Storium enters last day of Kickstarter with educational version fully funded

It’s the last day of Storium’s Kickstarter, and at the moment it’s raised over $212,000. This puts it well past the $200,000 goal to create a version specifically tailored for educational uses. At the rate Storium had been picking up new users until the last couple of days, I hadn’t expected it to make it. But it has, and I’m really happy about it. This is a product I’m already using, and that I firmly believe in.

A lot of big names have stepped up to offer up worlds to play in. Those include official adaptations of Steve Jackson Games’s In Nomine setting, Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds, and Charlie Stross’s Merchant Princes series (though Stross likely won’t be able to get down to working on it until next year sometime). There are over fifty different campaign settings that have been funded by stretch goals, and another one’s coming if Storium hits $220,000 by 9 p.m. tonight.

I had an iced café mocha at a Starbucks today, and it cost me $4.50 for a drink that was gone in two minutes. For less than half of that amount per month, Storium will offer a stable, easy-to-use forum for play-by-post games with a simple system of task resolution. Considering the alternative is banner ads or selling personal information, paying a small amount to cover the cost of keeping up the servers and improving the product seems entirely reasonable to me.

Unlike many Kickstarters, some of which don’t provide any product even months or years after they finish, you can start using Storium now, as soon as you pledge. The beta is a little rough in spots, but the project’s runners have gotten plenty of feedback from the users so far, and already have plans for how to improve it.

This is probably the last day to get in on being able to run games yourself, until they go public in November; people can be invited to the beta without having to kick in but they will only be able to play in games, not narrate them.

Given that the Kickstarter is almost over, this will be the last I mention Storium for a while, but I look forward to covering its use in education down the road.