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A pity that it's "yet another system" TM, because I've got enough of those to last me a lifetime, but I'll probably check it out anyway. Maybe there's something I can cannibalize for the Frankenstein's monster version of Magic World I run?
 
My zine Other Magic #3: The Ancient World is now live on Kickstarter as part of ZineQuest 3. It runs from February 8-11.

The zine is a system neutral toolkit/supplement designed to help GMs incorporate real world ancient magic into their games. It focuses on the magic of the ancient Near East, Middle East, Mediterranean, and surrounding areas.

In addition to providing the translated text of spells and rituals used in the ancient world, it includes tips for creating original ones with the same internal logic and style for use in your game. It includes instructions for making historically accurate props for those who enjoy using physical items in their games.

Backers at all levels get free PDFs of the first two issues of the zine, as well.

I have a new blog at woodcutgames.com set up to pass along interesting tidbits that didn't make it into the zine, links to additional materials and resources, and other things related to the use of real world magic systems in rpgs.

 
Zinequest 3 is running on KS. I backed these three. Lots of other promising material but one needs to be careful as a few I backed last time are just fulfilling nowish.

The nature of amateur creatives I guess. I backed ones where I was usually familiar with the designer and/or they've done successful projects before.

Terror of the Stratosfiend #3 : A DCC RPG #ZineQuest Zine, via @Kickstarter

The Haunted Hamlet - and other hexes, via @Kickstarter

Where the Wheat Grows Tall, via @Kickstarter

Just added this one as I have the first two installments and it is first rate.

Through Ultan's Door, via @Kickstarter
 
I notice there are a lot of solo journaling rpg zines this year as part of Zinequest. Probably partly due to Covid and the surprising success of Thousand Year Old Vampire? This one looks cool.

Bucket of Bolts, a solo RPG zine, via @Kickstarter
 
This looks promising, a Heavy Metal and psychedelic setting zine by an Argentian designer.

WARPLAND, via @Kickstarter
 
A Ducktales-inspired storygame zine.

Beakwood Bay: A Zinequest 3 Roleplaying Game, via @Kickstarter
 
Could we move the Zines to the Zine thread? I like Zines, but there’s so many of them it’s going to flood everything else.

Similarly, we really should have different threads for Bundle of Holding and Crowdfunding.
 
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My bad, I didn't realize there was a Zine thread.
 
Here's a few I've got my eye on, outside of the two that just ended (Swordpoint & Rebel Scum):
 
Looking at what I've backed... I need to maybe take a few off my list



Action Potential: a Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG
Gather your crew, and make your way through a transhuman, body-swapping dystopian far-future.


Action Potential is a Forged in the Dark tabletop role-playing game in Zine format. Set in a transhuman, body-swapping dystopian far-future, players create unique characters who form a Crew. Together they must make their way through a hostile and unforgiving universe!

Will you seek infamy and fortune as smugglers running illegal tech? Perhaps you will become highly-paid assassins working for one of the shady Mega-Corps. Or maybe your Crew has a more noble goal, and you will fight against the cruelty and injustices you find.
 
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Isometric Blanks
A zine you write on for Zine Quest 3.

Maps to Use
Fish in the Pot presents seven blank isometric maps for you to use however you want.

They're in a zine that Geoff prints at home and staples and cuts and puts in an envelope and sends to you with a stamp in the corner.

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Bucket of Bolts, a solo RPG zine
Build a spaceship and play to find out how it changes as it passes through the hands of many different captains.


The Bebop. Serenity. The Millennium Falcon.

You can’t have a good space story without an iconic spaceship. Of course, more often than not, the heroes of the story aren’t flying some shiny new cruiser. Those are for the wealthy, the elites—not our lovable scoundrels. No, they fly the bucket of bolts—the outworn, patched-up junker held together with hope, prayers and duct tape.

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The eponymous 'bucket of bolts'
These ships weren’t always hunks of junk though—they have long and storied histories, and might even have been respectable vessels at some point. We only ever see a slice of that story though, a single captain and their motley crew.

This game flips the perspective.




I have others on my watch list... but I really need to start paring them down. And backing off on the physical copies. This is one of the few that I backed in physical form- he also created The Artefact which is a really well made and interesting game that's useful to create something to be used in another campaign. I'm hoping for lighting to strike twice.
 
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I’ve backed The Drain and 13th Fleet. I’ve got my eye on a few more Mothership ones. Now I’ve got my eye on a few others you guys have suggested.

I feel like the zine is a great format to get a good amount of content for a reasonable price.
 
Hey guys I am ready to support a bunch of stuff but I can't read the recent posts.
 
I guess there are too many on one page? I'll try to separate them out with a blurb on each which might help.
 


Against the Dark Conspiracy - ZineQuest 3
A tabletop roleplaying game in which competent characters confront a shadowy supernatural conspiracy and its venal human pawns.


Against the Dark Conspiracy is a tabletop roleplaying game for 2–5 players and 1 gamemaster (GM) about capable professionals confronting a shadowy supernatural Conspiracy before it comes for them or those they care about.

Against the Dark Conspiracy is a rules light supernatural thriller game with mechanics built out from Cthulhu Dark (by Graham Walmsley). For a free introduction to an earlier iteration of some of the game's core mechanics check out my game Alien Dark.

Players take the role of people who previously made their living in Europe's overlapping crime and espionage communities. That's how they discovered the Conspiracy behind the skein of what passed for their normal lives. The die was cast; they can never unknow what they have discovered; never go back to what they were before.

Doing dubious and dangerous things for their country &/or personal gain has left them with few ties to family or friends, making the ones they have left all the more important. That's why they have to make a stand and take the Conspiracy down one corrupt piece at a time, before it catches up with them and anyone who still cares about them.
 


High Speed Low Drag
A solo journalling TTRPG that follows the career of an elite soldier on and off the battlefield.


With the help of some six-sided dice and a deck of cards, you can tell a story better than any Hollywood war film. You'll create a fresh-faced young recruit and follow them through their military career, celebrating their triumphs and commiserating their defeats. Your character will be indellibly marked by their experiences, growing in unpredictable ways as your story develops.

Your narrative could be a series of letters home, or after action reports. You might record audio snippets on your smartphone, or write an in-character diary.

With nine stage tables, and fifty-two random events, every career promises to be different. The zine also includes two quick-start guards, one covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the other throwing you into the jungles of Vietnam with the United States Navy SEALs.
 


The 13th Fleet
A Forged in the Dark Tabletop Sci-fi RPG of Dark Humor and Treachery. #ZineQuest3


The 13th Fleet is a light-hearted and occasionally co-operative role playing experience. Officers of the Imperial Armada (and especially the 13th Fleet) have traditionally furthered themselves through ruthlessness, deceit, and the needless sacrifice of disposable Redshirts. While they’ll need to occasionally help each other in order to make it home, the Captains will benefit from causing entanglements for one another. The campaign will end with a clear winner, who will be promoted to Admiral and named Fleet Champion upon their successful return to Imperial Space.

Or it’ll end with the remains of the 13th Fleet floating as cold, dead debris through the dark void of space.

. . .

One of the two.
 


Lowlife
old-school tunnel warfare zine


Lowlife is a toolkit for old-school RPGs about delving into tunnels, trenches, and mines.

The zine has:

  • Systems and consequences for caving, climbing, and tunneling: all the ways you might interact with (and suffer horrible fates in) caverns and mines.
  • Hazards, challenges, and encounters players can grapple with, down in the dark:flammable gases, toxic molds, and mysterious geological phenomena.
  • A handful of monsters and beasties that might live in the shallow underground: critters like the dire hellbender, the precognitive mole, and the greater trollworm.
  • Items to use in the tunnels: the standard tools and dynamite, yes, but also exciting chemicals (like gelignite) and strange devices (like singing holler-hammers).
  • Tables for generating your own warrens and trenchworks from scratch, if you want to build a hellhole dungeon from the ground up (or down, as it were).
  • Guidelines for modifying existing dungeons to be denser and tighter, if you already have a dungeon in mind but want to up the level of tension and danger.
  • Bits of flavor, aesthetic, and worldbuilding scattered throughout.
Critically, Lowlife is not a setting guide or an adventure; there's no preset content here. Rather, it's a toolset for GMs and players, full of rules and content you can slot in at your table when and where you need them.
 


Rascals - an RPG Zine
Rascals: An RPG zine of high stakes sci-fi action and adventure.

Rascals is a science fiction table top role playing game of action and adventure. The game system uses traditional playing cards and poker chips, and is designed to bring the tension, twists of fortune, and calculated gambles of action adventure stories to the fore. Rascals is ideal for 2-5 players, including the GM.

You are Rascals: ex-special forces, spies, or crooks. Hard boiled types who worked together in the hottest zones during the former unpleasantness. You were some of the few who managed to get out, make a new life, but something has changed all that...

Now the old crew is together again, you Rascals who survived the bloody final years of terrible war, have been pulled back. An abominable plot is unfolding in secret...

From high-tech cityscapes to shattered habitation domes, through the heaving corridors of stations in chaos to empty transfer stations and the broken worlds beyond... Where will your path lead, and what awaits at journey’s end?
 


The Thawing Kingdom
A system-agnostic, fantasy RPG zine: a kingdom emerged from its centuries-long icy sleep!

At long last, the Thawing Kingdom has found its way to becoming more than a series of posts on my blog as a part of this year's annual Zine Quest! Though, you might not be familiar with either. The Thawing Kingdom is a land where an old king cracked open his shrivelled black heart like a rotten walnut, to let a great supernatural frost into his kingdom out of spite. That kingdom was covered in ice for five hundred years, and the setting describes the land when it finally, after centuries, thaws again.

It's a great frosty wetland, filled with melting ice lakes, swamps, ruins and glacial rivers. Half-frozen wights stalk the forests, poisonous drakes have flown in from the sea, and the dead king's dread Glass Knights march in solitude through the night, with no master to serve and swords of frostbite in their hands.

Meanwhile to the south, the smoke stacks of Draailant belch out the fumes of dead gods. They have been awake for those five-hundred years, with dreams of dark, flaming machines...
 


External Containment Bureau, a Zine Quest RPG!
A tabletop roleplaying game of paranormal investigation and bureaucracy.

External Containment Bureau is a game of paranormal investigation and bureaucracy using a lightweight, hackable version of the Forged in the Dark design framework. You play as trained agents of the External Containment Bureau, an organization tasked with the study, identification, and containment of paranormal phenomena. The Bureau authorizes agents to make use of these phenomena to give yourself incredible powers (so long as the proper forms are in order). But take care: using paranormal energies inches you ever closer to joining the ranks of the paranormal yourself. Will you transcend humanity in the line of duty? Play to find out.

If you enjoy media like Control, Fringe, The Magnus Archives, Men in Black, SCP Foundation, or X-Files... you'll love External Containment Bureau!
 


THE POWER WORDS ENGINE
A limitless alternative to your tabletop RPG's spell list.


The Power Words engine is a custom magic spell generation tool designed to replace the spell list of your favorite tabletop system.

Spell lists trivialize the act of wizardry: the supposedly deep and mysterious practice of the arcane is reduced to plucking a phrase from a prescribed list. The engine empowers you as a player or GM to engineer spells from scratch by combining magic Words of Powerwith limitless possibilities.
 


NEON BLOOD
An OSR/DIY compatible cyberpunk RPG.

Neon Blood is an OSR/DIY (we call our work Dirty-OSR) inspired cyberpunk game set in a version of the world in 2035. We don't need to go very far into the future to see how culture, tech, and politics might shape the future of humanity. It is dystopian, but all hope is not lost for ye who enter here.

The goal of this game is to take the OSR-based RPG system and roughen up the edges, throw in some chrome, pump it full of HiCap neon, and light it on fire. The rules start with the d20, but we make a firefight feel like a frenetic two-way range where your decisions and training will be a matter of life and death. And hacking will never be boring or the side gig; it easily occurs in real-time alongside a firefight without disruption to either team.

The combat is brutal and deadly, and death is one bullet or NovaWire away. Zero hit points isn't the end, but neither is it a handful of chances to not experience what comes for everyone. Even hackers aren't safe; play hacking games, win deadly prizes. As awesome as this sounds, combat is full of player-facing choices to keep your character alive and gunning. But everything comes at a cost in Neon Blood.
 


Dying Hard on Hardlight Station: a Mothership Adventure
Die Hard meets Alien in this thrilling escape from a hijacked station, made for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. #Zinequest

Dying Hard on Hardlight Station is a new module for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It’s both an open-ended adventure and plug-and-play setting; envisioned as a cyberpunk Xmas mashup of Die Hard and Alien Resurrection. In the adventure, your team of grizzled PCs will be torn between saving friends locked in the Medtech facility or crawling to freedom in the vents of the corporate-controlled Hardlight Station; all while avoiding capture by the brutal Blackshield Mercenary Company. Unbeknownst to all, however, Blackshield’s invasion has caused the containment protocols at the Medtech facility to malfunction. Now, in the bowels of the station, something horrible has awoken, and, after a long, torturous sleep, they hunger to feed.
 


The Vast in the Dark - Exploring Ruins in an Infinite World
A zine about exploring the dark and alien megastructures of an infinite realm.

The Vast in the Dark is an exploration setting for the world’s most popular role-playing game and takes place in a crumbling alien wasteland filled with brutalist mega-structure ruins. It includes tools for generating massive areas to explore as well as unique player options and gameplay changes to keep the focus on player choice and ingenuity over dice-rolling and chance.
 
In addition to those, I've backed two more that have already completed - Swordpoint and Rebel Scum. One more is still in motion, but I found it here - The Drain.

I really need to stop, but I'm currently watching 10 more. And all of this doesn't include a few projects that are launched during this time. I really want to get The One Ring and Everway, but probably won't. I'm also signed up for Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, Scion, and a project for some 3d models.

I have a problem...
 
Taking a look at my new posts, it appears to be when you have a lot of them in the same post- as they render at the same time, Kickstarter flags it as being a bot. And once you're flagged, none of them will render until you get past the bot-gate.
 
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