Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for February! Uh oh…it’s February already? You know what that means…ZineQuest! This month I (mostly) put the big games aside and look at all the different zine campaigns that are coming up thanks to Kickstarter’s ZineQuest event. ZineQuest is now in its fifth year, and after some hiccups over the last two pertaining to both blockchains and scheduling, everything appears to be full speed ahead. Of course, this is a Kickstarter-specific event, and there is also a companion event, Zine Month. We’ll have coverage of some of those campaigns later on, but as these campaigns are all on Kickstarter, they’re all ZineQuest campaigns.

And as far as the great Zine agglomeration goes, Kickstarter is the place to be. Last I checked there over over 150 campaigns with the Zine Quest tag applied, and I’ve been able to pull out just about half of those as interesting little nuggets worth your attention. As that number is almost certainly going to increase, we’re going to have a second go-around of Crowdfunding Carnival in a couple weeks (that’s also where the five-year retrospective is going to go, in a slightly different form because it’ll be talking about ZineQuest from five years ago). For now though, check out a whole bunch of zines, as well as a couple more traditional big campaigns that happen to be running in February.

Major Campaigns

There are a couple of larger campaigns going on amidst all the ZineQuest excitement that I did want to pull out and talk about. Snow (known for .dungeon and My Body Is A Cage) is campaigning the third edition of Songbirds, a story of incremental design from a hack of Into the Odd to its current bichromatic form. Songbirds has been an emblematic game in the new weird/NSR/SwordDream side of what us outsiders just call “old-school gaming”, and it’s certainly worth checking out the third iteration.

Over on Backerkit is a Mork Borg hack with a twist. Punk is Dead takes the original musical origins of Mork Borg and splays them literally over the dystopian setting of the Un-United Kingdom. There’s songwriting written into the rules, and the book is a 7” square so it’s the same shape as the slipcover to a 45rpm record. Mork Borg hacks are a dime a dozen at this point, but if this one leans hard into the music, it may just make something of that aspect of the Mork Borg stock and trade.

ZineQuest Highlights

There are a lot of campaigns this year. Although it is just the beginning of the month that is when the biggest ZineQuest rush typically is, and in my potentially misremembering view this is a bigger start of ZineQuest than we’ve had in a while. It seems that the rocky last two years have finally passed by, and the momentum is back for all of these little, weird, and wonderful projects.

The below listing of projects is not meant to be entirely exhaustive, though it is more broad than deep. These projects have been selected through clear criteria, and I do think every one of them is at least worth reading the campaign if the short description sounds interesting. For the caveats: I have endeavored to include no campaign using AI art; after all, ZineQuest is about creating art, not stealing or co-opting it. Second, and a bit less seriously, there are no 5e-specific campaigns in here (though some of the system agnostic campaigns do name drop it). Finally, if I read through the campaign and couldn’t figure out what the point was or what was interesting about it, I just didn’t include it. This collection is already bigger than my typical goal of 50 campaigns for a ZineQuest update, so opting not to include campaigns that I couldn’t be brought to care about was an easy choice. Some campaigns that posted last night or today obviously missed my window of reading, but have no fear, I’ll be doing a mid-month check-in in two weeks.

Without further ado, here are the campaigns. I’ve divided these into three categories: Standalone games are just that, Supplements of note are designed to be used with one or two specific systems, and System-agnostic gems are more broadly usable zines that aren’t tied into specific mechanics.

Standalone games

52 Pickup: A collection of three unique game zines, all built with the aim of being playable with easily accessible game components like d6s and playing cards.

8-BIT THEATER THE ROLEPLAYING GAME: Yup, an RPG based on a webcomic.

Battle School: Not-Ender’s Game, the RPG.

Beetle Knight: You play beetles…you play knights. There you go.

The Black Wren: An ‘impressionist’ game about a rural environment with no characters.

Campanions: A game where you play the NPC companions from video game RPGs.

CONVICT-ION: A game of breaking out of a Foucaultian prison of social constructs.

Death Enters the Saloon: A one-shot ‘filler’ RPG about guilt, judgment, and the fear of death.

Death Game: Gladiatorial combat to entertain the rich and famous! Surely there is no underlying message here!

The Details of Our Escape: Lead a caravan of over 2000 people to their new home. Designed by Tyler Crumrine, previously known for Beak, Feather and Bone and others.

dGö – your story in your hands: A diceless game except it’s a shitpost, using an incredibly specific d1.

Dice Dumbbells & Dragons: It’s like D&D, except there are exercises for you to do instead of skill checks.

Fealty: Token-based game of court intrigue and petty noble drama.

Godspark: A solo RPG about using the corpses of dead gods to power your own ascension.

Ganymede Outriders: Driving souped-up dune buggies across the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons.

Galactic Grit: A space western RPG which looks interesting but completely misuses the pre-existing RPG definition of the term high-trust.

Grotten: Tile-based dungeon crawler with a “1-bit” art aesthetic.

HOMETOWNE: A worldbuilding game about the groups which share influence over a city.

HIC: Tapestry: Tell an epic story on a tapestry…made of toilet paper.

The Last Ride of the Rustwyrm: A post-apocalyptic game about a girl who finds a pirate ship.

The Magus & The Oracle: A solo RPG about a mage inspired by The Thousand Year Old Vampire, plus a 78 card oracle deck for inspiration.

Me, the Singularity: A playing card based game about a “haunted house in space”.

Milk Bar: An RPG about post-Soviet Poland, and the ‘milk bar’ which continues to be your community’s center.

Mystery Under Magi-Mart: A gamebook zine about what’s left in the basement of a magic shop.

Notorious Style: A journaling game about getting known in the street art scene.

Red Borg: More Borg! This Mork Borg hack is about the revolution. Sabotage the capitalist factories!

Rock the Apocalypse: A post-apocalyptic RPG where you can be the all-bard party of your dreams.

Rushlight: Medieval horror RPG using the Crux system.

Seelie Court: A game of fairy fantasy and Scottish folklore…but also literally a courtroom drama.

Sentai & Sensibility: Jane Austen meets the Power Rangers, and I don’t know what else to add to that.

The Sewers & the Stars: Standalone expansion to the tarot-based RPG zine The Hidden Isle.

Steamboat Willie: A solo RPG about copyright and, appropriately, rustling Disney’s jimmies.

Subterranean Fightin’ Freaks: Play as mutants venturing up into the streets of Chicago.

Super M.E.G.A Heroes 2d6: A standalone supers RPG intended for beginners and young players.

Tabletop Gone Mad: A simple d20 system with a twist: fill in the blank characters, fill in the blank adventures, everything you need for a zero-prep game night.

TAPE: A game designed to be played asynchronously by sending playlists back and forth.

Wandlore: A witch RPG that centers around creating your own wand and approach to magic.

Which Way: A solo dungeon crawler where you draw the dungeon as you go through it.

Witch’s Cat: A solo RPG where you play not a witch, but a witch’s magical cat.

Within the Kind Red Building: A solo RPG about an abandoned building on a desolate planet you might not ever be able to leave.

You Are A Billionaire And One Day You Will Die: A solo game needing no more description.

Your Friend in Witchcraft: A two-person letter-writing game that takes place between a novice and master witch.

Supplements of note

Chambers of Agony: Adventures, items and classes for either Shadowdark or Mork Borg.

Dustland Saga: The Road of Wrath: A Fabula Ultima adventure inspired by, uh, John Steinbeck. Huh.

The Elixir of Kosomodes: A city-centric level 1 ‘weird fantasy’ adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

GAS! GAS! GAS!: A Mothership adventure, sadly not about touge or any form of street racing for that matter.

GOBLINS!: More goblins than you can shake a stick at, for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Life-Paths: A (well, duh) lifepath-based system for introducing Boons and Banes to your Shadowdark characters.

The Neon Jungle: New locations for Mutant Crawl Classics.

Old School & Cool 5: An Old-School Essentials zine, celebrating 50 years of D&D and five years of ZineQuest.

PULP HEROES: Pulpy sword and sorcery character generation options for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

QA: A Mothership adventure where you’re doing QA testing of a very special robot.

Raiders of the Ghost Zone: Explore a spaceship graveyard home to many horrors in this micro-setting for Savage Worlds.

The Rats of Ul-Gol: A collection of adventures for Shadowdark.

The Soft: A Troika setting combining blankets and pillows, your favorite stuffie, and (of course) cosmic horror.

The Sorcerer’s Fate: Play poor villagers sent to find out the sorcerer’s fate in this Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel.

Spara Electronics: Mechs, vehicles, and other gear for Salvage Union.

TerrorVision: A comedy-horror pointcrawl across 1986 NYC for OpenD6. It totally isn’t Ghostbusters, you guys.

Tiny Fables: A folklore and fairy tale adventure collection for Mausritter.

System-agnostic gems

The Abbot Trilogy: Three standalone science fantasy adventures that can be linked together into a longer campaign.

Bergmal: A pointcrawl generator which uses runes.

Boletus: City of Rot and Revenge: A ‘new weird’ RPG setting of evil corporations and, well, mushrooms.

DNGN CLUB: Relics Remastered: Over 100 RPG doodads including items, encounters, GM tools, and even a couple complete games.

Dungeon of the Week: Ten weekly issues including a five room dungeon and one page adventure.

Fishbone Archipelago: Lost Lighthouse: An adventure about surviving a shipwreck on an uncharted island.

Glimmerlight Inn: A drop-in mini-setting for your fantasy game: an inn that’s also a gate to the fey realm.

Hollow Dungeons: 55 hand-drawn dungeon maps.

Mapazine: Nine full-color maps, each with their own inspirational material.

Only the Dead Face North: A historical fantasy adventure part of the ‘Kitsune Tales’ series, set (surprise surprise) in Japan.

Populated Hexes Monthly Issue 31: A ZineQuest special edition of the monthly magazine, including about 10,000 words of OSR content.

Pink Security: A post-apocalyptic ‘junk-punk’ setting and, thankfully, something other than more OSR content.

A Tower Made of Sky: A bestiary of “allegorical monsters”.

The Tower: A ‘puzzle dungeon’ crawl.

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Week one of ZineQuest and we’re already storming out of the gate. Will there be more? Most certainly. In two weeks time I’ll be returning to the stormy Kickstarter seas and pulling out even more ZineQuest campaigns. Amidst all this chaos, Seamus is going to go brave the wilds of Crowdfundr to see how companion event Zine Month is doing. By the time the dust has settled on February we’ll be covering well over 100 crowdfunding campaigns and you are sure to find at least one you want to take home with you. Strap in, folks, because February is ZineQuest, and the month of the double header Crowdfunding Carnival!

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