Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! ZineQuest is all the way back in full swing this year, and I have definitively lost track of everything going on so far. According to Kickstarter there are 158 ZineQuest projects live as of this writing (live, not total, live), and sorry, but I can’t summarize all of them. I can’t.

What I am going to do is show you fifty zines that I thought looked cool. We’ve got everything here: Llamas, procedural generation, ghost porn, bowling, and of course, pirates. This group also includes all of the zines I’ve personally backed so far from this ZineQuest, so you know there’s some good stuff in here. Like I did at the beginning of the month, I’ve divided the projects into three categories. There are full games, playable on their own, supplements of note, adventures and other materials for specific systems, and system agnostic gems, which should work with either any game or any game of a relevant genre. Without further ado, here are fifty more projects of note from ZineQuest 2023.

Full Games

7 Fingers: A PbtA cop drama RPG from Venezuela.

Ballad Hunters: The sequel to Shanty Hunters. Get ready to sing!

Brother, Why?: Rules light games that you play with weird, screwy, and hilarious medieval art.

BURGERPunk: A dystopian PbtA game of 80s action movies and twisted fast food mascots.

Chorogaiden: An RPG inspired by Japanese horror, taking place in a small town.

The Connection Machine: A GMless game about characters in a dimension they cannot comprehend, filling in their perceptual gaps with their own memories and traumas.

Dodgeball the RPG: In the distant future, humanity has joined the galactic council…where everything is decided by playing dodgeball.

Drama Llamas: A game about reality TV competitions. There may also be llamas.

Earth to Jupiter: A solo game about being left behind on Earth while everyone else is fleeing the apocalypse.

Facility: A sci-fi horror game of prisoners escaping a labyrinth, having no memory of how they got there.

Ghost: A journaling game about meeting a ghost and discovering who they are/were.

God’s Gonna Cut You Down: A solo western RPG. Set up your situation by rolling against a table of Bible verses, and see if you stay on the path or if God will cut you down.

Goons & Doubloons: A pirate hack of Nate Treme’s Tunnel Goons. Arrr.

Hedgehogs and Hot Air Balloons: A solo journaling and map drawing game where you’re, well, a hedgehog in a hot air balloon.

A Home Reforged: A Black Hack hack about dwarves and rebuilding one’s home.

Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound: Slice-of-life RPG on a giant space station.

Hungry Gnoles Eat the Rich: You and your community of hyenafolk must strike back at your oppressors. You have two stats: Hungry and Gnoll.

Lampblack: A solo RPG where you’re an artist capable of creating creatures made from living ink.

Legacy Zines!: Legacy like legacy board games: zines designed to be written in and played through once.

ODD GOBS: Cyberpunk gig economy dystopia. For goblins.

Penetrating the Veil: Take the title literally: this is a smutty game about ghosts. If that’s what you want, though, I doubt you’ll find anything better.

Pigeon’s Eleven: A game where birds do crimes. From the designers of The Very Good Dogs of Chernobyl.

Psychic Trash Detectives: Psychic detective opossums and raccoons, with game mechanics that use literal garbage.

Public Guest 5: Not exactly a zine, but definitely in the same spirit: a journaling game printed on a single 11×17 poster.

Roll for Fire: A paleolithic survival game.

Shoppers: A slice-of-life game about hanging out in a shopping mall.

Small Adventures in the Human World: Three zines about taking on humans from an animal perspective.

Strikes and Spares: A slice-of-life RPG. Let’s go bowling, dude.

Terminus: A tarot-based journaling game built on telling stories from the places around you.

These Stars Will Guide You Home: A journaling game about making it home from exploring a strange archipelago.

Supplements of Note

Beyond the Gaping Maw: A Mork Borg adventure where you must help cure a dying God…from inside its body.

Blessing Guide: Mechanics for minor boons, 1-3x use powers for 5e D&D.

CLEAN BREAK: A zine for Cy_Borg about rescuing the city’s sanitation AI. Four heists to give S4N1 a ‘clean break’.

Critical Hit Parader #1: Like your favorite rock magazine, except for DCC.

Decagone: A Mothership adventure involving an undersea research facility and time loops.

The Sins of Eden Prime: God-AIs, biomechanical horrors, and brainwashed cultists in this adventure for Mothership.

Smorgasborg: Cannibalism for Mork Borg. How could we say no?

Two Mothership SCI-FI Horror RPG One Shot Pamphlets: Yes, exactly that.

System Agnostic Gems

52 Card Generators: Three zines for using playing cards to build out adventure materials.

The Adventurer’s Guide to Political Lobbying: Become a fantasy lobbyist for some reason.

Aquilus #3: The third in a series of weird-fiction OSR zines.

The Artifacts’ Awakening: A collection of sentient magical artifacts for inclusion in fantasy games.

Fairies and Witches for Heartwarming Tabletop RPGs: Yeah, that. Also contains standalone rules.

Here Be Dragons: OSR content about dragons by GURPS designer and Mork Borg superfan Philip Reed.

One Million Random Dice Rolls: Literally just tables of random dice rolls.

Pirates, Ships, and Artifacts: A system-agnostic zine for putting more pirates into your game. Arrr.

Rumored Blades: Swords? Swords! Fully illustrated bladed weapons and rumors about their provenance.

Script Wizards: A ‘zine for hackers’ about and including digital tools for enhancing your game.

Temple of BLANK on the Planet BLANK: This one’s super cool: At the basic level you get a digital pack with a bunch of random generators, but if you back at the physical level you get a zine randomly generated from all of that stuff. None of the copies are alike, and there may be only 100 of them. I…bought one. Because I like weird stuff.

Timber Wolf Tavern: A system-agnostic tavern guide, including NPCs, adventures, and isometric maps.

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Feeling overwhelmed? Excited? Wallet a bit lighter? Well, this is the halfway mark. We’ve got another set of zines coming, ready for wrapping everything up at the end of the month. When that happens, we’ll pull in some stats and take a look at how the entire month went, both ZineQuest on Kickstarter and Zine Month over on Crowdfundr (check out our coverage here). When all is said and done, I’ll have some wise words about this year’s return to form (at least that’s the hope). Until then, though, keep questing through zines, and be ready to join us for the next quickly impending Crowdfunding Carnival!

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