As we approach this year's Zine Quest and I gear up to launch my first Kickstarter project, I reflect on Zine Quests of yore. I really bought into and got excited for the flurry of RPG goodness on Kickstarter these past couple years. Zine Quest is a cool thing and my excitement to see this year's crop manages to overwhelm my substantial nerves for my own offering. To close the loop and get me in the right headspace for this year, I thought I'd take a look back on Zine Quest 2020. In this post I'll be talking about the zines I backed last year, why I backed them, their current release status and—if yet delivered—reviews for each.
Kozmik Objects & Entities
By Nate Treme
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/treme/kozmik-objects-and-entities/description
Status: Undelivered (delivery estimate August 2020)
Last year as I was just starting to poke my head around the Twitter RPG scene, Nate Treme's vibrant work kept popping up on my feed. When ZQ2 rolled around, Kozmik Objects dazzled me with colors, promised relevance to Mothership and Troika--my then and still favorite 2 RPGs--and seemed all around pretty cool. Though not yet released, Nate has been consistently posting beautiful progress updates on the art and I'm still just as excited to get my hands on it as when I backed.
Sinister Red
By Rudy Mangual
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rudymangual/sinister-red
Status: Delivered July 2020 (3 months late)
Sinister Red was an impulse buy. I hadn't seen anyone talk about it, I'd never before heard of the creator, I just saw its cool art and coagulated blood sea setting and clicked "pledge". Despite funding over 2x its goal, this zine was definitely on the lower end of Zine Quest popularity at 158 backers. I am both saddened and happy to report that Sinister Red is a vastly underappreciated gem that deserves more attention and discussion. This project is the kind of diamond in the rough that makes Zine Quest so exciting and gets me pumped to rifle through this year's offerings.
Review
Sinister Red is a 32-page, "2 color" (it's mostly black and red ink on white paper, but it's full color) zine and pretty much everything about it is good. The layout neatly organizes each section into a single page or spread. Bullet points, subheadings, bold and italicized text make digesting information a breeze. The design and production aren't perfect, but they're quite good for a first effort. My copy suffers from a few smudges where wet ink from one page imprinted on its opposite. The art varies in medium from breathtaking watercolors and woodcuts (I think… I'm no expert) to a few unfortunately unattractive photoshop filter jobs--all in marvelously gory shades of blood red.
The point crawl adventure meanders from morbid location to morbid location over a coagulated blood sea. Vampires, gruesome residents of the blood sea, and other foul creatures lurk behind every frozen wave crest. The adventure makes great use of its format, packing each location with fearsome dangers, memorable NPCs, and cool things to interact with. Some locations reference others, encouraging exploration and tying together the setting as a dynamic whole rather than a series of independent landmarks.
You should really buy this zine. It's damn good, and way too under-loved. I have no idea if the creator plans to make something new for Zine Quest this year, but I very much hope they do. I haven't run this yet (a crime, I know) because I've been busy playtesting my own stuff, but I will one day. The finale involves a standoff between a vampire prince, a djinn, and a wizard frozen in time. How would players unravel such a delicate and potentially calamitous puzzle? I want to find out.
Thirty-Six Stranger Chambers
By Harrison Swift and David N. Wilkie
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hswift/36-stranger-chambers/description
Status: Undelivered (delivery estimate July 2020)
This one I found while trawling Zine Quest projects and random. I felt drawn to its authentically zine-y collage aesthetics and extremely usable purpose of location-neutral drop-in dungeon rooms. I've since become friends with and published a small project in collaboration with David, one of the creators. Stranger Chambers hit some understandably pandemic-induced rocky waters last year but appears primed for imminent release, which I can't wait for.
YOU GOT A JOB ON THE GARBAGE BARGE
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/garbagebarge/you-got-a-job-on-the-garbage-barge/description
Status: Delivered July 2020 (1 month late)
Garbage Barge generated a ton of buzz last ZQ with its punk aesthetics, immediately graspable dope concept, and contributions from indie darlings like Scrap Princess and Zedeck Siew. It hooked me with a delightful sea shanty featured in its campaign video. Amanda got the zine finished and delivered promptly, and I devoured it upon arrival. Let's talk about how one of the largest breakout successes of last year's Zine Quest turned out
Review
Garbage Barge is a 60 page B&W setting zine with simple layout that contributes to its DIY zine-ass-zine aesthetic but somewhat obfuscates usability. Hunting through pages of identical-looking plain text in this on-the-larger-side zine proves difficult without a table of contents. Similarly, its unbroken and often quite meaty paragraphs make on-the-fly detail scanning painful. However, the art by Scrap and Amanda is fantastic and elevates the layout from frustratingly plain to endearingly punk.
The zine splits comprises four main parts: Locations on the mythical garbage barge, notable residents, zoomed-in adventures, and appendix miscellany. The 28 locations vary wildly in detail and usefulness. Some span pages, others single lines. When the zine dwells on its locations and punches out concrete ideas it feels imaginative and palpably atmospheric, but occasionally it strays towards a twee, almost dismissively curt tone that isn't my cup of tea. A GM would have to work hard to fill the gaps between solid ideas and loose prompts. Contributions from stretch-goal guest writers like Scrap and Zedeck are the setting's standout sections, including a fantastic scrapyard armory with perfectly terrible jury rigged gear and robust systems for equipment mods and scavenging-driven store upgrades.
The zine's two adventures offer glimpses into how a GM might expand on the book's ideas. The first, a trek through a gas lake to prevent explosive buildup has the makings of a solid open-ended challenge but suffers from text density and confusing information design. The second adventure takes PCs deep into the trash heap via a tunneling vehicle crewed by eccentric NPCs. Mysteries discovered while churning through each subsequent strata of trash accelerate to terrifyingly surreal heights. I love this adventure and it would be my go-to if I get around to running Garbage Barge, but its great walls of plain paragraphs and lack of practical information design stifle my joy at the prospect of using it. A simple relationship chart and/or some bullet point character traits for the NPCs would have gone a long way.
The Garbage Barge is undoubtedly cool and packed with interesting, strange, and inspirational ideas. I adore the setting and I'd be thrilled to play in a game on the barge but its lack of clear information design has dissuaded me from attempting to run it myself. I respect the zine's commitment to DIY aesthetics, but I can't help imagine its glory if the layout and editing were redone with an eye towards usability.
The Waking of Willowby Hall
By Ben Milton
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/questingbeast/the-waking/description
Status: Undelivered. (delivery estimate December 2020)
Questing Beast videos were a gateway drug for me getting into games like Troika and Mothership that I love and cherish today, so I backed Ben's campaign in part to repay that debt. The zine has some sweet art by Sam Mameli and seems to be nearing the finish line. As an aside, one thing I hope to see in the coming years are more indie RPG video reviewers. Ben got the ball rolling and some great people like Vi Huntsman (Collabs Without Permission) have taken up the mantle, but we need more people reviewing indie RPGs out there.
Primeval
By Lone Archivist
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lonearchivist/p-r-i-m-e-v-a-l/description
Status: Delivered August 2020 (on time)
I should say up front that I did a bit of development work on Primeval (and I'm credited in the book!--much appreciated Lone Archivist) so take my opinions here with a grain of salt. That said, when I backed the book I was only doing so as a fan. I'd recently been getting heavily into Mothership and I was excited to get my hands on a sleek new adventure. The zine's Kickstarter page has a sleek and minimalist presentation that's the envy of Zine Questers everywhere. I got my physical copy exactly on time in August along with some fun stickers. Let's dive in.
Review
Primeval is a 56-page full-color zine with mostly white text on black pages. While striking and stylish as a PDF, the design choices get Primeval's physical copy into hot water. The thin body font plunges to dangerously low sizes to accommodate extremely information-dense pages. The NPC and monster sections use red and green text respectively on black pages, which unfortunately causes me too much eye strain to read for any length. The information design, however, is built to fly. Packed with GM notes and asides, diagrams, highlighted terms and thorough references, this zine efficiently conveys more information than your average 300-page D&D hardback.
There's a lot of stuff in this adventure, but at its heart it's a dungeon-crawl through a research base overrun by hostile aliens on a jungle moon. The scenario's introduction extensively covers the approach to and overland travel through the moon's jungle--which could be an entire adventure in its own right. The dungeon proper feels very old school survival-horror influenced, with progression through the facility blocked by key cards, monsters waiting in ambush for unwary scavengers, and expertly crafted environmental storytelling.
One of the zine's major draws is the jungle moon's flora and fauna. The author put a lot of effort into making the local species feel distinct, alien, and dangerous. A particularly nasty mutating creature has its own multi-phase life cycle with 9 different variants. I'd be curious to watch players learn from and attempt to exploit (or at least survive) the local species.
Despite caveats about the physical zine for anyone with eye strain problems like me, Primeval is a sterling example of sci-fi adventure design and a solid place to start if you're looking to expand into Mothership past the 1st party modules.
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