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.
Tag Archives: Zinequest
Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2024
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.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2024
The Ink That Bleeds Review – An Immersive Dive Into Immersive Journaling
“My friend Adam feel that bleed, and games that aim for it, are ‘comparatively cheap, short-term pleasures… a bit like jump scares.’ My experience is so the opposite.
I think immersive, bleedy journaling games are act of purging ourselves of narratives that aren’t in our interests and enlivening ourselves for the temporal world.
I’m totally going to show you how.”
So writes Paul Czege in The Ink That Bleeds – How To Play Immersive Journaling Games, and I’m going to show you some of what’s inside and what it made me think.
Continue reading The Ink That Bleeds Review – An Immersive Dive Into Immersive Journaling
Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2023
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for March! It’s a bit of a weird time, early March. ZineQuest is ‘finished’, but with campaigns starting as late as yesterday there’s still a bit of backlog to dig through. Meanwhile, the bigger, more traditional campaigns are starting to spin up, but they’re often lost in the shuffle.
The campaigns we’re covering this month reflect that reality. There are 25 Zine campaigns here, which I will do my best to sell to you in a sentence or two. I didn’t have to have a hard cutoff like in the middle of the month, but most of the Zines that didn’t make the cutoff were just material for 5e that I don’t have the energy to care about. Such is life.
Here at the beginning of March it’s also worthwhile to reflect on ZineQuest as it is now, here in 2023. Based on numbers, there’s no doubt in my mind that this year was a return to form compared to the misstep of moving the event to August. That said, there’s an enthusiasm gap that seems to have formed between 2021 and now, and it’s in large part due to what happened in 2022. The number of people tracking and providing data on ZineQuest has withered significantly, meaning I don’t have a project count, funding level, or success rate easily at hand to compare to last year or the year before. Based on our August 2022 coverage, this year was significantly better than last year’s Kickstarter’s outing, but I don’t know how it compares to the combined total of the 2022 events, and that’s important because of what happened to Zine Month.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2023Crowdfunding Carnival: ZineQuest Check-In
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.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: ZineQuest Check-InCrowdfunding Carnival: February, 2023
Welcome back to the Crowdfunding Carnival! Now, it’s Thursday, which is a little unusual. I did this, though, for you, dear readers. You see, yesterday was the first day of ZineQuest, and a veritable torrent of zines hit my inbox around the time this article would have otherwise gone to post. That just won’t do, so I held off to pick through the wreckage for you. So now we have over 40 zines, and it’s been just one day! There are some other games too, and of course our second installment of the Crowdfunding Carnival/Kickstarter Wonk fifth anniversary retrospective. Onward!
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2023
Back Again from the Broken Land Review – Small Heroes, Heavy Burdens, and Stories
You are small people who walked into a big war. The Doomslord’s forces were gathered in the Broken Land, and your fellowship unexpectedly played a key role in the Doomslord’s fall. Now, laden with stories to tell and burdens to bear, you set off on the journey home. But the Doomslord’s Hunters are still out there, and it’s a long way to walk. Let’s see if you can make it Back Again from the Broken Land with a storytelling game of small adventurers and a journey home from Cloven Pine Games!
Continue reading Back Again from the Broken Land Review – Small Heroes, Heavy Burdens, and Stories
Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2022
It’s September! A slight bite in the air, days shortening, and the kids are off to school. Quick, go look for crowdfunding campaigns now that you have a spare moment! September marks a change in the season but also a change in focus among RPG crowdfunding coverage as ZineQuest 4 wraps up. ZineQuest 4 puts the bow on what was a really messed up year in RPG crowdfunding, so I’m going to talk about that a bit. Beyond that, there are some ZineQuest campaigns which are still trying to finish off strong, and of course there are plenty of full-sized campaigns across Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Gamefound, and Backerkit.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2022
Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2022
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! You know what time it is, it’s…well, you might not know what time it is, because while yes, it’s ZineQuest, 2022 is both the first and last year ZineQuest will take place in August. It’s ultimately a little confusing, which may be why Kickstarter moved next year’s ZineQuest back to February before this one even happened! Nevertheless, it’s happening, and there are a lot of zines to go through, just like every year.
Because it’s August it’s GenCon, which means that usually crowdfunding channels are a bit quiet as many designers and publishers look to the con for promotion. This does seem to be true this year, though there are major campaigns on each of the competing platforms which are worth a look.
The big news under the carnival tent, though, is ZineQuest. It is day three as of this writing, and the initial flood of projects looking to start strong on August first are already out in the world. How are things going?
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2022
Solitaire Storytelling: Bucket of Bolts
Busted, rusted, set adrift, cloaked in cloth and grime.
This old ship lies still—a relic
from a different time.
Lift the dust sheets, one by one, pry the broken latch.
Up the ladder, flaking paint,
up towards the hatch.
Crank it open, hit the switch, dim lights flicker on.
Yellowed bulkheads, fraying wires—
captains, dead and gone.
In the cockpit, fire it up—engine’s thrumming roar.
Creaking, lurching up towards
shining stars once more.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 