🫥 10 Zine Month Games You Missed
Solo RPGs, collaborative worldbuilding games, and more!
1. Hidden Gems of Zine Month
We’re in the final days of “Zine Month,” the crowdfunding event hosted by Kickstarter and Crowdfundr. In this issue I’ve picked 10 games for as low at $4 that look interesting but haven’t hit their funding goals. What caught my eye is marked with an 👁️. Check them out soon, some have only hours left in their campaigns!
👹 Rumbling of the Giants is an 8-page zine filled with world lore, art, and mechanics to bring the terror and tyranny of a frost giant into your tabletop RPG. It explores the legend of a fearsome giant through a bard’s song of a fallen knight, a necromancer’s journal entry, and the ramblings of a mad lich.
👁️ Prototype: This $4 zine is a proof of concept for creating a comprehensive tool to build brutal giants, uncanny fey, and tyrannical dragons.
☢️ Zones is a solo-friendly modern sci-fi tabletop RPG inspired by immersive survival simulation videogames like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You explore a radiated, procedurally generated world filled with artifacts of extraordinary power and unique NPCs.
👁️ Sasquatch Games: I enjoyed the solo mechanics in Glide, Cody Barr’s Dune-inspired RPG. And Zone’s preview edition is already fun to play with.
🔮 The Find is a 30-page horror journaling game inspired by films like Hellraiser and Jumanji, where the arrival of a mysterious object changes the lives of the protagonists.
👁️ Chain-journaling: When the game is over, the diary can be passed to a friend who will play your story’s sequel and pass it on in turn.
💖 Heartbeat Highschool is a solo journaling dating simulation RPG. You play a 17 year old who has moved to a new town and high school in the late 1990s. You have schoolwork, a part time job, and opportunities for an active social life.
👁️ Calendar gaming: Use a planner to manage your weekly activity pool of dice to study, work, and pursue hobbies. On weekends you can make calls or go on dates using dice rolls to test compatibility.
☕ Greasy Spoon is a system-neutral and solo-friendly zine inspired by late 20th century New Jersey diners. Designed as a lore-heavy, rules-light supplement, it provides adventure hooks, NPCs, unique gear, and a d100 locations table.
👁️ Underground zine vibe: This book really delivers on the classic cut-and-paste DIY zine style with 20 hand-drawn full-color pages in an oversized horizontal format.
🚀 What We Found Beyond the Stars is a GMless hard Sci-fi game about cooperation between a small crew discovering alien worlds. It’s played with a standard set of dice and a tarot deck.
👁️ Combat-free: The game’s focus is working as a team to solve problems that arise to build the world.
🏰 Collaborative Story Books: Fantasy Adventures is a children’s book without a story—just rich, hand-drawn settings to spark collaborative tales. Guided prompts and storytelling tips are provided to help adults create imaginary worlds with little kids.
👁️ Worldbuilding with kids: Kids are natural storytellers. I love the idea of a tool to help adults and kids create imaginary stories together.
👾 Enter the Space Labyrinth is a solo Sci-Fi RPG where you explore a monster-infested science station, searching for air, weapons, and a way out. You will navigate hazards, uncover events, and wield the powerful Star Sword to survive.
👁️ Retro videogame: Inspired by classic LCD handheld videogames. I’m interested in trying out its procedural space station map.
🩸 Vortex of Blood is the fifth Night Office adventure. It is a Lovecraftian solo RPG book played with a tarot deck, with multiple narrative paths and many ways to die.
👁️ Horror bureaucracy: The book is described as a new exercise for Night Office field operatives that allows roleplaying a journey through magico-temporal space without having your mind devoured by space jellies.
⚔️ Kal-Arath: Twin Sun Sutra is a solo campaign for Kal-Arath, the solo-friendly procedural sword & sorcery RPG. Twin Sun Sutra features a short comic, new play modes, several tables, and deadly monsters.
👁️ Kal-Arath: This old school RPG from
is a favorite of many readers of The Soloist. I’ve been meaning to write up a Kal-Arath play report for Solo Sessions, and this expansion gives me one more reason. You can check out ’s excellent video playthrough series here.
2. For Small Creatures Such as We Expansion
Love & Lust, the first expansion to
’ For Small Creatures Such As We, released last week. In it you will find new mechanics and events to explore the relationships of your alien crewmates. You can befriend, romance, and even start a family with them or other characters. Explore their likes and dislikes, their dreams, their kinks, how they reproduce, how their family units are structured, and much more. In the expansion, you can:Explore three new worlds,
Undertake new missions,
Choose new captain backgrounds, crewmate skills, and ship systems,
And have children on your ship as part of the crew’s family or as passengers.
Anna reports that A Guide To Fauna, an expansion focused on xenozoology and creating alien creatures, is nearing completion. For Small Creatures Such as We was one of my favorite releases last year. Check out the Solo Session play report to get a feel for the game.
3. News Bits
In 2024, the DOTS RPG Project introduced the first mass-produced Braille RPG Dice to help make tabletop gaming more accessible for blind players. The RPGs for Accessible Gaming Bundle funds production of additional dice sets for non-d20 systems and supports DOTS’ advocacy for accessibility at gaming conventions.
The Lone Toad reviewed Sundered Isles: Seafaring Adventures for Ironsworn: Starforged.
The crowdfunding platform BackerKit told Polygon that it tripled revenues in 2024. The top campaign was th $4.6M raised for MCDM RPG: Draw Steel.
4. SOLO BORG Update
SOLO BORG, The Soloist’s standalone rulebook for playing MÖRK BORG without a GM, is leveling up. I’m partnering with Chris Lowry of Beyond Cataclysm, who will co-create and publish the project. Chris has been making solo RPGs for years, and is a seasoned a MÖRK BORG veteran. His latest project, MÖRK ORG, is a horrifying game set inside a terribly dull office environment.
I’ve been speaking with Chris about SOLO BORG for only a few weeks and I’ve already learned a ton from him that’ll make the game better. With this partnership, we’re expanding the book’s scope, bringing on multiple artists, and refining the design. To accommodate the new content, we’re shifting the Kickstarter launch to mid-March.
Follow SOLO BORG on Kickstarter to be notified when the campaign goes live.
Anyone know of a US distributor for Blackwell Writer’s games? I was going to pick up hardcover of FSCSAW a while back, but shipping from the author’s shop to the US was basically the same price as the hardcover itself. 😬
I physically saw them all, however the glut and volume of Zine Month kickstarters is so massive I found it hard to really register any of these games mentally. Thanks for curating a neat list!
Looking back, Glumdark launching a week before Feb 1 was "The Move". You get attention from Zinequest traffic while also frontrunning actual ZQ projects and stay on top longer.
Shadowdark is going to launch their KS on March 11 after ZQ to complete its first First Party Expansion (and possibly selling the base game itself again to new audiences). Wonder how that will go.
Wonder how the KS meta will shake out next year.