RPGnet is the top independent web site for tabletop roleplaying games. The heart of our site is one of the most talked-about forums in the industry — with 11,000 active members and almost 16 million posts. We also publish several reviews every week and a few columns. Finally, we maintain a constantly expanding catalog of roleplaying products that currently indexes 19,000 games and supplements, 2,000 magazines, and 36,000 articles.

All of this costs money, so in 2013 we decided to turn to crowdfunding to encourage readers to become members, to support the site. The drive was very successful, so we've turned into a yearly tradition.

In years past, we've thanked our members with proactive work that's helped to make the site a better place.That's included the reinstatement of the search function, the movement of the machines to a cloud platform, the fixing of bugs, and the improvement of security.

We'll be offering proactive work again this year, with a focus on improving the mobile experience. However, we also want to offer another sort of thanks. So this year we'll be offering some free PDFs in January and February to everyone who's a member, as long as we hit the core goal of this crowdfunding. So, join us now, and get some cool stuff for some cool RPGs. 

Following the end of this GoGo, you can sign up for a membership directly from RPGnet. Cool stuff will be available to everyone who signs up before the end of February.

We hope you'll become members to support a site that you use and enjoy. However, as long as we meet our core goal of $2,500 $1,500 (see below), we'll also be giving out cool PDFs to all of our members in January and February 2016 thanks to some help from some great RPGs companies!

If you're a Cthulhu fan, we have:

• Extraordinary Renditions, the new fiction anthology eBook for Delta Green.
• The Unspeakable Oath #23, with the "Cold Dead Hand" scenario.
• The Unspeakable Oath #24, with haunted houses, shotguns, and more.

If you're a fantasy d100 fan instead, we have:

• Legend Core Rulebook, Mongoose's take on a classic d100 system.

Finally, if you're an indie fan, we have two books from Rogue Games:

• Colonial Gothic 2nd Edition Rulebook.
• Lovecraft for Colonial Gothic (yep, that's another Cthulhu book!).

Thanks to these product sponsors!

      

   

Though ads and affiliations pay some of our costs, we are picky about which ads and ad networks we use, so that we can maintain high-quality ads that are likely to be of interest and that won't distract our readers. We've opted out of high-value ads that include audio, that expand, or that are placed as interstitials between pages. We forbid dating ads, gambling ads, gold-farming ads, political ads, and certain other categories of advertising. 

As a result, we occasionally ask RPGnet readers to become members, in order to help support the community. We've done this on a somewhat ad hoc basis in the past, but now that crowdfunding has matured, we've turned to IndieGoGo for our annual RPGnet Membership Drive.

We hope that you'll join us, and help to support the RPGnet community.

Our goal for this IndieGoGo crowdfunding is simple: we want you to become an RPGnet member. Every single reward other than the $5 support level will grant you a membership at RPGnet. Most of them provide membership for the next year*, but we also offer Lifetime Memberships for Patrons and others who want to offer a higher level of support.

As a member, you'll receive a few benefits as thanks:

• No Ads.You may choose to turn off some or all ads at RPGnet.
• Forum Recognition.You'll receive a Member flag on your forum account.
• Forum PMs.You get a larger 150-item PM Box and you can mail to users with full PM Boxes.
• Forum Avatar.You can select a larger 60x60 avatar.
• Early Columns Access.You can read columns before they're posted.
• Early Review Access. You can read reviews before they're posted.
• XP. Just for fun, we'll give you Experience Points every month, to reflect your contribution to the site.
• Cool PDFs. Becoming a member is how you get access to the PDFs our sponsors are providing. From about 1/1/16 to 2/28/16, they'll be available as a free download directly from your membership panel. 

* We'll start all memberships shortly after this crowdfunding closes, once we get your forum account names. If you already have a yearly membership, we'll just add a year to your current end date. If you already have a lifetime membership, then we offer our thanks!

To ensure this, we'll guarantee increased staff time at many of our stretch goals. That will allow us to once more be proactive in 2016 and to put more time toward increasing the coolness of RPGnet. 

As we reach new funding levels, we'll be adding stretch goals, most of which relate to specific work that we'll undertake for the site in 2016. 

We gave our past sponsors the opportunity to renew their sponsorship buttons in advance of the GoGo and will be counting that toward the drive. As a result, we've lowered all our intended stretch goals by $1,000, thanks to the sponsorship renewal by DTRPG.

$1,500. Bag of PDFs. As soon as we hit our core goal of $2,500 $1,500 we'll start working on programming a simple interface to let you download our sponsor's PDFs. Files will be available in January and in February. Goal Met! PDFs are Coming!

$4,000. Boots of Striding. The biggest technical request for RPGnet seems to be better mobile support. If we hit our first stretch goal, we'll put up to a week of effort into making mobile work better. This will definitely involve releasing a standalone mobile app and ensuring that we have the newest and most up-to-date mobile skins for RPGnet. We may decide to upgrade from vBulletin 4 to vBulletin 5 as part of this process, to really make sure that everything is up-to-date. Goal Met!

$6,500. +1 Staff. Our chief programmer (Shannon) dedicates a full week of work to RPGnet, absent any emergencies with our various machines. Our top priorities for this (and all other work time that we stretch in) will be: improving the security of the site; aggressively fixing bugs; and adding cool features (possibly including blogs, but fundamentally focusing on what our Patrons, Talkative Members, and Lifetime Members want to see). Goal Met!

$9,000. Amulet of Contributions. Though our forums are the heart of our site, our reviews and columns are very important too. If we hit this stretch goal, we're going to create some infrastructure to better identify our top contributors of all sorts, allow them editing capability, and give them a place to talk. We'll also create the foundation for a line reviewers program. If you're a reviewer or columnist, you'll get better support; and if you're a reader, you'll get more cool stuff. Goal Met Through Bonus Stretch Goal! (See Below.)

$11,500. +2 Staff. We dedicate a second full week of programming & sysadmin work to RPGnet. This will probably occur late in 2016.

$14,000. Bag of Holding. A new membership benefit? This stretch goal slot is undecided, so feel free to offer suggestions.