Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling sounds), but as has been tradition I’m taking a look beyond the white-green halls of the original ZQ to see what other excellent projects can be found in the wider Zine Month 2024.

Crowdfundr is the only other platform aside from Kickstarter to attempt any sort of event for the broader Zine Month culture with its Tabletop Non-Stop Content Creators Spotlight. The italicized bit there reminds us that they opened up the event to more than zines, but in contrast to our cynicism at the time of the announcement there actually aren’t a pile of dice-based money sinks. There are a few actual plays, some note-taking accessories, a multimedia Mothership project, and a really neat looking solo martial arts RPG that has too many pages to fall within the definition of zine, but there’s no real sign of a cash grab. 

I’ll talk a bit more about ZiMo ‘24 overall at the end, but first let’s see what’s

Up For Grabs

From Midgard to Eternity is “a solo roleplaying game about seeking glorious death after a life full of deeds that defy belief.

This apocryphally biographical game will task you with journaling the life of a Norse adventurer throughout their remarkable life, challenged by the gods themselves to fulfill tasks and quests ranging from the intimate to the epic.”

Originally born from the question “What happens to a Viking who does not die while raiding? How do they get to Valhalla?” From Midgard to Eternity will see you facing various challenges and encounters throughout the Nine Realms, overcoming as many as you can before you meet your destined end, and see what kind of afterlife you earn. There’s a playable demo to check out, showing off the straightforward rull-under-d100 mechanics and the system of narrative traits that you character will gain, lose, and sacrifice to deft fate. Plus, ‘Neon Viking’ vibes, come on. 

I Got A Knife is a game designed for two or more players who are “tasked to solve a dastardly crime using your wits and brawn. Can you dig through the grimy city’s underbelly to find the killer?” It uses a system called DIE vs DIE wherein character stats are defined by dice size, and actions are handled with a face-off roll. Get the higher number? You succeed! Fail? Your die size goes down one step (i.e. d20 to d12), although a bonus sleuth die that represents your determination to catch the culprit will grow the closer to nabbing them you get.

Notably, the campaign is a ‘keep it all’ campaign instead of the traditional ‘all or nothing’, which I’d usually caution about. However, checking their history it looks like creator Meldar16 has done a couple of ‘keep it all’ campaigns on Crowdfundr before and delivered on all of them despite not reaching the stated goal amount, and I Got A Knife has already been performing better than those previous efforts. Looks like if you fund it, you’ll get it.

Also? Downright delightful amounts of ace alliteration in the campaign.

Goth Borg – “With Good King Garrond’s demise, a new entity took control of the Kingdom of Druekar. Since then, danger lurks in every corner. Drama and despair fill the houses, and shadows bathe the streets. Mysterious obelisks rose from the ground, and the Sun in the sky is no more.

Will you attempt to turn these lands into what they once were, or take advantage of the new change in power to get what’s best for you?”

As you might guess, no Star Trek assimilation here, it’s a gothic horror take on good ol’ Mork Borg. Monsters, boss monsters, classes, powers, spells, and a setting to play around in for as long as you can avoid getting your blood sucked out.

If MB isn’t your game of choice, however, it needs to be noted that Goth Borg is also compatible for D&D5e and Pathfinder Second Edition.

Precious Things is a rarity this year, a project taking the ‘itchfunding’ route over on itch.io. It’s also the smallest project I’m looking at, “a one-page RPG about tiny dragons building cozy hoards.” “Your ancestors were colossal dragons with mountains of gold and earth-shaking magic. You are their proud descendants, building a hoard of your own full of magical power. It’s not easy, since you’re under two feet long.”

Hoarding dice? Hoarding dice.

You can get the game for free for the duration of February on account of there being hundreds of community copies, so there’s really no reason not to at least check this one out. However, if you buy the game for actual dollarbucks you’ll be contributing to the itchfunding effort, which if successful will net everyone who supported it a sheet of tiny dragon stickers by illustrator Emily Entner.

Done Deals

These are projects that have already reached their goals. By no means, though, are these projects no longer worth your time and money. There’s just not quite as much pressure. On the other hand, they’re about as certain to be made as anything that ever crowdfunds, so if you only want to click on the surest of things…

Making a Tabletop RPG for YOUR Particular Kid is a “guide for families, friends, facilitators, and other creators to make their own kid-specific TTRPG!” Created by the ENNIE-award winning TTRPGKids, this ~50 page zine which discusses things like choosing setting and mechanics, all to play a game with your kid(s). Less than a day left to get this one!

Beth and Angel Make a Campaign is probably the most experimental campaign I’ve covered, because it’s all about Beth and Angel making a total of 16 digital zines over the course of the month, chosen from a variety of prompts and their Patreon community. I first came across Beth and Angel during Ind of the Year ‘23, and trust me, they are more than capable of churning out that many good games in a month.

Lethe is “a game about rediscovering your past and deciding how much you will let it decide your future.” The characters awake in a dreamlike world, knowing only their name… and their players have a blank character sheet, which they’ll fill out as they play and learn about themselves. An aggressively cool idea, only made better by stretch goals that are actually worth chasing with additional settings ranging from corrupted cybernetic datastacks to Fair Folk shenanigans. 

Random Realities is a resource intended for use with solo roleplaying games, an oracle system with 60+ results on each of its 36 pages. You roll d66 to see which page you land on, and each page’s results are divided into categories like location or quest. For example, if you wanted to check the likelihood of something, you’d roll and then check the fate category – a 66 would mean it’s “Very Unlikely” with a 1 in 6 chance of occurring. Overall a very neat way to generate ideas. 

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The notion of Zine Month as some sort of Kickstarter alternative movement is well and truly done for – the original website is unresponsive, and even a surface glance shows that Kickstarter has if anything increased its dominance. It’s important to highlight alternative methods of crowdfunding though, and not just because monopolies are bad – a number of the campaigns above couldn’t be Kickstarters because of where they’re geographically based. No alternatives? Literally fewer awesome games can even be made in the first place.

The Discord community of TTRPG zine creators, however, is thriving and has also produced this handy-dandy (if unofficial) list of all zine projects being crowdfunded in February, which I found to be a great help.

And, as always, there’s a wealth of data to be looked at for the curious.  There are all sorts of trends to examine, like more Kickstarter campaigns this year than last but fewer campaigns overall (so far), and an increased % of campaigns using non-USD currency. Then there are the totals, like the fact that since 2019 there have been more than 1300 ZineQuest/ZiMo projects that have collectively raised more than $6 million!

I’ll be looking over other existing projects and keep an eye on Crowdfundr and elsewhere to see if more projects pop up – there’s about half the month yet to go after all – and next week Aaron will get hit with a second ZQ wave. We should have gotten a life preserver in for him by then.

Until then, weep for your budgets and check out some awesome zines!