as I think it will), I’ll have plenty of writing work to keep me busy and my family fed until well past when the last 12 for ’12 book is out, and then I can jump into my own Kickstarter sometime this fall.
So: WOOT!
