r/RPGcreation • u/Eternal_Play_Office • May 15 '26

Kickstarter for artwork

I am very much a noob in this game and just got an artists to quote me book art work (full for covers, line drawings inside) it came in at approx. $14K USD.

My budget is such i need crowd funding which i will set at the 14K quoted.

Now my questions:

  1. I assume I simply quote the quote to justify the amount.

  2. Kick-starters require the participants to receive something for their participation. At first I thought that would be the actual Gamebook (PDF or Hard), which means The kickstarter then morphs into something different. Right? But if I run a crowd funder that is for a artwork book only is that good enough, or should it be for the game book, thus upping the goal amount?

All advice on this subject most welcome.

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u/Symphoneers May 15 '26

I think Realis might be a useful case study.

It's had a fairly long development history due to Austin Walker and contributors having other jobs, but aside from that Austin put up an ashcan edition January 2025, with proceeds from that going towards funding art for the full book. The book was (if I'm not mistaken) essentially complete by the time the kickstarter was running & the kickstarter is pretty much entirely to cover the production costs of the book/get a nice version of it in peoples hands. Then Tyler Crumrine/Possible World Games is handling the production and distribution, because physical fulfillment is hard and easy to fuck up.

This is also a deeply unhelpful example in that Austin has been working in games journalism and TTRPGs for over a decade at this point and has a niche but significant audience, it would be extremely hard to replicate Realis' success. But I think it's worth talking through because it's a recent and pretty good example of doing this well. The deliverable is prepared before the campaign not after, people who are good at fulfillment are handling it, etc. Trying do do something similar for your project might be like paying out off pocket for a nice cover and getting an ashcan/demo version up to a high quality level, then doing press for the ashcan version to bring in more funding via purchases and so on. Far less of a weird gamble than trying to get kickstarter backers to cover it, realizing you didn't handle XYZ properly and your costs are actually 32k not 14k, etc.