I’m pleased to see the makers of old-school The Midderlands RPG have nearly fully-funded their Kickstarter, and in just a few days.

The game is set in a gritty fantasy-comedy-horror late-medieval West Midlands. It has my unofficial Stoke-on-Trent expansion and I see there’s also a new September 2020 “Chewer of Fingers” introductory Midderlands game set in “Staffershire”, specifically in the bogs along the river Pegridge (Penkridge) north of Wolfhorton (Wolverhampton).

A couple of new issues of the Midderzine fanzine have appeared since I last looked, Midderzine #4 and Midderzine #5. #4 has an interesting new character-class: Serpentist, and #5 has another “Staffershire” location detailed, “Abbots Bream: A merchant’s town in Staffershire” and “The Town Market: An Abbots Bream market complete with stalls.” (Abbots Bromley).

All in all, the game appears to be expanding quite nicely into mid Staffordshire, with the option to make an unofficial trek up the new earliest canals into the fledgling early-industrial Potteries in North Staffordshire. Once there, slipping past the Clay Guard and stowing away on one of the pottery canal barges there would offer a natural way for your party of adventurers to reach ‘The City of Great Lunden’ which has its own Midderlands book.

The game’s £7k of Kickstarter funding will now bring this table-top RPG to the fifth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules (“5e D&D”, popular, but perhaps no longer an ideal-fit in terms of its new-found politically correctness). It currently runs on the free Swords & Wizardry tabletop RPG system. The Kickstarter looks set to go far beyond its base £7k though, in terms of hitting expansion goals.