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!
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!
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.
|
| 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.
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.
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
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.
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