#Zimo 2023

[smallredrobin13games]

Do you like Horses?

Hi there,

My name is Robin and I’m the daughter of a bona fide Horse Girl. For ZiMo 2023, I wrote a 2-player game about the horse and the person trying to tame it. It draws both from the techniques used by a farrier family friend to tame horses and stories my mother told me from her youth.

The game also uses a completely unique mechanic: braiding of a ribbon to represent the growing trust between the horse and rider.

If this sounds like a game that appeals to you, you can back it here. There’s also some pretty neat stretch goals for accessible layout and a rosette for each copy of the game.

[dicestew]

This looks adorable! Love that cute stego with googles!

We're very excited to announce our Zine Month 2023 project, DINOCAR! A chaotic game of messy map-making and city planning for all ages, Dinocar will be coming to Crowdfundr in February!

Sign up for our Newsletter to know when it's live~

[mortphilippa]

Oops, All Draculas - play as vampire roommates

Oops, All Draculas by Jessica Markrum is a dark comedy TTRPG about playing a bunch of vampires who all live together. It has been dubbed the 'what we do in the shadows' simulator and it's hilarious.

Oops, All Draculas is currently crowdfundung on Crowdfundr and is one of my sponsored choices for Tabletop Nonstop.

Tabletop Nonstop is Crowdfundr's spotlight event celebrating indie creators and their projects. Support the projects mentioned in this video and more this month on Crowdfundr here

Crowdfundr is the creator-friendly crowdfunding platform. It's free to use, offers multiple ways to fund your project, and directly invests in its user's success with spotlight initiatives like this one and resources like the Creator Hub. Get started now at crowdfundr.com

[nyc-looks]

Ana, 31

“I’m wearing a jacket from the young black designer Onychi, whom I found through my model friend. The pants are Zimo; I’m styling seasonal lookbooks and shows for this brand. The shoes are from my fav The Row, and the bag is Vasic – a cool high quality Japanese brand. The basic tank is from COS, and the tights are from Falke, my most worn hosiery brand. The earrings are from Bonheur – the best hoops! The face ring is Brenna Colvin; I always get compliments on it. The 40s classy chic style inspires me. I love wearing red lipstick, being elegant and sexy. Accessories and casual elements are making me look more modern and cool.”

Mar 16, 2023 ∙ Tribeca

[gigantic-spider]

Itchmas 2024 Days 2-4

Thus far I have managed 1 consecutive day of Itchmas 2024, so let's make up for that!

Day 2. I've added 25 community copies for my game The River Spirit. It was my ZiMo 2023 project, a solo journaling game about creating your hometown and then venturing into the forest to save it from a drought. It uses a standard deck of 52 cards to create your memories of the place, give you encounters in the forest, and then have the river spirit demand sacrifice from you in the form of dripping water onto your journal and tearing out the sodden pages. Easily the best (and most complete) thing I've made so far

Day 3 - The Technicolor Forest by Mynar Lenahan

The Technicolor Forest is an adventure for RAD, the post-Soviet nuclear wasteland hack of Mausritter, by Hipolita. This adventure has everything that's great about RAD: archival Soviet art/ads, clean two-column layout, bizarre mutations you can acquire, etc. What does it add? A monster called That Fucking Frog. Need I say more?

Turns out, yes, I do need. Because I love me some mushrooms, and this adventure is chock full of them. The titular technicolor forest is something straight out of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a forest of giant fungus that sits smack-dab in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. On the one hand, its constant expansion poses a threat to human life around it. On the other hand, isn't it nice that something is actually growing and thriving in the nuclear winter?

Throw in three factions that all have direct connections to the Forest, several settlements at various levels of wealth, and a small dungeon at the Heart of the Forest, and you've got a compelling adventure location that will ask some big questions of your wasteland adventurers.

Day 4 - The Rumbling Forest by goobernuts

I'm only now realizing that there's a real silvestral theme in these Itchmas posts. Well I'm a biologist at heart, so that makes sense.

I've had my eye on this adventure for over a year, ever since Idle Cartulary reviewed it in September 2023. While obviously inspired by Princess Mononoke (namechecked on the first page of the adventure), the adventure is much more than just that story translated into an RPG. Perhaps the best intervention it makes is trapping the locals in between the colonizing Conquistadors and the enraged mass of boars. Unlike the citizens of Iron Town, who are actively participating in the destruction of the forest in Princess Mononoke, the people of Barangay Tindigan are faced with a fundamental lifestyle change due to the arrival of colonizers. They're not the ones who shot the Ancient Boar, but it's their village and not the Conquistadors' stone fort that will get trampled in retaliation. This change makes for a very different dilemma at play: how can you protect the innocent townsfolk without also protecting the Conquistadors who are clearly at fault for everything that happened?

This is a question with no easy answer, if your group is even interested in answering that specific question (maybe they'll work for the Conquistadors; they are offering 1000 gp as a reward after all). Still, whatever they want to do they had better act fast because as the Ancient Boar lays dying, its death throes are causing literal earthquakes. The mechanic that underlies this clock is pretty ingenious actually: an earthquake triggers every time you roll doubles on the 2d6 Wilderness Encounters table, and the Ancient Boar dies after the fifth earthquake. This means there's a 1-in-6 chance of an earthquake, so you're looking at an average of 30 wilderness encounters before everything comes down around your players' ears. That's theoretically more than enough time to explore the 20 hexes on the given hexmaps if they're really booking it through the forest.

The Wilderness Encounters is perhaps a little lacking, and for me the least inspiring part of the adventure. I particularly like the giant hermit crab using an overturned boat as its shell, but many of the other encounters don't feel like they add all that much context to the world. In particular, I would love to have some interesting people to happen upon in the forest, because the people in the keyed hexes are by and large pretty compelling.

All in all, the adventure is deceptively simple and really gives players the space they need to mull over how to resolve the presented dilemma. There are no easy answers presented in the text (because god knows that killing the Ancient Boar isn't going to be easy even though it's technically the most obvious 'solution') and that's just the way I like it. Newer GMs might find that aspect of the game a bit frustrating or confusing on first glance, but if you just venture into the Rumbling Forest I think that an answer will present itself to you one way or another if you just let it happen.

[moononmyfloor]

My Year End C-drama Review (2023)

Part 1

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17. Actors I newly discovered in 2023

Hong Yao, Wang Yinglu, Marcus Li, Tian Jiarui, Qin Hailu, Wang Ke

Some of these are new actors, some are already very experienced but I discovered only now. All of them provided phenomenal performances in their roles this year.

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18. Favorite Child Actors of the Year

Wang Haoze (Ou Zimo- Be Your Own Light), Phoebe Sun Yichen (Duoduo- Stay With Me)

Child actors in C-ent always baffle me, I have zero idea how they are SO good. Impeccable performance. I want to take them home. 🥺

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19. Feminist Cdramas of the year

Be Your Own Light, A Journey to Love

The premise of the first is about women to begin with, the second only partially. Most of the time the self-identifying feminist stories fail massively in realistic depiction of women, let alone idol dramas where the focus is elsewhere.

But these two shows really understood what women think and say, their priorities and what they want in life, how they conduct themselves....and not through the eyes of men who assume women crave xyz things only. The arcs and growths of women in these two shows felt very organic and relatable.

(I hear there were few other such dramas this year as well, eg: Faithful. But this is all I managed to watch huhu)

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20. A drama that let me down

Destined

The chemistry of the real-life pair Bai Jingting and Song Yi was adorable, but the story just wasn't my cup of tea.

I absolutely loved their spacious bedroom tho!

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21. Favorite BGM

Be Your Own Light- I Only Wish to Face the Light by Liu Yuning

Stay with Me- Stars Shine by Zhang Jiongmin, Xu Bin

I Am Nobody- Sea of Time by Zhou Shen

Young Blood 2- Lending a Ray of Light by WineQ (圈9)

Romance On the Farm- Letters from Spring by Su Yunying

Silence of the Monster- Cross a City Just to See You by Huang Yi

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22. Favorite wardrobes

Sui Yi (Sun Yihan)'s wardrobe in Silence of the Monster and Pang Hongmei (Peng Xiaoran)'s fits in Unshakable Faith

Oh they looked so delightfully vintage and exactly my style! 😍

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23. Best Breakups

Moxi and Jiagui (Gone With the Rain), Xiangyi and Wanmian (Mysterious Lotus Casebook)

I HAD to include this category simply because of these two pairs. I LOVED those two scenes. So mature! Such thorough discussion about how their feelings have changed over time, the frank admission that there are indeed some remnants left (because contrary to popular depiction, feelings don't POOF overnight), how they'd always consider the other as a special someone that they were lucky to have met in their lives, the wish to remain as tight friends in the future as well.... 🤌🤌🤌👏👏👏

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24. Worst character designs

Road Home

Gods know I only sat through this for Jing Boran in army gear and snow. The characters were so mind-blowingly flat despite the actors giving their best to "understand" their roles and make them relatable but there was only so much they could do. All the interpersonal relationships happened just because the writer said so. There was a child character who was passed from hand to hand for whenever the writer wanted a "warm childcaring and family moment" but was discarded without a glance the next second, I got second-hand abandonment issues from watching that lonely kid. I did not understand why anyone was doing anything at any given moment.

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25. Most convincing villains aka characters I loved to hate

Yuan Hao (Young Blood 2)- Gotta be one of the most dangerous villains I have ever seen. He was insanely smart, unpredictable and cunning AND strong, and it took all the heroes of the story to defeat him and still it was barely enough. He was so well written and portrayed, till the very end of the show the viewers weren't sure of the outcome of the battle.

Jiao Liqiao (Mysterious Lotus Casebook)- AHH Jiao jie! We all love a good unhinged female villain who isn't uwufied in the name of some weird "women should always be portrayed with tearjerking backstory" notion. Let her go crazy all over the place, we support women's wrongs as well as rights! She always meant what she said and did what she meant and it was terrifying to see.

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26. Favorite murder kittens of the year

Gong Yuanzhi (My Journey to You), Li Tongguang (A Journey to Love)

Oh these two bois were VERY disturbing individuals and I wouldn't go within 1 mile radius around them but were them such delightful affection starved meow meows with killer (ha!) hair and eye acting? Heck yes.

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27. A drama that I wished was longer

Romance On the Farm

I really appreciate how 3D and empathetically portrayed all the family members are. We are shown all their sides and what made them what they are today without making a mockery of Asian family values, but rather constructively analysing + celebrating the good parts.

And then there is a political thriller story arc.

And then there is "this is all but a game" part which I had to try very hard to pretend like it's ignorable.

And then there was the basic premiere of the pastoral country life story.

Clearly the dramamakers had LOTS of ideas. And you can see none of them were empty bite-more-than-can-chews but had actual potential.

If only.... it didn't try to do all this at once under the guise of a 26 ep lighthearted fluffy romcom genre.... it would've made such a difference.

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28. A drama I wanted to watch but couldn't

SO many! For all sorts of reasons.

Ray of Light, Butterflied Lover, The Road to Ordinary, Pledge of Allegiance, Where Dreams Begin, There Will Be Ample Time, Faithful, Stand By Me

ARGH!😭

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29. A drama I wish more people watched

Stay With Me

This is a Chinese BL, with Chinese cast, Chinese locations, but produced by a TW company. That's all I'm going to say about it, give it a try. You won't regret it. (Maybe don't watch last episode tho lol)

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30. Most favorite Cdrama of 2023

Mysterious Lotus Casebook

Why? Because... well if you are in the fandom you'd know, if you aren't... I can write ESSAYS about it so I won't 😂 In short, it was such a healing watch.

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31. A Cdrama I'm excited to see in 2024

JOL 2. Obviously.

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Conclusion

2023 served to solidify my belief that there's really no 'perfect' drama, what I can do is listening to the stories people have to share and then take what I want from them, and leave what I don't want behind. Some may resonate more with me, some less. Some may teach me new things, some may feel redundant. Sometimes you will enjoy only 50% of a drama and hate the rest, but that won't diminish the impact that 50% had on you. It could be a totally different experience for another viewer and that's fine. I watched all the DMBJ shows this year as well (but didn't speak about them in this list since my focus was on 2023) and it really was an exercise on not being overly critical and going with the flow or you would totally miss out on all the good things DMBJ had to bring.

Overall I enjoyed 2023 Cdramaland a lot. I hope this review helped some of you to try out dramas that you didn't know existed/were hesitant to press play or continue on!

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More Posts by Me

[capacle]

What if Star Trek went terribly wrong?

Alright, so here we go

Following my lo-promo directive for 2023, this is the official announcement for my newest game

DERELICT DELVERS is my dungeon crawler in space that asks:

"What if Star Trek went terribly wrong?"

You play as a space trooper scavenging alien-infested derelicts of Earth's failed diplomatic mission, seeking profit and survival.

🚀 Solo or coop (up to 6 players) 🚀 Create your own weapons and powers 🚀 Rules-light, procedural gameplay The gameplay will lead you through a search for more weapons and loot, but things are… not exactly what they seem to be

Soon you find out that you'll get more than you bargained for This is my entry for this year's #Zimo 😍

I'm funding it through @Crowdfundr, and that's my first experience with doing something out of itch by myself, so fingers crossed! 🤞

If you liked the idea, a reblog goes a long way! ��

[goevol44]

Zimska kolekcija 2023

Zima prihaja: Naj vas navduši naša nova kolekcija prtičkov Ko se dnevi krajšajo in temperature padajo, je čas, da v svojo restavracijo vnesete toplino in eleganco z našo novo kolekcijo prtičkov za zimo. Navdihnjena z lepoto prazni��nih dni, ta kolekcija ponuja vrsto privlačnih dizajnov, ki bodo vašim gostom pričarali nepozabno doživetje. Tukaj je nekaj razlogov, zakaj bi morali izbrati naše…

[wally-b-feed]

Anthony Fineran (B 1981), Zare Harad Zimo, 2023

[smallredrobin13games]

Do you want to live out your Horse Girl dreams? Back Horse and Rider today to not only play out forming a unique bond with a horse, but to represent this bond through a unique braiding mechanic!

[mortphilippa]

Porcelain Souls - play as humans trapped inside dolls

Porcelain Souls by Penny For a Tale is a horror TTRPG about the lives of the remains of humanity trapped inside dolls.

Its creepy, uncanny, and quite different from other horror ttrpgs I've run in the past.

Porcelain Souls is crowdfunding on Crowdfundr, and it's one of my sponsored choices for Tabletop Nonstop.

Tabletop Nonstop is Crowdfundr's spotlight event celebrating indie creators and their projects. Support the projects mentioned in this video and more this month on Crowdfundr here

Crowdfundr is the creator-friendly crowdfunding platform. It's free to use, offers multiple ways to fund your project, and directly invests in its user's success with spotlight initiatives like this one and resources like the Creator Hub. Get started now at crowdfundr.com

[gigantic-spider]

November 2023 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I recently became curious about the state of TTRPG crowdfunding (full transparency, it's partially because I am gearing up for a ZineMonth 2024 project *shameless plug*). How much money is actually being made? Who's making it? What are they making? And how many people are backing?

I know that this information is tracked for ZiMo by a variety of people (scroll down for the credits), but what about the rest of the year? What about bigger projects?

Essentially: what about the real money being made?

Well here's the quick stats:

175 campaigns

10 Backerkit

1 Crowdfundr

164 Kickstarter

$10,275,932.48 raised

$1,256,857.98 on Backerkit

$455.00 on Crowdfundr

$9,018,619.50 on Kickstarter

Types of campaigns

7 accessories

2 Actual Play shows

41 adventures

2 advice books

8 campaign settings

1 magazine

58 supplements/expansions

56 systems

39 distinct systems used across all campaigns

66 campaigns (37.71%) used D&D 5e and raised $5,621,468.60 (54.71% of all money raised in November)

43 campaigns (24.57%) developed original systems and raised $751,587.43 (7.31% of all money raised in November)

To read the rest, check out my latest blog post (yes, on a different blog lol) or look at the raw data here.