Zine Month is a chance for indie TTRPG creators to break away from Kickstarter

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding company that launched Kickstarter in December announced it was moving its technology to blockchain. It was then done in less than a month with advance notice. rescheduledIts popular community event, Zine Quest. Two of these decisions caused an irreparable rift between the community’s most dynamic members: Independently produced tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). Now there are more than 100 TTRPG makers, which includes small groups and one-person shops.

Zine Month is their new event and will start February 1. Organizers tell Polygon that they’ve had it with Kickstarter. Zine Month organizers can use any crowdfunding platform in 2022. However, in 2023 the goal is to eliminate Kickstarter completely. Ultimately, organizers hope that creating a critical mass of talent will open up new opportunities and attract new audiences, regardless of who’s handling the money.

Zine Quest was founded in 2019 by Kickstarter as an avenue to increase the visibility and reach of independent TTRPG developers on Kickstarter’s platform. Throughout the last three years — including twice during the global pandemic — Zine Quest helped hundreds of indie TTRPG developers promote and fund their work. Over 800 projects have been made, many of which are small and pamphlet-sized PDFs or games.

Although the event was always held in February every year, director of games Anya Combs announced that Zine Quest 2022 would be moving to August. The reasoning, shared with Polygon during an exclusive year-end interview, was that all the activity created by the annual Gen Con tabletop gaming convention — long a focal point of tabletop crowdfunding projects of all kinds — would bring in even more attention, and therefore more money, to indie creators.

There’s just one problem, says Charles Ferguson-Avery, one of Zine Quest’s creators. Many indie developers will go bankrupt if they wait for eight months before launching their largest campaigns.

“I am somebody who relies on the month of February monetarily,” Ferguson-Avery said in an interview with Polygon on Monday. “We had three years of this kind of being a regular occurrence. It felt like someone pulled a rug. For a lot of us, we don’t have the money to have the rug pulled out and get back up easily. […] We need something to fill that time in February.”

You can also see the shadow of another company. Kickstarter’s pivot to blockchain technology.

“A lot of us in the tabletop role-playing game community are very much against it, for a lot of reasons,” Ferguson-Avery said. “As somebody who’s played around with it a little bit, it is wildly inefficient. It consumes way more energy that is necessary. We already have a bunch of systems in play creating the internet that are perhaps not the best way, but they’re certainly better than using blockchain.”

The Verge, our sister site, has an excellent explainer on all the controversy surrounding blockchain technology.

As of today, Ferguson-Avery says that more than 100 TTRPG projects have been spun up on Zine Month’s official website. Every day, more are added. This website contains lots of useful information about how to make your own magazine, as well as alternative places where you can host a crowdfunding campaign.