Introducing my 'Zine Quest 2 Project: Monty Haul!

Last year, Kickstarter surprised everyone with a cool little event called Zine Quest, a celebration of the early days of Role-Playing Games and the 'zines that jump-started (and for a while, sustained) the hobby.

Their intention was simple: don't think, just do. Make a 'zine, old school, with folding and stapling and drawing and paste-up and so forth. Take two weeks to raise money for it. Then print it and move on to the next issue, or whatever your jam is.

It was very cool, and it produced some really interesting projects. I'm not the only one who thought so, either. In a stunning move that surprised absolutely no one, they are doing it again. And this time, I'm doing a 'Zine of my own. Meet Monty.

Ever since I got back into Dungeons & Dragons, I've been both strip-mining my old campaigns and creating a lot of new content to slot into my current fifth edition game. For every single thing that has hit the table, there's a stack of stuff that hasn't. Monty Hall will be that crucible where I hammer these new ideas into shape, or better still, publish the stuff that I know works so that you can use it in your game.

Not surprisingly, a lot of my stuff is tethered creatively to the sword and sorcery glut of the 1980s, as well as being informed by all of the fantasy I was reading at the time, a mix of classic Appendix N stuff and new books that were being published (although many of those left me cold, for they were merely clones of Howard and Tolkien and quite mediocre, at that). There were also those wonderful, terrible movies, too. So my aesthetic lies somewhere between Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber, with a good dollop of Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance in the middle. So, my 'zine will be flavored, very much in the style of, vintage 1980s gaming materials. I'm a first generation gamer, and that stuff is still a potent influence on my thoroughly modern, fifth edition D&D game.

The campaign starts next week. If you like it, please consider backing it, particularly if you enjoyed the content I published here during the 30 Day RPG challenge. Of course, you are welcome and encouraged to share it with anyone you think will dig what I'm doing. If you want to sign up and be notified when the campaign launches, just follow this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

That's all for now. I'm looking forward to this.