Zine Month 2024 Recap
We’re Talking Love and the Games That Scratch That Itch
Rom Com Drama Bomb Ups the Token-Powered Tempo
Last Chance to Support!
The Rom Com Drama Bomb Kickstarter campaign is almost over! There are less than 48 hours to support this project. So go do that, then come back. Or, if you need a bit more convincing, let me tell you about what I love about the design of this game.
Tokens as Rhythm
I am continually influenced by the work of Jay Dragon and Possum Creek Games. Each game and piece of writing unlocks something new in my brain about story, roleplay, or, most often, design. In 2022, we had Jay on My First Dungeon in preparation for our season of Wanderhome.
Wanderhome makes use of elements of the Belonging Outside Belonging system (created by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum), giving and taking tokens to perform different moves from character playbooks. How Jay described this to us was as a “rhythm of play” with the story moving to the beat of this exchange of tokens.
When it came time to crack the mechanics for Rom Com Drama Bomb, this idea of a rhythm powered by tokens resurfaced. But there was one thing holding me back from committing to its use: pace. I felt like the rhythm of a game like Wanderhome or the relaxed chapters of its spiritual sibling, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, was too slow for the chaotic experience I wanted to cultivate.
I am not a musician, but I know a few musical words. Rhythm is one. But it was tempo that would prove key to cracking this design open.
Upping the Tempo
Rom Com Drama Bomb is inspired by two genres of movie that move at a quick, efficient pace: romantic comedies and action flicks. To match that pacing, I had to up the tempo on the BoB rhythm I had grown to love.
An Actual ‘Ticking Clock’
Rather than do something elegant like the segmented clocks of Blades in the Dark, I went for a literal clock. The 90-minute timer serves two functions in play:
A real-world analogue for the timer of the Villain’s in-fiction bombs
An in-your face time-limit for each of the 6 scenes
In playtests, the addition of a timer has proven to ramp up the pacing as each scene comes towards an end, pushing players to make big plot-driving choices and spend their tokens before they’re wiped at the end of a scene.
tick…tick…BOOM
Rom Com Drama Bomb changes two things about the typical moves of a BoB game. Much inspired by Yazeba’s, I opted to give these moves a thematic naming convention.
ticks - moves that gain you 1 token
BOOMs - moves that cost 1 to 3 tokens
I encourage the players directly in the text to lean back on the rhythm “tick tick BOOM”, a thematic description that reminds them of the intended tension in the pace of gameplay.
BOOMs represent another slight departure from other BoB games, with a variable cost that encourages players to increase the use of their ticks in order to be able to afford higher-impact BOOMs.
Encouraged Power Gaming
A consistent result across all playtests of Rom Com Drama Bomb has been an exponential ramp up of players’ willingness to “power game” through the mechanics.
What begins as a shy exploration of each of their playbooks becomes a delightful tear through their ticks and BOOMs as they learn what moments will help them break free from or lean all the way into the forced rom-com.
By pushing the rhythm and finding this new fast-paced tempo, I’m starting to hear the wonderfully discordant, chaotic song that is Rom Com Drama Bomb.
Or is that just the bomb ticking?
— Elliot
Elliot was BUSY this week! Just look at this list of podcast appearances and game news that happened JUST THIS PAST WEEK!
Party of One plays Project ECCO for its podcast-hopping 400th episode
Elliot turns When Harry Met Sally into a horror film on But Make It Scary
Elliot debuts the latest Powered By Poultry game called Welcome to the Silly Goose Convention on Mage Hand High Five
Elliot plays the villain in QueeRPG’s game of Rom Com Drama Bomb
Shenuque’s Character Corner: Characters in Love
Making Love Fun, but Also Genuine
Ah love, a feeling that humans crave and seek out in all forms, shapes, and sizes. Sharing stories about love is a tale as old as time. From Beauty and the Beast to Love Actually, we love talking about love, and now that I’ve played two TTRPGs specifically about telling stories about love—Star Crossed (over on our Patreon) and Rom Com Drama Bomb—I’m ready to belt it out like Mrs. Potts. Let me regale you with some insights I’ve had on how to best create characters for such stories.
1. Know what gets your character going and what cools down the engines.
We all find things attractive to various degrees. Similarly, sometimes your yum is someone else’s yuck. These can be whatever you want, whether they’re common attractors like someone’s eyes, dimples, voice, or less conventional things like the way someone says “doughnut.” That seems strange to me, but who am I to judge! It’s also important to make it apparent to the person you’re playing with and (depending on the game) your GM to be aware of these things so they can tee you up to experience/play within the story. So be sure to ask for that moment early on to share what it is your character is looking for in a potential romance.
2. Know your character’s flaws.
Everyone is flawed. Sometimes these flaws are the reasons we lose love. Sometimes they’re the reasons that people end up not falling for us. It’s okay, life’s a journey and everyone will hopefully work to correct those flaws (if they’re egregious), or find someone that loves them in their entirety, including their flaws. Either way, it’s up to you to decide how flawed your character is and what these “flaws” might be. Lean into these, as they’ll be a lot of fun for the other players to work with.
3. Know whether your character is ready for love/wants love in the way the game is defining it.
Star Crossed asks you to play characters that really, really want to but really, really can’t. Rom Com Drama Bomb asks you to play characters being forced to live out a rom-com as directed by an evil super villain. The circumstances of your game will inform how your character feels about love and whether they’re ready for it. Regardless of what type of love your character wants—an unexpected “they were there the whole time” romance, a “will they, won’t they” game of cat and mouse, a “let’s keep things casual” fling—it’s important to check that against the intention of the game so you can play it in a way that feels both genuine and fun.
Now go make some love, you chaos gremlins!
— Shenuque
My Favorites from Zine Month 2024
It Was an Excellent February
Ever since I discovered Zine Month, February has been transformed from a drab and cold month into a wondrous time of the year when I’m revitalized about games—and also spend WAY more money than I reasonably should supporting new ones. This year we highlighted 8 different designers in our ZiMo series on Talk of the Table, but there are even more games I want to make sure you know about before we skip past a leap day and into March.
Here are some of my personal favorites from Zine Month 2024:
Rom Com Drama Bomb by Elliot Davis
This one shouldn’t be a surprise considering one of my best friends wrote the game, I’ve playtested it multiple times on- and off-mic, and I’m going to be doing the layout for the game, but it truly is one of my favorite games I’ve played in a long while. We don’t play just anything on My First Dungeon unless we’re INCREDIBLY excited about it, and Rom Com Drama Bomb is no exception. You’ve got two days left to grab a copy on Kickstarter—or you could pick up the quickstart materials on our Patreon—but you should absolutely expect this game to be talked about in the coming months in the same breath as Star Crossed and Fiasco.
Home: A Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking Game by Nick Gralewicz (Deep Dark Games)
The line graph of my interest in this game increased exponentially with each word of the title. I was already seriously interested by just the phrase “Mech x Kaiju” but seeing that followed up with “Mapmaking Game” immediately after meant this was a Day One Back for me. Elliot and I spoke with Nick in the final episode of our Zine Month series on Talk of the Table and he was one of the most prepared and excited people we’ve ever interviewed. If you aren’t already sold by the title alone, go listen to Nick talk about his game and I promise he’s sure to turn you into a backer and get you excited about what games can do.
ARKYVR by Rhodrick Magsino (Alewood Games)
ARKYVR is a film-documentarian toolkit for Mothership 1E where players try to make a movie in an alien-infested kill zone. As a person who has worked on plenty of film and television crews, I was immediately sold on this premise. The combination of the originality of this concept for a module and our excellent interview with Rhodrick on Talk of the Table made this one of the first things I backed this Zine Month. The cherry on top (and a great in-joke for anyone who works in production) was the addition of a special edition C-47 for all backers of this project. (A C-47 is an archaic–but still widely used–film set term for an everyday clothespin.) ARKYVR understood the assignment from front to back and it is the reason I finally started reading Mothership. A module so cool that it makes you pick up the core rulebook? There’s no stronger recommendation than that.
The Stone-Flesh Gift by Jordan Boschman
Mothership’s popularity is built upon the strength of its incredible community of third-party creators and, just like ARKYVR, The Stone-Flesh Gift was cool enough to make me finally dig into Mothership after months of intense procrastination. If we ever do a Mothership season of My First Dungeon it will almost certainly be a combination of The Stone-Flesh Gift and ARKYVR. I really can’t give a stronger recommendation than that—these two modules are so cool they made me want to sink HUNDREDS OF HOURS into making a podcast to celebrate how cool they are. Go buy this. You won’t regret it.
Outliers by Samantha Leigh (Far Horizons Co-Op)
Sam Leigh is one of the best and most vocal champions of the indie TTRPG space which means I’m almost guaranteed to immediately support any project they put out. But what’s really convenient is that everything they put out is absolute gold. Outliers is a single-player journaling game in which you play a research assistant trying to do their job in an absurd environment. This game distills Sam’s real life experience as a research assistant into an incredibly stylish solo experience. Just like with ARKYVR, when a great designer turns their occupational expertise into a game, you can absolutely expect something cool. It’s also worth noting that as part of the crowdfunding campaign the Far Horizons Co-Op will also be adding HUNDREDS of community copies of Outliers to itch.io after this campaign ends. And that’s just another way that this team gives back to the indie TTRPG community.
100% Modern Ghosts by B Marsollier
100% Modern Ghosts is the purest distillation of Zine Month: A first time designer, an incredibly cool concept, and staple-bound A-5 paper. 100% Modern Ghosts is actually two zines that each contain three ghosts to be identified and engaged with. Similar to a game like Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, you’ll play with different mechanics—and even different numbers of people—for each ghost! I love that B is able to do so much inside this game, but what really sold me was her goal for the game: To assist readers in mythologizing the mundane by identifying the ghosts that hide in day-to-day life, and engaging with them in modern ways. “Mythologizing the mundane” is a phrase that has already taken root deep in my mind where it will, no doubt, bloom into a future Zine Month game.
— Brian
What Zine Month games have you been most excited about? Get in the comments to give your go-to games a shout out.
I just backed Home. Kaiju, mechs, and mapmaking?! Heck yeah.
Thanks for the heads up on ARKYVR. Need to look at that.