Rust Belt Zine
Zine Quest 2025 So I finally got a fire lit under my ass to try my hand at Kickstarter's Zine Quest.
I'm going with a splat book for Brendan LaSalle's Xcrawl Classics published by Goodman Games.
Things have changed so much in past fifty years, economies and labor markets shift. Local competition turned from other states to other countries. Cities that used to be industrial powerhouses fell into ruin in the rust belts of the north American Empire.
The vast tracks of these minor fallen cities are thousands of acres of poverty and lost hope.
Everyone knows that there is no poverty or unhappiness happens in the NAE, or at least that what the state run news tells us to believe. I remember my dead grandfather talking about living in South Bend, Ind working at the steel mills and summering on Lake Erie at Latasha’s beaches. I can't find them on any map or find anything about them in any city library archives or atlases of the Empire.
Some Games claiming to be from of these lost cities are circulating through pirate broadcasts. It's rumored that some of the nobiles share secretly recorded videos of these crawls. No one is really sure if it is a some form of gorilla advertising for a new league or if it's a way for Internal Security Division to catch dissidents.
So what happens to failing cities when the commoner population can't move away? Nobiles move in exploitative companies and the city almost becomes a gulag ala Escape from New York. The cities die slowly, slowly starving out every penny until it's not worth keeping the dragons away.
Certain cities in the Rust Belt of the NAE have gone under economically just like IRL. Most nobiles let the cities go fallow. At first these cities had fake games where street gangs would fight each other. Those games got enough attention from the criminal element to start sponsoring them.
It wasn't long until there were low budget DJs hosting the games in these cities. At first the criminal element played hell with the fairness but that was soon remedied by all the other various criminal organizations who were making money sponsoring the games.
When poverty and despair grow like weeds crime and drugs often take root, beautiful and tempting flowering weeds with stickers to bleed a person dry. Spark came on the scene about a decade ago. A magic and drug hybrid that was hailed as a miracle aphrodisiac but corrupted into an addictive substance and eventually taken mutated into a means of violence.
Drug and magical manufacturing companies vie to figure out the secrets of Counterfeit Spark in order to exploit it's violent results for the police, military and of course for the Xcrawl Games.