On Understanding & Adapting System Neutral Modules: Ave Nox

 

Ave Nox: Guaranteed to be a blast!

INTRO

    Most of my RPG-running career has led me far astray from system neutral modules. Not out of spite - rather, that so often the things I would play would be rife with modules pre-made and ready-to-roll for what I was playing. Even as I transitioned out of the D&D ecosystem and into indie titles like The Electrum Archive, there were still plenty of introductory premade modules included with the various games I'd try out, or else they'd be packed with how-tos for making your own dungeon like literally half of the His Majesty The Worm book or roughly 90% of Down We Go. Over the last year as I've found myself trying out more systems and understanding the nuances of what each system is trying to tell you the kind of story it wants to tell based on the rules it has, I've found myself ending up with more and more modules that advertise themselves as system neutral and wanting to try them out - and that means trying to fit these modules with systems that will play well with them.

    As a quick aside - my first time playing an adventure that bills itself as being for use with multiple systems was actually the three-part promo stream for Duginthroat Divided - and what's interesting here is that while Daniel very clearly does put the "Designed For Use With OSE" logo on there, the promo material indicates that it can be used with "other games" - which makes sense, right, because OSE is one of the many repackagings of pre-3e D&D, and so any other game that basically does that thing would make sense. I appreciate this kind of shorthand, because it'll tell you what it wants - even if you're not running OSE, it expects you to have those kinds of player principles in your mind: resources are limited, you should be looting as much as possible if you want to become stronger, and careful play and thoughtful problem solving will take the bite out of the harshest encounters because if you're rolling dice you've already messed up. This isn't just a vanity link - we'll come back to Duginthroat in a little bit.

    While some system neutral adventures may include a list of conversion/equivalence information to assist in translating jargon between systems or use generic terms for certain things (armor, etc), unless the module catches the eye of one of the few review channels out there that covers this stuff, it's unlikely that you'll be able to tell at a glance what you're getting into outside of some general stereotyping from what you can glean from the cover and the item description page. Likewise, while some systems (like Down We Go) may give you help in converting statblocks that are shaped a certain way into what that particular system demands, depending on exactly how many things are different from the base assumptions of the module you may end up having to rewrite massive portions of the adventure on the fly - not just in terms of difficulty, but also in terms of just making sure things like the economy of the system works the same way.

SIEZE THE NIGHT

    And so we come to Ave Nox, a 250-room megadungeon. I've been in the process of reading through this for a few projects I've got planned for this year (and also for fun - I think everything I've touched published by Feral Indie Studio has been excellent in terms of art & writing), but one of the interesting things is that since there's not a lot of coverage for it and the lone one-shot of it up online runs it in Down We Go, a system that does not use many of the basic mechanical assumptions written in the first two pages of the text (more on that in a minute) yet is still interesting to play in, I thought it would be useful to me and the few folks who have taken to asking Reddit over the years and gotten minimal response to see if we can parse out exactly what the dungeon wants you to do and what things will make that easier or harder to achieve.

Now We Have To Talk About Math, Unfortunately 

    Right off the bat, there's a glossary of terms that are used in the book as well as some inter-system translations. From this, we know that the basic listed assumption of the system is that you're using a game that treats rounds as 6 second intervals, you're using a d20 system that has the standard 6 D&D stats. Interestingly, there's a note about challenges, indicating that systems that want you to roll under a stat to succeed at a test can be used as is, but roll over systems should treat Easy challenges as something that succeed roughly 50% of the time, whereas impossible challenges only succeed 5% of the time - except that's ALSO kind of not true, because that's just the d% column - the d20 column lists an Average challenge as a DC15 versus an Impossible at DC30, and if you recall my Mathematically Average Challenges post you'll know that in D&D 5e (which is what much of the terminology in here points towards) characters with average stats and no bonuses can only succeed a DC15 check 50% of the time once they're extremely high level (in the level 13-16 range) - a character has to have minmaxed to get a 20 in a stat to be able to be able to succeed a DC15 check at least 50% of the time (technically 55%). On the other hand, a much more intentionally brutal game like MÖRK BORG treats DC12 as its normal difficulty but in reality characters only hit that 40% of the time with average stats, meaning that DC15 to an average character only succeeds 30% of the time. 

     Why am I even talking about this kind of thing, especially since many non-D&D dungeon-crawling games care so little about numerical balance instead opting for more narrative balance/encouraging the OSR-style "the answer is not on your character sheet" kind of approach? It's because the farther away what your preferred system and what the module consider "average" challenges to be, the rougher of a time you may have - and not just in a "I'm willing to throw characters into the woodchipper until we finish playing" way, I mean in the "is the system you're choosing going to allow you to succeed" kind of way. It hurts my writer's soul to reduce genre into math, but being able to interpret what the game world considers "average" versus what your system of choice considers "average" is a great way to figure out what kind of fantasy those systems support. Modern D&D & its clones support a more heroic fantasy where the characters are superheroes, whereas MÖRK BORG and its cohort want you to feel doomed from the start - and both of those things are reinforced by how hard it is to get successes from your dice rolls. Ave Nox seems to be shooting for somewhere in the middle - something where success is achievable, but you're going to have to either take it slow or facetank your problems.

    We are not done talking about math yet, I am afraid, because now we get to move onto...

Value, Hit Points & Trade Goods Explained By Someone Bad At Economics

    So the NPCs in Ave Nox very much do not use money in a traditional sense - like, things still have coin values, but it's called out that this is very much a barter economy even among the other non-local factions in the area and that the coin values are mostly an abstraction to help you keep track of relative value of labor and goods. OK, this is cool, in theory I like this. The issue comes to when you're running a game like OSE that really wants you to care about loot, because it ties directly to how you level up. Putting the actual calculation of experience points aside from a moment (Ave Nox does not mention them, nor do I think it should), the literal scale of how money works in your system is something to keep in mind because what money can do for your character vastly incentivizes or de-incentivizes certain actions like "looting literally everything." This is where we return to by experience with Duginthroat - having come from later editions of D&D and then other rules light OSR-y games like Down We Go, I didn't realize that securing loot was the #1 way to advance your character until the last session we did - I was getting all kinds of cool story out of the session, but my poor little magic user was never gonna level up. 

    As a quick point of order, let's compare the values of a few things you can purchase in Ave Nox versus their equivalents in some games I've mentioned so far:

• In Down We Go, a weapon is 100 coins across the board, and all attacks do 1 HP of damage - one or two hits takes down chump enemies in that system. In MÖRK BORG, weapons range from 5-35 coins doing between d2 and d10 damage but mostly in the d4 or d6 range - meaning you'll need 3-5 hits to take out most chump enemies in that system. In OSE, weapons go from 10-150 coins, dealing between d4 and d10 damage, but mostly sticking in the d6-d8 range, putting it back in the 2ish hits to knock down a chump enemy range. Ave Nox doesn't list weapons for purchase, but many of the weapons held by chump enemies do between d4 and d6 and many have around 11HP - meaning that it could take 3-5 hits on average to take them down with their own regular weapons, and then based on the system you're running in those weapons could be worth somewhere in the 20-30 coin range in OSE, and about the same in MÖRK BORG. This means, at least in terms of potential violence from these examples, MÖRK BORG is most aligned with Ave Nox.
  
  
• All the games mentioned so far have purchasable light sources that function for various lengths of time. OSE gets you six Torches for 1 coin (1 hour each) & a lantern for 10 coins + oil for 2 coins (4 hours per use, oil flask has 4 uses). MÖRK BORG has torches for 2 coin (no listed duration, strangely) or oil lamp for 10 coin + oil for 5 coin (lasts 6 hours plus your Presence stat, so between 7 and 26? wild). Down We Go has candles for 10 coins (good for one room, which if we do conversions for exploration turns is probably...10 minutes?), three torches for 40 coin (3 rooms each, so 30 minutes each), and an oil lantern for 80 coin plus the oil flask for 100 coin (last 6 rooms, so an hour). 
  
  
• Lastly, let's look at some non-magic loot. Down We Go says small loot is 3d6x10 coin, 3d6x50 for medium and 3d6x100 for big loot. OSE is wildly granular as is to be expected and mostly wants you to be finding magical, high value items, but jewelry is worth 3d6x100 coin which is interesting to line up with Down We Go. In Ave Nox, most loot items are either jewelry (usually lumped under "trinkets") at 50 coin, art items (small statues, paintings, etc) go in at 75 coin, and other bigger art pieces usually around 100-200. Ave Nox also includes payment amounts for labor in town - tending a furnace for a day gets you 5 coin or 10lbs of charcoal, tending to the greenhouse for a week gets you 40 coin or a dose of medicine. You can also sell remains that you find to one particular vendor for 100 coins each but uh...don't.
  

    What I find particularly interesting here is that while a megadungeon might lead one to think that you're going to be constantly doing the grind/loot/repeat loop with Ave Nox, the supposition of this dungeon is that you will be much more likely to find lore as loot rather than actual saleable goods - and that means that games that treat loot as XP are going to be particularly difficult until later parts of the dungeon when magic items start to appear (and those are few and far between, even if they are very cool). Likewise, it means that some games are going to prioritize certain playstyles - for example, because of how cheap light is in OSE, players can go deeper into the dungeon before coming back - or at least won't have to prioritize managing light management as heavily as in Down We Go. The flip side of that is that Down We Go WANTS players to be coming back to town fairly often as coming back to town after clearing dungeons is how you level up in that game. And, of course, in 5e, everyone has darkvision so it doesn't matter anyway. Ave Nox is designed such that many of the major sections have their own themes and specific dangers to them - so having players come back to town fairly often isn't a bad thing by any means, but it DOES mean that in addition to the literal money economy, you also need to look at the game's economy of powers (i.e. does this game have spells that obviate certain hazards, and how many do you get per day) and what these characters can carry to resolve these conflicts.

Conflict Resolution

    Briefly touched on in places above, the way that Ave Nox intends for you to interact with its game world means that paying attention to what systems are in place in the given game system you choose is important. Again back in that beginning two pages, we have explanations of the difficulty of various tasks, the kinds of stats it assumes you to have as well as the ways to avoid perils it assumes you to have. Looking through the adventure itself, it expects you to have a system that differentiates various levels of armor (for combat reasons), it expects you to have a system that has magic (though not necessarily leveled magic), a system that cares about specific effects of poisons and diseases, and a system that has methods for the creation of medicines. (Optionally, the ability to interact with ancient languages/history.) The bit about the medicines is particularly interesting: while there are certain effects that call out needing to be healed magically, there are exactly two sources of magical healing in the adventure: an NPC you might befriend, and some NPC spellcasters you definitely will not. Otherwise, there are many places to find healing herbs throughout the dungeon, and all the diseases explicitly say what kind of medicine cures them, but otherwise if you don't have any magical healing, your options are either 1. whatever kinds of potions your game system lets you buy, or 2. taking your character back to the healers in town and having them out of commission for weeks. Personally, I think this is fascinating - but on the other hand, I think it points out to the problem kind of endemic in modern D&D of the absolute abundance of magic that makes certain problems go away. "Oh, did you get this curse that says you can't heal? OK well I cast Remove Curse." "Oh, is there some kind of extraplanar creature that has been summoned causing trouble? OK, I cast Banish." I'm not saying this to be wholly negative - I find it legitimately interesting that the spellcasters in D&D have evolved such that they're supposed to just be the toolkit that solves every issue and the ramifications that has for system neutral adventures, but that's a chat for another day.

    This being a dungeon crawler, there are expectations of solving issues via combat, disabling/avoiding hazards, and general skullduggery to avoid being noticed by inhabitants of the dungeon, which I would venture most or all games you'd think to pick up for this will offer you. This is, however, a dungeon that has an absurd number of factions packed into it and therefore all kinds of roleplay opportunities and/or places to use social skills if your game includes them (though there aren't any hard and fast rules about doing so in Ave Nox). Not only do you have the citizens of Shear (the town above the dungeon), you've got all of the merchants and mercenaries nearby that have their own interests, you've got several domains inside of the dungeon itself each with their own mini-bosses to go along with the big bad of it all, but you've also got an over-faction that affects the difficulty of the adventure itself and that does have procedures attached to it - the ghosts of the people who died in this place. Without getting too much into spoilers, you learn pretty quickly than having a good relationship with the spirits in the dungeon is a good thing to have - and sometimes a hard thing to maintain, as certain dungeon mishaps can result in angering the ghosts and resetting your progress. The procedure for tracking your reputation with the ghosts is the first thing that feels truly system neutral - and not just because it's a procedure that is written explicitly in the book, but rather because it tracks not so much what players are doing, but how they do it. It is somewhat explicitly a play culture checker - if your players are going to go full colonist and exploit the land and dungeon for ANYTHING that can be sold without respect to the people who lived there and if they help the shitty people who remain there continue to exploit the people who are left, then congratulations - they're going to get some more money, but their life is going to be much harder for it down there. 

    Perhaps a better way to say that, and a way that is inclusive of the other ways to solve problems that don't use dice rolls, is that Ave Nox rewards thoughtful play. Rushing into any situation will likely get you killed, or worse. Meddling with things without understanding them will likely get you killed. There are so, so many ways to just immediately accidentally die - but when you do, it will be your fault and the dungeon will tell you that. Did you choose to fight something when you could have talked it out? Did you walk into a place without checking it out first? Did you go poking around somewhere without protecting yourself? Again, these are all playstyle choices which may or may not be reinforced by the system in use - again, certain systems present options to simply ignore certain hazards which means that certain parts of the dungeon just turn off for you, which is fine, because that's still problem solving. But the less "get out of jail free" powers you have, the more the players will need to engage with the game world as it is written, both with and in spite of whichever system you use.

The tl;dr Conclusion

    As with basically every post I make here, I think the conclusion is that understanding multiple systems rather than just "that one system you really like" is key to being able to enjoy playing games. By having an understanding of what games prioritize what kinds of play, you can look at a system neutral adventure, see what kinds of problems it wants solved and how it rewards you for solving them and then compare that to games you want to play. The more you understand the expectations of the module itself, the more you'll know what you have to do to make a given game function for it (and, importantly, how much time you're going to have to dedicate to a conversion for it).

    In the case of Ave Nox, the systems I most want to try running it with (and their most glaring chafe points) are: 

• Down We Go - doesn't have the correct number of stats, any thing to do with damage and/or defense will have to be recalculated, prioritizes short excursions due to light resources unless clever use is made of NPC merchants, may need to rebalance magic items.
   
•  Cairn 2e - also doesn't have the right number of stats, damage will need to be rebalanced across the board. Otherwise probably ok? There are some items that interact with the world in a way that do not appear in Cairn but also like...it's fine maybe?
  
  
• The Electrum Archive - obviously the established lore doesn't really line up with this dungeon, but taking the basic rules and principles would be fine. Magic & general tech level present a concern. 
  
  
• OSE - an obvious choice. As mentioned, character advancement will be roughly non-existent, but aside from that most things line up well. Would need to figure out a reasonable level to run this for, which means more MATH.

    I've got a few more system neutral adventures I've grabbed over the last year or so that I'm excited to try to apply this methodology to to pick games I think will be most cohesive with them, but that's later on down the line. I've also got part 3 of the "In Praise of Print TTRPG Zines" post to get out here soon, but at the moment I'm in deep prep for running the MAGFest Indie Tabletop Showcase next week so it's just gonna have to hold tight.

Thanks for reading.

A Second Digital Post In Praise Of Physical RPG Magazines

INTRO

 

    In the first post in this series, I covered publications with print editions that covered either the TTRPG play culture broadly, or else covered multiple games per volume. This time around, we're focusing in on publications that just focus on a singular game system. This is something I find fascinating because while some of these are still fan zines like much of the last post, a lot more of these are put out by the companies that actually produce the games in question. Although I never owned any copies, I entered the hobby right near the end of Dragon Magazine (not to be confused with the Japanese publication of the same name) before it went online as Dungeon Magazine - as far as I knew back then, that was the only magazine ABOUT roleplaying games, period. Shows what 17 year old Adam knew, Alarums and Excursions had been around twice as long as I had before I ever picked up a D&D book!

    Please know that this cannot be an exhaustive list - and, much more than last time, this set pulls from a list of publications largely unknown to me because it was only in the post-Pandemic years I really started getting into non-D&D games. I hope you have as much fun on this journey of discovery as I did! It does mean that a lot of these entries are going to be much more raw information than the lightly editorialized entries from the last post, but I hope you'll come along with me anyway - you might find out about some zines for your favorite games you never knew about!

EDIT 12/21/2025: I had intended to share a few more zines in this one, specifically ones about Draw Steel, and because I was too sleepy I forgot to do so. I've added them in at the end.

THE CHAOS CRIER

As mentioned in the last post, The Merry Mushmen also publish The Chaos Crier. Originally something intended as a bonus from The Black Sword Hack's Kickstarter, a true Issue #1 was released in 2025 which means we may expect more to come down the line! 

ADVANCED FIGHTING FANTASY: 

THE WARLOCK RETURNS

Sorry for turning our conversation into content Jay

    This and the following publication are definitely thanks to other folks cluing me in. Until I started poking around about this topic, I'd never even heard of the Fighting Fantasy series, or Advanced Fighting Fantasy, or Warlock Magazine. Turns out, there's still a vibrant community of fans who have been putting out publications dedicated to those games The Warlock Returns has been going since 2020 and is notable for being one of the few publications listed as Print On Demand in this series of posts, this one through DriveThruRPG. As a reminder, the Warlock magazine this publication is a spiritual successor to is the one from the 80s about Fighting Fantasy and not the Kobold Press publication of the same name - we'll get to that one in a bit.

FIGHTING FANTAZINE

    This one takes the award for the longest running publication on this list! Fighting Fantazine has (mostly) been going strong since 2009! They skipped a few years between 2017 and 2022 (the last published volume), and they've confirmed there IS another zine in the works. With the recent Kickstarter from Steve Jackson (that is to say, the American Steve Jackson, not the British Steve Jackson...you saw the bit at the beginning of this, we don't need to do this again) having been extremely successful in reprinting the first five books in the Fighting Fantasy series earlier this year and the Books 6-10 Kickstarter live now, I suspect we'll be seeing another surge in popularity here again. Solo games in general have had a huge uptick in the last few years - it'll be interesting to see what happens when another generation of game designers get their hands on these books.

d12 MONTHLY

    Finally, a project outside of the US and UK! Coming straight out of Fourecks Australia, d12 Monthly is mostly a D&D zine that's been going since 2021 - although there IS regular content for Old School Essentials and for solo play! Technically that means this should have gone in the last blog post but who's counting, right? As someone who started on D&D 3.5 and has now played 5e and OSE, I think pretty much everything in these issues is roughly convertible between systems - you just need to do a little math! And if you hate math, then just take inspiration from them! Each issue is themed on a specific topic, so you can just hunt for the kind of thing you need and go from there.

WARLOCK (Kobold Press)

    Oh Kobold Press, never ones to make this easy on the ol' Search Engine Optimization, are we? Though to be fair, there are but so many words one may use regarding fantasy games, and the previously mentioned Warlock magazine had been out of print for quite some time by the time that Wolfgang Baur et. al. decided they wanted to start doing a Patreon-release series of dark fantasy options for 5e, expanding on their Midgard campaign world and beyond. To be clear, I say this with love - Kobold Press was basically one of two third party companies whose content I trusted back when I was running 5e (again - I started in 3.5, so I was quite aware of Wolfgang Baur's work in the realms of dungeons and/or dragons). Kobold Press' Warlock series is actually comprised of two separate sections, each available as separate zine-length PDFs: the "Lair" series are short adventures, the "Zine" series are focused bits of worldbuilding and lore. The "Zine" series are then periodically bound as the "Grimoire" series, and the "Lairs" have only officially had one big volume but content from them appears in a few other of the big setting books Kobold Press sells. 

So like...they paid Matt Mercer for his likeness for this, right?

    I would probably be remiss not to mention the "Kobold Guide To" series here as well, even if it's somewhat outside the bounds of what we're doing here. The original 2012 "Game Design" and "Board Game Design" books both won big awards the year they came out and collected game design advice from some of the biggest names in the industry at the time. Since then, they've rebooted that series to include "Worldbuilding (Volumes 1 and 2)," "Combat," "Magic," "Plots and Campaigns," "Game Mastering," "Monsters," "Dungeons," "Roleplaying (of particular note, as it includes a significantly more diverse cast of contributors, in many senses of that word)," and a 2nd Edition of "Game Design" which includes reprints/updates of the original essays plus new essays from other folks. It's easy to take for granted the absolute glut of blogs we have these days where you can get great advice from your favorite designers for free at the click of a button. In 2012, if you weren't going to Origins/GenCon or any of the other big events, or if you weren't in a very specific set of message boards, you basically didn't have access to this kind of thing as an average person. Whether you're a fan of how Kobold Press makes games or not, they're a company that has the ability to publish this kind of content to make it available to people offline and/or for the future and they're kind of the only ones doing it right now that aren't a part of an academic library. (Though, shoutout to MIT Press for what they're doing out there.) Actually, speaking of publishing companies putting out books for a second...

A Tangent: The Simon & Schuster Family of Books

    When I was originally planning out this blog series I was actually going to skip past most of these books since I was trying to focus more on zines and magazines, but you know what? The Kobold Press thing has me thinking about who else has been kind to TTRPG bloggers and internet personalities, and the one other company I can think of is Simon & Schuster - at least, through its various imprints. Keith Ammann is still running the The Monsters Know What They're Doing blog, which is mostly largely focused around thinking about the tactics of the various folks you find in the Monster Manual. The many years of this blog have now spawned four books - two explicitly referring to D&D 5e, one more system agnostic book on lair defense and then just recently a fourth book on monster & encounter design aimed at all the big popular players - 5e sure, but also Pathfinder 2e, Cypher, Call of Cthulhu and even Shadowdark! Cypher and Shadowdark getting shoutouts in a book you can buy at major chain booksellers! That is wild! (Also while I've been writing this post, Keith actually published something about the future of this project.)

    Then, of course, you've got James D'Amato's "The Ultimate RPG" line of books and the Campfire Cards - all of this not drawn from a blog but rather from his tenure as the host on One Shot & Campaign as well as his years of improv work. I'm not going to spend too long here - if you're from my part of the Internet you're well aware of these, and if you're not I genuinely encourage you to go check these out - I've learned a lot from listening to James over the years and these books are good encapsulations of how he does what he does.

    In a similar vein, you've got Jeff Stormer's book on making fantasy characters - which like, look man, if you haven't listened to All My Fantasy Children, you don't know how extremely good Jeff is at riffing and coming up with seeds for fantasy concepts that very quickly blossom into full blown extravagance. If you haven't listened to Party of One, you might not know how well Jeff works at taking a simple character concept and making you believe it completely inside the span of an hour. At time of posting, this book is just under a year old - I'm hoping they got Jeff for a multi-book deal, because I'll be damned if he couldn't write a whole encyclopedia on building believable characters.

OK, that's enough of a sidetrack on books. Back to zines.

CARCASS CRAWLER

    Carcass Crawler is the official zine for Old School Essentials. Technically that makes anything in it compatible with any other B/X clone (or, y'know, that version of D&D). Rather than d12 Monthly's approach where when statblocks would pop up they were sparing enough that the content could mostly be converted to any D&D-oid you wanted, these zines run much more heavily towards actual gameable content with OSE, which is fine. Starting at Issue 4, Brad Kerr joins the team - which I suspect means that the adventures included in each issue from then on got much wilder.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE GONGFARMERS?

    Look man. Look. Look into my eyes. I don't know where all of you DCC fans came from but I am pretty sure you are singlehandedly keeping DriveThruRPG in business. More to the point though, the issue as to why none of the NUMEROUS DCC/MCC zines are here is because by and large, I cannot find a way to prove that they're in print, which somewhat defeats the purpose of adding them to this list. Now, I can prove that the Goodman Games website has a lot of them listed for sale, kind of - the issue is that the Goodman Games store page is not terribly easy to navigate. The DCC/MCC Zines page can be helpful, eventually, but there's no way to sort alphabetically, and there's on way to see if something is in stock or not unless you click into the product description, nor is there any way to filter the site by in-stock options only or truly any modern e-commerce conveniences. If you DO hunt through and find the fan zines that are what we're looking for here and not just adventures, you can go search those names elsewhere - mostly, they show up on DTRPG, or else you find long-out of date websites. This kind of thing is exactly the issue that prompted me to start this miniseries in the first place - the more quickly folks can find and preserve the print media versions of the online content they like, the more likely it is to stand the test of time and not succumb to linkrot, the whims of businesses, or other kinds of general enshittification.

    I do have a consolation prize for you: at time of writing, there is a very well maintained resource of DCC fan content including a list of known zines. On that zine page, there's also a link to a(n outdated) list of OSR zines, many of which suffer the same issues that have befallen the DCC zines - but it's a good resource to go hunting with. The final blog post in this series is going to be a roundup of digital only things that I think would be in print of the world was right and just, so I'll be putting a roundup of the various OOP DCC zines there.

HIVE MIND

    Alright Hive Mind, you're on thin ice. Hive Mind makes it onto this list because sometimes it is in print. Mainly if you're lucky enough to catch the Mothership team at a convention. If you go to the Tuesday Knight Games website you can go be teased and tantalized by what a print version of this excellent Mothership community zine looks like, but you're not going to be able to get one unless you're lucky - or I guess maybe if TKG sees this post and is like "Dang, we probably ought to make this physical version obtainable." A kid can dream, right?

MEGADAMAGE

    Megadamage is also a weird one to put on here because outside of some concept images, it doesn't exist (yet). Like, it probably will - volumes 1 and 2 were add-ons for Mothership Month this and last year, and they're supposed to be filled with comics and fiction and extra content for Mothership - but as far as I know, only the folks at TKG know what these actually look like or when they'll exist in the real world. I actually don't even have a link to point you to - most of the information I could actually find about them online come from crowdfunder updates.

THE BÖRK MORGUE: ISSUE #666

    This one is cheating, slightly, but GreysonWHY has put out a few Borg zines over the years, so I'm counting it. Exalted Funeral put out the print copy of this one - and actually, while we're talking about it Exalted Funeral does actually put out quite a few magazines and zines - Carcass Crawler got mentioned earlier and of course there's GreysonWHY's zines, but they've also got just straight up fiction magazines as well. That's a little outside the scope of this blog series, but it's worth noting all the same.

RATCATCHER MAGAZINE

    Tidal Wave Games, largely known for their many projects in conversation with and partially in critique of many old-school systems as well as See You Space Cowboy...has also begun putting out a Draw Steel-centric magazine. Given the relative newness of the system (at time of writing this blog, it's only been a few months since the first actual release of The Delian Tomb in partnership with Chessex at GenCon), it's surprising that this and our next few entries have had time to come together, but it's cool to see folks like Tidal Wave Games be interested in getting community-submitted content together to publish.

THE BLACKSMITH'S GUILD

    Billing itself as the first fanzine for Draw Steel, The Blacksmith's Guild is up to four volumes this month and also provides additional information for the game in the same vein as many other projects listed here and like Dragon Magazine before it.

    As a quick point here, I appreciate this a disclaimer for two reasons: 1. This is the correct stance to have regarding accidental use of AI - you should be willing to be notified and be willing to remove the offending art; but 2. I feel this serves as an important thing to touch on for people who are not artists who want to make fanzines - we as creators need to be doing more to actively not use AI art and to not platform, uh, platforms, that purvey it. There are many artists out there who will create stock TTRPG art packs for purchase and use that do very broadly declare that they make that art with no AI - Fernando Salvaterra comes to mind immediately, as do movements like the TTRPG Art Asset Jam. If you are someone who is light on funds and wants to purchase art for your fanzine, I would recommend prioritizing custom art for your cover or for chapter/page breaks and utilizing public domain art via things like the Smithsonian's Open Access.

OUTRO

    This one was a little harder than the last one to research! I find it interesting that by and large, the single-game zines that exist are largely focused on dungeon crawlers, and specifically on D&D or D&D-adjacent products. My rampant unfounded speculation is that this skews this way due to the culture of Dragon and Dungeon Magazines over the years giving people a mental template of what to shoot for whereas other games may not map quite as directly to this kind of project. Someone I had spoken to online (please forgive me, I do not remember who it was but if it was you and you reach out to me I'll correct this) had speculated that this may skew away from more story-focused games due to those games not having as permissive or obvious 3rd party content licenses. There's also the fact that based on the kinds of games and communities I tend to hang around in, my research may be heavily skewed! Whatever the reason, if you're reading this and you know about a single-game zine or magazine that I missed, reach out to me! I may just do a follow up to this series later on down the line!

Stay weird out there.

A Digital Post In Praise Of Physical RPG Magazines

 INTRO

    It will likely come as no surprise to someone who would be reading this blog that much of what we would consider modern TTRPG design discourse and thought lives and dies in the ephemerality of the Internet. Back when I was but a wee D&D 3.5 CharOp board denizen, The Forge and the G+ chatrooms fermented the thoughts and feelings and games and grudges that my generation of game designers would come to know - or not, as the case may be, as in some ways many of those designers became influential enough that their games are now grandparents or great-grandparents many times over and we may have never seen the originals that spawned them. Before them, there were tales of the fan-zines that kept the RPG hobby alive - people circulating handmade periodicals, or in some lucky cases a game would be tied to a big enough publisher that it could have its own tie-in magazine that fans could write in to. 

    While people say that what you put on the Internet is forever, we are finding that more and more that is not the case - websites will die, archival efforts like The Internet Archive are under constant attack, people may scrub their online presence after a scandal. Consider the fact that much of Magic The Gathering's official web releases - including literal YEARS worth of lore - only still exist because someone backed it all up: WOTC didn't see a point in maintaining it since it didn't turn a profit. (Shoutouts to all the original members of The Vorthos Cast, who all ended up getting jobs with WOTC because they proved they knew what the hell they were talking about and proved the value of a lot of that stuff.) Physical books and magazines though, those are much harder to purge. Sometimes they too exist as transformations of the original work - maybe a publication will bundle a bunch of blog posts together and reformat them with new art and layout, maybe someone takes the opportunity to do some Lucasing to their old work to make it more accurate or palatable to a modern audience. Sometimes, the people who contribute work to these publications become personæ non grata and while the work they did may have been good or even foundational, their presence in the work becomes a blight upon its name such that modern designers don't even know who they were. All of these things, even the changed ones, become markers of the time they are written in and sometimes can provide just as much context about the ecology of the gaming hobby as they do about the games they're being written about in the first place. To that end, I'd like to take the time to shout out some currently running publications - and as always, I'm not making any money off of this, I'm just shilling for a cause I think is good: keeping good records to help future generations.

   There are a few things I need to make clear here before we get too deep in here: mainly, that the more I started poking around and asking for help on this, the more people kept coming up with additional entries which has made this a much more in depth post than I first expected. I've tried to keep this as short and punchy as I could, but I'm going to have to split this into three separate posts. This post is going to focus on print zines for more that one game/category. The next post I'll be putting out (later this week, so I don't spam you all) will be focused on magazines that are dedicated to a specific game. The final post will be about digital-only zines that if the world was right and just would have print versions to go along with them. 

    Shoutout to everyone who told me about their favorites, and especially to all the Bretonnians folks in the UK for shouting out some publications that hadn't made their way across my desk yet. There are games I'd never even heard of that still have robust, thriving communities out there, and I think that rules.

    EDIT 12/21/2025: I made one very important omission in this post, and I have added it as the last entry to this list.

TUMULUS

    Tumulus is the paid counterpart to the extremely prolific and extremely free blog "Skeleton Code Machine" as well as the (presumably) free community game design presentations given at local libraries by Exeunt Press. If you're unfamiliar with "Skeleton Code Machine" I...I don't know how, honestly. Your friend and mine John Exeuntpress writes posts like he's haunted by that Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross - Always. Be. Posting. More importantly, not only is he extremely consistent in addition to maintaining a terrifying output schedule, he's also got this quarterly zine that lets him explore some weird and wacky stuff - some of it (in his own words) is greatest hits posts from "Skeleton Code Machine," but each volume contains a few exercises to build your own games, a few theory articles, and a few ready-to-go games - and not all of it is home grown Exeunt Press originals! Each volume has about eight chapters, excluding the introduction or any full spread art, and guest contributors so far include Strega Wolf, M. Allen Hall, Jesse Ross, Hinokodo, Nate Whittington, Junk Food Games, Binary Star and Charlotte Laskowski. If you get a lot out of "Skeleton Code Machine," this one's a no brainer. Also, if you do a subscription for four volumes over the year, it costs you right around $5 a month up front, give or take, which is a pretty appropriate amount of money for a subscription these days I think. 

MEAT CASTLE GAME WARE ANNUAL

    Christian Sorrell has their fingers in a lot of (meat) pies. In addition to being fairly prolific in the Mothership scene, they've also got pretty regular MÖRK BORG and Cairn content that pops up as well a fantasy tactics game going that they're slowly building on. They also show up pretty regularly contributing to other peoples' projects. What we're here for today, however, is the "Meat Castle Game Ware Annual" series, which collects all of the freebie newsletter games they put out over the course of a year - currently, there are two volumes out: #1 has content from the games mentioned above, plus some microgames and some setting-agnostic content. #2 has more standalone content - a few games, a little Mothership, but lots more musings on games. No word on if/when the next one of these drops, but you can keep up with Christian's newsletter here.

KNOCK!

    I'm glad that publishing groups like The Merry Mushmen exist - for one thing, they're responsible for rounding up years and years and YEARS of blog posts, giving them some good ol' spitshine and fancy new art and layout and presenting them to the masses by way of the KNOCK! series (currently on Issue #5 with #6 theoretically in progress). But beyond that, they've really made a name for being a good indie publisher for OSR content. They don't do a lot of publishing, but they've got a pretty rock solid line of Old-School Essentials books, they've got The Black Sword Hack, and finally they have one other zine I hadn't noticed until just now as I was writing this which will get covered in the next entry in this series. 

    The one key note here, though, is that these are somewhat premium products. Obviously, all the blog posts still exist from their original creators (as long as their websites are still up, of course) and you can go read them, but getting these nice versions can be costly - particularly if you're in the United States, like myself. That said, if you grab a bundle deal (or get them through a crowdfunder) so you're getting everything all at once, you can avoid a lot of the pain of importing them from France. Or you could live in a country that knows how tariffs work and you could avoid all that!

WYRD SCIENCE

    Another excellent publication from across the pond, Wyrd Science is about twice the size of the first two zines mentioned and contains interviews with game designers, authors of novels for Warhammer 40k, comic book creators, and community organizers, plus game reviews and more. Unlike most of the other publications on this list, Wyrd Science leans much more heavily into representing the culture side of tabletop rather than just providing gameable content, and I think that's super valuable to have in print: for one, I can read two pages way faster than I can listen to a 30 minute interview; and for two, niche culture magazines like this are a truly dying breed. Perhaps I may be overly taken by the ritual of reading a magazine to learn about a thing you like, but as someone who has absolutely fallen into the passive media absorption brainrot of letting reviews and interviews in podcast form just constantly wash over me, I retain so very little - whereas when I read an interview, I'm actively engaging with it, I'm seeing what pictures the editor wanted to put with it, I'm consuming it as a whole experience.

    Yes I DO have ADHD, why do you ask?

    One final note: by the time this goes out, the Wyrd Science website version's days are numbered. That's not to say they're going away, but per this article (which, again, to prove my point, may not exist the next time you try to click it) outlines the financial untenability of maintaining their own separate website. This is a thing I empathize quite a lot with as someone who does next to none of what Wyrd Science does but have still paid an arm and a leg for a website over the past few years in website hosting nonsense. When I had last polled the internet for help on this, Hinokodo had helpfully provided a step-by-step guide to hosting your own site which I certainly need to do - if you're out there Mr. Wyrd Science, if you still want to have a site I hope that helps you out. One way or the other though, Wyrd Science has stated they'll still be around and that the most recent funding push for Volume #7 of Wyrd Science has re-energized him into making sure the zine survives. These are limited print runs and again, if you live in a country whose leadership has yet to look up the word tariff in the dictionary it can be a little dicey getting them over here - but it's worth it.

RASCAL NEWS

    Look. I support paying journalists a living wage. You support paying journalists a living wage. We both know that Rascal was founded to be able to provide unbiased reporting on the tabletop games industry and beyond. We've both got the subscription, right? But what if you have a friend who hates journalism and needs to be shown the light, or at the very least lightly concussed with a small book until they learn the error of their ways? What if you just wanted a tailored Rascal experience that was all gas, no breaks, just the bangers? Then you'd better be one of the like four people who sees this link to the IPR website because Rascal - Year One is sold out pretty much everywhere.

    More to the point - similar to but contrasted against Wyrd Science, Rascal - Year One is a zine covering tabletop culture broadly - not just RPGs, but also how each of the writers themselves engage with the portion of the fandom that best suits their interests. I'm not gonna belabor the point considering how difficult this has become to get in print - but if you can, do, and if you can't, clamor loudly and give Rascal your subscription money so they can pay for another print run.

THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS REVIEW

    Probably the newest of newcomers in this particular list, the International Players Review literally just funded their books naught but a few weeks before this blog was written. They generated a lot of buzz, but I'm gonna be honest, I don't know where to find much information about these folks - they're flying pretty far under the radar! Some digging does reveal the Bluesky account for Golden Achiever (credited as "Graphic Designer" on the Backerkit page but does also seem to be in charge of the Itch page and a Patreon) I do find it fun that these zines are straight up intended to be evoking the nostalgic zines of yesteryear rather than channeling them perhaps on a more stylistic, internal level like Tumulus has, but I'll be honest, my interest was piqued! Particularly excellent was noting that, in going through the descriptions of #1-3, #3 contains an interview with Lee Gold, whom is ultimately responsible for this kind of zine existing in the first place and only just retired this year after roughly five decades of this. Excited to see what comes of these folks.

SECRET PASSAGES

    SPEAKING of zines intending to invoke yesteryear, Secret Passages does this too but coming about it from the reverse side of things - it's not that the zines themselves are evoking the past, it's the writers who were there in the first place! Self described as "an Old School RPG and Oldhammer" publication, this thing has folks from all over the history of the industry (though, understandably, skewed on the English side of the hobby) sharing stories both about the hobby as it was and how certain things today have arcs that can be traced all the way back then, but also just all kinds of fun little gaming apocrypha that can get lost over time as the oral tradition of the hobby fades - hence, put it in a zine! Job done. 

    They've just launched a Kickstarter for Issue #3 of the zine, which is slightly curious to me - not in and of itself to use a crowdfunder to get a print run, of course, but rather that it appears that they're using it to offer multi-volume subscriptions, meaning if you back high enough during one Kickstarter, you don't need to back the next one. I would think that the Kickstarter fees alone might eat you up rather than just sourcing subscriptions as normal, but I suspect I also have no idea what I'm talking about. Legitimately very interested to hear about this kind of funding model, I don't think I've seen anyone do it like this before. 

    Either way, Kickstarter tells me that this project is based out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so unless there's a Geordie audiobook add on pledge level AM NOT BUYIN' AN AM GAN'N HYEM. (Shoutout to all two of my Tyneside pals, whomst I have just lost with that bit.) (Also that's a lie, I can't say no to something with Lukasz Kowalczuk art on the front.)

PRISMATIC WASTELAND

    Hello, Warren. You're reading this because I posted it in your Discord. You probably saw this title and said "Well, I didn't write a magazine, so I'm probably not in this. That's a shame, I really wish more people would say nice things about that book I wrote." Well JOKE'S ON YOU, Birdman. It's your blog's 5th birthday and you're getting a mention in here too.

    To any of you unfamiliar with the Prismatic Wasteland blog, what began five years ago as a way to chat about an Ultraviolet Grasslands game and review some games has expanded into a blog that's also includes all kinds of theory posts, event coverage, ready-to-run game content and more. After putting out a few games including the excellent Barkeep on the Borderlands, Warren joined the fight against Internet enshittification, collected all the hits from the blog from 2021-2024, spruced 'em up real nice and got the cool cats over at Games Omnivorous to publish it. Well worth the read.

GLAIVE

     Glaive is one I'm very excited to learn about, and it looks like I'm not the only one: The Weekly Scroll just interviewed the magazine's editor CJ Somavia. Glaive is a lifestyle magazine a la Thrasher - not just about TTRPGs, but about all kinds of related game culture. As someone who already lives in the middle of the Venn Diagram of lovers of dungeon synth, chiptunes, TTRPGs, wargames, and the late 90s era of gaming, this is unfortunately laser targeted at me and now I'm gonna have to figure out how to go beat someone up and get a copy of the first volume since it's 1.exclusively a physical magazine and 2. starting to pop off. Very excited to see where this one goes.

UNDER THE DICE

    In a similar vein as Glaive, Under The Dice is put out by Steve H of the Hive Scum podcast. This is, in my opinion, peak fanzine - almost no information about it online, only the amount of web presence that is necessary to get information out there, and otherwise it's getting around by word of mouth. I literally cannot tell you how much of the zine skews towards TTRPG content versus wargaming content, but I can tell you that the Glaive interview with these folks is up online to view, so I encourage you to check that out. And hey, UTD, if you see this? If you restock your zines, I'll buy 'em! 

SPEAK, FALSE MACHINE

    One of the more prolific OSR bloggers still trucking on today, Patrick Stuart released this collection a while back. I don't think I can sum this up better than in the item description, and I believe it underpins the main point of this post and its sequels:

OUTRO

    Sweet Jiminy Jesus. This project quickly spiraled out of control. Thankfully the other two posts that will follow this one are functionally almost done since I cut a lot of it out of this one, but still. Again, thanks to everyone who helped me expand the search beyond what I already knew. If you're someone like me who craves physical media, please show these folks some love. Stay tuned for the next post, which is all zines/zine-adjacent objects which are all dedicated to specific games.