Dawn of the plague-ridden undead

I'm not usually a big fan of zombies (except in a Voodoo context) but I could revise that opinion for 17th century plague-ridden zombies. James Desborough's Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned starts with the closed-up streets of the Great Plague and runs with that to its sanity-rending beyond-all-logic conclusion. 

Wightchester is a low-fantasy horror campaign that sounds perfect for gamers who play to discover the story. As the Indiegogo description explains, this is "a setting where blades and gunpowder are more important than magic, and where the magic that does exist demands a price. Not a hex crawl, or a conventional adventure, but a free-roaming setting where you can decide what you want to do. Do you want to try and escape? Do you want to create a fortified place to live within the prison? Do you want to clear the entire city of the undead and earn your release? Good luck with any of those." 

You've got till the end of September to back it. And after the last eighteen months of real life, what could be more cathartic?

Love and a sense of wonder

Unless you achieved full consciousness prior to 1977, it's hard to explain what science fiction was like back then. For one thing it was called SF not "sci-fi". And there was none of the Errol Flynn stuff we see today. Well, that's not quite true. There were throwbacks like E.C. Tubbs' Cap Kennedy series. Don Wollheim sent me a stack of those books back in the mid-70s when I'd made a slighting remark about space opera. Little did either of us know that the whole bloody field was about to be set back forty years by George Lucas.

SF was proper, you see. Interesting. Literate. Diverse. Unsettling. Brimming with wonder. I liked it because it stretched me more than the adventure stories I read as a kid. At its best it could boggle the mind and the imagination. The nearest we've got to that these days, outside of books, is Black Mirror.

That's why I like this Kickstarter, In Other Waters, a game by Gareth Martin in which a stranded xenobiologist explores an alien world. That sounds exactly like the kind of perfect science fictional setup that exists on the cusp between the awesome and terrifying infinitude of the cosmos and the all-conquering power of science and reason. Bleak and hopeful, if that makes sense.

The game is relationship-driven, which immediately ticks another box for me, and as well as the game itself backers can get a book detailing the strange lifeforms of this alien world.

I'm slightly wary of recommending In Other Waters because the Kickstarter campaigns I like tend to plummet like Icarus. But Cultist Simulator did okay, so maybe the jinx is broken. This one has a week to run, so if you grok grown-up SF you know where to find it.

And while we're talking crowdfunding, another project you might want to take a look at is Chernobyl, Mon Amour, "a roleplaying game of love and radioactivity set in the Zone of Alienation". I couldn't resist that and plonked my money down right away, so hopefully the Morris Effect won't scupper it. This one is by Finnish designer Juhana Pettersson, who was inspired by a Ukrainian urban myth about a criminal who fled into the Zone and became so radioactive that the authorities had to leave him there.

"You know that there is no return from the Zone. Your crimes are such that society will no longer accept you, and the only thing you have left is the possibility of a new life in the radioactive forest. As you settle into the Zone and meet its inhabitants, you start to yearn for something more. You want love."

Chernobyl, Mon Amour is on Indiegogo, but only for a couple more weeks.

Eternal Escape

If gamebooks have a future, works like Metahuman Inc and 80 Days point to that future being in digital format. With all the advantages you can see why. It's easier to give readers a free sample. The device keeps track of any stats and variables so you can stay immersed in the story. The text can adapt to the choices you make in a way that a print gamebook, contrained by the physical limit on the number of paragraphs, cannot do.

This week we got wind of a new digital gamebook called Eternal Escape that's being funded on Indiegogo. You can read more about it here and play the demo here.

Evgeny Nesterov and his development team promise a 2000+ section adventure with a strong story hook. You wake up in a dank cell. Your memory has gone; you don't know who you are or how you got here. There's a 400-year-old statue with your face. And among the characters wh might help, hinder or eat you is a seven-foot ant called Tal. Who are you going to trust? It sounds like "Alice Cooper in Wonderland"! The campaign runs just one month, so jump over there and see for yourself.