Enter the fantasy world of Zin Never Dies, inspired by classic animated films, fairy tale charm, and folklore darkness...
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Good news! (Hush, character sheets, art-prints)
about 2 months ago
– Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 08:13:06 AM
Hush is now out!
40 pages of delicious adventuring potential, shot right into your email. Make sure to check the email address associated with your BackerKit account. If you ordered Hush and haven't received it, reach out on the Discord Server, please. I'll check behind the scenes and see what's up.
Thank you all for bearing with the delays. Also, thank you everyone for the well-wishes. I've been improving slowly. Hopefully, I can ride this trend back to full function <3
Directory of Hush
Physical rewards
The time has come! Physical rewards are beginning to arrive. The art prints are the first physical reward to arrive and they came out so good! Look at them!
We did the second physical reward half manually, so we didn't have to wait for shipping. Pictured here are the almost ONE THOUSAND character sheets, NPC sheets, and spirit sheets for those who got that lovely little add-on. I never knew paper gan get so heavy.
What's left?
We are waiting for price quotas on the enamel pins, and the deluxe edition hardcovers. Then we'll print out a prototype, just to be safe (wouldn't want to print a few hundred badly formatted books). If the Great Sandworm isn't too angry at us, we'll have a physical copy of both by the time the next update rolls around.
I hope you had a wonderful February and a good first week of March. Take care of yourselves.
Thank you!
Eiko Nemo Dowme <3
I'm sick... (update +preview of HUSH)
3 months ago
– Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 03:21:42 PM
I'm sick...
dramatization
It's true, I've been under the weather this month. As you can tell from this real-life picture of me (yes, that's what I look like). I hope the worst is behind me. I'm sorry for failing to meet the deadlines I set. To be honest with you, I feel awful about it and in general. Not having a very good winter here in Berlin. Each task on its own is doable, but as a pile of interdisciplinary work, it's overwhelming. But I'm going to pull through! I'm also cutting down on my expenses, because with all these delays and set backs, I don't want to ever cut into the money set aside for the printing and manufacturing rewards. Not on my watch!
Hush (adventure)
While lying in bed, I couldn't do much but illustrate, so at least the adventures will have lots of visual fun! Here are some updates regarding the contents of Hush:
40 pages long, though most runs will only require the GM to look through ~15 of them.
9 locations
11 events (not including the intro & inciting incident)
10 characters
1 spirit
13 art pieces (not including diagrams, graphics, and visualizations of information)
1 area map
1 building layout map
4 narrative sections (optional reading)
A "Quick Facts" spread about all the characters and entities in the adventure, to be used as handy reference (and to keep track of everyone's names)
All of which means this has a TON of replay value. I'm very happy with how this one came out. I've run through it 3 times now with different groups and each group saw different locations, encountered different events, and came to completely different (and opposite) conclusions on the morals of important characters. I also included something I WISH every adventure had, which is this:
A graphic that shows how characters are connected! I'm sure it's been done before, but in the adventures I've read, something like this would have helped so much. I'm a very visual learner, and with ADHD on top of that, a big square block of text is not fun. I hope you enjoy the adventure! Here's a sneak peak at Satsat, the Spirit ruling over the Domain of Hush. As you can probably tell, it likes rabbits.
Hush will be downloadable in 2-3 days. Right now I am lying in bed and going over the PDF again to make corrections, rearrange spreads & pages, and looking for typos.
Thank you to everyone for continuing to be interested in this world. It helps to know that I'm not sending content into the void. That real people will get and play and read and enjoy the art I make. It's after midnight so I'll sign off for now.
thank you
Eiko Nemo Dowme
Happy Beansmass!
4 months ago
– Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 06:46:46 PM
Happy Beansmass!
Just like everyone else on the planet, tomorrow I'll be celebrating Beansmass, the universal holiday of good beans. I hope you all have a merry happy Beansmass with the best beans by your side.
2023
...has been a very challenging year, but we made it through together! Thank you for bearing with me through the delays and the setbacks. Just this past month I got to release the final edit of the book in digital form, the starter kit, the reference sheets, and the very first adventure! To everyone who is surprised by this, if your pledge tier includes the PDF of the core rule book, check your BackerKit account. That download is waiting for you right there. If it isn't and you believe it should, please message me here or on Discord and I'll check how things look on my end.
Weekly game
I'm starting a weekly ZND game over on the server. The time & other info are in the #game-ads channel. If you want to be a player, hop on over and add the time that works for you!
The quick start guide, character sheets, and reference sheets are all free to download through Gumroad links on ZinNeverDies.com. Whereas other websites have a free download button and a donate button, Gumroad just asks you to input a fair price. To download for free, just put zero. Now and again someone drops in a few dollars through there and that's always appreciated, but please don't feel bad for downloading as many free assets as you want as many times as you want!
The next releases
I still hope to get Hush out by the end of this month. It's proving especially difficult because, in addition to being the first big Adventure, it involves setting lots of precedence about how a ZND adventure is structured. Mask-A-Raid is as close to a standard adventure ZND will have, with its relatively straightforward 1-2-3 structure. Hush and Spirit Water involve larger areas with more powerful spirits, more serious threats, and a darker tone. Hush will be the darker of the two, with the potential for some nasty outcomes for the player characters and their companions. Spirit Water will be more focused on the spirit world and less on grim-dirty realism. Both feature spirits heavily. If all goes well, you'll have Hush by the 30th and Spirit Water on the second week of January.
Links
Here are the updated links to the latest versions of all the free ZND downloads:
Reminder: just put "0" as the price to download for free.
Final reminder
Almost everyone has confirmed all the details over on BackerKit, all except 22 people. If you're not sure, double-check that you did.
Feedback
If you got Mask-A-Raid I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's the first adventure so feedback is invaluable! Whether you skimmed it, read it, played it, or ran it, it's all valuable to me. The most effective way to do this is, as usual, on Discord.
CALLING ALL PLAYTESTERS! (also Mask-A-Raid, releases timeline, adventure structures & more!)
5 months ago
– Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 12:44:15 PM
Tl;dr - If you played ZND before release, tell me by what name you want me to credit you. The final version of the pdf plus a one-shot adventure comes out this month. Thanks everyone for the help with proofreading!
I've got lots to share this month, so let's start with how we're doing on the timeline. November will see the release of the finished version of the pdf (this week), and 'Mask-A-Raid!' The one-shot mystery adventure that will start off the next batch of releases!
Proofreaders & playtesters
Thank you so much to everyone who has been assisting with proofreading. I'm just one person, so this help with spotting typos and consistency errors is AMAZING! If you spot something, please point it out on the #proofreading channel of the ZND discord server. If possible, before the end of this week.
Next is the subject of names! If you played ZND at any point before the pdf release, please write in the general/kickstarter channels of the discord server. Add how you would like to be credited. For example:
"I played with a group last year! Please credit me as HandleMcUsername28730."
I would hate for someone to miss out after helping, so do it before this weekend if possible.
Adventure
Alright, next! Mask-A-Raid! It will be a light-hearted mystery (with the standard ZND hint of darkness) fit for a group of 1 to 5 players, playable in 1~2 sessions. The structure of this adventure will be a little different from what you can expect later on. It will involve clues, witnesses, lots of accusations thrown around, and at least one very big hat.
masked detective
As for structure, ZND adventures aren't your typical adventure module. Because of the unique nature of the game, every adventure will come with the spirits and domains of the area. The GM can change their properties to suit/challenge the players' unique talents, of course. The structure will be dynamic like the mechanics of the game. What this means is that, like with Zin Towers, the game master is given lots of pieces and abilities and may do with them whatever they like. This kind of design isn't suitable for everyone, I know that. That's why I will also include several suggested courses to string all these parts together.
For example:
The adventure includes [character], [location], [spirit] and illustrates the general relationships between them. A suggested course at the back of the adventure will be: The players meet [character], who explains to them about [spirit] and [domain]. Then [character] realizes the players aren't who they thought they were, and runs away to hide in [location].
The 2 following adventures, HUSH and Spirit Water, will have a darker tone. I look forward to every single release so much! 😊
thank you
Eiko Nemo Dowme
Check your email, the ZND pdf should be there :D
6 months ago
– Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 08:16:30 AM
The October 10th release was a success!
I checked again and it looks like the last of you should have gotten the pdf v.0.9 of the complete core rulebook. If you don't see it, make sure you're looking in the same email you signed up to BackerKit with when filling out your survey. Final callout to the 20 people who haven't filled out their surveys yet. All details will be locked and shipping costs will be charged at the end of this month.
Another reminder: This is version 0.9 of the ZND Core Rulebook. Please let us know about any mistakes or inconsistencies you find by posting on our discord server, also found at ZinNeverDies.com. Thank you for being lovely!
It's almost ready! It will feature 8 characters, 3 domains, 3 spirits, and 2 locations (a town, and a city), as well as an additional life-path table to establish a connection between party members. It will be released on Sunday Oct 22nd.
