Welcome back to the Crowdfunding Carnival! Zine Quest this year has been very active, so we’ve got more zines to look at in the usual categories. In addition, I’ve done a brief look back at February of 2020, which in addition to having some mainline games was the inaugural year of Cannibal Halfling’s Zine Quest coverage.

ZineQuest Highlights

Standalone Games

Solo games

Beton Brut: A tarot-driven game about, appropriately, loneliness.

Chronicles of the Finite State Machine: A solo cyberpunk life-sim.

The Cosy Witch: A solo game about a witch moving into their new home.

Driftwood: A post-apocalyptic journaling game about the survivors you meet.

Fishbone Archipelago: Subtitle ‘Escape from the Tower of Dusk’, a fantasy prison break zine.

Grimscar: A gritty dark fantasy solo RPG.

Heartbeat Highschool: A journaling game inspired by dating sims.

A Song for a Serpent King: A solo journaling but also songwriting game about lulling a great serpent to sleep.

Space Labyrinth: A solo game inspired by old-school handheld electronic games.

Tail End Charlie: A solo game about being a WW2 bomber tail gunner.

Tales of Kthonic Waters: Prompt-driven Lovecraftian ‘New Weird’ game.

Vortext of Blood: Seek dark horrors and swear you were in The Laundry Files as part of The Night Office.

Duets

Against Time and Death: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ across the multiverse.

The Devil’s Lounge: A ‘dating app horror game’ using tarot cards.

Existing Rulesets

Anomaly Hunters: A monster-hunting RPG built off of Breathless by RP Deshaies.

Disposable Future: Grim and gritty cyberpunk built off of Into the Odd.

Neon City Blues: ‘Cybernoir’ inspired by George Alec Effinger’s Marid Audran novels, using the ‘Carved from Brindlewood’ mechanics.

Silver Age: Modern werewolf gaming built off of Into the Odd.

The Singularity Will Happen in Less Than a Year: Chart the last year of an intentional community before an AI singularity, inspired by The Quiet Year.

Neat and Unique

Development Hell: A GMless game about filmmakers which pits creativity against the demands of an unreasonable studio.

In Dreaming Avalon: A new ‘roleplaying party game’ by the Bakers, this is a collection of storytelling games described as Arthurian, Shakespearean, and fae.

The Gala: Troupe-style, GMfull, ‘coopetitive’ fantasy intrigue game.

Games for an Ordinary Life: A collection of games written for the 36 Word RPG jam.

Going for Broke: A game about literally scrambling to make rent, designed by Avery Alder.

Love for the Love Gods: You’re in the Facility from Cabin in the Woods, except instead of making a slasher movie…it’s a Hallmark romance.

OMEN: A one-shot game of saving a doomed world you create by LUMEN designer Spencer Campbell.

Pale Dot: A game about non-human space explorers setting out to see their solar system.

Pocketfold Adventures: Small pocketfold zines that function as Fighting Fantasy (or Choose Your Own Adventure)-like stories.

Reducks: A game book about being a time travelling duck. Yes, I’m serious.

Warped FM: Host an interview podcast of interdimensional creatures.

The World Well (And Friends): A system for generating and building conflict-rich RPG worlds…and two additional zines as well.

Something new

Avon by the Sea: Play as kids who must stop an ancient evil that came to your beach town alongside a hurricane.

Broken Oaths and other small games: Three small narrative games bundled into a zine.

Cryo Drakus: Conduct reconnaissance into alien hives surrounding Earth.

FLOPS: A game about remaking bad movies.

Growing Thylacine: The group all plays a thylacine, dreaming about what life was like before it went extinct.

A Heist Game: A game about stealing things in a ‘pseudo-medieval’ fantasy setting.

Home Slice: Pizza delivery…into a dungeon crawl in progress.

It’s What My Character Would Do: A game that encourages the classic justification of bad in-game behavior.

Killers and Kittens: An OSR game where all the characters are kittens.

Load the Simulation: A game about the training simulation for colonists on a long interstellar journey.

Maximalism: A gonzo RPG that, true to its name, is trying to do as many genres and concepts as possible at once.

Orc Astra: A game about elves becoming orcs, but more about the ‘Orc-Astra’ and what it means to be in a fantasy vaudeville troupe.

A Perfect Rock: Mount an expedition to find a new home planet in this worldbuilding game.

Project Omega: Project Omega is the last line of defense against the existential threats of deep space.

Regnum Solis: An RPG set in medieval Sicily.

Salt the Earth: A gritty OSR game inspired by Into the Odd and Mork Borg.

The Spooky Place: A GMless game about kids venturing into a ‘spooky place’.

Streetlights and Shadows: A zine-sized ‘early edition’ of a hard-boiled detective RPG.

The Tourist Hole: A roadtrip game about strange attractions, liminal spaces, and possibly cosmic horror.

Troubleshooter: Cyberpunk criminal hijinks on Jupiter.

What We Found Beyond the Stars: GMless hard sci-fi space exploration game.

Supplements of Note

The supplements in the latter half of the month were a bit more concentrated in the old school realm. Even a couple of the highlights from last time saw only one or two zines; I found one Mothership zine in the form of Emergence, and a Mork Borg zine called The Endless Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Mork Borg also saw some lateral inspiration in the form of Dark Gift, a minis game inspired by Mork Borg and Forbidden Psalm (which was itself inspired by Mork Borg). The other key supplements were adventures that were just a bit too specific to be system agnostic, including modern British horror scenario This Blighted Isle: Terminus, and the City of a Thousand Gods.

Old-school rising

Old school is still cool, and a number of projects are adventures or modules for ‘OSR’, ‘D&D’, or other less specific terms. Feasts and Fortune, A Blight Upon Sombreval, and Lost Phantosmia should all work with your old game of choice, as should the creatively named ‘OSR D&D Modules’. There are a few games which get some specific love, like Dungeon Crawl Classics, which sees both The Cult That Never Was and When The Sky Comes Looking For You targeted specifically at that game’s brand of d20 weird. Old School Essentials also sees a callout, although the game is basically just B/X D&D. Even so, Denizens of the Blood Sands is aimed at OSE as opposed to any other retroclone.

Even more Shadowdark

We saw a few Shadowdark zines in the first half of the month but even more have popped up here in the second. When Dusk Falls and Aynbath are both region-focused zines (and both about creepy forests), while Twisted Tales is a collection of different resources. There’s also the creatively-titled ‘Creating Monsters for Shadowdark’ that provides guidance on expanding the game’s bestiary, as well as some sample creatures. We also do have a couple full-fat adventures for the game, in the form of The Chateau Amongst the Stars and The Lost Opus of the Lich Bard.

System-Agnostic Gems

Catch me if you Cant: A supplement for adding Thieves’ Cant into your campaigns.

Loop Unlimited: A setting of corporate liches, souls as collateral, and contractually-obligated dungeon crawling.

Flott’s Miscellany, Volume Three: The Third system-agnostic setting and spark zine based on The Rainy City, a setting which debuted in Zine Quest 2020.

Five Year Retrospective

Five years ago was the first time I covered Zine Quest in an additional crowdfunding article. Between the two articles I covered roughly seventy zines and five mainline campaigns; the zine number is roughly half what I covered this year. Needless to say the format is quite different; I still didn’t do full dives into each zine but the selections were more intentional. For the last few years I’ve ventured to pull everything that looks at least a little interesting, resulting in big lists of zines, albeit broken down by a few specific categories. Given the fact that it’s hard to tell how good any zine will actually be at the campaign stage, I find setting a low bar and doing a lot of categorizing to be more useful, but that’s just me. Let us know what sort of zine roundup article you would find most useful, and I just may adapt future Zine Quest coverage in that way.

As for the major campaigns, it was an interesting crop. There were two fascinating licensed games in the form of Blacksad and The Elephant and Macaw Banner. The rest of the games were from a who’s-who of indie design luminaries; that month I covered Venture and Dungeon by Riley Rethal and Jay Dragon, Trophy by Jesse Ross (and campaigned by The Gauntlet), and Cobwebs by Adam Vass of World Champ Game Co. I did personally back Trophy and Cobwebs, so between those games and Zine Quest it was a good month for gaming (and a bad month for my wallet).

---

Zine Quest is fully back to being an anticipated annual RPG event, and I’m fully back into trying to go through all these zines. Have any thoughts about what you’d like to see out of zine coverage? Let us know. Have a favorite among these, or among one of those I didn’t highlight? Let us know that too. Apologies for the late post, but there’s still another seven days of Zine Quest to go, and at least one more ride around for zine designers to grab a brass ring during this crowdfunding carnival!

Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonk@dice.camp for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with (which is eactly what we did here)! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!