A Brief Guide to Indie/Zine RPGs - Part I: Overview

My recent obsession with the zine scene has left me with lots of reading, pondering and contemplating how to introduce my graming groups to this weird corner of the hobby over which I am now almost entirely obsessed. I can't even think about running something as mundane as D&D 5E right now, it just feels so....tiring. Worn. Plebian? Been there and done that. The following games? Not at all.

The market for this weird indie corner of the hobby is a bit hard to describe. The term Zine RPG seems to fit best, because a nontrivial number of these games come from various Zine challenges over the last few years leading to ways for designers to create compact but full featured rulesets in limited page counts. Not all have been successful, but the ones that are really stand out. Some of these have devolved from zines to brochures...the trifold pamphlet corners a significant chunk of the scenario and expansion market on Exalted Funeral, for example, and about half of the supplements out for Mothership are in the form of these tri-folds. They are an interesting way of taking a tight space and making it work for what is needed, while also rethinking entirely what it takes for a module to be considered "good to go." 

While Zine RPGs have their roots in indie games, I hesitate to use that term to describe them because some of these systems have big budgets and big followings (or feel like it). Mork Borg is indie only in a spiritual sense, Into the Odd, Ultraviolet Grasslands....indie, sure, but they are also closer to "zine RPGs" than might be obvious. Into the Odd, for example, is the same mechanical system as you will find in Screams Amongst the Stars and several other RPGs that are definitely "zine RPGs." But....we'll lump these larger non-zine sized RPGs in to this group. One could also call these the "itch.io" genre but usually that's the fermenting ground for many, who then become popular enough to elevate to print products of greater value elsewhere.

Features all of these games tend to have in common include:

1. Brevity of Design - the game provides a very small footprint from "picking up the book" to "we are playing the game." These games often cut out anything even remotely looking or feeling like filler text and expository text, assuming the reader either knows all that stuff or doesn't want it to begin with.

2. Artistic Liberties unseen outside of music album covers; these games often feel like a guy with a vision for a game met a buddy with an artistic streak of madness and together they produce something that can be simultaneously brilliant and difficult to parse out. The end result can just be a very satisfying game that doubles as a coffee table art piece on down to something which appears to be a graphic designer's submission for graduation from art college, with words approximating a game hidden somewhere within.

3. Weird. Weird! REALLY WEIRD. These are all games that defy genre conventions by taking the established norms and inverting them in as many interesting ways as possible. Mothership takes the tried and true formula of a game like Traveller and recreates it as an Alien/Thing/Body Snatchers simulator. Mork Borg takes D&D fantasy and says what if Appendix N was actually just a list of heavy metal album covers and lyrics mixed with grim Catholic imagery. Liminal Horror grabs the contemporary zeitgeist of modern horror and shows how The Backrooms can be melded to a game like Control with themes from Hellboy, and turned into an even stranger, darker and grimmer experience than the classic Call of cthulhu. If you've got a weird take on a genre that kills all the darlings, it fits here.

4. High Concept and Low Budget. These are often quite gorgeous but the vast majority of the books are also print and staple affairs, and even the high budget games emulate the "We made this at Kinkos" look on purpose. Not all do this, but the deliberate melding of a brevity in design with highly atypical art styles gives all games in this weird subgenre a unique look. 

5. Advancement is through play and not the rules, and are also brutal in this process. Most of the games in this style of design are unflinching in providing grim worlds, worst case scenarios as a starting point, mechanics which encourage character strife and death or genre-appropriate behaviors, and almost without exception they tend to eschew the notion of playing heroic and successful types (at least to start). They are often built around rules that avoid advancement and improvement entirely, or make it very hard or make it something that happens entirely through emergent play. The key goal seems to be to move the game space away from carefully codified concepts (like D&D's classes and species) and to force everyone to think outside the box. If your sorcerer in Mork Bog misfires a spell and is liquefied into a living skeleton: that's a good thing! It builds character. If your Mothership character is now host to a race of alien parasites: we call that growth, in more ways than one. 

Okay! End part one. Next up we'll start looking at these games (or at least the ones I have). For reference, here's what we'll take a look at:

Fantasy Games:

Mork Borg

Into the Odd

A Grim Hack

Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells

Science Fiction Horror Games:

Mothership (along with several hundred supplements)

Death in Space

Screams Amongst the Stars

Vast Grimm

Zyborg Commando RPG

Cyberpunk Games:

Cy_BORG

Running out of Time

Dancing with Bullets Under a Neon Sun

NooFutra (Mothership cyberpunk hack)

Horror Games:

Dead Malls

Liminal Horror

Liminal (not the same as LH)

Into the Zone

The Dead Are Coming

Hard to Classify:

Ultraviolet Grasslands

Electric Bastionland

Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells (it's maybe space fantasy?)

There are a few games I debated including on this list, but ultimately left them off. If they didn't quite fit the following criteria I excluded them:

1. Did I look at the rulebook initially and go "I have no idea how to start reading this," and then an hour later said, "That can't be the entire ruleset, can it?"

2. Did the game have a two page summary of the entire ruleset buried somewhere within?

3. Is more than half the game random charts? 

If none of those qualified (see, for example: Ryuutama, Tri-Stat, Rogue Element, etc.) then I excluded them even if they definitely felt "indie." They just weren't "zine" enough for this list.

Although Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics both feel in the spirit of this genre of games, I feel that they are too traditonal in their ways to count. That said...OSE and DCC both arguably have an influence in this genre. 

We'll start with Mork Borg and the other fantasy systems next!