Every February, Kickstarter holds a month-long celebration of tabletop RPGs called ZineQuest, featuring all sorts of crowdfunded zines. What’s a zine, you ask? It’s a short, self-published book, in this context usually an adventure, a supplement, or a small, self-contained game.
They tend to be a bit scrappy and weird, allowing creators to run with wild and niche ideas you might not see in full TTRPG books. This year’s no exception in that regard, and there are lots of great opportunities to spice up your shelves with something unusual and creative.
You can check out the full list of ZineQuest projects through a search of the ZineQuest tag on Kickstarter, but it’s a lot to sift through. To save you some time, I’ve picked out what I think are some of the most promising zines on offer this year—read on, and see if any take your fancy.
Gas! Gas! Gas!
This one-shot scenario for excellent sci-fi horror TTRPG Mothership involves a catastrophe at a subterranean prison, where players will have to contend with both a malfunctioning computer system determined not to let them escape, and a rapidly spreading and oddly intelligent poisonous gas leak. You’re in safe hands with this one—creator WacoMatrixo has previously worked on one-shots for Mothership called Aurora and Decagone, both scenarios that had really interesting and creative twists on the game’s usual formula. They’re also known for making great animated videos offering play advice and house rules.
Blister Critters
A stand-alone game about mutant cartoon animals trying to survive in a world where both humankind and the ozone layer have disappeared. The tone of this one is a little muddled—it’s like Looney Tunes with body horror, and I’m not sure the two themes gel perfectly, at least in the free quickstart. But it’s bursting with personality, the art is brilliant, and I love its weird tree of mutations players can progress along, so I reckon it deserves the benefit of the doubt. Plus, I really enjoyed the style and charm of creator Anthony Grasso’s previous project AMMU: An Eldritch Extermination.
The Lair of the Skateomancer
Sometimes all an adventure needs is a great, simple hook, a village under attack by an evil skateboarding lich is certainly that. This adventure for D&D 5e not only gives you a skatepark-themed dungeon to battle through, but also a magic item, the Board of Skateomancy, that if claimed will allow you to “cast gnarly spells by doing tricks”. Radical.
Beetle Knight
With Hollow Knight: Silksong still nowhere to be seen, we must turn elsewhere for our bug adventures. Beetle Knight stands ready to fill the void. It’s a stand-alone game where you play as an insect hero in the world of “Litterfall”, a forest floor where flies, mantises, fire ants, and more form kingdoms and factions to interact with. Also included are two full adventures and even rules for playing solo.
The Abbott Trilogy
Designed to be easily adapted to your TTRPG system of choice, this trilogy of adventures can be run as one-shots or linked together into a short campaign. The stark art-style is very appealing, and I love the old school vibe—particularly with the mix of traditional dungeon fantasy with strange sci-fi elements. If you miss the days when it was perfectly normal for your D&D group to explore a wrecked spaceship and pick up a laser pistol, this is the zine for you.
Meatheads
I love the burly barbarian aesthetic of this dungeon-crawler—like a blend of Conan the Barbarian and that one episode of Adventure Time where everyone can’t stop rough-housing. Mechanically it sounds like an interesting twist on old school-inspired gaming, where levelling is replaced by a system where you rise and fall in muscle mass by succeeding or failing at mighty feats of strength. Also included is a megadungeon featuring, among other things, magic snails, hallucinogenic toads, and a water gun axe—the perfect place to put a party of meatheads through their paces.