In Brief

• A system-neutral resource for creating military culture in fantasy settings. 
• Written by James Holloway, cover and illustrations by Letty Wilson. 
• Coming in June. 
• 24 pages, B&W cover and interior, print and digital versions available.

The Story

In 2021, I released The Pamphlet of Pantheons, a zine devoted to helping RPG game masters and other worldbuilders create real-seemingpantheons and religions without lots of research and prep work. 

This Zine Month, I'm following up with The Guide to Grunts. There are a lot of books out there about soldiers and armies in RPGs, but the Guide isn't about battles, tactics or weapons. It's about the social and cultural aspects of military life. If your players need to hunt down a group of cultists operating in an army camp, what are the soldiers they meet like? If your fighter spent years in the army, what customs or habits might she have picked up? When the random encounter table gives you 2d6 soldiers, what sort of people are they? 

What You Get

The Guide to Grunts will be a black-and-white softcover zine with 24 interior pages. It will feature a cover and interior marginalia by Letty Wilson, whose work you may recognise from A Folklore Bestiary, Knock!, Wanderhome, and more. 

Inside, you'll find random tables, writing prompts, historical asides, and more, all designed to help you create the cultures and traditions of military regiments or even whole armies in minutes. 

About Me

I'm James Holloway, host of the RPG podcast  Monster Man. In addition to hosting the podcast, I also write games. You can find my work in publications like the aforementioned A Folklore Bestiary, as well as books like Cthulhu Dark Ages from Chaosium or Trophy: Loom from The Gauntlet. 

Why I Think It'll Work

This is my third crowdfunding campaign: my last two RPG zines funded fully and released on time, both in digital and physical formats. I'm putting a lot of the lessons I learned in those campaigns to use here, so I feel confident that the Guide will be out by the June date I've set. The campaign has no stretch goals, add-ons or guest contributors; it's intentionally small to have fewer elements that can go wrong. Of course, international shipping from the UK can sometimes be sluggish, and the unpredictable can always occur, so I make no 100% guarantees, but with the limited goals of this campaign I feel confident enough to anticipate smooth, on-time fulfillment.