The perils of backing a crowdfunded game are nothing new; a successfully-financed campaign failing to deliver is hardly an outlier, and is often down to the team behind it being inexperienced. In the case of the RPG Grimwild, however, the lack of a delivered project is for potentially more serious reasons.
The tabletop RPG, which was originally supported in 2024 on crowdfunding site BackerKit by 590 people for $40,000 (before a later hardcover version was backed by 597 for a further $47,000), promised a “cinematic narrative rules system” which eschewed the finer points of rules in favour of a game that was more “concerned with the dramatic over the realistic”. After a few updates to the rules and some production delays, both physical editions of the rulebook were supposed to be delivered to customers in July.
That window has obviously come and gone, with no books delivered. In an update delivered to backers on the game’s community Discord server last month, a moderator explained why, revealing that nobody involved with the book’s production had been able to get in touch with Grimwild’s designer, J.D. Maxwell, for weeks.
“As many of you have noticed, Max has been absent for nearly two months”, the statement says. “Initially, we weren’t too worried. We knew he needed a break. Launching a successful crowdfunding campaign and a project like this is as rewarding as it is exhausting, and Max had also been going through some real-life changes that we hoped he was taking time to adjust to and enjoy.”
Maxwell’s colleagues on the game’s design and production, Per Janke and Luke Saunders, have been “doing everything they can to reach Max or at least someone who can confirm he’s okay”, and acknowledge that they “understand how confusing, frustrating, and even worrying this situation is”.
A crowdfunded game designer cutting off all contact after getting their money would normally be cause for concern among the backer community, sparking fears the game would never be completed. In this case, however, things are different; not only is the game finished and the manufacturing costs reportedly already paid for–fans have been able to play a downloadable edition of Grimwild for months now, it’s only the physical book deliveries that are being held up–but just a few weeks ago both Maxwell and Grimwild‘s free pdf version were nominated for, and won, an award at the Ennies.
Yet physical deliveries have been unable to proceed because the manufacturing accounts are in Maxwell’s name, while Janke and Saunders (who are just freelancers on the project, not employees of Maxwell’s company) have run into the same issue with the game’s Backerkit page, so they’re unable to publish updates there either. Meanwhile the website for Oddity Press, Maxwell’s publishing entity responsible for the game, is now down and showing a “website expired” error.
“None of us were involved in the actual process of the crowdfunding or order of the printing”, Janke tells Aftermath. “So we’re trying to make any effort to figure out the situation around J.D. Maxwell and the current state of the crowdfunding campaign. I got in contact with the printer and as far as we know the order for the Grimwild print did go through to them. But without a final go from J.D. as the only legal entity from Oddity Press, the printing process can’t be started, unfortunately.”
As a result, the remaining team say in their update that until Maxwell can be located, “Fulfilment of the project appears to be on hold indefinitely”. “Until a few months ago it looked like everything was on track for the expected delivery of July this year”, Saunders tells Aftermath, “but Max has been gone for a while now and there’s nothing we can do on our side to help with fulfilment I’m afraid.”
A couple of days after I spoke with Janke and Saunders, the latter posted an update on the game’s Discord saying they had “submitted a detailed report to the BackerKit Trust & Safety Team regarding the current situation”, and that the team’s hope is that “BackerKit will be able to move things forward as they have much greater legal capacity and resources than we do.”
The Grimwild community are asking anyone who may know how to get in contact with Maxwell to reach out to the game’s Discord mods privately.
[Thanks James G]
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