Skip to main content

Zine Zone Zapped

Zine Quest 2 is taking its toll on the ol' discretionary funds.


Gourmet Street: Fantasy Street Food Adventuring Zine
I love food in my fantasy. When keying a dungeon, I usually end up spending more time thinking about what sorts of foods the inhabitants prepare than I do on traps. Pretty eager to check this out.


Kozmik Objects & Entities
Nate Treme gets better and better with everything he releases. I'm pretty sure I want to live in this zine. The genre tone is right up my alley, and it looks gorgeous.

5 Room Dungeons: an RPG zine for D&D 5th Edition
This was an expensive one, as it's a subscription to a series of six zines. Furthermore, I can't actually bring myself to visit Johnn Four's website anymore, because it is SEO'd to the point of strangulation. But I have every reason to think he'll put together some pretty solid adventures. And I love a good five-room dungeon.


Dungeons & Dilemmas
I'm drawn to the idea of moral dilemmas in rpgs, but they're hard to pull off in a way that doesn't kill the fun and momentum. I hope this zine delivers on its promises. My wife is an ethicist, and has shown some tentative interest in joining a game. I'd love to have some hearty quandaries prepared for her.


Very Pretty Paleozoic Pals: Permian Nations
Okay, not a zine, but look at it! So cute! So weird! I love it! I don't expect to ever run Troika, as delightful as I find it, but I can certainly mine some great ideas from this setting book.


Dish Pit Witches
I already picked this up as part of Nate Treme's Tunnel Goons itch.io collection, but I found it so endearing I wanted to support the creator.


The Waking of Willowby Hall
This is the one that sucked me into Zine Quest in the first place. I like Ben Milton's stuff. I like it bucketloads. Maze Rats and Knave are neck-and-neck for my favorite ruleset. I couldn't not get this.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav
14 comments
Read more

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch
Post a Comment
Read more

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S
1 comment
Read more