Wayne Roberts, the author of Dungeon Plumbers, is crowdfunding two 'zines at once: Worldbreaker and Dark Tides of Zaratos.
Question: Easy question first: Give us the elevator pitch of your project. Tell us about it in two sentences or less.
Answer: I'm launching TWO zines at once: Worldbreaker is 4 zines that serve as a modular toolbox and sample campaign setting where game masters are encouraged to destroy their campaign worlds with various cataclysms in order to spice things up and explore the ramifications. The Dark Tides of Zaratos will be the first 2 issues in an ongoing swashbuckling psionics & sorcery campaign setting based in a flooded world of pre-medieval and alien seafaring thalassocratic island-nations.
Q: Is this your first ZQ project or have you done it before? If you've done it before, what's something you've learned from previous ZineQuests 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 third Kickstarter project! I've made Memento Mori / Memento Vivere (a whimsy-dark gothic horror setting and adventure for 5E where ghosts and mortals live alongside each other on the cusp of the afterlife) and Dungeon Plumbers for Zine Quest 3 (a dieselpunk-fantasy zine for Old-School Essentials with a grab bag of new things). I've learned that how and when you advertise can be as important as the content you produce, and engaging with the community is more important at times than trying to crank out preview content too quickly. I've also learned that you have to pace yourself to not get overwhelmed during the KS campaign process and, no matter how well you have everything planned out, sometimes production delays require being adaptable. But what's humbling and exciting is learning that you can't always go it alone, so that by teaming up with other creatives you can produce even better content and value, as the synergy of ideas and effort explodes into reality. 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: Oh, wow! I'm extremely excited to take Jack Kirby-esque world-shattering events usually only seen in the superhero genre (world-eaters, interdimensional invaders, zombie apocalypses, etc.) and show you how to use them in your normal fantasy RPG campaigns! Some of the earliest RPG adventures featured fantasy characters exploring crashed spaceships—I'm just taking this to the extreme end of that genre. I'm also deeply happy to be able to work on a pulpy sword & sorcery seafaring setting. What's really cool, though, is both zines will explore psionics in new and different ways (more sci-fi in Worldbreaker and more pulp story-style sorcery in Zaratos)!