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 Last year, Kickstarter held an event called Zinequest, calling on new and experienced rpg designers to publish a drug-related zine in February. In February 2020, ZineQuest is back. This year, the rules are (still) simple, with one notable change. Your campaign now have a maximum life of two weeks. quote:
To participate in 2020, you gotta do three things: launch a campaign with a two-week funding period, launch it between February 2nd and 29th, and send an email to kickstarter when you do. 2019 saw some incredible launches, including these three totally rad projects:  CASKET Land Project We Love $21,722 pledged of $2,500 goal 1,399 backers You wrap your bandana around your mouth as you bolt towards the general store. The dust is coming hard and fast, and today is not the day you drown in it. You burst through the doors, slamming them shut before the loud blast of dust blackens the windows. Something is wrong. More wrong than usual. As you cough and spit mud, your dry eyes scan what’s left of your settlement. The Grave Diggers, the stench of decay clinging to their clothes, huddle together next to the Undertaker and their own sharp, chemical stink and sallow skin. The Preacher eyes you and mouths empty prayers. The Barber, Drifter, and Gambler surround the Barback, drinking as though the poison they swallow will be the last liquid to ever pass their lips. You grab a seat - and though there are more empty chairs than filled ones Loam, the Wrapped Madman of the Northern Hill, claims the seat next to you. Your skin itches and burns. Loam’s heady scent of brush sage and secrets twisting your thoughts and memories. He reaches impossibly deep into his poncho and removes a tattered black book. The journal of Loam. His brittle fingers struggle for purchase on the page - the wrappings that cover them long since rendered useless by the air and sun - but he finally finds the prophecy he’s been searching for… “It will get worse.”  A Pound of Flesh $43,209 pledged of $500 goal 1,286 backers A Pound of Flesh is a toolkit for building your own run-down, back-water, black market space station for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. And all in a compact zine format. A Pound of Flesh is a brand new module for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It's largely centered around the notorious space station, Prospero's Dream, a grimy and sprawling outer-rim black marketplace where mercenaries and raiders rub elbows with spooks and slickscreen stars. The Dream is a cramped city-sized criminal haven where anything can be bought or sold and any crew can find well paying work (if they're willing to get their hands dirty). Written by Donn Stroud and others, with art & layout by Sean McCoy.  Girl Underground $16,243 pledged of $500 goal 1,531 backers Girl Underground is a tabletop roleplaying game for 3–5 players about a curious girl in a wondrous world, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth, The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away and similar tales. Follow a young girl’s journey of self-discovery through a whimsical fantasy land with the friends she meets along the way. Explore twisted, willowy woods filled with whisper-soft lies, or tricky fairy rings with riddling promises on the way to overthrow an unjust ruler, like the possessive Crowing King or the deceptive Mask Mage. The game uses a simple system built on the Apocalypse Engine—the same foundation for popular games Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Night Witches. I have a question... it's really more of a comment Price Points Last year, many projects had a price point of $5 for a digital copy and $12 for a physical copy. Others didn't. When do I have to have this finished? Up to you, but transparency is best. One of the projects I backed last year just made it to DTRPG last week. What else? Download the ZineQuest 2 logo pack here Note: Kickstarter says "In order to use this material you must follow the rules on Kickstarter's Brand Assets page" Upcoming Goon Projects See the second post for a consolidated list! Last year 108 authors (including yours truly) kickstarted a ZineQuest project. What are you waiting for? This is our thread. Get writing. slap me and kiss me fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Jan 13, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 16:29
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| # ? May 2, 2024 17:37 |
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This year, goons are writing:quote:
potatocubed posted:
Mirage posted:
Liquid Communism posted:
TK_Nyarlathotep posted:
Meinberg posted:
madadric posted:
slap me and kiss me fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Feb 6, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 18:30
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Currently my options are looking like:
Fleet's definitely the closest to being done (not just because it actually has a name), though it still needs more refinement and testing. That said, it's the least flexible and least conventional of the three. UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 19:03
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All of these sound really cool! My best advice is run with the game that you think has the best hook for interest. 24-36 pages sounds like a great sweet-spot. Do you have anyone in mind for art?
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Jan 3, 2020 19:09
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slap me and kiss me posted:All of these sound really cool! My best advice is run with the game that you think has the best hook for interest. Fleet: I've got someone in mind (haven't approached them, though, so who knows  ). They mainly use charcoal and similar media, which would work fine printed on the probably-pale interior pages, but not so much on a deeply-coloured cover. Either I'd have to go with a paler cover or use lineart, powerful lettering, and/or very expressive borders. If you know anyone who does art with a similar style to Necropolis...Scientific expedition game: I'm not sure one-colour printing would suit the art I'd be going for. Right now I'm kind of torn on the aesthetic - on the one hand there's the kind of 'realistic' alien ecology that people like Wayne Barlowe or Alex Riesart do - on the other hand it could easily go simpler, more vibrant, and a bit cartoonish. The main thing I want to avoid is a pulp sci-fi or a used future look... which are coincidentally the things that'd probably look a lot better than these in one colour. Folk horror game: Could easily be the same person as above for Fleet (well, there's a growing wellspring of folk horror, urban legend, and cryptid artists online right now), but I could easily fill in a lot of the art needs with fragments of fake or edited OS cartography that I could do myself, plus pay someone (or multiple people) to make some fragments of a variety of more informal/folk maps. I don't have anyone in mind for that yet, though.
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Jan 4, 2020 11:46
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Alright, I'm in. But I'm going to do a proper zine: none of this glossy, high-production-values nonsense. It's going to be rough-and-ready, it's going to be slightly wonky, and it's going to be dirt cheap. All art will be done by me, which means it will be bad. I'm thinking a system-agnostic hexcrawl, with maybe actual game stats for whatever I come up with as stretch goals.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:15
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Not gonna lie, I'm tempted to do absolutely everything myself too (which I've done for hardcopies of games I've playtested before), but it'd also be nice to have a fancy physical product too. But, to be more true to the zine, you have to find a genuine public library photocopier left over from the 1970s and photocopy your pages on that.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:28
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Yeah. A public library photocopier I can do, but I think it's a modern one.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:29
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A 1970s public library photocopier is a decent approach, but true zining occurs when you produce on the work printer after hours without permission.Tibalt posted:One of my goals for the coming year was to finish a few projects and ideas for projects that I had for a few years now. As part of that, I'd like to bring to fruition a game about a group of damned individuals with supernatural powers who are at the tail end of the Faustian bargain. It seems like a good fit for Zine Quest - the rules are simple, there isn't a lot background or setting information, and it would probably work best as a novelty one-shot or short campaign. I still need to edit the text into a coherent final form, and after that commission some artwork and figure out the layout, so things are very much in the early stages. Stolen from the other thread, here's my advice, based on last my zine from last year, LIFTS. I went into it with zero credibility and no real following, and wound up with a cool 230 customers. 1) Unless you're doing a DIY zine in Word and a home printer, you want to get yourself a template for your fav. publishing software so that printers can create your product. DTRPG has an A5 template you can grab. 2) Plan plan plan. Figure out how howe many pages, figure out how you'll produce your zines, figure out how you'll spread the word. Figure out who you want to contribute - are you doing this alone, will you want help with art or layout? Figure out a plan for creating and promoting the kickstarter - you only have two weeks to run the campaign, so there's no time to come up with a plan mid-stream. Most of all, figure out a budget in advance - what do you need to pay for, how much will it cost, figure out fees and taxes, and make sure that you can do this all without it being a loss. Distribution: You have two options - print and mail yourself, or drop-ship If you're doing #1, use the postage calculator of your national postal service If you're doing #2, find your publisher (lulu, dtrpg, etc), and use their estimator I spent over $500 just on postage last year, so make sure you account for costs in advance. slap me and kiss me fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 21:01
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I appreciate the answers, slap me and kiss me. I'm not sure about a promotion plan for the kickstarter, so that's something I'll need to think about. I'm thinking about hitting two birds with one stone by running a semi-public playtest, but getting a presentable rough draft together and organizing a playtest in 1 or 2 months seems like too much.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:53
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Tibalt posted:I appreciate the answers, slap me and kiss me. I'm not sure about a promotion plan for the kickstarter, so that's something I'll need to think about. Promotion is going to be really important - if your plan is to post the kickstarter, send a tweet, and wait for the backers to roll in, you'll be hyper disappointed. My campaign last year ran for three weeks, and I had at minimum 1-2 social posts a day + engagement in RPG communities across the internet. Without that sort of planning - and promotion in advance too - there's not a chance I would have even recouped my initial pre-production investment in art and content.
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Jan 4, 2020 22:07
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I'm working up something for this as well. A little book on cyberpunk gaming in the Information Age, and why dystopian games are important even when the real world is more and more taking on aspects of a cyberpunk dystopia. Figure a rant, a couple adventures with intentionally lovely hand-scrawled maps, and maybe a GM advice article or two like The Knowlessman's Guide To Corporate Security that lays out how to challenge players without creating a murderhobo expectation or ensuring a bloodbath. Could put together a quick and dirty system to go with it, but I think I'm going to leave that aside for now and kick it into shape later as I'd want a lot more playtesting than something I expect to roll out this calendar year would give. Not sure if it'll fund, because I don't know how big an audience that stuff has in 2020, but it's something I feel strongly enough about to do work on and mostly only want to kinda break even on. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jan 5, 2020 |
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Jan 5, 2020 10:55
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Just started work on mine and I think I criminally underestimated how much work it was going to be. Welp.
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Jan 9, 2020 13:54
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My experience was that it's an enormous pile of work. Do you have a page count in mind?
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Jan 9, 2020 14:49
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I'm aiming for 32. I figured I could knock out 32 pages pretty quickly.
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Jan 9, 2020 16:52
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Thirty two is a bigass project. Definitely not just a couple days of work. Good luck!
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Jan 9, 2020 17:03
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Cover sketches in today. drat did I pick the right artist
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Jan 10, 2020 05:19
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So how long after the end of the kickstarter would people expect their zines? I've been pondering a little Wizard's menagerie supplement, and honestly, doing it as a single colour zine would cut down my art load significantly. re: goal for Kickstarter what things do I need to consider 1. Cost of print run - get quote from local print/copy shop. How many copies do to? 2. Time and materials for myself? - should I work out an hourly cost, or do a /word /art cost? 3. Time and cost of post and packing Stretch goals? - maybe a limited number of 'your pet as a potential familiar' spots? - 1-5 fully hand coloured copies?
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Jan 10, 2020 08:53
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Apart from the other stuff you're budgeting your Kickstarter for, remember also:
And then there's a whole load of complexity based around adding shipping costs to the pledge levels. Like, a print copy of Sunlands is going to be £5. But shipping that to the US is going to cost ~£6. So each US backer advances me £11 towards funding. If Sunlands funds at £308 with nothing but 28 US backers then I'm going to get ~£270 after fees, of which I'm already committed to paying £168 in shipping. So I get about £100 for my efforts. If I fund entirely based on pdf backers (total shipping cost £0) then I get to keep the whole £270. For a zine where you're doing all the work yourself, this isn't a huge deal -- you won't lose money if the only person you owe is you, although you might end up egregiously underpaid for your work. But it's something to be aware of. Budgeting Kickstarters is an art form unto itself, which I largely muddle through by assuming the worst at every step and being pleasantly surprised when they cost less than I expected.
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Jan 10, 2020 11:02
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(Hopefully) launching Feb. 10th I'll be launching the Kickstarter for MYCELIUM and Other Horrors: 4 Incursions for Trophy Dark RPG, based on allergens and personal fears. This is my first ever Kickstarter and I'm taking the advice in this thread to heart. Honestly I'm petrified with worry. Just scared shitless I won't succeed. Hhtrhgnrg.
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Jan 13, 2020 03:25
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All y'all fill this out, I'll throw it into the second post.quote:
slap me and kiss me fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Jan 13, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 03:41
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 SUNLANDS: A HEXCRAWL ZINE A system-agnostic hexcrawl for your favourite fantasy TTRPG By CHRIS LONGHURST Sunlands is a system-agnostic hexcrawl zine, intended for use with your favourite fantasy roleplaying game. There's a map, a brief overview, and over three hundred hexes of STUFF for players to encounter, fight, befriend, betray, murder, loot, or run the hell away from. All in 32 pages (give or take -- I haven't done the layout yet) and for a price best described as 'beans'. ~32 pages Going live 18th Feb 2020 Kickstarter preview potatocubed fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 15:51
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Ahh, what the hell. ALL SKATE FANTASY: THE RPG A fantasy TTRPG system for 3+ players By Chris "Mirage" Casey Three mighty adventurers. A wild world of treasure and peril. A system where the players are also the gamemasters, any player can play as any character, and the story grows like a live thing. In this collaborantagonistic system, players build maps, add challenges, and run the characters, all at the same time. Includes a diverse bestiary of monsters, traps, and other strange twists which players can drop on the heads of their characters. 32 pages Going live Feb 18 URL: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miragex/all-skate-fantasy-the-rpg Mirage fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Feb 11, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 19:03
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Updated. potatocubed, your print zine is too cheap! Hit at least USD$12
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Jan 14, 2020 01:06
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 Blue Moon: A Cyberpunk 'Zine for the Information Age A Cyberpunk Retro RPG 'Zine about the importance of dystopian play in a world that is more and more resembling classic cyberpunk's fears. By Liquid Communism A cyberpunk TTRPG gaming 'zine, leading with a Stretch goals include a write-up on advice for how to run security without being a joke or an inevitable bloodbath, a roll-your-own-run table set, as well as the top-end Just Pay The Creators More. ~24 pages Goes Live ~18 Feb 2020 URL preview or live URL pending approval by KS. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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Jan 14, 2020 08:01
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slap me and kiss me posted:Updated. Here's my thinking behind prices: £300 buys about 20 hours of my work at £15/hour. I usually budget based on the assumption that I'll sell about 100 copies of whatever, so the base price is £3. The price to print a copy of a 32-page A5 zine is a bit less than £2, going down as the print run goes up. Hence, £5. Plus shipping, which is added to the pledge. Having said that, now that I've done some work on this thing I think that 20 hours is lowballing it; I'll probably need to revise the prices upwards some. I'll work that out as I go.
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Jan 14, 2020 10:59
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slap me and kiss me posted:Updated. I'm probably missing the point here but £11 is just over $14USD. If you're targeting US customers I'd round that up to $15USD. Pigsmoke was a steal for the £10 I kickstarted it for.
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Jan 14, 2020 19:19
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Yeah, I definitely underpriced Pigsmoke. In my defence it was my first KS and I was utterly convinced that it would go 100% of nowhere. I mean, who wants a game about wizard academics? (Loads of people, it turns out.) In Zinequest news, I started sketching out some pictures and... I can't in good conscience put that in anything. Hoo boy. I'm going to need a different approach.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:36
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Yeah, Pigsmoke was a hell of a value for the production values it brought.
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Jan 14, 2020 23:30
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bbcisdabomb posted:I'm probably missing the point here but £11 is just over $14USD. If you're targeting US customers I'd round that up to $15USD. Pigsmoke was a steal for the £10 I kickstarted it for. I missed the + six pounds for shipping and thought it was all going for five. Still, pay yourself by the word, and give yourself at least 0.20/word.
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Jan 15, 2020 03:19
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Get INNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.gif https://twitter.com/blue_troller/status/1217921553624641552?s=20
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Jan 16, 2020 22:47
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I've done my pricing and it looks pretty similar to Potatocubed's. How do you take the extra money for shipping later?
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Jan 21, 2020 16:18
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Angrymog posted:I've done my pricing and it looks pretty similar to Potatocubed's. Backerkit and gumshoe are two things I've heard of people using. Any reason you don't want to collect as part of the campaign?
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Jan 21, 2020 17:14
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slap me and kiss me posted:Backerkit and gumshoe are two things I've heard of people using. Any reason you don't want to collect as part of the campaign? Well, just because that doesn't seem to be how its done? And whats to stop someone in the US paying for a UK one, then getting shirty when you refund them or ask for more money?
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Jan 21, 2020 20:04
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I think most times people do external shipping, it's because they're shipping giant boxes of specialty stuff. Your zine will essentially be letter mail.
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Jan 21, 2020 22:06
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 MYCELIUM and Other Horrors Four allergen-based incursions for Trophy Dark, presented by The Gauntlet. By Tristan Jusola-Sanders Decay. Crawling through the mud and rot for a chance at absolution... Fungus. Soft roots grow through your body, holding you back from the secrets of life... Mold. A thin layer of fuzz covers a book of secrets too terrible to bear... Pollen. Something stalks you on your journey to the temple, choking the air from you with its presence... This is MYCELIUM and Other Horrors. 32 pages Goes Live Feb. 2nd https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tknyarlathotep/mycelium-and-other-horrors-4-incursions-for-trophy-dark-rpg sasha_d3ath fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 02:14
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slap me and kiss me posted:I think most times people do external shipping, it's because they're shipping giant boxes of specialty stuff. Your zine will essentially be letter mail. I mean how do you collect the money for shipping? It doesn't seem to be included in the tiers on things, and how do you stop people just picking a cheaper location then getting lovely at you.
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Jan 22, 2020 12:18
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In 2019 I paid for shipping out if kickstarter income without charging anything extra. This time I've got a fee for shipping to canada and a shipping rate to the rest of the world. If someone tries to be lovely I am not going to care, because again, the shipping on a piece of international letter mail like a zine is maybe two dollars more than domestic and honestly who cares about a two dollar difference?
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Jan 22, 2020 13:23
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This thread and this concept excites me and I wish all of you the best of luck with your Kickers.
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Jan 22, 2020 13:33
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There's two ways of doing shipping costs. In Kickstarter Go to your reward in the KS backstage editor, edit it (or create it) and scroll down almost to the bottom. There's the shipping section, third from the end -- go with 'no shipping' for digital products, or select as appropriate for physical products. That should create a sub-list with 'rest of world' and a cost you can set. If you want to get detailed you can add different shipping costs for different countries, but the way I do it is to split it between 'domestic' and 'other' then bump the price of 'other' a bit so that people who live in e.g. Europe end up subsidising the people who live in e.g. South Africa. Anyway, you should end up looking at something like this:  The way this works in practice is that backers are asked to specify a country when they back, then their pledge is adjusted to pledge level + shipping cost. As far as I know there's nothing to stop people from choosing a cheaper location and stiffing you on shipping costs. That's just a risk. You can check the delivery addresses they give versus the shipping they paid once the KS is over if you like, but as slap me and kiss me said -- in the case of zines worth a handful of dollars it's probably not worth getting lovely over it. (In the case of board games and the like, where the difference in shipping is substantial, I'd be inclined to be more rigourous.) Backerkit Using a post-campaign pledge manager is almost certainly not worth it for a small-scale thing like Zinequest, but in case anyone looks to this post for advice in the future: Set all your shipping in KS to 'no shipping' and make it clear everywhere you can in the campaign that shipping will be charged later. Some people will still get shirty with you about it, but if they don't pay they don't get, so. Then follow all the instructions the PCPM gives you. I found Backerkit pretty easy to set up just clicking through the screens and following the prompts, and where I did run into trouble the campaign manager assigned to my account was very helpful. There's more security with Backerkit regarding people trying to stiff you on postage, though, since they require you to enter an address then tell you how much you need to pony up. You can try to fool them with a cheaper address, but then that's where your stuff gets sent and you end up with nothing.
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Jan 22, 2020 13:37
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