It’s February, and that means it’s still ZineQuest! We saw a large number of zines in the first round of Crowdfunding Carnival at the beginning of the month, but there are more, oh so many more. I’ve brought together a whole second round of zines to make sure that everyone who wasn’t live in the first week of the month still has a chance to be highlighted.

In addition to the zines, I’m continuing with our Crowdfunding Carnival five year retrospective, which was just a bit too much in the first week with all the zines to go through. I’ve disappointed myself by not starting ZineQuest coverage in its first year, but there were still a number of campaigns and a fair amount to say about them.

But first, the zines. I’ve, in theory, strived to be more selective among the zine wilds; there are over 200 zine projects live now and I can’t possibly cover them all. So for today I’ve brought 40 more zines to the front. These have all caught my attention and, in a few cases, I’ve thrown some money at them. Like before we have three categories, dividing the zines into standalone games, supplements, and zines which are entirely system-agnostic.

Even More Zines

Standalone games

Assemble!: A light narrative game about a team of superheroes coming together.

Be Kind Rewind: A journaling game about working in a video store, like back in the day.

Behind the Magic: Create a mockumentary with incompetent adventurers and the bard who’s documenting them.

Blister Critters: A game of mutant animals, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meets Ren and Stimpy meets scaling dice mechanics.

Cocagne: A game of feudal intrigue. Play lieges seeking control of a kingdom in a game designed for play in a group chat or Discord.

Cartograph Atlas Edition: A solo mapmaking game of exploration designed around similar setting conceits as D&D.

Dice Dragons: A ‘game for dice hoarders’ which requires at least 35 dice to work.

FÄNGELSEHÅLA: Dungeon fantasy meets Ikea instruction manuals.

Fast Action Hero: An action hero game hacked from The Black Hack.

Field Agent Handbook: An occult solo RPG that will have you out using a pendulum and training your ESP.

The Frankenstein Society Meeting Handbook: A game where all the characters are trying to stitch corpses together and bring them back from the dead.

Hellsite: An occult RPG about social media, using social media in the mechanics.

Out in the Black Hack: Mix sci-fi and sitcom tropes in this game descended from a couple The Black Hack, erm, hacks.

Outliers: A solo RPG about running academic research.

Ratcatcher: The Sewers of Merestall: A dark fantasy RPG about living life in the sewers of a fantasy city.

Rom Com Drama Bomb: A three-player game about playing out a tropey romantic comedy in 90 minutes.

Terra Arcis: A solo RPG about venturing into the fae realms of Celtic myth, using playing cards.

Three Games About Life: Three micro-games about how life unfolds.

Xtreme Death Ball: A game about a far future death sport. Rollerball played out with d12s.

Supplements of note

Bad Trips: A series of adventures in a trip across America, for Monster of the Week.

The Drug-Addled Riff Wretch: A new class for putting more metal into Cy_Borg.

H2O-pocalypse: ‘Surf Punk Piracy’ for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Hecate Cassette Archive: An anarchist collective is after a cache of encrypted tapes in this adventure for Mothership.

To Insanity and Beyond: Psychological horror adventures for Mothership with ‘disproportionately uplifting soundtracks’.

Last Call: A tavern generator for Mork Borg.

The Lesser Key of Sandestin: Two zines exploring The Rainy City for Into the Odd.

Martian Crawl Classics: A War of the Worlds inspired adventure for Mutant Crawl Classics.

Ninja City: Drug Demon Disco: A Dungeon Crawl Classics zine based on the ‘80s Ninja Explosion’.

Radish Quest: A setting about radishes who may or may not be monsters, designed for the Index Card RPG.

Shadow Over Gloomshire: Gothic horror adventuring for Dragonbane.

Silam No. 1 & No. 2: Two adventures with new classes and deities for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

The Wigmaker’s Fingers: An adventure zine for Into the Odd. Steal one of those prosthetic fingers that are all the rage these days.

System-agnostic gems

The Graverobber’s Guide to Games: Games in your games! A guide to in-world tavern games which are completely playable out-of-character.

Metal Gods of the Apocalypse: A setting about heavy metal, demons, and yes, the apocalypse. You could airbrush this on the side of a van.

Shrines: Sites of Reverence and Power: A Buddhism-inspired zine on bringing themes of the sacred into your games.

Splat 5: Fifth zine of interviews with industry figures. In this issue, celebrating the 50th anniversary of D&D and asking where the hobby’s headed.

Tales from the Dungeon: Forgotten Deities: The eighth issue of Tales from the Dungeon, exploring deities, demigods, and other objects of worship.

Thrifty Trades of Fey: A guide to popping tags in a fey thrift shop.

The Tome of Tombs: Information for lavishing your underground crypts with more detail, and giving you even more burial places for your games.

What’s My Motivation: A system-agnostic (medium-agnostic even, it lists novels as a potential application) for creating interesting and complicated characters.

Five Year Retrospective

One thing that in hindsight may be surprising is that I didn’t actually do any ZineQuest coverage in 2019. Sure, I mentioned that it was a thing and that readers should check out some of the zines, but the actual article was still completely dedicated to mainline, full-sized campaigns. We didn’t really know what impact ZineQuest would have in its first year, so of course now I’m kicking myself a little bit that I don’t have anything written up or prepared. Still, no one else really knew what ZineQuest would become either, so unlike in future years, February 2019 still had a full stock of campaigns to review, and even an honorable mention follow-on in the form of Interface Zero 3.0. There were some successful ones in there, too: Carbon 2185 got some good attention and follow-on support from publisher Dragon Turtle Games, and The Bone Marshes was successful enough that designer David Schirduan was able to run another Kickstarter to get another print run out in the wild. There were some less great stories, though. Clockwork Depths failed to fund; its LARP-based system apparently didn’t have more than niche appeal. ADOM did not complete after a major life change for the designer, but to his credit he recognized what was happening and offered a refund. A shame the game didn’t make it to fruition, but the honesty is appreciated. Especially when you compare it to what happened with Reach of Titan…another month, another ghosting. 

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ZineQuest is fully back in action this year; no schedule shenanigans and not a blockchain in sight. My hope is that from here on out, we see ZineQuest simply as a fixture in the RPG environment, a once-a-year celebration of small games and first-time crowdfunders, just like it was always meant to be. I have yet to tire of ZineQuest; there’s always been plenty of weird, idiosyncratic, and simply original zines out there, not to mention supplements for games that never get supplements, and ideas that in other venues wouldn’t get an opportunity to get fleshed out.

It can be tough to wade through the sheer volume of projects that come across the screen during ZineQuest, but I’m always glad that I do (and do it twice in the month), I see things I never would have thought about and never known I needed at my table. So many designers get their first exposure here, and it’s always a pleasure to be part of that. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled crowdfunding next month, so take a chance on some zines and get ready to go full-sized again in next month’s Crowdfunding Carnival!

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