Choose-Your-Own Skills
My first successful Kickstarter project was a small D&D zine printed as part of ZineQuest in 2021. ZineQuest was an indie tabletop zine event Kickstarter hosted for a few years, inviting creators to write tabletop games or game-related projects, short enough to fit into a zine, and fund those zines through Kickstarter.
Choose-Your-Own Skills successfully funded at $265, which paid for 25 copies of the zine to be printed and mailed to backers, and 30+ distributed digitally through Itch.io. The digital zine can still be purchased from Itch.io here.
This project integrates with the existing D&D rules, giving players an alternative system for handing a specific game rule. The zine is written for game players and game moderators alike, with specific pages of advice for both type of player. I wrote the zine in Word and finalized all formatting and page layouts in Affinity Publisher.
For this project I also created a custom D&D 5e character sheet, to be printed in landscape format inside of the zine. I reused assets from the official D&D character sheets, rearranging them to utilize the space more efficiently, which resulted in a game tool I found very useful. I released this character sheet on its own, for free, on Itch.io. You can find it here.