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Bloody Barbershops & Sanguine Scissors is a zine for barbers and fans of barbering. Come for the new PC class: the Barber! And stay new new magic items, spells, monsters, and level-0 funnel adventure: The Demon Barber’s Phrontistery! The Barber class takes inspiration from the days of the historical “surgeon-barber” but also from more whimsical barbershop quartets. PCs will be able to slice, dice and amputate while also creating a debilitating four-part harmony. The new spell Imbue Elixir will also allow barbers to create perfumes, tonics, oils, creams, and waxes that beautiful hair (including magical mustaches) and grant magical effects. 

The zine was entirely written by Ken Jacobs! He’s a new writer and I’ve partnered with him to publish the zine. But I wanted to help everyone get to know Ken and what inspired him a little more so here’ a great interview with him. Plus! He’ll also be on Rules As Written on the Goodman Games Twitch channel. Ask him questions in the chat on 9/3/24 at 5/6PM Central/Eastern.

Hey Ken, what your “RPG Origin Story”? And when did you discover DCC?

I got started with Dungeon and Dragons in 1979. When 5th edition came about, I was ready to start taking my son to game stores. I was really impressed and weirded out with the 5th edition. Consequently, I picked up a Goodman Games 5e module, The Fey Sister’s Fate. About that time, The Original Adventures Reincarnated (OAR) kicked off, I got my hand on Into the Borderlands. After some 5e interaction, I went on line, played some MCC, DCC and X-Crawl at online Covid conventions. The Cyclops Cons were a great opportunity to meet artists and writers.

In 2023, I attended Gen Con. Between the ziggurat and the Wizard Van I knew I was with my ilk. My son and I attended a seminar on how to write for Goodman Games, and a follow on Indie Game Developer’s conference opened the door and after reading the 9th printing of DCC RPG.

I got it in my head that if I got 6,000 words in a document, that I might be able to get the attention of one of the legendary 3rd-party editors. The trade secret is to get an editor and appease them. So I started writing down things that I though might be relevant to a home brew city adventure. I wanted to show up with something that added resources for game masters. In short, I know how to give incredible value for a $20 haircut, but a zine was unfamiliar territory.

Your day job inspired a whole zine so I imagine that you love your job! What in particular got you started and kept you going in this project?

Barbers love people, or more specifically, the human character. I hear from people all day long, and most have stories. That is the primary reason I love my job, it’s all about people, from all works of life, and their story. And people have stories to tell! And people are characters; real characters, with real personalities. So I believe it’s only natural, to think about characters in my favorite community: the Goodman Games gang. Simultaneously, I am thinking about characters in DCC. I am watching the every day magic of barbershop friendships. These are all central to my world. There are transformation haircuts, which sounds an awful lot like charm and deception. There are pomades and sprays, promising to hold the hair, and protect it. There is the confidentiality, spying, loyalty, and deception. And sharp blades, like adventurers carry.

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Are there any “in-jokes” about the barbering profession hidden in the zine?

Pretty much the entire zine seems to be a parody and jest towards the art of barbering. My favorite is the Barbershop Pets. So, by local law, dogs are not allowed in barbershops. Well, Jumping Roo an a pogo stick, if we don’t have the most amazing dogs visiting our barbershop pretty much every day! The barbershop shares a parking with the veterinarian next door, everyone in town with a dog stops in the barbershop to say hello. So that had to do something with pets and that awkward cognitive dissonance they bring to my world. There is a great deal of irony about barbers being central to any magical universe, in the same way a gong farmer becomes a heroic adventurer. So in the fantasy world, we get to take a local gong farmer and elevate them to barber. In real life, barbering is pretty routine. In Punjar, when someone visits the barbershop, it is the start of an adventure!

Some of the other insights, like spells reflect on the hilarity of barbershops. A couple years back, someone in the greater area was robbing salons. So all the barbers had their biggest set of shears convenient. Nobody robs a group of barbers, so I had to name the imaginary scene in my head where this villain makes the mistake of trying to rob barbers, and it is nothing but Japanese steel in their face, thus the Scissor Whizzer Whammy Slash was invented. Fortunately, the real thief was caught and incarcerated before he made it to our shop.

In addition to barbering and writing, you’ve also done a lot of the art in the adventure. You’ve described your art process as “a quick way to make clip art”. Can you tell us a little more about the process?

Several years back I took a whole bunch of art classes. So the sketch pad was my friend for several years. Ultimately, I got into painting, Banksy street art stencils, ceramics, a lot of sculpture, and tons of sketching. One professor, Brad Killam, a profound sculpture artist, talked about letting the imperfections into the art. For me this is the magic of the zine. It cannot be perfect. It has to have a human made feel to the overall product. That is why the clip art began to feel right. It corresponds to the writing: keep it simple. I truly believe anyone should be able to pick the adventure up and play it on the fly, and the inside art doubles as a coloring book and sketch pad.

Furthermore, it has that 1974 feel, of cut and posting on a photocopy machine. In the modern world, the tools are all different. Instead of taking cheesy paper and drawings and trying to make it look as great as possible, like so many years ago, I now take great stuff and make it look like a cheesy drawing. Instead of glue, scissors and magazines, and shrinking and enlarging on paper, the modern method is all in apps. It makes me smile every time I take a picture with my phone send it to the computer, edit it and print it out so I can trace it by hand. Reverse the process, and you have your own clip art, which is really just processed sketching. And sketching is important to the process, it really helped me visualize the story board, the intended adventure flow, and gave me something do something with those weird images I collect. And doing our own interior art, freed up some cash, so that we could get some legendary art on the cover.

Cover art itself is a game changer for bibliophiles such as myself. Indeed, I judge books by their cover. And with the incredible variety of paper products available, I had to think about the overall zine, before I committed to clip art. I like the insides of my zines black and white made of cringy paper I can write on with a pencil. I like the outside of my zines, glossy, thick, full colored, and feeling clean to the hand. The kind that you can spill coffee on and it wipes right off. The kind you see in Dragon Peak Publishing products. And that quality counts, because it is what allows for clip art and the hand sketches. If you don’t offer up great art on the cover, then it doesn’t feel right for its value. It feels sketchy. On the other hand there is this balance, if you have the good stuff right up front, then the inside doesn’t feel so precious, and thus becomes usable, as it is really intended. The community must feel this is actually quite a nice product and belongs on their bookshelf or PDF library, yet it has to be useful for years to come, because just sitting on a shelf is no fun at all. And I think the zine fits this concept quite nicely, this idea of a high quality publication with simple feel. Something you can take notes and draw in while at the table.

The funnel adventure, The Demon Barber’s Phrontistery, is something that got created a little later than the rest of the zine and I acted as a sort of co-developer on it. How was the overall adventure writing process?

The funnel adventure totally sprang from the zine, as the process really took shape in its own right. That is my art style, some artists have to be very precise, and others have no idea what the end product is going to be like. I am the latter. I like to envision the big picture and just start hacking. And that was something I new right from the start. I did my research and was looking for that avid writing - editor with a nose for what is going on in the market right now. Everyone has good ideas, but getting enough together to be of interest, and to make it useful to the judges and players, and well that is why I needed an editor and publisher.

Stefan Surratt really gave the idea structure, and it quite honestly, it was a huge compliment, to take it up a notch, and get mentored by someone who has contributed the finest 3rd party zines in the current scene. I definitely would not have tried writing the adventure without his encouragement and co-operation, so, of course, a part of the process is learning new things, and that is really when the value became added. Having never written an adventure for other judges was difficult at first, and a lot of nonsense was getting kicked around, and what really what happened, was the next 5000 words basically got thrown out. I went back to outline, then the product gained focus. And with some good focus, we got the crawl narrowed down to five primary areas, each with it’s own challenges and secrets to explore.

Thanks for sharing with folks! Anything else that you want to let everyone know about?

I really hope people will take a l look at something they know and love and apply it to their favorite fantasy world and I hope people get motivated to have their own barbershop adventures. I just know that the physical copy of this zine will be a very very fine sculpture in it’s own write, worthy of the stories that will be created using the tools contained within it’s cover, and no PDF collection will be complete without a copy.

If anyone else has a job that you could turn into a zine, tell me about it! And which of the two bonus zines do you want more focus on in the next article?

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