Zungeon25
Back on January 1st 2025, Idle Cartulary posted The Zungeon Manifesto, which argued that “[z]ines in TTRPGs in 2024 has come to mean ‘A5, highly produced booklet’, but that isn’t what zines have traditionally been.” The post is an argument for making custom, home-made zines—warts and all. Quickly, Nova added an Itch Zungeon Jam 2025 to match the post, and encouraged the community to submit. I’d commented on that post on January 2nd as a promise to myself I’d participate. Cut to today, December 30th, and me realizing I’d pushed this off for the entirety of the year. Well, you know what? This is a promise to myself that I intended to keep!
Yesterday and today, I cobbled together a quick adventure using some random prompts, a bit of improv, and a quick and dirty one-pager was born. I don’t know why I put it off for so long, really. I guess I was afraid it’d turn out bad? I mean, it’s not a polished product by any means, but that was also the point of the Zungeon post to begin with. I think it was also part that I didn’t dare put anything out there, because what if people thought it was stupid?
Well, I did put it out there. The Crone of Ogrebelch Quarry is now on Itch.io. It’s cobbled together in LibreOffice, and in my frantic dash to keep my promise to myself, it’s not playtested (yet). But you know what? I put something on Itch.io. I never thought I would, but I have. So thanks to Idle Cartulary and thanks to the 1e Manifesto for giving me the push to just put something out there.