Crowdfunding Corner (October 2023)

The inspiration behind the Defenders of the Wild RPG

By Sean Jaffe and Nicole Amato

This month, I’m going to let Nicole take the reins for the most part on a new project she’s very interested in: Defenders of the Wild by Outlandish Games! It’s a compelling crossover, a campaign that works with both a board game and an RPG. I’ve been reaching out to other IGDN members about some crossover projects, and we’ll likely see some in the coming months- but breaking out of the TTRPG space into the realm of board games is very intriguing, and I’d love to see more of us give it a try! Now, I’ll turn things over to Nicole!—Sean Jaffe from Nerdy City

Nicole Amato here, the Games Outreach Lead at Kickstarter! I’m excited about a lot of games coming up, but one of the ones that I’d love to tell you about is Defenders of the Wild, which is a campaign for both a board game and a tabletop RPG.

Outlandish Games, the creator of Defenders of the Wild, is a team with a great deal of board game design and development experience. Creators TL Simons and Henry Audubon were both fans of tabletop RPGs growing up, playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and Cyberpunk. One inspiration from contemporary RPGs is Mork Borg, and Simons said they’re aiming for an RPG that is quick to get into and rules-light for players without a lot of experience.

The audience that Simons has already built with his company are board gamers that dabble in RPGs, and it’s also an audience that has left-leaning politics, and are people who are involved in decolonization and environmental campaigns. He has watched the crossover between that community and gamers grow larger, and these are the people he’s focusing on.

How are they planning to make this lighter on rules? “This won’t be an RPG planned around long, multi-session or multi-year character arcs,” Simons said. There’s “not a ton of leveling up…it’s not really about that.” The character creation borrows from roll and writes and will allow you to choose different paths through a development tree that will give you additional powers through gaining items.

It was also important to him to create a game where characters die all the time, and wants to make sure there will be a smooth way to get players back in again. “There’s a lethality to this AND the board game,” he said. “They’re not about superpowered animals fighting machines, they’re about very vulnerable animals that can easily be killed. They can do really badass stuff as well, but…It’s pretty easy to escalate to being killed.”

The kinds of adventure hooks—and what the system is based around—is a mission-based RPG, one full of heists and infiltration. He imagines a lot of these could be played in one or a few sessions, but not anything like a campaign.

I asked Simons what some of his inspirations were, and he said Princess Mononoke, as well as Redwall, and The Beehive Collective—“An anarchist poster collective that did anthropomorphized animals fighting oppression.”

Defenders of the Wild launched on Kickstarter on September 26th. You can check it out here.

This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Sean B. Jaffe from Nerdy City. If you want to get in touch with the contributor you can visit their website at nerdycity.com.