Holiday Happenings is yearly 25 day event for bringing comfort & joy to those who need it in the TTRPG community. It culminates in this year's edition of the Holiday Happenings zine of TTRPG content. The 2019 edition is available at the Holiday Happenings 2019 Itch page.
Holiday Happenings is not a legal entity. It's been primarily coordinated by Phillip Wessels since 2016.
It would be so wrong for this to turn into a business. With having received free community labor in the form of administration, contributions and marketing, all over several years with the understanding that it was to bring free comfort and joy to those who need it, we have to honor where we come from and respect the work that was done by the TTRPG community to help this succeed.
It's not clear what structure Holiday Happenings will need in the future, but we'll figure it out openly and do our best to keep it pure. You can hold us to account for that; after all, the crowdsourced game material (excluding game jame submissions) in Holiday Happenings is under a Creative Commons license and there's nothing stopping anyone from using that to publish the material separate from us.
There are of course concerns with the Kickstarter, Itch, Discord and this website being centralized. Please feel free to contact us with your ideas, and if it helps, the site's source code is open source on the GitHub repository and there's also a Dat version you can copy, modify & republish using Beaker Browser (read more about Dat, a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol for distributing websites).
Regardless of the Kickstarter, we will release a new edition of the free zine, so Holiday Happenings is, well, happening! The Kickstarter isn't for that, but rather to raise funds to cover the costs of our safety & sensitivity editors (who are being paid in advance by Phillip), to fund inclusivity efforts such as expanding our writing staff and aiming for equity, as well as to possibly pay for layout. Additional funds will sit in a bank account to support the event next year.
As a reward for your support, Kickstarter backers will be listed in the Holiday Happenings zine PDF. There's limited higher reward levels that include runnig games.
You may be wondering about a print option. It's very hard to separate this from a profit-motive. If we can find a way, hopefully we can make it happen (probably not this year).
You can find them on our Itch page!
You can download the zines from our direct downloads page as well. We encourage community participation and feedback on Itch.
The zine is free, however the 2017 version and onward are priced as pay-what-you-want on Itch. You can choose to pay $0.
Phillip Wessels, the primary coordinator, was not able to coordinate the project in 2018.
Please note that the zine was previously known as Happenings in Christmas Village. We changed the name of the event and the zine to be more inclusive.
No, this year's edition of the zine will be called Holiday Happenings.
It's the goal of Holiday Happenings to be welcoming and representing of all sorts of folks who are seeking comfort and joy this holiday season. It is a crowdsourced publication and there was a lack of diversity in the small crowd participating in 2016 and 2017. The existing work is being edited for safety and sensitivity, and we are taking steps to bring diversity into the crowd, such as the inclusivity sponsorship.
Revenue helps us pay for editors and inclusivity initiatives such as expanding our writing staff and increasing equity for participation in the event. We are considering paying for layout assistance, depending on the volume of 2019 submissions.
No. All art and content in Holiday Happenings is to be submitted without the expectation of pay. The ethos of the Holiday Happenings zine is to be an open community collaboration with barriers to participation limited as much as possible.
EDIT 12/10/2019: Holiday Happenings is hiring designers/writers to expand our core offerings. These pieces will be included to create space for miscelanea and may be reprinted in future editions of Holiday Happenings. Please look forward to announcements of our new staff.
Phillip Wessels does the layout, however select features may have their layout done by others. Anyone aside from Phillip contributing layout gets paid.
Please use #submission-box on the Holiday Happenings Discord. By submitting to this channel you are giving us the right to publish in the upcoming & future editions of the Holiday Happenings zine. If it's desired for publication, we will contact you to verify & accept your submission. Please be sure to provide us a way to do so.
Yes. You can set a price to the game, put a note on the game's page that it's not for publication in the Holiday Happenings zine, or reply with such when we contact you to verify & accept your submission.
Please do so via the Itch game jam, or #submission-box on the Holiday Happenings Discord.
Phillip Wessels has done web development for Holiday Happenings since 2019. The website is open-source and can be found on GitHub.