Craig (also known as whodo_voodoo) is raising funds for Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound.
Q: Easy question first: Give us the elevator pitch of your project. Tell us about it in two sentences or less.
A: Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound is a slice of life RPG about normal, everyday life when you just happen to live on a gigantic alien space station. It's a game about how life in space can become mundane, or even boring, until something goes wrong and events take a turn for the dramatic.
Q: Is this your first ZineMonth project or have you done it before? If it's your first, talk a bit about what inspired you to give it a shot this year. If you've done it before, what's something you've learned from previous crowdfunding projects that you may be doing differently this time, or, if you're not doing anything differently, talk a bit about your previous projects.
A: This will be my third crowdfunding experience as part of Zine Month, having run campaigns for Project Cassandra in 2021 and Signal to Noise in 2022. Each campaign has been a massive learning experience, in terms of marketing, logistics and just how to produce a game that people are interested in. The big difference with my new campaign is the level of completeness. My previous campaigns were feature complete and 90% written at the point I ran the campaign whereas this year I am in the position of only having a working draft of the rules to present with the aim of doing the bulk of the writing over the coming months. As a small creator with a relatively small audience it is a big risk to be taking as it limits how much of the game I can present during the campaign but it's also important because Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound is going to be foundational to the space opera setting that it is set in. Because of that I want to provide backers a chance to shape the setting while everything is still open and malleable while also teasing elements that might not fully be revealed until much later. It's going to be tricky to balance all that and without the experience of running the previous two campaigns I don't think I could manage it.
Q: Finally, tell us something about your current project that really excites you but the average backer may not be aware of. Maybe a twist to an old trope, a new way of presenting something, or maybe just something you've never tried before that you're using this as an opportunity to try out.
A: I continued developing the setting with Rock Hoppers and The Kandhara Contraband but Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital Bound is the first to focus directly on the vast Arrays, the space stations that humanity discovered in Tau Ceti and now call home. My long term goal is for the game to serve as a cornerstone of the wider setting, allowing players to build a core community over time that will develop over time and that can be incorporated into sessions of future games that I've yet to write. For example I have plans for a mystery/investigation game where players will explore the mega-structures and try to reveal clues about their origin but return to a home base between missions. Placing that base within the community created while playing Hopes and Dreams of the Orbital offers the opportunity for it to feel more alive and to have a range of established and fleshed out characters who have their own goals that will drive the interactions. Characters may even start in one game before moving on to another, developing in unexpected ways as they live out their lives in the shadow of the Arrays.
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