- TTRPG Insider
- Posts
- News Roundup: Avantris Breaks Records W/ $16 Million Neon Odyssey Kickstarter
News Roundup: Avantris Breaks Records W/ $16 Million Neon Odyssey Kickstarter
The D&D sci-fi Kickstarter raised massive numbers, making it the latest success for Avantris Entertainment after Crooked Moon's release
Christopher Hutton
June 07, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Welcome to TTRPG Insider!
Every week, we send you interviews, news and roundups straight to your inbox. Everything you need to know within the TTRPG hobby and industry without the hassle of social media, generative AI or Google search.
If you want to know more, check us out here! If you like what you’re reading, make sure you subscribe.
This week, we’ve got a lot of big news! First up is the record-breaking campaign run by Legends of Avantris that brought in 16 million dollars in crowdfunding. D&D launched a community support group. A DungeonTuber surveyed 30k people about their favorite TTRPG. Finally, we’ve an interview with the team at Horrible Guild about MemoryCore, their Playstation anthology of video game TTRPGS.
Check it all out below!
In This Edition
Avantris Entertainment Raises $16.1M in Sci-Fi 5e TTRPG Crowdfunding Campaign
Avantris Entertainment
Neon Odyssey, the 80s-inspired sci-fi D&D supplement made the team behind Legends of Avantris, has raised more crowdfunding money than any other TTRPG campaign in history.
Neon Odyssey wrapped up its crowdfunding campaign on Wednesday, successfully raising $16,139,970 from 49,116 backers. It’s an outstanding number, and a million more than Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere TTRPG, which raised $14 million in 2024. The campaign featured a package of three books written by the team at Avantris Entertainment. Avantris previously saw immense crowdfunding success with the launch of Crooked Moon, a horror supplement based on its past campaigns.
“Honestly, this is hard to wrap our heads around,” said Avantris Entertainment Co-Founder Mikey Gilder in a press statement. “Neon Odyssey started as this big, ridiculous dream of building a massive science-fantasy universe for people to play in, and the community showed up for it in a way we’ll never forget. We’re incredibly grateful to every single backer who helped make this happen.”
The campaign saw a massive surge of interest in the last two days of the campaign when it announced that it was going to use Neon Odyssey rules to run a D&D campaign featuring the band Tupper War Remix Party’s Starlight Brigade. The characters were introduced in a 2019 music video and will now be played out in a future AP using the Neon Odyssey rules.
TTRPG Insider spoke with Gilder last month about the campaign and their decision to launch a sci-fi campaign that reflavors the setting through a 5e framework. The actual-play turned publisher previously saw immense success after raising millions of dollars to fund The Crooked Moon, their folk horror campaign.
Neon Odyssey’s record-breaking campaign follows the Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG and board game’s outstanding success, which raised $13.3 million in May 2026, and several other campaigns that have raised over $1 million in 2026 to date. While crowdfunding appeared to dip in 2025, the numbers have surged in the first half of 2026 despite the lingering effects of the Trump administration’s tariffs and the volatile geopolitics between the United States and China.
Other Stories from This Week
Rascal spoke with Fred Hicks about how the recent release of the Umdaar sourcebook might end Evil Hat Productions’ support for the FATE ruleset.
Baldur’s Gate 2, the prequel to the award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3, might get a remake from Wizards of the Coast.
EN World spotted a new D&D book titled “D&D: Golly” on the Barnes and Noble marketplace. Likely a fill-in title, but it’s something.
John Blanche, the artist who helped define the aesthetic of Warhammer 40,000 and numerous other games, passed away this week.
New drops from D&D Beyond this month, including some biblically-accurate angels, new spells and more.
Speaking of the Drops system, D&D Beyond stated that it will consider ways to share the drops through its content-sharing program, and plans to allow the content to be purchaseable for non-subscribers in the future.
Hasbro also stated that it is launching its own AI studio, Sixth Wall, which will help license AI-powered versions of its IP to third parties. This could include D&D but it has not been stated explicitly yet.
Mongoose Publishing is previewing its upcoming horror TTRPG Dark Conspiracy on its blog.
Designers at UKGE spoke on a panel about how AI is creating paranoia in the tabletop space, forcing designers to spend a great deal of time reassuring supporters that AI was not used in their work and defending against those who might suddenly claim that a certain piece of art is or is not AI-generated.
Indie TTRPG creator Fistful of Crits unveiled a new solo TTRPG at UKGE about paladins and their oaths.
While sci-fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky made news earlier this year around his partnership with Rowan Rook and Deckard to launch a Children of Time TTRPG, he’s also working on a game focused on his other book The Tyrant Philosophers, published with Handiwork Games
Dungeons and Dragons Launches Official Community Advisory Group
D&D Head of Brand Dan Ayoub announced this week that the team is formally unveiling its first Community Advisory Group.
Ayoub spoke about wanting to include community input into D&D’s ongoing efforts during GenCon 2025. This meant bringing in creators and others from the space to speak about the state of the game and what it needed. That team was formally announced this week (alongside the launch of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within in Early Access).
The group brought together “a variety of creators, WPN store owners, event organizers, community builders, and educators, each bringing a different lens on what D&D is and what it can be,” Ayoub wrote in a blog post. The group has been meeting with D&D’s team since December, where they discussed early product concepts and D&D Beyond tools. They also addressed what the company intended to do in the coming months.
The group contains a list of longtime contributors:
Third-party creators such as Monty Martin and Kelly McLaughlin of The Dungeon Dudes
Commentators and media figures like Ted Sikora of Nerd Immersion and Teos Abadia of Alphastream
store owners like Donna Ricci of Geeky Teas & Games and Scott DeBoard of Silver Dragon Games
And several more. You can see the full list of contributors here. The list appears somewhat diverse so far, although the common thread remains creators who have been involved in D&D-related content for a long time. It will be some time before it can be determined if this group has a long-term impact on D&D, and what that may entail.
As the first D&D Advisory Group, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves. As a diverse group of professionals from across the RPG industry, long-time players of the game, and members of the community, we care deeply about the future of D&D and tabletop gaming.
We all joined this panel with both a sense of responsibility and a fair share of skepticism. We are here to offer honest, independent feedback to Wizards of the Coast, ask hard questions, and raise concerns directly. We share our perspective, but what they choose to act on is ultimately up to them.
Since we began, Wizards of the Coast has actively listened and engaged in good-faith discussions with us, which has created a productive exchange of ideas.
We're grateful to be part of this community and look forward to continuing this work and the conversations ahead!
Want to see more reporting in the TTRPG space? Heard a scoop or a story you want covered? Let us know! Subscribe to TTRPG Insider and get exclusive interviews, trend pieces, speculation and coverage of D&D, mainstream publishers and the indie scene.
We here at TTRPG Insider love data related to our hobby, and this is no exception. DungeonTuber Bob World Builder posted a simple survey on his channel asking what the public’s favorite TTRPGs were. More than 30,000 respondents answered, offering a limited look at people’s favorite TTRPGs.
Disclosure: The data here is limited in scope due to the specific demographics of Bob's viewers. He admits that the majority of viewers of the original video are American millennial males, which likely means the data skews toward that same base. Bob World Builder’s fanbase is also highly likely to be very focused on D&D content or OSR content, based on his past video coverage. That doesn’t mean that the data is useless, just that the data is limited in what insights it might offer the reader.
At the same time, I did see the poll get some attention on platforms like Threads and BlueSky, which may have helped it attract a larger audience and balance that base out.
The final results, based on Bob’s own calculations, are:
D&D 5e -3,260
Pathfinder (1e and 2e) - 3,148
D&D 5.5e aka D&D 2024 - 2,548
Daggerheart - 1,239
Shadowdark -944
Draw Steel -922
Nimble 723
Call of Cthulhu -628
World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness -593
DC20 - 466
Savage Worlds -433
Traveller - 377
Blades in the Dark - 367
D&D 3.5 -366
Warhammer TTRPGs (40k and Fantasy) - 331
Dungeon Crawl Classics - 323
GURPS -305
Lancer 304
Mothership - 284
Old School Essentials -282
The data seems to match past trends, with fantasy-oriented games remaining among the top favorites in the hobby. The presence of “Fantasy Heartbreakers” like DC20 and Nimble surprises me, since those games (which are modified/updated versions of D&D that gained popularity after the OGL fiasco in 2023) seemed more like flashes in the pan among the general player base. Daggerheart, Shadowdark, and Draw Steel, in contrast, have made significantly more money in crowdfunding and appear to have a steadily growing community of third-party creators.
Interview With Claudio Pustorino about MEMORYCORE and Converting Playstation Games into TTRPGs
Horrible Guild
TTRPGs can cover a wide range of subjects, and it’s common to adapt popular and nostalgic video games into TTRPG format. But what if you tried to do all of them? That’s the idea behind MEMORYCORE, a TTRPG Anthology that contains games inspired by Castlevania, Tekken, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and a plethora of other games found on the Playstation 2.
Memorycore is designed by Claudio Pustorino (Not The End, Vileborn), published by Horrible Guild, and features six games based on nostalgic gaming properties. The project will crowdfund on June 9, 2026.
TTRPG spoke with Pustorino about what inspired the game, his choice of games and more.
1. What’s the inspiration for this project?
The most immediate answer is “the 32-bit era”, but that's pretty obvious. In terms of feel: I want to capture the magic I experienced playing PlayStation in my childhood bedroom. In terms of design, I want to live the same challenge that game developers faced during the golden age of video games, inventing brilliant solutions to push past the hardware limitations they were working with. The jewel-case-style clamshell of MemoryCore games is a design constraint, a small space where we're trying to fit entire worlds.
2. Why were these six games specifically created? What were the criteria for selecting inspiration?
We started by listing every game that immediately came to mind when we thought about that era… and the list got long fast. From a product standpoint, we knew we had to narrow it down to six, so we built a set of criteria: cultural impact (not commercial numbers or sales figures, but the mark a game left on the medium), iconicity, design opportunity (meaning how much including a game would push the core system to expand and grow) and the variety of experiences the final lineup would offer as a whole. Every game in this first anthology has both an action component and a storytelling component, but each takes the base system in a different direction.
I want to be clear on that point: in my head, this is just the first anthology. There are lots of games, both mainstream and more niche, that I already have in mind. Genres like platformers, visual novels, and rhythm games are still not represented... There's so much more to explore!
3. Can you explain the thought process of how you attempted to capture the distinct vibes and aesthetics of each video game that inspired your games?
It's a different journey for every game, and by the end of it I need to know clearly why that game was special to me, what made it a defining example of its genre, and what the core elements are that people actually identify with it.
I've been replaying (and am still replaying) every reference game, untangling what was actually in the design from what was just my memory of it. Then I take each key element and ask myself: how does this translate to a shared experience at the table?
4. Would you describe these projects as one-shots or on-page RPGs? Or are they intended for longer play?
Each MemoryCore game comes with a map, a set of pregens, a game disc, 32 MemoryCards, and a 40-page game booklet that – together with the user manual included in the base box – supports a campaign of roughly 10 sessions.
Every game gets there in its own way. Solid State Machine, for example, delivers a tightly structured, campaign-setting-like spy story. Final Tournament is a full martial arts tournament where every fighter has a backstory and a reason to compete: the fights and their outcomes weave the characters' individual storylines together and evolve them. Overdrive Crew is a procedural generator for high-speed heists built around the Highway City map and generative tables. This reflects the spirit of the reference games themselves: some are essentially interactive films with a precise script and plot twists; others are more about exploration and quest completion.
5. Your designs are eerily close to the original products. How are you balancing the creation of the experience with copyright issues?
The key distinction is this: original IP, original art, original stories. Aesthetic homage and copyright infringement are two very different things, and we're firmly in the first camp.
Every piece of content in these games is built from scratch and adapted for the tabletop: the reference games inform the feel, not the material. These aren't cheap ripoffs; they're love letters to the games that shaped me growing up.
When I'm developing a MemoryCore game, I'm not asking "how far can I get from X before it's legally safe?", I'm asking "how do I do justice to something I love?" If you see an aesthetic similarity, it's because every MemoryCore artist is a devoted fan of that visual style and of the reference work. If you see a trope, a quote, or a meta-reference, it's because without it there's no trip down memory lane. None of this is lazy. The design effort is entirely focused on creating faithful, quality tributes that respect the source material and translate it into a shared experience at the table.
6. What’s the elevator pitch for this game series?
MemoryCore is a curated anthology of 32-bit-era–inspired TTRPGs – bringing the great video game classics of the 1990s to the table and reimagining them as a shared, multiplayer roleplaying experience.
7. What is something you are excited for within this?
A few things, at different scales.
At the system level: MemoryCards. Basically, mini poker-sized cards. Every game includes 32 of them, with different content across each title: equipment, key items, vehicles, special moves, feats, and more. They theme each game beautifully and keep bookkeeping to a minimum. But even though they're hyper-thematic, they're also fully cross-compatible across all the games. If you want to run a campaign with sacred relics, cursed swords, thermal visors, and tactical weapons, you just grab the MemoryCards from Bloodsong and Solid State Machine and use them together. We pulled that off through a system of universal descriptors and icons that each game interprets in its own way.
At the player level, I can't wait to see what people do beyond the games themselves. We've worked hard to make everything pick-up-and-play, while still giving anyone who wants to write their own campaigns (or design their own games entirely) the tools to do it. The creation toolkit is still a chapter in progress, but the idea of putting those tools in people's hands, making them able to build from scratch, is what gets me most excited about what this project can become.
That’s it for this week! Have any thoughts or story suggestions? Feel free to send tips or emails at [email protected].