2019

2019 was one of those years where so much was happening that it often felt overwhelming. It feels like everyone’s end of year thoughts will be quite different.

Zine Quest

I think that one of the big things for me was Luke Crane’s Kickstarter initiative to encourage people to create small amateur creative projects.

There were so many interesting things that I haven’t really been able to follow up on and even keeping track of when all the zines have been released and finding time to read them was difficult.

The major thing that Zine Quest did was legitimate basic means of physical production and permit fragmentary and incomplete ideas to see the light of day. It could what was magical about early roleplaying zine culture and revived it. The original zines were part of a process of discovering what roleplaying was, what it could be and sharing what you were doing in your games.

Zine Quest allowed people to share their gaming ideas without embarrassment with their final state and allowed people to put out something incomplete in a physical form rather than a blog post. It’s impact was felt throughout the year as there was a classic ripple effect where people saw the initial wave of zines and were inspired to do their own.

Some of the authors are now thinking of writing follow-ups and responses to the reaction. If this can be made self-sustaining then you have the making an amazing richness of grassroots content creation that I’m not sure we’ve ever witnessed before.

Trends

2019 was the year of being Misforged in the Dark.

Games based on the Blades in the Dark template proliferated and, just like Apocalypse World before it, few of the new games seemed to understand let alone hack on the systems effectively.

The most frustrating thing about these misfiring designs is often the idea or the colour is very exciting and it is frustrating to see a good idea brought low by a poor choice of system borrowing.

Itch

Independent publishers have tried a number of different places to distribute and take payment for their work: Gumroad, Payhip, Drivethru RPG.

However 2019 was the year that everyone seemed to converge on Itch, formerly a computer game platform now a general games platform.

Itch provides payment and distribution functionality but also importantly social and subscription features that allow you to follow creators and know when they have new releases.

It also provides hosting for game jams and design competitions so it’s basically a one-stop shop for all your distribution needs.

The volume of entries to the various game jams has been huge. It has been impossible to even skim read through a lot of the entries.

Quickstarts

A number of Kickstarter campaigns launched with Quickstarts ready to go from day one. I was particularly struck by the Root which I felt both illustrated the game and demonstrated exactly what the game was going to be like.

The same was true of Voidheart Symphony which gave you a complete set of playbooks plus a scenario that outlines the concerns and themes of the game well.

Podcasts

It’s clear that for a lot of people listening to podcasts help them feel connected to the wider gaming community, even if they don’t currently have a game. More surprisingly to me a number of people I met this year had actually got into gaming by listening to the podcasts and feeling that this was something they might enjoy doing for themselves.

What I’m looking forward to

On the Powered by the Apocalpyse front I think Voidheart Symphony is going to be very interesting but maybe not for unusual reasons. It’s an overt piece of progressive propaganda which sits firmly within a capital realist framework which seems to deny the possibility of social change but only the creation of safe communities within the current moment. That’s maybe realistic give the political situation but is maybe bleaker than its author intends.

Root again looks interesting as the use of the character archetypes to embed the concepts of the world looks like good characterful design.

Cartel might also get a final release. Each playtest has been a bit of flawed gem so it would be nice to have something that was mostly the good stuff.

In the indie publishing world it will be interesting to see what the next ZineQuest brings and whether there is enough interest and material to sustain an annual outpouring of new material.