Anathema! Anathema!

Black Mass , by Will Jobst The pitch : A tarot-based game for four to eight players about two girls leaving Salem to seek a black mass in the woods. Why I backed : Creepy cool aesthetic, plus I’m a sucker for tarot RPG stuff. What I received : A zine with a beautiful cover whose typography and layout evoke old pamphlets. Lovely creepy illustrations on front and back. Inside there are a few more illustrations, along with a bunch of photography that looks good in the pdf but is somehow less effective in print. The cover is slightly bigger than the pages inside in a way that makes it oddly uncomfortable to hold and flip through. It came with two tarot-sized cards with illustrations of the protagonists. Very cool. There is also some ambient music that goes with the game, but I haven’t listened to it. How it works : The players share control of the two protagonists. Each player gets one “persona” for each girl - essentially an aspect of her personality that can come to th...

In February 2019, Kickstarter launched Zinequest, an initiative to encourage RPG designers to publish short zines. I backed enthusiastically. Too enthusiastically. I have been backing RPGs on kickstarter for more than a decade. In the beginning, it was easy to back everything that appealed to me. Gradually that number crept up. Zinequest was something of a wakeup call that I needed to impose much stricter criteria on what I backed, because there’s just so much interesting stuff coming out that I can’t possible get it all. Now, one year on, I think it’s time for a retrospective on my Zinequesting. I am going to do a status update on every Zinequest kickstarter that I backed. For those that delivered, I will read them, though I do not promise to run or play them. And I will write a short review using the following format: The pitch:  Why I backed:   What I received:   How it works:   What I thought:   What I’m going to...