🃏 When to Hold 'Em and When to Fold 'Em

Dear friends,

I had planned to talk about NaNoWriMo today, but I got sidetracked by ZiMo instead!

The land of tabletop role-playing games has plenty of jargon, and I know not everyone is as much of an RPG fiend as I am. I’m going to try to talk about this without making too many assumptions about what y’all know!

So first, some definitions:

• ZiMo, or Zine Month, is a challenge in which tabletop RPG designers try to crowdfund their zine projects during the month of February. (Dicebreaker has a nice article about the origins of Zine Month here!)
• The term zine has its own long and storied history, but for the purposes of Zine Month, it’s a small paperback print project, usually stapled or sewn together.
• Crowdfunding is raising funds online to complete a particular project. Essentially, people can preorder your project, giving you the money to make it. Kickstarter has been the most popular platform for crowdfunding games, but there are smaller alternatives as well.

Second, a quick description of my ZiMo project:

Your Friend in Witchcraft is a letter-writing game for two players. As you and a friend play through the game and exchange letters, you'll tell a compelling and creative story about how magic spreads, how leaders grow, and how people change.

Alright! Now we can get into it.

I’m a sucker for a time-boxed challenge, but ZiMo intimidated me—it’s so public, and makes your game so real. I waffled on whether or not I wanted to do it for most of January, and hastily pulled my project together in the last few days of the month.

YFIW fully funded on the first day of February, which is such a relief! I still have to actually finish the project, so there’s still plenty of work to be done, but two things helped me get from idea to launch: challenging myself as a designer, but going easy on myself as a project manager.

Here’s a little more about what I mean by both of those phrases.

When to Hold ‘Em (Challenging Myself)

When I first started thinking about ZiMo, I was torn between two options: writing a new game, or perfecting an already-once-revised game. Writing a new game sounds harder, but I knew, deep down, that that was actually the easy way out.

Your Friend in Witchcraft has been downloaded over 800 times; it was included in a large, popular bundle of games by queer designers last summer. Honestly, the idea of revisiting it and seeing what I could do better, now that so many people have already looked at it, is scary! Way scarier than trying something new.

I commissioned a custom cover for the game last summer, and I still haven’t updated the files to include it yet. I’ve been putting off opening the files at all.

ZiMo is giving me a series of deadlines to work with. I like deadlines, and I kind of need to have some external accountability for them to work. And now I have it! I got my ideas together by February 1 in order to launch my Kickstarter, and now I’ve promised eighty people that they’ll have my zine sometime in October. I feel more excited than scared to open the files now.

One of my biggest challenges as a designer is being vulnerable—revisiting “finished” work, opening myself up to feedback, asking for people’s support. Even if it’s scary to start, I know that when I get to the end of this process, my game will be as good as it’s gonna be.

When to Fold ‘Em (Easing Up)

Unlike NaNoWriMo, ZiMo isn’t about just writing a game—it’s mainly about printing it and sending it to players.

From my work with Sword & Kettle, I have a good amount of experience with launching crowdfunding campaigns, printing zines, and running an online shop. Y’all…it’s a lot of work. Previous campaigns have definitely suffered from scope creep, in which the project just grows bigger and bigger and harder to actually finish.

With these experiences in mind, I kept my project small. You can get just a digital copy, or a digital copy plus a print copy. You can add on a second print copy to give to a friend at a slight discount. Eight backers are getting a set of curated letter-writing supplies, and I have (at least so far) masterfully resisted the urge to open up more spots for that.

Lots of projects do stretch goals, to encourage further funding after the intial goal is met. A stretch goal for my kind of project might entail higher-quality paper, or a fancier binding, or extra content by other authors. And that stuff is cool, but once you add on more stuff, you have to do more stuff.

We’ve already raised the money to print the project the way I want it, because that’s what I set my goal for. I’m using 100% recycled paper; it’s made this zine a little more expensive than average, but it’s what I wanted. We’re not doing fancier binding because I don’t like having to finagle a little spine for a tiny book. We have extra content by other authors that you can get for free right now! We’re not making stickers, or bookmarks, or stationary, or anything else.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I just finished up fulfillment for New Cosmologies, our last Sword & Kettle crowdfund. We raised money and finished the project and didn’t let the scope creep too much—but we’re always afraid that people won’t like what we’re doing, and we feel like we need to offer them more to entice them in.

Shing Yin Khor sent this out in the most recent update about their new project, The Bird Oracle:

There are no stretch goals for this campaign - I don’t really like the vibe of constantly pushing to make more money by making unnecessary things and driving the final pledge amount up. The game, in its current form, at this current pledge level, is already the game I want to make.

I’ve tried to take this to heart when planning my campaign, and I realized that this part of this project is also tricky because it’s vulnerable. It’s about saying, “This is who I am and this is the art I want to make. You in, or not?”

Special Announcements

• In case you didn’t read the top section, I’m crowdfunding a print edition of Your Friend in Witchcraft! From now until February 22, you can help me bring this project to life.
• We also got a new entry to the Your Friend in Witchcraft game jam! Designer Logan Timmins wrote amazing playbooks for The Immortal and The Reincarnated. There’s still time to submit your own work to the jam – I’m extending it until the March new moon.
• And now for something completely different: submissions to my literary journal Corvid Queen are now open!

Things I Worked On This Month

• Lots and lots of behind the scenes work for Sword & Kettle! We shipped out all the rewards for our latest crowdfund! We’re figuring out a new legal structure! We brought on an intern!
• Amateur fiber arts project of the month: latch hooking! I designed my own pattern for the first time and have been steadily chipping away at it. I bought fancy yarn and it feels SO good.

Crowdfunds I Loved This Month (In Honor of ZiMo)

• The WYOMING Project by The Cantabrigian Magazine, a weird & wild choose-your-own-adventure journey that is edited by my partner & features some of my poetry!

• Songbirds 3e by Snow, the acclaimed eldritch-fantasy adventure game and one of my all-time favorite RPGs

• The Bird Oracle by Shing Yin Khor, a keepsake journaling game about fortune telling, multi-level marketing schemes, and becoming a bird

• The Magus & The Oracle by momatoes & NessunDove, a magical journaling RPG and coordinating oracle deck

• Precious Things by Lucas Zellers, a game of tiny dragons making cozy hoards

• These projects haven’t launched yet, but I’m excited for them!

  • Ritual Magic for Besties by Rat Wave Game House

  • Outliers by Samantha Leigh & Far Horizons Co-Op

  • 100% Modern Ghosts by B Marsollier

Thanks for joining me today! As a quick housekeeping heads up, this newsletter is going to be monthly instead of biweekly moving forward. (I need to spend a little more time actually writing my work instead of just writing about my work.)

See you next time!