A Few Indie RPG Zines: Fun to Macrabre

Aidan Chen (G6)

Entertainment

Published Issue 6 2022-2023

Table-Top Roleplaying Games, or TTRPGs, are most commonly associated as a “symptom” of being a nerd. Most people commonly think of games like Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons when someone mentions it. However, there is a vast community that enjoys creating their own adventures or worlds, using new or old systems of gaming. This article will review three of these independently developed zines that all vary in style and game design.

The first zine is MIRU by Mimic Publishing, a solo roll and write adventure game. However, the game is quite dark and set a century into the future, where the player's brother has been killed by a robot. The main goal of the game is to kill the God that controls the robots that caused the brother’s death. As you explore the solarpunk world, you draw what you find onto a grid of hexagons. You can complete side quests, fight through dungeons, and trade at villages. This zine was backed on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform and raised around $7000 of its $100 goal. A sequel, MIRU 2, is currently raising funds on Kickstarter as well.

Next up is Flik Silverpens Guide to Dragon Town by JP Coovert, a 40-ish page whimsical and easy to start TTRPG adventure, with the adventurers investigating the disappearance of Dragon Town’s mayor, a gold dragon. Dragon Town was also backed on Kickstarter for Zine Quest, an event meant to promote RPG zine publishing by Kickstarter. The zine is designed so it is easily adaptable for any RPG system, so anyone who plays a RPG game should be able to use it in their campaign/adventure. Furthermore, after the successful funding of the zine, JP Coovert started a Patreon. Where anyone could be a member for a subscription fee applied each month. Each month he released a short RPG zine, shorter than the original Dragon Town Zine, but anyone a fan of his work are able to sign up and get either a digital or physical version of the monthly zine.

The last zine is Mausritter, which is more box set than zine, but it is still quite short and comes with lots of physical components. The regular, physical box set will set you back around $73, but you can get the digital set for free at itch.io. The game revolves around the players being mice adventurers and suddenly

very simple things to do as a regular-sized human become much trickier. Climbing stairs? Better bring some pitons and rope. Jumping in a puddle? You’ll need a matchstick raft to cross it. The box set includes a fully functioning set of rules to create your own mouse adventures and adventurers, who can explore through old forests or stinky trash cans. The box set also comes with little cardboard tiles to use as items, so one does not need to write anything down for the inventory but instead maximizes physicality, like placing squares on your sheet or marking usage with a marker, and less book-cracking.

In the end, it is your choice if you want to try any of these RPG zines. I’ve only given some suggestions of what games would give some variety and be good fun, if you want to enter the world of TTRPGs. In the end, there are many more independently developed TTRPG adventures and resources beyond the three I’ve listed here. The world of gaming lets small content creators express their creativity and show their work to a much greater audience. These creators put in so much effort and are overshadowed by large RPG corporations like Wizards of the Coast or Pathfinder, so in the end, we should also support them and help them continue producing such amazing, high quality content that most corporations would never think of making.