Splat 3: Touched

? This zine contains mature content and is intended for an adult audience. If you are under 18, please do not engage. ?

Splat 3: Touched is a zine focused on how romance and intimacy in TTRPGs are implemented safely and meaningfully for everyone at the table. It includes eight exciting essays about how everything, from rules or tools, to sexuality and kink, can change or shape our experience of intimacy through play and design.

Splat 3 is brought to you by Summoning Circle Press (our new name!) the team behind Splat 1 & 2 and Skill Points (Zine Quest 1-3), and we're excited to be celebrating Zine Month #ZiMo!

What's Inside

Christina is writing about the necessity of open communication and safety tools when exploring intimacy at the table.

Daisy is writing about anthology system play for romantic gaming narratives; utilizing the same characters, system, and genre across different systems and rulesets.

Jillian is writing about how you can fade to abstraction instead of fading to black to give intimate moments more narrative weight if desired.

Jonathan is writing about how separating intimacy into romance and sex can help your table dial in on what content they’re comfortable with, as well as validate players on the aromantic/asexual spectrums.

Kat will be exploring some different ways sex has been represented in games, and how this helps us challenge dominant narratives about intimacy and sex.

Max is writing about some of the lessons he’s learned in kink space and how they influence his play and design philosophies and practices.

Victor is writing about how honest and vulnerable communication creates powerful and safe environments for negotiating intimacy at your gaming table.

Yeonsoo is writing about how to end an intimate in-game relationship with care and why break-ups and relationship transitions can be extremely meaningful experiences for characters and players alike.

The zine will be approximately 32 pages in total. It will be printed in black and white as a digest-sized, saddle-stitched booklet. The PDF copy will have the same layout as the print version.

Admin Team

Sam Hotchkiss (@Hotchmoney) - editor, layout, distribution

Jillian Wakarchuk (@OrbWitch) - editor, campaign manager

Eli Pineda (@dvangeli_) - editor, assistant everything

Art Team

Jesse Gazic (@gazictron) - logo and cover art

G.C. Houle (@gchoule) - promotional art

Meet the Contributors

Christina Stone-Bush (@HyveMynd | she/her) is a TTRPG author, graphic designer, and layout artist who comes up with way more ideas than she ever finishes. She creates small, meaningful games – often focusing on intimacy – in what little free time she manages to find while raising an extremely active child.

Daisy Grant (@AWiseArtist | she/her) is an artist, designer, and educator. She has contributed work to over thirty game titles. She has produced and performed in over one thousand actual play recordings on the Twitch platform. She is a Certified Mentor Advisor working in talent development.

Eli Pineda (@dvangeli_ | she/her) is a Fil-Can creator. By day, she edits videos in the eSports industry, by afternoon she is a cast member on a TTRPG podcast (check out Many Realms!) and by night, she edits this zine. She also makes a mean milk tea!

G.C. Houle (@gchoule | they/them) is a French-Canadian illustrator, comic artist and designer. They love creating fun stories about queer characters, in every sense of the word. In their spare time they enjoy playing TTRPGs, often incarnating big gender weird monsters looking for love and acceptance.

Jesse Gazic (@gazictron | he/they) is an artist and designer from Toronto, Canada. He works in game and puzzle design, RPG writing, illustration, and podcasts.

Jillian Wakarchuk (@OrbWitch | she/they) is a ttrpg podcaster, supplement writer, and GM with a penchant for queer drama. They like teaching folks new games, offering really hot NPCs to ruin your characters' plans, and building up to a well-timed forehead touch or smooch in game.

Jonathan Mendoza (@RY0MASA | he/they) is a TTRPG showrunner, player, writer and designer with a love of player-driven stories and introducing new folks to their first TTRPG experience. He wrote his Master’s thesis on the usage of roleplaying games as a therapeutic intervention, and they are also a founding member of the Lesley University Academy for Virtual and Roleplaying Arts (AVRA), a graduate student research lab.

Kat Jones (they/she) is a queer Latina game designer and scholar. Kat's games explore identity and community, while offering playful social commentary. They have co-authored two games featured in Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Games: The Sleepover with Julia Ellingboe which focuses on teenagers sharing information about sex, and You Inside Us which explores a relationship between an alien symbiote and their host.

Maxwell Lander (@maxwellander | he/they) is a futurist, photographer, feminist pornographer, gamemaker and interactive media artist. He teaches VR, game design and volumetric video and likes to play games about himbos, roudy queers and ultra violence.

Sam Hotchkiss (@Hotchmoney | he/him) is a zine editor, game designer, and programmer from Philadelphia, PA. His zines focus on advice and ideas from around the games industry. Sam also wrote the larp Seapunk 2222, and is developing it into a Discord-based text adventure.

Victor Villavicencio (@villainvicencio | he/they) is a queer latine ttrpg performer, podcaster, designer and writer. Always looking for intersectionality in games, he finds joy in adding in all the parts of himself in everything he creates and portrays.

Yeonsoo Julian Kim (@yjuliankim | they/she) is a game designer, writer, and cultural consultant who creates and contributes to TTRPGs, LARPs, and interactive fiction. They love roleplaying a good angsty romance and enjoy making and running games that explore kink, non-monogamy, and communication.

Budget

Printing has been donated, so our only expenses are shipping and platform fees. All profits are being shared among the writers, editors, and artists, so your pledge helps everyone involved! We're asking for $2000 so we can afford to pay all of them a fair rate for their contributions (minimum ~15c/word).

Add-Ons

Risks and challenges

This is a small and relatively simple project, but there are still risks involved. Contributors could miss deadlines, or there could be delays in editing and typesetting. Our timeline is built to accommodate such issues, however, unexpected occurrences could delay delivery of the zine. If a collaborator should drop out, we will try to find a replacement. If not, the zine may have less content.