Legendary Games, Eight Kickstarters in 2021: An Interview with Jason Nelson

February 24, 2022 Egg Embry Interrogation Droid 0

At EN World, I talked to Jason Nelson about Legendary Games’ 2022 plans and some aspects of their 2021 experience. We discussed so much, that there was leftover answers that I’m sharing here. It’s 2021, so we discuss Kickstarters and Covid.

EGG EMBRY (EGG): In 2021, Legendary Games produced multiple Kickstarters, multiple new projects, and a variety of bundles. In other words, Legendary created a lot of fun for the gaming table. Before we get into the individual parts of the year, how would you rate 2021 for Legendary?

JASON NELSON (JASON): It’s been our best year ever! We did the Kickstarter series you mentioned, a Bundle of Holding, and nearly 100 products for D&D 5E, Pathfinder 1E and 2E, and Starfinder. We’ve completed fulfillment on the first 5 Kickstarters, with the last two already begun. It’s been a crazy busy year, but a great success by any measure.

 

EGG: You did seven Kickstarters in 2021 including support for Mike Myler’s Legendary Adventures crowdfunding. What were some of the highlights of those campaigns?

JASON: We actually participated in one more Kickstarter project, supporting Miguel Colon’s Cloudsea project for 5E. Miguel was the lead designer for the Boricubos project and did a ton of work on several of our other projects, and we were delighted to help promote his first solo Kickstarter, which succeeded very nicely.

  • [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Adding this for uniformity.
    Cloudsea: (5e) 5th Edition Primer to Living Atop the Clouds (Kickstarter, DriveThruRPG) reached 164 backers that pledged $4,335 in July.]

 

EGG: With your Kickstarter campaigns, are you doing Stretch Goals anymore? Do you feel it impacts backer interest when you don’t offer Stretch Goals?

JASON: Sure, we’ll do them sometimes, when it’s the right project for it. As a general rule, though, I’m not sure how much stretch goals really help you as a project creator. I’m a huge Order of the Stick fan, and Rich Burlew ran I think one of the first million-dollar gaming Kickstarters way back in what, 2013 or so. To the best of my knowledge, there are still stretch goals from that project that have not quite been completed. I backed it at one of the basic levels and got my stuff, and everything Rich does with it is terrific, but it’s also a great cautionary tale about how a project can get away from you. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: To head off comments, The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive campaign ran in January, 2012, and the comments section points towards several outstanding deliverables.]

I think in the days when Kickstarter was mostly a “venture capital” kind of platform, where you’d pitch an idea, see if it had support, and then build up the project to the level at which it was supported, stretch goals made sense. Heck, it still makes sense for projects like that, where you really don’t know what the market is going to be like for whatever it is you’re making.

For a lot of projects, though, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be like, especially if you’ve done a lot of them. I think we are up to around 17 completed Kickstarters now. You then have to think about your overall workflow and the opportunity cost of each choice you make. Do you want to have one large, amorphous, and uncertain project that sprawls out and you never quite know when it’ll be done? What you designed as a ladder could turn into an anchor that follows you for years as you keep chipping away at something. It also could require extra writing or playtesting or editing, or it might require you to wait on additional contributors (sometimes including fan contributions), or new art, and definitely on finalizing layout.

Alternatively, would you rather have a tightly focused, coherent project that knows exactly what its scope and scale is and that you can turn around and deliver right away? And then be able to move on to the next project!

There’s room in a company’s ecosystem of work for both models, but of the projects we did this year only one had stretch goals. It did the best overall of the projects we launched, but it also required the most work before, during, and—especially—after the Kickstarter to get it completed. We also kind of split the difference on the Boricubos project in that we released “beta” versions of the PDFs without the stretch goal material right after the Kickstarter ended, followed by the final versions of each PDF as they were completed. Print fulfillment, of course, had to wait until after everything was done. It was still a pretty quick turnaround, just a few months, but it was a delay.

 

EGG: You’re not an exclusively Kickstarter company, you continue to release projects outside of KS. What have been some of those highlights for 2021?

JASON: We used to do just one or sometimes two Kickstarters a year, but with more coherent, focused, quick-turnaround Kickstarters we did far more of them this year than ever before, but as you said we also have kept turning the crank on a wide array of products for all three systems as we mentioned above. The biggest release of the year was the Aegis of Empires Adventure Path, capping off a Kickstarter project from last year with a massive 600-page adventure saga for D&D 5E and Pathfinder 1E and 2E.

That’s kind of a cheat, though. As far as non-Kickstarter projects, we are excited to be closing in on completing our “Legendary Heroes” product line of Pathfinder RPG class revisions with new class supplements for hunters, monks, sorcerers, bloodragers, and coming soon oracles and druids. We’ve been working on that product line for quite a while and it’s exciting to have it so close to completion. We’ve also been spreading our class design wings with new ninja and shaman classes for 5E and new mesmerist, cabalist, shaman, and cartomancer classes for PF2! We’ve got a ton of terrific class options for all three systems.

 

EGG: Was Legendary Games able to return to the convention scene in 2021?

JASON: Nope, no conventions for us this past year. Just too much COVID going on for me to feel good about doing that, on top of the expense of running a booth vs. the sales prospects at a diminished convention. We’ll see how things shake out in 2022. I’d like to get to the GAMA trade show in March to show off our various new lines, but it’s still hard to feel great about conventions even with booster shots. We’ll see how things are going later on in the year like PaizoCon in May and Gen Con in August.

 

EGG: Thanks for talking with me. Where can fans follow Legendary Games?

JASON: You can find us any time on:

Or if you ever have a question, hit us up at [our email].

Thanks for having us on and all the best to all of our friends and fans in 2022!

Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, and Amazon.

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In Our Dreams Awake #1: A Cyberpunk/Fantasy Adventure By Egg Embry, John McGuire, Edgar Salazar, and Rolands Kalniņš with a variant cover by Sean Hill "Jason Byron can't wake up. Each moment feels real, yet each moment feels like a dream. Issue #1 of a dreampunk comic book series coming to Kickstarter." ------ I’m a freelance RPG journalist that writes RPG crowdfunding news columns for EN World, the Open Gaming Network, and the Tessera Guild, as well as reviews for Knights of the Dinner Table and, now, d20 Radio. I've successfully crowdfunded the RPG zines POWERED by the DREAMR and Love’s Labour’s Liberated. NOTE: Articles may includes affiliate links. As a DriveThruRPG Affiliate/Amazon Associate/Humble Partner I earn from qualifying purchases.
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