Mark Finn is raising funds for Polite Society: the Zine for Thieves, Rogues, and Scoundrels.
Q: Easy question first: Give us the elevator pitch of your project. Tell us about it in two sentences or less.
A: Polite Society is a quarterly zine, designed to help transform your 5e "vanilla" D&D game into a sword-and-sorcery style City of Thieves campaign: get a crew together and stage daring and audacious heists in open defiance of the nobles and corrupt politicians who rule the once-great city state with draconian cruelty!
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 is my fourth Zinequest project! I'm doing something different for ZQ5--in past years, I've used ZineQuest to put a smaller project out so I can build an audience for my stuff and keep working on my big splat book project, Polite Society: The RPG. Well, I've made a bad habit out of adding more to my Kickstarters than originally promised. Doing ZineQuest kept interfering with my now-five-year-long writing and development of Polite Society. I've written 80k words, and I need to do another 20k, but now here's another ZineQuest? What to do? Then it hit me: instead of creating an interesting zine and then setting aside my passion project AGAIN, I thought, what if this year's ZineQuest IS my passion project? Boom. Done!
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: What excites me most about this collection of rules I'm publishing is that no one has done the real work in putting a heist generator and a supporting campaign together for D&D, ever. This hearkens back to the original Thieves Guild supplements, Chaosium's Thieves World boxed set, and of course, AD&D's Lankhmar setting. Polite Society updates those concepts for modern players and GMs.