Albi F is raising money for These Stars Will Guide You Home, a solo-journaling game.
Q: Easy question first: Give us the elevator pitch of your project. Tell us about it in two sentences or less.
A: These Stars Will Guide You Home is a solo journaling rpg about journeying through a mysterious archipelago in search of your new home. Then, hundreds of years later, writing the epic poem of your ancestor's voyage.
Q: Is this your first ZineMonth project or have you done it before? If it's your first, talk a bit about what inspired you to give it a shot this year. If you've done it before, what's something you've learned from previous crowdfunding projects that you may be doing differently this time, or, if you're not doing anything differently, talk a bit about your previous projects.
A: This will be my third time funding a zine - I did Zinequest in 2021 with Superstition and Zine Month in 2022 with The Royal Cartographer.
I think with this game I'm going "back to basics" a little bit compared to The Royal Cartographer - that game had stickers and maps and a flippable booklet and it was amazing but I had to assemble each and every copy by hand. The result is stunning, but I have a second child now so I won't have time to do that again! I'll be keeping it to one, possibly two booklets with no "add ons", and I'll be relying a lot less on product design and much more on art design, which is why I've got the fantastic Fernando Salvaterra to illustrate it.
I'll also have slightly more interactive KS campaign, and I'm hoping to have some guest writers on board. The cool thing about The Royal Cartographer is that I worked with seven different artists, and the variety of contributions they brought was fantastic. That's something I'll keep the same going forward, always attempting to have more than one contributor to the project, costs permitting!
Q: Finally, tell us something about your current project that really excites you but the average backer may not be aware of. Maybe a twist to an old trope, a new way of presenting something, or maybe just something you've never tried before that you're using this as an opportunity to try out.
A: There's two things that I hope will be slightly different compared to other games.
The first is that I've come up with a way of shifting the islands about on each playthrough, as well as changing which islands show up in your playthrough out of the available ones. This means replayability is different to other games and hexcrawls because its the geography of the map that changes instead of the prompts.
Secondly, I think the idea of revisiting the story you wrote, but having to rewrite it like an epic homeric poem hundreds of years after events took place, is a cool twist that's not been done often before!