Nor Cal Mythos Entertainment’s tabletop RPG, Carbyne Jungle, managed to surpass its core goal on Kickstarter. The sci-fi fantasy adventure sports a rulebook, cards, character creation, and a few nifty options to make start-up play quick and painless.

The Kickstarter campaign has only been active for just over a week, with 22 days still left on the clock but it already managed to surpass its rather meager goal of just $2,000. In fact it’s currently at $2,701. I don’t know if this is going to be enough to print out all the material for the tabletop RPG and get it shipped to backers, but I imagine the $2,000 was a baseline to get the basics done and everything thereafter is to actually fund the physical materials.

The entry level package for the game is actually digitally oriented, with a PDF rulebook, player sheets, and cheatsheets.

At the 25$ pledge you’ll gain access to the Carbyne Jungle digital materials as well as a black and white physical copy of the rulebook.

At $35 pledges, backers gain access to all the aforementioned digital material, as well as a colored copy of the rulebook.

Some people have described Carbyne Jungle as Halo meets Dead or Alive, but it seems more like Valerian meets Lexx with a touch of Shadowrun.

The hook for the tabletop RPG is that it caters to both hardcore and casual players. It’s designed around systems that allow you to quickly generate a character within minutes and then hop right into the world without having to spend hours in prep on character and worldbuilding.

The character archetypes operate on a six tier system that allows you to quickly or slowly level, depending on your play-sessions and how much you want to get out of the game. If you decide to play it slow and focus on the standard rules, you can max your character out over the course of 100 sessions.

While the concept of the tabletop game seems somewhat interesting, I’m still having a hard time trying to figure out how this will all be made possible on such a low budget?

I know they have a preview copy of the official rulebook finished, but it just seems like delivering the physical goods on what they’ve accrued from Kickstarter seems like a bit of a stretch. Then again, they don’t expect to have everything finished and out until June of 2020 next year. So there’s still plenty of time to continue raising funds to get everything printed, published, and distributed.

[Correction:] According to Nor Cal Mythos, the character entries in the expansion and the stretch goals are scheduled for a June, 2020 release. The core package of Carbyne Jungle is actually due out in October of 2019, later this fall.

If you’re interested in Carbyne Jungle you can either learn more about it by visiting the official website, or you can contribute to the cause by paying a visit to the Kickstarter page.

[Update:] Nor Cal Mythos reached out to clarify that the reason the initial Kickstarter goal is so low is because they’re actually running a rather light overhead operation, saying…

“Producing the book, we did have to license a lot of stock images to keep the cost down. We are using print on demand which allows us to start with a lower cost. On our team, we have a person with professional experience as a copy-editor and another who has worked with layout before which has kept cost down. Outside of that, the cost has mostly been just a ton of hours. So $2,000 covers our cost of production, but mostly through the groundwork laid out ahead of time.”

(Thanks for the news tip Treavor GornintheUSA)