Æther Corp

Love This!

Description

Crowdfunding on Kickstarter from 14 Feb 2025 to 28 Feb 2025 in digital, physical format 5 / 20 GBP (digital/physical)

You are a duck.
With no quacks to give.

You have bread.
It's time traveling bread.

You have a ball of string.
It tracks your timeline.

You have a mission.
It's near impossible.

You'll need the bread.

This is going to be a rather odd, slightly scrappy and very silly choose your own adventure zine based on a this sentence I've had kicking it back in one of my ideas notebooks: Reducks. Time-travelling ducks.

Inspired by a throughly wonderful (but as yet unpublished) choose your own adventure I was lucky enough to read last year I've decided to try my hand at my own.

Bread and String

You will cut the slice of bread (or gluten-free and duck-friendly substitute) into cubes and eat a piece to travel back along your timeline, the piece of string.

You will pass the string through the holes punched in the pages to track your journey through time.

If you're unable to open the book because of the string, you can cut a piece of string, tie your end to it and follow it back to the start at which point you'll find your original self (creating a pair-o-ducks, of course) or discover that you're trapped in time loop.

This will not be playtested. It might be terrible. It should be funny.

Ink and Watercolour

I'm going to be hand illustrating this myself using a combination of watercolour washes and fountain pen ink. They will not necessarily be Good illustration, but they will be done by me.

Each of the eighty-ish illustrations will be 3x3" on a 5x5" piece of paper and will all be available on a first come, first choice basis once the campaign is over.

I'll add an example drawing here as soon as I've done one!

Paper and Proportions

The zine will be roughly 8x8" square with around twenty-four pages and each page of the adventure will be split into four illustrations, one for each bit of adventure.

The cover will be a hefty 300gsm with marginally less hefty 200gsm pages of 100% recycled paper. That should be enough to handle the time warps.

Rewards

Keeping things simple this time round, there are just four rewards:

£4 Digital

A PDF of the zine — downloadable from your choice of itch.io or DriveThruRPG — ready for your home printing needs. You could probably get away with not printing it out but where would be the fun in that?

£20 Physical

The zine itself in all its (probably) hand-punched glory (unless I need to print enough to necessitate getting them die cut) as well as the PDF of the zine and a 1" Reducks promo button badge.

£20 Art

The zine, a PDF of the zine, a button badge and one of the original illustrations from the zine to put in a frame, hang on your wall, and call your very own.

£100 Æther Bundle

One of every zine from my back catalogue that now includes:

Orchidelirium
Coiled.Spæce
Advanced Double D6
Field Agent Handbook: 1924 Revolution
Field Agent Handbook: 1925 Leviathan
Field Agent Handbook: 1926 Communication
Field Agent Handbook: 1927 Tempus
Field Agent Handbook: 1928 Colossus
Field Agent Handbook: Calibration Record
Field Agent Handbook: Notebook

All of which are also available separately as add-ons.

Stretch Goals

Just a couple of small stretch goals this time round to keep things nice and simple:

£1,000 — Gold foil cover
The front cover will get a glow up with gold foil lettering for the game title
£2,000 — Art prints
A small set of prints of my favourite drawings will be included with all physical rewards

Timeline

This is intended to be a simple and silly project to act as a bit of a palate cleanser after what was quite a difficult 2024 for me so here's some rough timings:

February: Campaign! Also plotting out the adventure
March: Writing the adventure and doing some test illustrations;
April: Illustrations and editing the adventure; Gamefound pledge manager opens up
May: More illustrations after I get dismayed by the first lot or, heaven forbid, better at illustrating
June: Mass panic as I realise this was the original expected finish date that dissipates once I remember that I pushed it back to August to allow time for this very moment of panic
July: Final adjustments to text and illustrations before sending to the printer
August: Printer prints followed by me punching holes (probably)
September: I realise things have overrun so use this month to do anything that hasn't already been done
October: Your get your zine

I'm secretly planning for you to get your zine earlier than October but things do not always go to plan so I've built a little wiggleroom.

Like my previous projects, I'll send you an update on the last weekend of every month so you'll know how it's all progressing or if anything has gone horribly wrong.

Shipping

A Kickstarter survey will be sent out a few weeks after the campaign ends to collect your email address so I can send you your digital rewards.

A pledge manager — most likely Gamefound — will be set up to collect shipping for physical rewards. EU taxes will also be collected at this point to avoid any additional customs charges when it’s delivered.

Estimated Shipping Costs

These are likely to be costs for shipping:

Physical/Art: US £8, EU £8, AU £8, ROW £8, UK £5
Æther Bundle: US £20, EU £16, AU £20, ROW £16, UK £10

Packages will be sent via Royal Mail's International Standard and 2nd Class services.

A tracked and signed option will also be available for anyone who wants it but obviously will also cost a little more.

Your Creator

Monochrome stylised view my face


I'm Luke Earl (he/him), a UX designer by day and game designer by night (and at the weekends) as well as the sole operative at Æther Corp (est. 2019), a badge factory, design studio & publishing house that produces quirky creations to weird your world.

When not pushing pixels or playing with paper, you’ll often find me singing my little heart out with a growing number of amateur dramatic groups, being bothered by two oversized black fluffy cats or mauled by a smaller, ferocious ginger cat.

Like with my five other Kickstarter projects (Orchidelirium, A Small Collection of Flowers & Entanglements, Coiled.Spæce, Advanced Double D6 and the Field Agent Handbooks: 1924–28), I'm doing all the writing, editing, art and layout tasks myself, like a loon.

Reducks. Time-travelling ducks.

It's going to be quick, hand-drawn with ink and watercolour illustrations (think maybe just below GCSE standard), potentially unplayable definitely not play tested, but it will involve a ball of string and a slice of bread so what's not to love?

Details

Use of AI none

Playstyle choose your own adventure