Insanity Cards Crowd Sale

I'm incredibly fortunate that my good friend Paul Siegel is also one of the finest GM's and game designers that I've ever had the opportunity with whom to game. See here at Paul's Gameblog for some of his writings (which he's massively ramped of late, I might note). He's also the designer of the OED Deck of Spells, compatible with the OED rules Book of Spells (see sidebar).

Now, his latest production in that vein is a work called Insanity Cards. This is a variant add-on to any game that calls out for a Sanity mechanic: I've seen it used in D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, etc. It's a pretty nifty mechanic: the basic idea is several "suits" of insanities, and as a player stacks more cards on a given suit, they take more aspects of a given type of insanity. This gives players a little bit of agency over exactly when and in what fashion they go insane. But insane they go. This does warm my heart as a pretty good middle ground.

The other thing Paul is testing out is a Crowd-based print run program on The Game Crafter, which he uses for production. The idea is something of a reverse Kickstarter: the product is already completely designed, extensively playtested, and available for purchase. The only remaining variable is: the more people who can commit to the initial print run, the more the price goes down. Sounds like win-win to me; in my own mind, this solves a lot of the conceptual problems and risk around crowdfunding projects. In fact, I'm rather eagerly looking to see how this works, and may release products of my own the same way in the future (whereas I've scrupulously avoided crowdfunding products to date).

Check it out at the link below. Complete rules are in a free document at the bottom of the page. I believe the Crowd Sale program ends this Sunday, Jan-14 (end of day). Consider telling us how you like them in comments below!

Crowd Sale: Insanity Cards at the Game Crafter