Craft a unique magical item and play to find out how it changes as it passes through the hands of many different keepers.
Just at the last minute we hit £30,000 - that’s so great! That means we’ve hit every stretch goal I set - even the ridiculous ones.
Thank you all so much. I’m looking forward to sharing my plans with you when the dust settles and I’m back at my desk next week.
For now, cheers! 🍻
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Good morning! With 4 days to go, we're almost at our final stretch goal - that's so exciting! But I thought today I'd share some other projects that have launched as part of Zine Quest 2 this month. There's so much cool stuff out there, and these are just a few of my favourites. I'd encourage you to scroll through the collection too and see what else catches your eye!
This looks like a perfect companion to The Artefact - it's a game of sprawling character histories across long spans of time. It seems like it has a lot of themes in common. The game cites Microscope by Ben Robbins and Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands by Meguey & D. Vincent Baker as inspirations, and those are two of my favourite games, so I'm super excited!
This is the latest project from Jacob Wood, who runs the blog Accessible Games. Jacob's blog is a really good source of RPG reviews & articles, focusing on the things that make games accessible (or inaccessible) to the widest possible audience. This project is to fund the first four issues of Jacob's new zine, which will contain advice & interviews with RPG designers & players on topics like GMing, game design and conventions.
This project is from Johnn Four, who you may already know from his incredibly useful website Roleplaying Tips. He's an absolute font of knowledge on how to be a better DM and make your games as good as they can be. In particular, his '5 Room Dungeon' method is a really great way to prep for an RPG session, ensuring you've got a coherent but flexible set of encounters for your party. Now, Johnn is launching a series of adventure templates in this '5 Room' format, and this is the first. Check it out!
This one only launched a couple of days ago and it's already doing really well! There's a whole team involved, but it's Eli Kurtz that I know best. Eli was the first person to really welcome me into the indie tabletop RPG design scene when I started last year, and he's always been really supportive and helpful. This project looks great - Trophy is a really cool system and this (potentially too real) hack seems like a great fit. You play, as the pitch puts it, 'rotten bastards' - corrupt politicians, decadent aristocrats, and other greedy elites. Trophy Dark is designed for short, 1 or 2 session games that show how everything goes wrong and ends in catastrophe. Seems like a great way to get a little catharsis from our current global political situation!
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Dirty Town, from Portuguese imprint Maré Baixa. Honestly I'm not really sure what the hell this thing is, but the people involved are great and there's something strangely compelling to me about a pigeon with a knife. If nothing else, you should probably sign up to be notified when it launches next week so you can see what on earth they've got planned!
Thanks everyone!
J
Hey all, so we hit £25,000, and are now pushing £27,000! That’s incredible! 💫
We’re visiting friends in Edinburgh this weekend, and it’s a great place to see the end of this campaign; burnished monuments, winding cobbled streets, gothic architecture - the works! 🏰
This has been such a wonderful journey to take with you all - everyone has been so enthusiastic & supportive. I’m excited to share my plans for delivering all your rewards once they’re finalised. I can’t wait till you’ve all got the game in your hands! 📝
All the best, and here’s to a great last day of the campaign! 🎉
So we hit £20k, which is now so far beyond what I could have imagined when launching this project that it doesn’t quite feel real. We’re gonna get four new super-sweet illustrations from CROM, which is super exciting as I‘m already bowled over by his work on the cover.
With the final stretch goal met I was all ready to sit back with a nice cup of tea and watch the campaign come to a close, but then my printers got back to me with some new options...
Have any of you ever made the mistake of putting ‘final’ in your file names? ‘Dissertation - Final.docx’? We all know how it ends; ‘Dissertation - Final Final FINAL! v2.1a’. So here we are, with two more FINAL?! stretch goals I never thought I’d have to write.
I’ve got costs to upgrade the book from the planned A6 size to what’s known as ‘reduced A5’ (it’s kind of like half letter). This has a sizeable impact on each unit cost, hence the stretch goal, but it’s a really nice size. I actually love A6 booklets, and have laid the book out to be nice & readable at that size, but all the new artwork would shine even more in a slightly larger format.
This is getting really ridiculous now, but you have all shown me that nothing is impossible! Singer stitching is when the book is bound using thread, sewn along the spine using a singer sewing machine. It makes the spine a feature, with neat coloured thread instead of boring (perfectly serviceable!) staples. It’s also EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE as it’s much more time-consuming than staples. That’s why the goal is so high for this one - it lets me offset the extra unit costs of the process.
So there we go. If we don’t hit those goals, we’ll still have an incredible product at this point. But I want to make sure that if the pledges keep rolling in like they have been, we’ve got the best that we can get.
Thanks again,
J