$1,021 is not a small amount of money and my Kickstarter is reasonably likely to succeed based on current momentum. It’s a lot less than $1,312, however, which is how much Strangers in Ramshorn had on day 5. Only a tiny fraction of my previous backers have shown up so far, with the as many people backing the current project at $25, for copies of both the original and the sequel, rather than $15, for only a copy of the new .pdf.
Now, RPG campaigns are big and unwieldy things, and it’s possible that the reason people haven’t responded well enough to Petals and Thorns to want to buy the sequel is because they haven’t actually run it. There could be delayed success here where, in a year or two when people have actually played Petals and Thorns, they find they really like it. MailChimp also indicates that two-thirds of my audience haven’t even downloaded the .pdf link I sent them for Strangers in Ramshorn, which would indicate either that they decided they didn’t want to read the adventure after already paying for it, or else that a huge proportion of my audience prefers the VTT version, which I decided not to promise for Heroes of Ramshorn on account of Roll20 having atrocious distribution capabilities. It’s even possible that people liked Petals and Thorns on first reading, and simply haven’t heard about the sequel – the email I sent out to existing backers was a Kickstarter update, which is frequently ignored once people already have their rewards. Certainly every time I’ve run the game, it’s been very popular. Plus, it’s still possible that the Kickstarter will be saved by sudden surges in popularity towards the middle – it was always impossible to predict when things would suddenly leap up several hundred dollars for the first one, and it’s possible (though not likely) that these unpredictable leaps will occur more towards the middle of this campaign than they did for the first, where they mixed with the initial surge of backers to create continuous amazing fortune in the first week.
But I must also acknowledge the possibility that the reason people like the game when I am running is because I am running it, and that I simply will not be able to scale this whole tabletop RPGs thing up at all. It can still serve as seed income for other projects, but it may not be able to serve as the seed audience for anything.
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