Fantastic Odysseys

OpenQuest 3rd Edition is getting along nicely three years after its initial release. With a range of supplements (such as OpenQuest Companion and OpenQuest Dungeons) gradually emerging as support. This website has a decent amount of traffic, as does the SRD in both online and downloadable form, and the OpenQuest channel on the D101 Discord Server is nicely busy. But there’s something to my mind that the game is missing.

I tend to overwrite, and I have a ton of small bits of adventures and articles that don’t have an obvious home. Also, I’m missing doing Hearts in Glorantha, a Gloranthan Fanzine I published between 2008-2018. As well as being nice to produce a fanzine, it was a nice way to establish contact with new artists and writers.

So late last year, the idea of doing a zine in much the same format but for OpenQuest and related games popped into my head. I asked Dan Barker to do a logo. Earlier in the year, he showed me an illustration he was doing for fun, and my imagination came up with a short adventure to explain what the hell the monster was. So here’s the cover for the first issue.

Fantastic Odysseys Issue 1 cover by Dan Barker

ZineQuest, Kickstarter’s February promotion, is always fun to do. I’ve previously done Into the Shroud for Crypts and Things, and Grogzilla, a fanzine for D101 Games overall. So why not launch Fantastic Odyssey there and hopefully bring it to a wider audience?

Fantastic Odysseys on ZineQuest 5 – prelaunch page, sign up for notification when it launches in February.

But wait, the zine also has a Patreon! Well, everyone else seems to have a Patreon, so why not me? As well as allowing me to focus on getting the magazine produced and other bits of OpenQuest done and be paid a monthly amount in return for previews and exclusive access to drafts and blog posts, the Patreon lets me do stuff outside of the magazine, such as video and podcasts.