Shards Issue One

Shards describes itself a world-building zine but its actually just a fairly normal almanac collection of detached ideas that try to be generic enough that you can fit them into your own game.

Only one of the pieces actually attempts to tackle the topic more generally and then by repurposing an essay-writing structure called the “6ws”. It feels a little churlish to say what they are but they the straight-forward: who, why, when, what, where and how.

Interestingly this article provides a framework for critiquing the rest of the zine.

Let’s take the locations offered in this issue: The Great Labyrinth and Bokort’s Bar.

The Great Labyrinth is the weakest: we are told what it is and what it contains but it is neither rooted in a timeline or a place. It has people who work within it and a footnote talks about a local lord who has an interest in essentially encouraging tourism to the dungeon but there’s no sense of how the economy of such a place works. No answer to the why questions either, why does this place exist? Why would people enter it?

Bokort’s Bar is a sci-fi bar which answers the What in great depth, it offers reasons why the bar is a good place to conduct private business while remaining respectable and safe.

The Who is a hive or gestalt creature embodied in the identical humanoids who staff the bar. This is a pretty imaginative Who to be honest and out of everything in this piece I wanted to know a lot more about Bokort themselves and what they were like.

The rest of the Who, the patrons of the bar, are much less thought through. There’s almost an air of “will this do” as the sub-headings literally describe the physical properties of the character or the tropes they embody.

Some locations are inherently interesting due to their physical properties. Take stone circles, or teleportation arches as examples. The properties of the Where make them compelling. Things like bars or shops are really only interesting if the people occupying them are interesting. This aspect of Who is vital but is underserved.

The When is a generic space opera future, the Where is a spaceport. Neither of these feel very important, this is a piece that is meant to be generic and fitted into many possible settings.

That leaves the How and the Why, why is Bokort running a bar? What is their motivation? How did they get into the hospitality trade? I have questions but they are for me to answer.

How will the bar be relevant to your game? There are some hooks but they feel lame. They identify issues with how the bar fits into its community but that’s really about integrating it into your game world rather than your game. There’s no inherent kicker or narrative instability in the concept. Bokort doesn’t really want to do anything except try to main the status quo.

The rest of the zine is made up of advice articles. Some are light satirical pieces around how exactly the economy and agriculture of Mordor is meant to work. Some religious musings with an in and out of character justification for having public temples dedicated to a god of thieves and a presentation of a god of impatience.

The presentation is nice, the zine has a white card cover, inner yellow paper, high-end home printing quality, proper illustrations sprinkled throughout.

The main trouble is that it doesn’t feel like it has a burning reason to be. It’s more like a bit of polish on some random gaming material. Which in the context of ZineQuest is a cool thing, there used to be lots of zines like this. However with the invention of the blog it feels inappropriate to use the zine format to do this now.

I’m happy to have given Shards a go but I don’t need to try and get the second issue.