The Abandoned Sweet Works and Pale Echoes

Check out this amazing new piece of art by Dharia Khlebnikova that just came in!

Well, the Kickstarter for Through Ultan's Door 3 is off to a strong start. While of course I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to people who purchased the early issues and expressed the enthusiasm in the past that's kept me going, one of the things that makes me the happiest is that about half of all pledges are from people who are picking up the back issues as well, i.e. people who have never experienced (at least the print versions of) Through Ultan's Door. We have blown through a huge number of stretch goals. I wanted to tell you a little bit about what's to come. So far we've unlocked three sets of stretch goals that I'm super-excited about. 

#1 Expanded Maladies and Afflictions

Through Ultan's Door 3 presents a rules-light system for maladies and afflictions that includes ways of tracking the progress of a malady and its mechanical and narratival effects. In the zine I present six exquisite maladies and afflictions of Zyan, from furniture pox to shadow blight. The first set of stretch goals will produce an illustrated, folded pamphlet (also PDF) with the full Through Ultan's Door house dressing and printed on French Paper Co. paper. It doubles the number of afflictions covered in the zine from 6 to 12. Although this is subject to change if more ideas occur to me, right now the additional afflictions include: onoma ague, penury blindness, spin worms, ruinous anomie, tempest catalepsy, and speculo obsession. The good news is that I already have this 2/3 written since some of these were cut from the original zine for reasons of space. 

#2 Increasing the Pay of Artists and Graphic Designers

For the second set of stretch, I am increasing the pay of all seven artists and the graphic designer for this project. 

#3 The Abandoned Sweet Works

I expect that this will be the stretch goal people backers are most excited about. Through Ultan's Door 3 presents a sewer crawl that connections the dungeons of issues 1 and 2 with 7 other locations. For the third set of stretch goals, which just funded, I am collaborating with Gus to create an 8th sewer location in the form of a one-page dungeon. He will do the cartography and layout, and collaborate on the keying of this location, which we dreamed up together. It will be printed on French Paper Co. paper and included in all print copy pledge levels (also as a PDF). I want to share the capsule write-up of the location, which I jsut finished:

In Zyan, confectionery jostles poetry and opera for the title of highest art. From the tumblers and molds, the sugar torches and glazing racks of the candy works, pour traditional favorites, from elegant drop candies in flavors of horeshound or lilac brandy, to candied orchis, or the jellied meats in Zyanese delights, and rosewindows of stained sugar glass. The Sweet Works was an underground workshop that once poured its sugared waste into the sewer river. Its sunken garden provided the narcotic white honey for their once famous cough drops. Long abandoned, the garden has grown wild among the ruined works, drawing to it honey ghuls from Zyan, where gangs deal white honey to addicts. Having lost the manners and customs of humanity, the honey ghuls are now jealous slaves to the hive. 

Possible #4 Elspeth's Letter and Pale Echoes

But the truth is that I'm just as excited about what comes next--if we manage to unlock the next set of stretch goals. The next set presents an alternate frame for a mini-series or campaign set in Wishery. Instead of traveling through Ultan's door, the party receives an inheritance from a former dreamer that includes the recipe for potions of penumbral transmigration. These potions allow them to use the memories of the dead dreamer to fashion priaducts that take them through the Oneiric Sea to different locations in Wishery. 

If this set of stretch goals are unlocked, this will be only the beginning. For the last stretch goal (at present, more may be added) involves a commitment to work on a new, episodically released, zine called Pale Echoes. It takes its name from the term that the Zyanese use for the drab waking world, which they call derisively "Pale Echo". 

Pale Echoes will be a zine taking you the other way through Ultan's door to explore different campaign frames and premises for the waking world of your game. In addition to numerous different "campaign starters" and house rules that will connect Pale Echo with Wishery, I hope in its pages to present the waking world from own home campaign, i.e. the city-state of Rastingdrung, where Ultan's door first appeared in my own campaign. 

To be clear, even if we hit this stretch goal, this zine will not be included in the Kickstarter. This is rather a long-term commitment I will make, on the basis of the interest expressed in the Kickstarter, to launch this zine in the future.

So if you're thinking about jumping on board the Kickstarter, now is a good time! You can find it here.  Feel free to share it with those you think might find it interesting. If we continue blowing through these stretch goals, who knows what else might lie beyond the veil of sleep!

I'm going to do my first Twitch stream!

 

In a first ever for me, I'm going to be taking Plus One Exp's crew through Ultan's Door to the sewers of Zyan on this Saturday, 1/30, at 730pm EST. Get a sneak peak of what's between the covers of the forthcoming Issue 3! You can follow the stream here: ttrpg.link/sewersofdreamland.

Through Ultan's Door 3 is an open-ended pointcrawl, so I faced the problem of how to get the players quickly in into it for a one shot. I didn't want them coming through Ultan's Door, since that would put them straight into the Ruins of the Inquisitor's Theater from issue 1, and I wanted to preview newer material. While I can't quite spill the beans, here's the premise I came up with and emailed to the players:

Elspeth was your godmother. She was a colorful character, a known adventurer, and renowned duelist in her youth. When you were a child, she brought wondrous gifts from her travels--exquisite moving dolls, gorgeous and frightening masks, a set of paints in remarkable hues--that she claimed were from Wishery, a land "beyond the veil of sleep", about which she told you many tales. Your mother told you the stories were just fairy tales, but you like to imagine they were true. After a falling out with your family, you lost touch with her, and were sad to learn that she had died. Curiously, there was no funeral held for her. But a sealed letter did arrive for you, in her unmistakable script, with cryptic instructions. It says that if you are receiving this, it is because she has died, and she wants you to know that she is proud that you have made yourself an adventurer. Her last wish is that you are to gather a party of your companions, outfitted for an expedition, and to come as quickly as you can to her house in the countryside.

I'm nervous for sure, but I think it'll be a lot of fun. I'm excited to play with Diogo Nogueira, who is one of the players who will be stepping through Ultan's door with me. Come if you want to catch a glimpse of the new opium dreamer class, or if you're curious what a potion of penumbral transmigration does, or if you want to meet the sewer wyrm Cephaia, Prophetess of the Muddle Waters. Or if you just want to see my grinning mug DM a session in the dreamlands. 

(Boring mandatory mention: if you want to follow the project and receive a notification when it launches, click here. Also, I now have a Facebook page for Through Ultan's Door Press that you can see here.)

Through Ultan's Door Does ZineQuest 3!

 

I will be launching Through Ultan's Door Issue 3 on Kickstarter for ZineQuest 3. 

I know this has been a long time coming. This new issue is more ambitious than the previous issues. I hope it's worth the wait. Through Ultan's Door 3 presents a pointcrawl along the Great Sewer River that winds its way beneath Zyan, flying city of the dreamlands. The pointcrawl connects the dungeons from issues 1 & 2 with 7 other locations. 

It introduces an entire settlement, the Sanitarium of the Benefactors, and numerous factions including the the sewer wyrm Cephaia, Prophetess of the Muddled Waters; her rival the Cranemay, melancholy fey witch; the Regulators of the Black Hand, dread sewer pirates; the Sons and Daughters of the Vigilant Watchers, ancient sewer mercenaries; and, best of all, the Lurid Toads, ominously polite cannibalistic parasites. It has a big sewer encounter table that brings the otherworldly sewer-of-the-dreamlands vibe hard. It even has rules for playing an opium dreaming wizard. 

Through Ultan's Door 3 was just too much Zyan to contain in one zine. So it's a double issue, with a Part I and a Part II. Each of these parts is its own 28 page zine, with a detachable cover with a map printed on its interior like an old school module, and a separate encounter card, so you can have the map, key, and encounters all open simultaneously at the table without any extra printing when you run. 

This extra room has also allowed me to commission more exquisite art for the zine than ever before. Through Ultan's Door 1 had two artists, Huargo and Gus. Through Ultan's Door 2, had five artists, Russ Nicholson, Huargo, Gus, Jeremy Duncan, and Orphicss. Through Ultan's Door 3 has no less than seven artists (!) who are creating the best art the zine has ever had. I'll introduce them in another post, but suffice it to say that Nicholson, Huargo, Gus, and Orphicss are back along with 3 amazing artists new to the zine. 

As if all this weren't enough, Gus has written an entire companion adventure to Through Ultan's Door 3, titled Beneath the Moss Courts. It picks up one of the hidden locations from the sewer point crawl, the wreck of the Verdant Purveyor, the base of operations for the Regulators of the Black Circle, dread sewer pirates, and expands it into an entire siege adventures that also reaches up into the law offices of Zyan Above. It contains the first published glimpse of the city that sits atop the dungeons and sewers of issues 1-3. This adventure is also being printed as a 40 page zine, with its own detachable cover, encounter card, and a second map insert with notes on running a siege adventure. So that's three separate zines with a total of 96 pages of the dreamlands. 

I will also be reprinting Through Ultan's Door 1 & 2 for the Kickstarter. So if you missed physical copies the first time around you'll have the chance to get them. Together, the first three issues are enough to launch your own campaign in the dreamlands and sustain maybe the first 30 sessions of lucid dreaming sandbox play.

The good news is that layout on Through Ultan's Door 3 & Beneath the Moss Courts is done. All the remaining art pieces have been commissioned, and all should be in hand by the end of February. What the Kickstarter will allow me to do is scale up the printing, so that I can print large quantities of all three issues of the zine, including the first two back issues, and Gus' companion adventure. I'm also going to pay to have the local printer I work with assemble the zines this time around. 

Don't worry about the physical quality of the zine. I'll still be using my fancy French Paper Co. paper, a full pallet of which arrive not long ago. The printing technique and quality of the images will be the same as previous issues. The only difference will be that they are folded, stapled, and trimmed by professionals with the proper tools to do it at scale. In other words, each issue will just contain a little bit less of my sweat and tears. I don't think they make the zine taste any sweeter.    

In case you are wondering, this is what a pallet of paper looks like

I will be shipping the zines worldwide, bagged, and in cardboard boxes as USPS first class packages, hopefully with tracking. (Given the zine specs I can't use media mail, or mail them as letters, or even flats.) Shipping prices being what they are at the moment, shipping won't be cheap, which I hate. I also understand there may be some of you who would like to buy the zine but are unable to do so on Kickstarter. Don't fret. Right after I ship out the zines to backers, I will put it on sale on my normal big cartel webstore, and upload the PDFs to DriveThruRPG and itch.io. 

So anyway, look for a Through Ultan's Door Kickstarter on ZineQuest 3 in the first week of February! Although I will admit to having had a couple of stress dreams about running my first Kickstarter, I'm getting excited.

Insectiary (Zine Review)

 The Insectiary is a zine written mainly by Andre Navoa, with smaller written contributions by Andre Tavares, artwork by Pipo Kimkiduk, and layout by Lina and Nando. It was produced as part of Zinequest II, where I heard about it. The system neutral zine presents 16 nasty bugs to include in your ttrpg game.  

The Good

The first, and most important, thing to say about the zine is that it is a beautiful object. It has unusual dimensions, being A6 rather than A5, and small and tall. It has a heavy cardstock cover and is printed on bright yellow paper in red ink, except for a single red page with yellow ink. Starting with the cover, there is a stretched out feeling to the font use. It mixes different fonts, for a page by page, boutique feel, similar to the intentionally over-designed Mörk Borg aesthetic. Despite this, things are laid out clearly and with a consistent aesthetic and use of space. The layout looks good. Very good. Lina and Nando should be proud. 

Let me mention a couple of neat layout tricks and information design that zinesters would do well to note. 

(1) The full-page illustrations of the insects come with a little magnifying glass that has a plus or minus in it, along with a percentage number. So -60% would mean that the bug is 60% smaller than the illustration, and +25% would mean that the bug is 25% bigger than the illustration depicted. This is a handy tool that immediately helps you to visualize the size. Obviously, this trick will only work for things that are consistently pretty small in size so that they bear an intuitive relation to the size of the illustration on the page, but HATS OFF in this context it works perfectly. (I could imagine it working for a bestiary of fairies or mushrooms, or butterflies, or whatever.)

(2) Interestingly, there are no descriptions for the bugs, since the zine offloads that to Kimkiduk's glorious illustrations of each insect, using supplemental random tables to provide colors and sounds. Each entry tells you the natural habitat and size of the insect (this is actually unnecessary given the magnifying glass), and focuses almost entirely on the bite effect. It also includes a humorous or horrible quote at the bottom that paints a little vignette for you. Again, designers should do well to note this trick of really leaning into the visual presentation to do work that text could do. If you are working with an amazing artist, why not consider letting the picture do the talking for you? This allows you to focus your energies elsewhere.

It is worth pausing here to emphasize how horribly delicious the illustrations of the bugs are. They remind me somehow of the best fiend folio illustrations. That they are produced in yellow on red somehow only adds to the awful beauty of the drawings. Kimkiduk has done a wonderful job. 

The Mainly Good

I have two minor gripes with the layout and information design, which I feel almost bad mentioning because the total package is so good aesthetically speaking and innovative with its information design. The first is that they chose to do a really great two-page spread illustration of insectoid horror on the interior of the cover. But the cover is stapled (attached) to the interior, which means you can't see the spread properly. As far as I can tell, the only two places where you can have a single unbroken illustration across two pages in a zine is either on the exterior of the front cover or on the center page of the zine. Or, if you have a detached cover, you can put it on the interior of the cover, as I do with my maps. 

The second minor gripe is that the entries for the bugs do not tell you what color the bug is or what noise it makes. Instead you are sent to roll on three utilitarian but fairly insubstantial tables at the front. This works against the wonderful design aesthetic of the zine to have everything about a bug on the same two-page spread and adds nothing, since what's at stake is just describing aesthetics trivia of the bug ("wait a minute, flip, clatter, clatter, it's green with mottled fuchsia spots") and the tables are very short anyway. I think it would have been better information design if this was simply included in the description. The take-way for me with this is that you should think about whether having a random table adds something or just throws up a procedural obstacle to smooth play. Again not a big deal and the main thing to say is that this zine has brilliant information design. 

The Definitely Could Have Been Better

But there is, from my point of view, a big problem with the zine. It comes out in the following text at the beginning, where Navoa writes:

"Insects are nasty little buggers that attack you during. your sleep or when you expect it the least. Or whenever the referee wants them to attack, just because you are being very annoying at the gaming table. 

The Rules: Whenever the referee sees fit, they may ask one or more of their players to make an appropriate ability check or saving throw (whatever makes the most sense according tot eh rules system you are using) on behalf of their characters. In case of failure, the character is either stung or bitten_depending upon the insect type_and must endure the effects as detailed in the description of the insect. It is that simple."

Perhaps this is meant tongue in cheek, but it relates to a real problem with using the zine. In the real world, one is usually stung by an insect before one ever realizes it's there. And this seems to be part of what horrifies Navoa about insects. 

The problem is that, at least in retro-game play, it's not fun to have things happen to your character by DM fiat without any warning. It's all well and good to hazard dangers knowingly and have the worst happen, it's another entirely to have something come from nowhere and harm your character. The classic example would be a trap that was potential lethal (save or die!) but had no external warning signs. That's bad adventure design. Instead the players should either be given signs that there is a trap there, or the context should be such that they know that the place they're walking into is chock full of traps, and they better go cautiously.

Some of the bugs are utterly lethal: they paralyze you and eat your eyeballs, or kill you from sepsis, or deliver an electrical shock like a sword blow, or compel you to kill your next sexual partner (!), and so on. Others produce mainly humorous effects like smelling bad or itching. It's obviously worse if it's lethal, but it might understandably rub a player the wrong way to just have even the less bad things happen to their character out of the blue. 

The advice about when to inflict this sudden penalty on players, which is probably intended as a joke, is also bad. The DM should never do things to players because they annoy them. That sounds like a dysfunctional power trip to me, and also pushes against the model that I enjoy most in retro-gaming play, where the DM is a fair arbitrator, who is certainly rooting for the players, but without allowing that to influence the challenge based fair play that is scrupulously established and builds trust between player and DM. 

Since the text of the zine focuses almost entirely on the bad thing that happens to you when the bug bites you, and since these are presented in the main just as bad things that happen out of the blue when something tiny without stats or even a description suddenly assaults you, it's not very usable at the table. As it turns out, the zine mainly consists of a series of gorgeous insect illustrations in a jaw-dropping layout that could be repurposed for other ends, perhaps with a bit of inspiration drawn from some of the bite effects. In other words, it's stellar design principles aside, it's not very useful at the table.

How Would I Use This Zine

Although I would mainly use this zine by repurposing the illustrations for other ends, nonetheless, I think there are some fun things that could be done with the zine as written. One way you could use the bugs is to turn them into known hazards of travel. "My God, no one goes into the Desert of Scorching. It's crawling with eyeball guzzlers that paralyze you with their sting, and pestilential fleas that give you uncontrollable itches!" Then the PCs can at least take precautions, and if something happens it will fall more into the daring known hazards category. 

Other bugs could be use as the centerpiece obstacle of an adventuring locale, as for example the moths that shock could be fluttering around an orchard with a magical pear tree with the smell of ozone in the air. The players would see the moths in huge numbers with the warning smell. So they would be primed to be careful and if someone got a painful shock it would be an acceptable cost to learn about the obstacle they had to face. 

Another idea I had was to introduce an NPC assassin who was a bug collector, and used insects to do their dirty work, almost like a ridiculous gimmicky James Bond style assassin. I think that kind of an enemy NPC could be a lot of fun. I could also imagine a murder mystery adventure where everyone died by a different kind of bug bite, and some kind of evil druid or insect collecting magic user was the culprit. In other words, I would use the zine pretty much as written as the equipment list of some bug-themed villain.

In Sum

Buy this zine in print and PDF here or in PDF alone here if you want to have something beautiful or to learn from its graphic design or to repurpose its wonderful illustrations. Give it a pass if you're looking for something substantial that you can use at the table in retro-game play, unless one of my proffered ideas has grabbed you.

The Evils of Ilmire (Zine Review)

 

The Evils of Illmire is a zine written by Zack Wolf. It was funded by another very respectable Zinequest 2 kickstarter (506 backers). The zine centers on the cursed town of Illmire and a 19 hex map that surrounds it, an entire campaign worth of material in 68 packed pages of small type--along with numerous downloadable bonuses including a 4-page "underdark expansion"--that you could run as is with almost no preparation. 

Damn Big

I can't emphasize how much material the zine contains: a map and write up for Illmire the starting town; a keyed map for the inn where the players are likely to stay; nineteen meaty hex descriptions each with their own random encounter table (!); and FOURTEEN completely keyed and mapped dungeons (!!). Aside from the high page count and small print, the zine accomplishes this with a pair of nifty tricks. 

1. All stat blocks are relegated to a monster stat block section at the end of the book. The same for descriptions of the copious magical items inn the zine. Aside from one problem I'm mention later, I found it very easy to flip to the back to check on stats. (If I were running it, I would print this section out ahead of time.) This is a neat trick that save a lot of space; while not everyone will want to do this, it's a nice tool to have. 
2. All the dungeons in the zine are attractive two page spreads, unless they have a key factional player in them, in which case the two page spread is supplemented by a further two page illustrated spread on the major players involved. This makes the dungeons all pretty small, mainly lairs and hideouts.

Although The Evils of Illmire almost comically pushes the limits of how much material one zine can deliver, it still manages to feel like a zine. It was graphically designed and written for the page size of a zine, as one can tell from the relentless two page dungeon spreads. Furthermore, the zine uses thin paper and a professional printer (perhaps Mixam?) with the capacity to fold and staple high page counts, so that despite being thick, it is well-folded and lies almost flat when closed like a proper zine.  

Note, what follows contains some spoilers. If you might play in the world of this zine, probably don't read on.

Good Vanilla

I would describe the setting of the zine as vanilla, but in a good way. By vanilla I mean that it uses a lot of classic D&D monsters (not always by name), and the town of Illmire bears a very strong resemblance to Gary Gygax's classic module T1 Village of Hommlet. (In fact, you might think of the town of Illmire as a reskinning of Hommlet in an alternate universe where the forces of good in the town had been driven out or destroyed.) When I say it's "good" vanilla, I mean that it works with these iconic elements in ways that are refreshing and not stale. In that sense, this module would serve as an excellent introduction to players who wanted to experience classic D&D for the first time, while also offering surprises to old hands like me. While I'm obviously not a vanilla man myself (my zine is lilac flavored with candied orchids on top), I can appreciate a vanilla sundae with fudge sauce from time to time.

But I found myself vacillating between two very different views of the setting of this zine. On the one hand, there's something refreshingly light or fairytale like about a lot of things in the zine. There are alpine woods with enchanted lumberjacks. There's a lake covered in strange mists with a legendary giant fish in it. There's an impenetrable forest of thorny brambles, and a crystal palace in the mountains where a giant lives who will host you at a feast. 

There's also a sandbox with a lot of mystery, with multiple layers, some more and some less obvious. There are a lot of ongoing dastardly schemes with villains hiding in plain sight.  The mystery feels almost Scooby-Dooish at times, in a good way. I feel like the aesthetic of fairytale cursed countryside plus the Scooby-Doo vibe is embodied visually in the cover by Heather Shinn and Jack Badashski. It fits well with the "good vanilla" aspects of the setting. 

On the other hand, the cult at the heart of things seems to be drawn from a different aesthetic universal. If anything, it reminded me most of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. The cult is evil. Like, really evil. Extreme torture. Slavery, including vaguely implied sex slavery (the giant king has sex slaves too). Human Sacrifice. Total mind control. Poisoning children. Nurturing hideous entities in terrible basements filled with gore. There's something called "the Fearmother" involved. Of course there is. 

This excellent illustration by Patrick Olsson belongs more in this other aesthetic universe

Reading this stuff left me feeling kind of awful. I'm a fan of Call of Cthulhu and a huge fan of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying (1E), so I can roll with demonology, hideous cults, and deadly alien entities in the right aesthetic context. But somehow these grubby and vile notes sounded dissonant when played alongside the charming mystery melody of the rest of the zine. But hey, I'm just one person. Maybe the notes struck together will be a dulcet harmony in your ear.

Interesting Approach to the Hexcrawling

The zine contains tidy little systems for hexcrawling, weather, and mountain climbing for exploring the peaks on the map, all of which I enjoyed. The map is nicely divided into three different geographical regions, one mountainous, one forested, and one swampy. But the map is less about region or terrain type, since each six mile hex is really a little world world unto itself.

There are no empty hexes, since each hex has a meaty write-up and almost all hexes have a dungeon hidden in them that players can find (3 in 6 chance) by searching the hex and hazarding an extra encounter check. Each hex also has its own separate encounter table drawing on the secret dungeon to be found there and what's in the surrounding hexes. As a result, there's a lot of texture, and individual hexes would, I think, be very memorable. Again, it's a sort of innovative model that could be emulated, although it wouldn't work for a very large map. 

The 14 mini-dungeons on the hexmap are mainly very well done. Dyson Logos did lovely and highly functional maps for them all. While not all are equally gripping some are very good, like The Observer's Tower, and Prismatic Grotto of the Fishmen. Those few dungeons with big NPCs in them are also accompanied by nice illustrations that hang together well. 

Some Things That Could Be Better 

There are some elements of the zine that could definitely be better. The prose could be more evocative, shorter, and punchier in places. The zine also has some organizational foibles that would be relatively easy to avoid.

For one thing, Wolf begins the hexmap key with a sequential overview of each numbered hex. I didn't find this very helpful, since the overview often didn't contain enough information for me to know what was going in the hex. The overview is then followed by a hexkey that has an almost random numeric order. It covers the hexes in this order: 19, 15, 16, 11, 10, 14, 18, 7, 12, 5, etc. You might be thinking this ordering corresponds to the different geographical regions of the map, but you'd be wrong. The sequence starts off with things in the order players are likely to encounter them, but then eventually jumps a fair bit around the map. 

Here are some basic principles about keying maps of whatever kind: 1. Every numbered area must be keyed 2. The areas must be keyed in numeric order. If you want the description in the key to flow a certain way, plan ahead and number things accordingly. For this reason, I recommend numbering rooms and hexes on the map last, so you can move the keys for them around in the text as suits your purposes.

Bizarrely, the same thing happens in the stat-blocks of monsters and NPCs. They are roughly in alphabetical order. Are you kidding me? There are also some inconsistencies I noticed; for examples the demons are said to have magical powers in their descriptions, but none were listed in the stat blocks. 

How I would Run This Zine

The truth is that you could run an entire campaign from this zine pretty much right out of the box without doing much more than reading it first. But here are some things I would do to prep.

1. I would start the party off coming into town and consider carefully how villagers and the cult are likely to react to them. I would think about how the villagers, who are all suffering from paranoia, would react to strangers coming into town. I think I would have the cult play it cooly at first, given that the adventurers are likely to seem initially like a capable group.
2. I would pick a few starting dungeons and give the players hooks that tell them where to look for them. I would try to pick some that made them tromp across several hexes to get there. I would also make the hexcrawling rules known so that they realize that each hex has secrets to uncover.
3. I would tone down the gore horror of the cult involved areas a bit, remove sexual slavery from the module, reduce torture references, and so on, to bring it more in line with the mystery woods vibe. 
4. I would drop hints about a couple of mysteries from early on, like where did the the druid go, and so on. I would try to give them a sense over time of how desperate people in the town were and make sure some of the townspeople were likable and memorable characters.
5. I would probably add one larger-size dungeon to break up the relentless lair-sized vibe of the dungeons on the map, I'm not sure which one. I would likely add it to the underdark portion, since that's least explored. I also love the idea that Zack Wolf floats in his 4 page underdark supplement of a parallel underdark pointcrawl map with locations beneath various hexes. I would also think about adding Matt Finch's underdark module: Demonspore: Secrets of the Shroom. 

Rating and Capsule Review

If you want an entire "good vanilla" campaign with a comfortable but fresh classic vibe, ready to run right out of the zine, then buy it right now here. If you want a repository of small dungeons to steal for your own hexmap, this product is also an excellent value. It also holds some interest for those who are looking for different models for how to develop hexcrawls. If vanilla's not your flavor, maybe give it a pass. At only $10 for print, and $5 for PDF it is a steal.

****/***** It gets four out of five stars: it's good! 

You've Got a Job on the Garbage Barge! (Zine Review)

You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge! is a zine by Amanda Lee Franck with a series of stretch goal collaborators, including Scrap Princess, Aaron King, Dungeons and Possums, Sasha Sienna & Jonathan Sims, and Zedeck Siew. The zine was funded through a very successful Zinequest kickstarter that had 700 backers. 

This zine is a system neutral campaign setting in 58 pages, a little world in a bottle that could, with a fair amount of work sustain a full campaign of retro-gaming play. The zine builds a sandbox (trashbox?) aboard a cyclopean multi-level dilapidated garbage barge that has been perpetually slogging up and down the coast, stopping to take garbage in exchange for fuel. The patrons and NPCs are a motley crew of down to earth laborers from tugboat operators named Irene (an AI) to dock workers, garbage sorters, trash miners and the like. As you might expect, there are people with a lot of pluck and grit, and not a few hearts of gold. There are also thieving racoons, fighting fish, talking bugs, evil interdimensional garbage wizards, forests of rebar, self-replicating frogs, and much more.

The Good

The setting has a heck of a lot of mystery: Who made the garbage barge and where did they go? What is the burning city and how did it get on the garbage barge? What is the lake of glowing orange gas? Is the trash in the barge infinitely deep? What happened to the third tugboat? I’m on record saying that every sandbox setting should come with big mysteries, so I certainly approve.

 

Another thing I like about the setting, admittedly under-explored in the already stuffed zine, is that it is a mobile campaign setting. The barge moves between different ports of call. The players can disembark the trashbox for brief episodic adventures or fun (all carousing should happen in ports). As someone who has run a thematically focused sandbox campaign for four years, I can tell you that these kind of episodic side hooks can be a lifeline. It's neat the way the setting builds in an "outside" to the sandbox for diversions like this.

 

The zine also has a lovely sideways cutaway map by Franck wryly labelled “The Known Barge”, which shows the relations of different locations, the terrain that lies between them, and also some different ways of getting there. As play starts many parts of the barge have just recently opened up by the discovery and magical enlargement of a defunct pneumatic tube mail system that intersects with a warren of raccoon tunnels. The opening up of formerly closed territory and the opportunity this provides for exploration and adventuring in the unknown is an excellent campaign starter. (The opening of Ultan's door is another instance of this type.)

 

The Mainly Good

The kickstarter for this zine had a festival air. The art and text were great. Quirky trash scavenging is reminiscent of themes with heavy circulation in the OSR during the heydays of Google plus, evoking nostalgia for earlier days of the scene that had giant sandbox ruined sea vessels (HMS Apollyon) and scavenging trash aplenty. As stretch goals were hit, the zine expanded from 32 pages to its current 58 pages. The large list of collaborators, some new, some old hands, gave it a feeling of a passing of the torch. 

 

The zine clearly gained a lot of heart through the recruitment of stretch goal collaborators. It also gained some amazing content. But through this process I suspect it became a bit more like the garbage barge it describes: from a tightly conceived and charming campaign setting, with each stretch goal it became a bit more like a motley assortment of ideas, art, writing tones, layout decisions, and presupposed rulesets, jumbled together, with quirky and delicious “finds” peeking out from a bed of rusted toasters and cracked porcelain.

Just look at this amazing toad king wearing a chandelier as a necklace, drawn by Franck. Badass!

The art by Franck and stretch goal illustrations by Scrap Princess are excellent. Franck is an illustrator whose work you can see here. Her illustrations in the zine run the gamut from charming to downright striking. I loved them! Scrap Princess works in their distinctive style, which fits thematically with the setting, but isn’t entirely in line with Franck’s style. The difference isn't jarring, but nor is it a perfect fit. 

This fox snake by Scrap Princess is pretty great.

Some of the other stretch goal contributions are wonderful. 

• Scrap’s rules for running Kat’s salvage armory. You bring her useful scrap and she puts together jerry-rigged equipment—the settings very own scrap princess! 
• Aaron King's extensive tables of different garbage smells  are also fantastic, especially when paired with the accompanying economy of smells mini-game, and the scent skald bard college rules (which seem to be for 5E). 
• Zedeck Siew’s speaking bettas—a kind of noble and divine fighting fish--are evocative and fun, although the tone is different from the rest of the zine, and they seem a little over-powered as an optional PC class.

Other contributions worked less for me, including Scrap’s Yoo-Hoos--confused, amalgamated, pop-culture weirdos, and an adventure by Sasha Sienna and Jonathan Sims I’ll come to in a minute.

This brings me to an important point: collaboration is hard if you want to maintain a consistent vision and level of quality. I’ve been thinking about this a lot with my zine, since I’m trying to open it up to greater collaboration. Zines, being so short and focused, are perfect vehicles for a singular vision, but they’re hard to collaborate on in exacting ways—because, hey it’s just a zine, and if someone is nice enough to throw their hat in the ring to support your vision. Franck paid her contributors generously, but in the DIY scene who wants to police the content of paid contributors like you were their boss? No one. 

 

The Definitely Could be Better 

The zine looks good, quite good, but there are some eyebrow raising layout decisions. Not a big deal--nitpicks really--but I thought I'd mention them. Like the zine contains this table with fonts of all different sizes, including some that practically require a magnifying glass for aged eyes. Don't ever vary fonts in a single table, and don't go this small ever.

Or, again, here's a table for "New Items" at Kat's salvage shop that looks like it was laid out in MS Word, with a box around the whole thing, including the title, and then broken up between two page spreads. This also doesn't look great. 

Look at Franck's great drawing of that raccoon!

Retro-gamers loves tables. My take away from this is that you can't just throw any kind of table into a zine. Think about cutting your tables down, or doing a table that can be presented as a numbered list rather than a multi-celled table, or presenting the same material without a table at all. Even if you're laying things out in MS Word, you can probably make it look pretty good if you remember you're writing a zine and not an a4 sized book, and there are some constraints given the format. I struggle with this in my own zine, even with the help of layout people using InDesign. Try not to split tables across multiple spreads, especially if the table is in a box. 

A Difference of Play Style

Initially, I thought that a more significant weak spot of this otherwise wonderful zine is that the keyed locations it provides on the map, while fun and interesting, with factions and mysteries aplenty, are not written up as sites for location-based adventures.This is the main business of a map in the style of retro-gaming that I'm accustomed to: it presents locations for adventure in the mode of dungeon or pointcrawl that can be discovered through geographical exploration. (To be fair, there are a couple of candidate locations. For example, the three bilges deep in the vessel are easy to imagine building out into full locations for exploration with excellent treasure opportunities; but that’s about it.) 

At first I was very confused about this--how could the zine do such a good job in general but miss this?--but then it became clear to me that I was misunderstanding how Franck envisions play proceeding. The problem lay with my assumptions rather than the zine itself.

I got a clue from both the title of the zine and the two included adventures, both of which have PCs taking a job for a boss to go do a specific thing. The envisioned mode of play of the zine is less self-directed exploration of the unknown in search of treasure (salvage) and more taking  job offers from patrons to go to specific locations and do specific work under the threat of various hazards and complications. The location entries are not really written as seeds for imagining a dungeon or point-crawl to be explored by free-wheeling PCs as I had assumed, but rather as fuel for imagining jobs that the PCs might get hired to do.  The two adventures in the zine, one by Franck ("your first job on the garbage barge") and one by Sasha Sienna and Jonathan Sims, probably are intended to give us some sense of how this might go. 

Franck's adventure involves the players taking a job to vent a concrete enclosed gas lake that's gonna blow. It seems promising given that it's a sort of "hands on" job dealing with weird decaying situation that fits the setting well. Unfortunately it is marred by a confusing presentation. Despite several readings I had trouble understanding how the two maps included were related to one another and to the description of the site. Franck also presents things in a disorienting order, omitting entries for several numbered locations. She also mixes in important NPCs and generalized threats in the middle of the key for the map, rather than pulling them out and presenting them at the beginning. But the adventure is flavorful, industrial, and useful in that it gives you the general gist of how this whole getting hired to do jobs thing might go.

The other adventure, by Sienna and Sims is a riff on Journey to the Center of the Earth. It has the players taking a job to help crew a drill ship that is to explore the question whether the trash on the barge is in fact infinitely deep. The adventure is well-written and presented, with a nice set of characters on the drill ship, and a simmering open-ended plot involving a plan by some of the crew to mutiny and steer the vessel elsewhere. But unfortunately the adventure does not seem to be written with sandbox style play in mind. For the different "locations" the drill ship encounters as it goes down read more like a series of amusing planned encounter scenes, admittedly with a lively cast of characters and (at lower levels) things getting suitably cosmic. The adventure is not really compatible with retro-gaming play: the rails are there plain to see in the set sequence of encounter scenes at various strata, and the space of creative anarchy is in the struggle that takes place within the railroad car hurtling along its otherwise fixed course.

The problems with the adventures aside, for a retro-game analogy, I think the setting if run as intended would feel a lot like Traveler, which is less focused on exploring unknown locations, and more focused on picking between jobs for various patrons (some shady) that drop the crew into complicated situations with various factions. Even in retro-D&D, hooks consisting of patrons wanting players to do jobs for them are a staple. But so is self-directed exploration of location-based open-ended adventuring sites. The zine gives you tools to do the former, but not so many to do the latter. 

This seems to me like a missed opportunity, since the map and the conceit of the newly opened pneumatic tubes suggest so strongly that one of the pleasures will be exploring the unknown, crawling through tubes and raccoon tunnels to new locations that can be explored for salvage and wonder--and getting their before rival salvage crews. To be clear, it's not that there's anything incompatible with this kind of play in this zine, but it also doesn't do much to help you to do this.

How I Would Use This Zine

This zine could be the foundation for an amazing campaign. Here's the work I would do to lay launch such a game. 

1. I would steal the coastline from a published map, maybe something by Judge's Guild or any fantasy (or real) map you could find by googling online. I would put a series of ports (maybe 6) on the coast if they weren't there already. Eyeballing the map, I would assign a number of downtimes between adventures that would have to pass before arriving at each port. I would next write three sentences describing each port, and list one adventure opportunity at each. For these adventures, I would simply plop in my favorite adventures. I would definitely use carousing rules, but only for ports, and if I was feeling ambitious, might write up different carousing tables for different ports. 
2. Since I like dungeon-crawling and site based adventures, I would place a bunch of (ideally free) written site-based adventure locations on the map. Michael Raston's Tower of the Weretoads would definitely fit, and maybe even Pollute the Elfen Memory Water with some heavy reskinning. I would probably use Dyson Logo's Challenge of the Frog Idol for the Toad Hotel location, treating the Toad King as the idol, the troglodytes as Yoo-Hoos, nixies as dryads, and so on. 
3. I would develop several (probably three or four) rival salvage crews (rival adventuring parties). I would write a short system for rolling each downtime to see what kind of exploration or work they had been doing, if any, and how they had fared. I would use this system to make jobs disappear if they players didn't take them, and also to pressure the players to race ahead to new sites before they were already looted for salvage by other crews. I would be sure to have at least one rival salvage crew work for patrons the party ends up siding against, as a sort of enemy party.  
4. I would look at all of Gus's HMS Apollyon posts on Dungeon of Signs for further inspiration in general for running a salvage-based sandbox on a giant rotting ship, and for some suitable location and monster writeups.
5. I would come up with a bunch of starting hooks that would direct players to these different locations, and I would also follow Franck's lead and list a few "jobs" that PCs could take for pay. I would use the NPCs and factions she provides to develop a set of possible patrons at the starting location with opposed interests and schemes.

And then I think we would be ready to go. 

Rating 

I've decided to adopt a stars system. Five stars is the max.

*         Bad

**        Mediocre

***      OK

****     Good

*****    Excellent

I give You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge **** four out of five stars: it's good. If a quirky campaign setting in a trashbox sounds appealing, where PCs will get hired as laborers to do dangerous jobs, definitely pick it up. It is a zine with a lot of heart, stuffed with cool ideas that fit its distinctive vision. it's well worth the cost. Get it here. 

Standards for Reviewing Zines

Over the years, I've done a few zine reviews on this blog. But I've never made clear my standards for evaluation (including to myself). I've also only written reviews of things that I liked, and which hadn't yet received much attention. In that sense, all my reviews were in the mode of recommendation or "signal boosting". I think it's time to move past those limitations and start reviewing zines in earnest. Every reviewer has their own angle. Here's what I'll be focusing on.  

(1) Heart
Zines are labors of love produced by hobbyists, in collaboration with other hobbyists, for consumption by hobbyists, usually spread by word of mouth (digital mouth these days) in small circulations. They're not slick soulless corporate affairs. That's one of the main reasons to love them. In some zines this really shines through. You get a lot of leeway from me if your zine has a lot of heart. 

By Studi MacBeth

(2) Layout, Form, and Construction

There's a lot of space for pure DIY creativity in the use of the zine format. This includes innovations in construction or materials, like Jack Shear's painting little fangs on the black cardstock covers of his gothic zine. But it also might include innovative layout, or clever use of illustrations. There's a balance to be walked here. On the one hand zines are scrappy DIY affairs and they shouldn't be criticized for not being professionally put together. On the other hand, there's such a thing as making obvious layout blunders that could be avoided by anyone (on one side) or ingeniously making the most out of the humble resources you've got (on the other side).  I'll especially be looking for generalizable or repeatable innovations, and also howlers that are easy to avoid. 

By Sabuda 

(3) Conception 

What is your zine all about? Is it a whole world in a bottle? Is it a mystery adventure? Is it a rules-hack? Definite bonus points for a cool concept for a zine. 

(4) Imagination and Aesthetics

And no matter what the concept, I will consider the aesthetics of its execution in the broad sense. If you're going to send me a world in bottle, I'll be asking whether the world is gripping and why. How evocative is the writing? How incandescent are the ideas? How compelling is the vision and how successfully is it conveyed? As highly individual and idiosyncratic creation, zines are a place where quirky and imaginative takes on game materials can and should proliferate.   

By Richard Sala

(5) Utility

And, of course, I'll talk about what you actually get in the zine and to what uses it might be put. How is the zine intended to be used? Are there things that get in the way of using the zine in that way? Are there changes that would be make it more useful? Who will find the zine useful and for what gaming purposes? Here I will often say how I might use the zine myself, for example, to set up a campaign. So some of my reviews may have a bit of my own contribution in a spirit of collaboration. 

At the present time I'm not soliciting "review copies", since my time doesn't permit me to even provisionally commit to reviewing anything in advance. So I'll pick up anything I'm going to review myself. Here are some zines currently on my docket to review in the near future (not necessarily in the order listed), either because I just read them, or am about to read them, or because I read them a long time ago but I have something to say about them: 

1. You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge!
2. Genial Jack
3. Pound of Flesh
4. Low Country Crawl
5. Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City
6. Pariah
7. A Doom to Speak Zinis

But if there's some other zines you'd like to see reviewed, by all means, post them in the comments below! Be warned that since this blog is a retro-gaming blog, and that's the type of play I mainly do, I'll have the most productive things to say if the zines you recommend are compatible with retro-gaming play (i.e. play focused on exploration, overcoming challenges, and open-world sandbox play, using a relatively rules-lite ruleset).

Zine Review: The Dirge of Urazya

The Dirge of Urazya is created by Jack Shear of Dolorous Exhumation Press, author of the long-running blog Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque. The zine is available in print + PDF here for just $6, and in PDF here for $4. Shear has written about the process of making it here and especially here. He did it all, from writing and illustrating to assembling the zines by hand. The zine presents the background of an apocalyptic gothic setting, and provides a series of questions for players and DM to answer in a session 0 where they collaboratively build the setting for their game together.

How is the Zine Made?

The zine is trimmed and saddle-stitched (stapled) with a black cardstock cover. The interior is 26 black and white pages printed on decent white paper (a step up from copier paper, maybe 24 lbs). Let's start with the cover. Just look at that thing. With just a few brushstrokes of white acrylic paint applied in a stencil, shear has created the ragged outline of white fangs, which emerge, luminous, from the darkness of the pitch black background. There is an aura or mood that hovers around the zine before you even open the cover. This simple but clever artistry is why I love handmade zines. Hand-painted covers using a homemade stencil? Brilliant.

It makes me think of a range of other possibilities. I'm a lover of elegant ink stamps. How about a white cover with a black and white illustration, embellished with a single elegantly placed red stamp? Or why just the cover? How about a motif that runs through the pages of the zine. You could pay black and white printing prices and then hand stamp certain pages of the zine. It would be a delicate operation, but the effect could be striking.

Back to Shear's zine, the interior is laid out in a single column for each page (double column for the facing pages), using the free word-processing program LibreOffice. It is self-illustrated by Shear. The opening illustration of the castle outline is great. The other interior ones have crude DIY vibe, which won't win any awards but work with the overall aesthetic of the zine. Again, I love about this zine how much Shear is able to do with basic resources.

The zine was printed online by a service called Best Value Copy, a competitor to Mixam, which I talked about last time. Shear ordered the prints as unassembled sheets, and folded, stapled, and trimmed them himself. Although this is not a big deal by any stretch of the imagination, unfortunately there are telltale signs of printhead smudging or misalignment in the zine. In inkjet printers, printheads are little nozzles that spray droplets of ink onto the page. In laser printers, they're lenses that fire a laser beam at a drum, building up an electric charge to attract toner to the drum in the pattern to be printed, which is then transferred to the paper. In both kinds of printers, the print heads can be become dirty (inkjet printers get clogged, laser printer printheads get smudged). In inkjet printers, they also need to be lined up and coordinated with the paper that's fed in, since they jiggle and spray the ink directly on the paper. If they're misaligned or dirty you get strange features, like blurry or darkening text or thin white lines running through text and images.

In my copy of the zine, the type on some pages is a little crisper than on others. In particular, the type tends to get marginally darker and blurrier as it moves across the page. It was subtle enough that I had trouble getting a photo of it on my phone, because the phone corrects for the differences in the shade and blurriness of the writing. To be clear, It's not the kind of thing you would notice, unless you know about printing and are anal about this kind of thing. But if you're going to pay someone else to do the printing and copying of your zine, you probably don't want this to happen, so I guess I don't recommend Best Value Copies. But I do recommend Jack's zine!

Castlevania is in the zine's appendix N, with good reason

What is the Zine About?

The zine presents the fantasy setting of Urazya (Eurasia). Humanity here was ruled like chattel by the Nobility, four great vampire houses. The vampire houses jealously guarded their knowledge of powerful magic and technology (including AI, and robots), keeping the human masses they ruled in ignorance. The vampire houses fell in the Global War, a nuclear and magical apocalypse that left standing only the great Capital, a Duskvol like gothic metropolis with crumbling steampunk technology, ruled by humans. The Capital is surrounded by the Borderlands, an uncharted post-apocalyptic wild-west, full of small villages, witches, demon worshippers, and--of course--vampires. Beyond this lies the Devastation Zones, forbidden irradiated zones full of mutants, environmental hazards, and lost technological wonders. The players play a group of "hunters": monster-slaying heroes.

The briefly presented scaffold of setting material is neat, but I had a little trouble holding the three thematic elements in my head at one time. First, you have a post-apocalyptic Gamma World type setting, with AI, robots, radiation, and mutants. Second, you have a setting where great vampire houses ruled ignorant human chattel. Third, you have a gothic metropolis, with dark streets, occult secrets, demons, vampires, werewolves, unhallowed fey, and 19th century historical trappings, including both the gothic city and a wild west periphery. I found that I could get two out three of these in view at any time. When I tried to hold them together in my mind, the closest I could get was the kitchen-sink aesthetic of Rifts, which I don't think is quite what Shear is going for, since it treats any period trappings as just one part of a pleasing but incoherent melange. To be clear, I think this may be a failure of imagination on my part (maybe I just need to watch more gothic themed anime), and more importantly, it is an issue that could be posed and hashed out in the Session 0 that Shear's zine equips you to run.

This is another item from Appendix N.
I haven't read it, but I always love Yoshitaka Amano's art.

This is where the zine really shines: the real innovation is what the zine does with this setting. The zine presents a simple system neutral procedure for a session 0 get together, in which your group collaboratively creates a setting on the provided scaffold. The retro-gaming scene (OSR, NSR, *Dream, whatever) has been excellent in providing vivid and intensely imagined worlds in a bottle. In other words, it has excelled at worldbuilding in the service of open world style (sandbox) play. But this has tended to take an authorial form, where someone invites you to play in their created world, and an associated culture where people encourage each other enthusiastically to share their creations with one another. The scene has not explored collaborative worldbuilding sufficiently, although there are some notable and excellent exceptions, like the home village generation in Beyond the Wall, or the use that some have made of Microscope to launch campaigns. I think this is a shame, because there's a lot of room to experiment with techniques for drawing players into collaborative worldbuilding, without undermining the asymmetry between player and DM that is crucial to retro-gaming play.

The method of collaborative worldbuilding the zine presents involves breaking the setting into 4 thematic sections: the world, the Capital, the borderlands and devastation zones, and a catch all including technology, the populace, magic, and the hunters (the party). Each section first provides some setting background to serve as the scaffolding for improvisation. The background is followed by a brief section called "aesthetics, themes, and imagery" that names a themes and mentions common elements to give you a sense of the flavor you should aim for in answering the questions. For example, the aesthetics, themes, and imagery of the section on the Capital begins like this:

Urban Decay. Slums and tenaments, rust, fog-choked streets, gangs and the criminal underworld, ramshackle homes made from scavenged materials, vermin, graffiti, outbreaks of disease.

Each such section is followed by a series of five "prompts", i.e. questions, about different aspects of the setting that the group poses to themselves and collaboratively answers. This is the heart of the technique, and it's worth looking at some of the questions Shear poses.

My favorite question is this one from the prompts on the capital: "Whose thrilling exploits are written about in pulp novels and penny dreadfuls, adapted to the stage, and the subject of popular ballads?" This is an amazing question, because it's such a creative way of projecting your imagination into the setting. In essence, it asks you how the people in the setting imagine their own heroes. It also shows rather than tells a lot of setting materials, communicating that this is a place where there are penny dreadfuls, and that people in the Capital read pulp fiction, and throng to a lively theatrical scene. It conveys immediately that there are legendary hunters or daring criminals out there, and that they have a role in the popular imagination, which might or might not align with reality. The answer to this question just oozes adventure possibilities: one hopes that the party of hunters will, in one way or another, cross paths at some point with this figure of popular legend. I can also imagine these kind of questions eliciting riffs on a theme, sprawling unpredictably outwards into a shared world. 

Other questions are more prosaic, such as, "Name an eldritch horror and describe their cult." The question is solid, conveying that the setting has eldritch horrors and cults. But it lacks the verve of the question about the penny dreadfuls. Most of Shear's questions are of this latter, more generic sort, for example, "What commodity is currently sought after in the Capital?" I though this was a bit of a missed opportunity. Perhaps this latter question might be pepped up in line with the penny dreadful question like this, "What commodity in the mail order catalogues has recently become all the rage in the Capital?" This would suggest that there are old-fashioned mail order catalogues full of wares and consumer fads in the city. It presents the same information but in a way that conveys the sense of a broader world, while also suggesting elaboration into immediate adventure possibilities. What are the main catalogues called? Who is running them? In short, I find the penny dreadful versions of the questions more fun to think about, and I suspect they would produce more fruitful collaboration.

After the collaborative prompts, there are various further tools for play, including a set of "Additional Prompts". These are not formulated as questions, but rather seem to be different elements (locations items, villains, gangs, etc) that can be included in the game by DM with further elaboration. They were a tad generic, e.g. under uncanny locations one entry is "An island used for secret rendezvous". There is also a list of one line adventure seeds that strike me as quite useful. There are several alternate campaign premises (play revolutionaries, or missionaries, or entertainers, etc.), and very barebones character background and personality traits that didn't do much for me. 

In Sum

This zine shines in two ways. First, it shows you just how much you can do starting with a good idea, a free word processing program, a long-arm stapler, and some creative flourishes.  The second is that The Dirge of Urazya is innovative, presenting an original template that can easily be reproduced. At its best the template fills a real lack in retro-gaming play. The zine's structure of four sections, each with background scaffolding, followed by terse notes on themes and imagery, and then a series of collaborative prompts is solid and could be easily replicated with any number of settings. In fact it's a great premise for a continuing zine. I think it would be neat if Shear continued with future issues for other worlds: each issue presenting a different world to be collaboratively built in a session 0. I hope he does it.