Unknown Dungeon Newsletter April24
The Unknown Dungeon Newsletter for April 2024
How time flies; it’s another Unknown Dungeon newsletter!
New Unknown Dungeon Releases
Hero of Zeanad
https://unknowndungeon.itch.io/hero-of-zenead
Recently, when clearing out the attic at my parent's house I found my old GameKid console, as well as some classic games like Super Super Land, Kombat Kart, and Bubble Bobble Part Deux. With less than 100,000 GameKid units sold worldwide, most games for the system have been lost to obscurity. One such game is Hero of Zeanad - a mid-90s action-adventure role-playing game.
Rereading the manual for Hero of Zeanad brought back many great memories of hiding under the covers with a flashlight on long car journeys to play the game as a child. One thing that struck me now is how, even without the game cartridge, the information in the manual could be used to play the game as a tabletop RPG. So I have scanned in the manual as a PDF and uploaded it in the hope that others can use it to recreate the game and explore the world of Zeanad for themselves.
Cool Stuff
What I’m Reading
I’ve gotten big into my RPG histories in the past six months or so, and one of the most comprehensive is Designers and Dragons by Shannon Appelcline. This past month I finally left the slog that was the 80s and moved into the much more interesting 90s. You can get the PDFs or PoDs from DriveThruRPG or the audiobooks from Audible.
Deals
The Palestinian Relief Bundle on Itch has almost 400 games, including some great indie TTRPGs such as Davis Blandy’s Lost Eons and Runecairn by Colin Le Sueur. It’s only $8 and is raising money towards an important cause.
https://itch.io/b/2321/palestinian-relief-bundle
Melsonian Arts Council and Iglootree have teamed up to create a Troika! Charity bundle raising money for Medecins Sans Frontieres which includes the core Troika! softcover by Daniel Sell and Andrew Walter’s new module, Whalgravaak's Warehouse, from the 1:5 adventure line.
https://www.melsonia.com/troika-charity-bundle-492-p.asp
As people are starting to receive their Mothership box-sets, Tuesday Knight Games is having a sale on 0e zines.
https://www.tuesdayknightgames.com/collections/mothership-0e
Videos
Ben Milton over on the Questing Beast YouTube channel talks about David Wesely’s Braunstein, the first roleplaying game. For my money, Braunstein is one of the most important parts of our hobby’s history, acting as the fulcrum between wargaming and tabletop roleplaying games and Ben\s video is well worth a watch.
Podcasts
Chris McDowall has brought back his Bastionland podcast after a two-year hiatus, reviving the ‘Rule of Three’ format where he and a guest discuss three tabletop games.
Luke Crane launched a new Substack and podcast, Lugological Alchemy, on TTRPG theory.
Crowdfunding
Just a reminder there’s still a few days left to back the remaster of Emmy Allen’s Gardens of Ynn!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soulmuppet/gardens-of-ynn
The long-awaited Adventure Time RPG by Cryptozoic is live and already reached over 500% of its funding goal. This version of the game is built on fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, with a bespoke system supposedly arriving at a later date. Regardless of where you land within the discourse that surrounds it, I imagine the book will be full of usable stuff for running an Adventure Time game, regardless of system.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cze/adventure-time-the-roleplaying-game
MekBorg and Steel Psalm are a pair of mecha games by John K. Webb and Dave ‘DMDave’ Hamrick; the former a Mörk Borg hack and the latter a miniatures skirmish game. You can pledge for booths games together or just one of them.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidhamrick/mekborg-and-steel-psalm