Looking for a new game? Here are our favorite tabletop RPG Kickstarters and sales for fall 2024

The fall weather here in the Northern Hemisphere is the perfect time to hang out inside around a table with your friends, your collection of dice, and your favorite tabletop RPGs. It’s been a while since we took a look at new TTRPG Kickstarters, so without further ado, here’s a roundup of some new and exciting things on the horizon that could become your new favorite(s) — as well as a couple things you can get your hands on right now!

(Full disclosure: I’ve backed all of these Kickstarters personally, and have also purchased the Humble Bundle package.)

Call of Cthulhu Humble Bundle Encore

Call of Cthulhu is one of the stalwarts of tabletop gaming, now in its 7th edition; discovering the things that go bump in the night and then going mad as you gaze upon their unknowable eldritch forms never goes out of style. A few months ago Humble Bundle ran a massive sale on Call of Cthulhu books, but if you missed that sale, you might be happy to discover it’s back for an encore! This amazing deal gets you a 26 item bundle for $25 USD, including a starter set, both core rulebooks, the Pulp Cthulhu and Cthulhu Dark Ages setting guides, and more adventures and creepy monsters than you can shake a stick at. Just about the only thing this collection doesn’t have that I wish it did is the utterly brilliant Masks of Nyarlathotep — regarded as one of the best campaigns ever created — but once you’re fully loaded up with this bunch of digital books, you might not miss it. There’s even a coloring book!

Check out the Call of Cthulhu Encore Humble Bundle now – $5 gets you a starter set plus some adventures, $15 gets that plus the core books and more, and $25 gets you the whole shebang for less than a dollar a product.

Royal Blood, a tarot heist game

From the minds that brought you Hollows, Eat the Reich, Honey Heist, Spire: The City Must Fall, and Heart: The City Beneath comes a brand new game about heists, desperation, tarot cards, and magic. In Royal Blood, you take the role of one of several Royals, modern-day magicians and holders of ancient leftover powers who are out to take down an Arcane — who were once human like you, but since have become something iconic, something… stranger. Each game of Royal Blood is generated by a deck of tarot cards, as are your characters, and it’s designed to be played as a one-shot over the course of about two to four hours that generates something new and different each time. That same deck also resolves your actions as you steal power from the most dangerous people in the world. Time to get to work.

You can back Royal Blood on Kickstarter. (And if you don’t have a tarot deck, they’re producing one for the game, as well!)

Strap into a giant magical robot with Armour Astir: Advent

Climb into your technomagical mecha and strike back against an authority that wants to control you in Armour Astir: Advent. Channeling the spirit of anime like The Vision of Escaflowne and Code Geass, Armour Astir: Advent is a Powered by the Apocalypse game of players using their wits, expertise, and huge magical mecha to fight oppressive powers; it doesn’t skimp on the drama or the action, either. Armour Astir: Advent has famously been used to run the PALISADE season of Friends at the Table, and features things like both frontline and support playbooks, mech customization, a zoomed-out faction level game to see what the big movers and shakers of the world are doing, and even a microgame within a game about three players creating an Astir — the game’s magical mecha.

You can help fund Armour Astir: Advent‘s hardback run on Kickstarter now, but if you just want to check the game out, you can grab a PDF on itch.io for $15 — and there’s even a free version of the rules without the art for $0, so that’s an option too!

Pirate Borg gets a gigantic expansion with Down Among the Dead

Limithron’s Pirate Borg is a rum-and-cutlasses flavored, rules-light, art-heavy tabletop RPG based on the award winning Mörk Borg; it steps away from the latter’s bleak and apocalyptic dark fantasy setting and instead takes players to the Dark Caribbean — a fantastical setting for swashbuckling campaigns that are fast, deadly, and focused on player agency and smart decisions rather than “what’s on my character sheet?” and build optimization. Steal treasure, raid a port, evade the Kraken, die on the high seas, roll up a new scurvy-ridden sea dog and do it all over again.

Now, Pirate Borg is getting a huge shot in the arm in terms of additional content in the form of Down Among the Dead, a new expansion featuring an 128 page hardcover containing new player options, three full length adventures, random tables and resources for the GM, and more. Most fascinating to me is Lost to the Locker — how many RPGs include an adventure for after the entire party bites the dust? In these kind of old-school games, death can be easy if you make bad decisions — but that doesn’t mean the adventure is over. You might need it, based on some of these other expeditions. There’s even a starter set for Pirate Borg included in this set, perfect as an entry point for new players.

You can back Down Among the Dead on Kickstarter now. If you want to get a copy of the original Pirate Borg, that’s also an optional add-on when you’re backing, in both digital and physical forms.