The Razor Thin Edge Between The Desire for Community vs. Commodification

    You're getting multiple posts in the same month, that's how you know I've got way too much to do and how badly I need to free up mental computing power. Sorry not sorry. Also, a quick heads up: I am sponsored by literally nobody in this post, and in fact am quite the opposite - I would argue everything I'm about to talk about is stuff I've paid for myself or received as an inclusion with something I've bought with the notable exception of The Chair, which Zach Hazard Vaupen literally hunted me down and handed me at PAX Unplugged like the world's most helpful Terminator. This will become relevant, but I'm also letting you know because hoo boy am I about to namedrop a bunch of people and supplies and I'm doing that because they're relevant, not because someone's paying me to do it.

Also, this is going to be yet another long one - if you'd like to cut the crap and get right to the actionable content without all the context, just CTRL+F "What Is Adam's Actual Vision" without the quotes and you'll hop to the end.

An Introductory Diversion: The Return of the Convention Go-Bag

    I know not many people read it, but one of my first posts here was about my convention go-bag and how I'd fine tuned it for anything I'd conceivably need at a convention, because after one year at GenCon lugging around my huge heavy duty backpack with room for my laptop, extra screen, big wooden GM screen, all my books and more I had had enough. It's been long enough since my days in marching band playing sousaphone, my body just ain't built for that anymore. The thing is though, when I'm not at cons but AM running other IRL games, I find myself longing for something with a bit more storage space - not as much as the heavy duty bag, but more than the go-bag. That leads me to opting for a messenger bag and the old classic: the Trapper Keeper. (Yes, that's the South Park Trapper Keeper Akira/Terminator/2001: A Space Odyssey homage. I usually hide some link gags in these posts but I figure I'll throw a content warning out for cartoon body horror on this one. Let's not think about how long ago Season 4 of South Park was, okay?) 

Enter The Trapper Keeper

Don't you give me lip about falling for nostalgia. Just let me have this okay?

    This is great. I've got basically all the space for everything I need, I could throw dice in the pencil bag if I wanted to, the interior pocket can comfortably fit a few zines inside it (if I'm taking it with me on a trip, I will often throw game design zines in there to get me thinking, or sometimes a worldbuilding game if I think I'll need to entertain friends). It's great, and it's specifically great when I know I've got plenty of prep time to bring everything I might need with me at once. But I don't really like taking a messenger bag with me everywhere I go these days, and if I want to write notes down to keep with me for upcoming game things, it's not the most convenient. I mean I GUESS I could type them into my Notes app on my phone or throw them in a private Discord chat to myself and then copy them down later, but that's a lot of steps AND reliance on technology/my faulty brainmeat to remember to sync things up before the game. Part of the reason I wanted to get that go-bag ready is to have everything in one spot at all times, and so that got me thinking about something a little more compact. 

    In the go-bag, I've got the little utility bag that has the e-reader, mechanical pencil, and two Field Notes journals in it, and that's honestly just about perfect - but with the e-reader in it, it's a little fragile to just throw in any old bag/cargo pants pocket and go. I like a lot of the options the little utility bag gives me though - just like the Trapper Keeper, it's got pockets to slide things into, space for a writing utensil, and is otherwise of the correct form factor to slide into my bag without taking up much space. But also, I've found out that I write like a caveman and cannot be trusted not to constantly break and/or jam the lead, so I want some kind of durable pen and I'm not quite ready to commit to the world of fountain pens yet - I was gifted one, but I use it so rarely I have to clean when it I pick it up to use it since the ink dries on the nib. While hunting around Richmond for advice on cleaning that fountain pen, I stumbled onto a happy compromise which would spiral out into the real reason I'm writing this post. But first: the compromise.

Yo Dawg, I Herd U Liek Journals

    In the not-too-distant past, I had also started trying to use some of the journals laying around the house to help create a physical backup of my Google Calendar. I like to joke that I'm the most extensive Google Calendar user that's not in a polycule because thanks to your friend and mine ADHD, I can't remember when anything is in the future. I also plan my life out many months in advance. You can see where this might begin to present a problem. So, I try to make physical backups of my schedule since it helps me visualize my upcoming time commitments and I can also do things like physically map out my days to combat time blindness. I had been getting better about this, but had also been trying to keep one journal as just my scheduler and one for all the random things I'd need to work out during the day and come back to, and this arrangement was just bulky enough that it was causing me to forget to take it with me places, which was again beginning to defeat the point. 

    While I was bouncing around various stationary stores in town trying to get advice about cleaning the pen (spoiler, I was basically just told to use soap and water and to just dry it thoroughly and quickly after cleaning so it didn't rust), I began to see certain accessories pop up in multiple stores and one in particular caught my eye and really started locking this into place for me - the stickable pocket. Leuchtturm 1917s have a pocket in the back already, but it never occurred to me that someone might make replacement pockets - or, for that matter, pockets for journals that didn't have them in the first place. The fact that it also came with a pen loop was all the better - I had gotten a nice Sharpie gel pen during a trip recently as well as some tiny Bullet Journals to use for keeping inventory for merch at a music festival, and THAT meant I could slap one of those in one of the pockets, stick a second pocket into the journal just in case, and as long as I could find something I could use to make a straight edge with when I needed it I'd be good to go. I ended up grabbing a brass stencil and another slide-on holster for it - overkill, sure, but until I find another one that can go in one of the pockets it'll do. I've managed to keep this with me every day when I've gone to work and it's always nearby at home, so I consider this a success. But we're not here to talk about my journaling habits - at least, not exactly. Put a pin in this because what we're actually here to talk about is...

Gameable Ephemera

An assortment of games of various formats, plus related bookmarks & business cards.
I have more, but lord knows where they are

    I loathe single-use objects. I rarely use bookmarks, but they're always included as special bonuses with books when you order from places because hey, it's free promo right? Usually, they end up in the garbage can. Likewise with business cards - after I've made contact with the people after the event I've received them from, unless they're really spectacular I very rarely have a need to keep them. This is something the TTRPG community has realized and has thankfully started to combat - whether you're Yochai squeezing whole keyed dungeons into specially formatted business cards, Reilly Qyote including instructions and some statblocks on a bookmark so you don't have to keep flipping What A Horrible Knight while you're using it, or the birdman himself giving you optional IRL drinking game rules + some cocktail recipes to go along with the in-game drinking game rules, these can serve as anything from additional marketing for yourself to standalone gameable content. They sure can be troublesome to keep up with, though, especially if they were to fall out of the book or zine you're keeping them in. Sure, you can just paperclip them in I guess, but unless you're stealing them from your office job who has paperclips these days? Plus you run the risk of damaging them or the book.

    All-around cool kid and well-known maker of keepsake games Shing Yin Khor has an answer to this in the form of their a short rest series of randomized game-enhancing booster packs. These have long-since sold out, of course, but the idea here is solid - you take your little bonus stuff, slap it in something labeled to keep it safe and then you just keep it with whatever game materials you want to use it with. This is the more minimalist approach to something rather than, like, one of those huge packs that Beadle & Grimm's sells, and significantly more system neutral. 

    Actually, hang on a second. The cool thing about all of these bookmarks and business cards and booster packs is how interchangeable they are. In fact, I know I've seen people put whole games on business cards and bookmarks before, to say nothing of just the abundance of one page RPGs. And what are all these microRPG elements if not basically the same as the joesky tax? People love writing little things to stick into games. Hell, people love writing little games to twist other games. Once you become enough of a gaming sicko, you practically have to start making little bits of homebrew or you start to lose your grip. It's like some kind of law of g-

Ask Not For Whom The GLoG Calls To...

    I'm not explaining the Goblin Laws of Gaming. You can listen to the Dead Letters folks talk about it if you really don't know, or you can read Arnold Kemp's original post linked above, or you can visit the subreddit, or go watch Hexed Press or any number of other YouTube people talk about it. There's probably a thousand other online communities for the GLoG I don't know about, and it's because

People

Like

Making

Weird Little Stuff

And

Sharing

It

Particularly those of us with terminal cases of can'tshutthefuckupitis.

A Tangent About Convergent Evolution: Artist Trading Cards

    Whilst chewing on everything that has/will go(ne) into this post, I discovered a whole other community out there - artist trading cards. I knew nothing about them before today, but this video goes into the whole ethos behind them as well as some basic techniques for making them - and since so many TTRPGs I know involve altering playing cards, I thought this might be a welcome inclusion for those of you who also might not be aware since there's a lot of overlap in goals. But this, too, appears to be a scene who loves making things for making things' sake and trading them around with other creators. Also, critically, according to this video the scene is staunchly anti-compensation - that is to say, the goal of these is to make a thing and spread joy, not money. Again, if this video is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it, of course, other than it's the first thing I've seen about this scene so I haven't gone and done further research because holy shit this post is long enough already), buying or selling ATCs is a pretty big taboo, and I want you to put a pin in that as well.

Capitalism Is Always The Bad Guy

    So, let's thread all this together. While trying to find a way to minimize the number of notebooks I'm carrying around while also making sure I've got enough supplies with me at all times that I can jot notes or run a game at a moment's notice, I simultaneously realize that I've got a bunch of random gaming ephemera that I don't really have a place for but does seem to be made to be stored in something like what I'm slapping together. I also realize that people love making these kinds of things, they can either be pure game mechanics or gameable content plus marketing, and that if someone were so inclined they could create little packets instead of just single objects but ultimately you could still keep everything together to mix and match however you liked, and if these things were made cheaply but abundantly enough they could be traded around, collected, and allow people to have whole bespoke systems unique to each person depending on what you did and didn't want to keep in your notebook folder. All at once, I saw three possible futures: a world in which I started Yet Another Game Jam and maybe got people trading things around at events or maybe even encouraged creators to start making event-specific content to pass out as promotional material; a world in which I worked with people to make some seed content packs (i.e. a pack of fantasy rules, a pack of sci-fi rules, a pack of system neutral monsters, etc) and sold them as little collectible doodads; and the world where I walked up to John Leuchttrum or Mr. Simon Schuster and went "Hello, I have an extremely marketable idea that already has a community around it, please give me your big time printing money to coordinate a product about this." With visions of gaming communities and dollar signs dancing in my eyes, I did what any reasonable person should - drove 8 hours to talk to Shing about it.

    Disco Business

    OK actually I drove to NYC to see Nicky Siano DJ, BUT Shing was happy to get lunch and chat with me. They had a lot of really good community-centric ideas - things like having LARPs codify event-specific rules in little cards along with your character-specific rules, or creators at cons collaborating ahead of time to create a multi-part adventure that you'd only see the full version of if you visited each of them not unlike a stamp rally. They were also super into the idea of, if the form factor was more in the playing card size, having binders of rule cards to show off and trade with people like Magic cards. I brought up the idea of the game jam and providing people templates so people could print at home, and they mentioned if a bunch of people ended up wanting to go in on it, getting bulk printing made of each of the projects and then distributed to the creators either by mail or at events would be a really fun way to encourage people to trade things around and keep costs generally low while keeping the quality consistent.

(Also, I sadly did not get to see Nicky DJ, the venue lost power. I did take the time to finally visit the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, however, and ran into quite a few people I knew as I was buying games, so that was an unexpected delight. Also Shing gave me some of their games?!)

 

He Is A Real Blogger, Not A Real Worm

    As luck would have it, Mr. His Majesty The Worm Josh McCrowell visited Richmond very recently and I also had a chance to talk about this whole concept with him. As someone who's much more tapped into the Blogosphere (and the GLOGosphere, for that matter), I figured he'd have some thoughts about this. We had as many intelligible ideas as soju and fast-casual Korean food would allow us that evening - mostly in the context of His Majesty The Worm. I feel like the way the GM builds Wormgame's behind-the-scenes functionality could work very well with something like this - whether that be detailing whole floors of The Underworld or just single encounters. And as I type this out, I realize that as long as your entire stack was the same form factor, this would be a really fun and tactile way to stock your Meatgrinder table for each level of the Underworld - with players getting to keep certain cards once they defeat them/find the item on them/otherwise remove it from active use. But regardless - I think that if you're the kind of sicko that loves making dungeons and fiddling around with little bespoke mechanics, as I know you have to be if you're running HMTW, this kind of thing would be right up your alley. The quasi-official HMTW fan Discord already has all kinds of projects on it including bestiaries and converting various megadungeons to be usable with it, there's no way an IRL meetup of Adherents of the Worm wouldn't be made better with swapping around tiny pieces of homebrew.

What Is Adam's Actual Vision 

(And More Importantly, Do We Need To Beat The Capitalism Out Of You)

    OK look, as cool as it would be to have like...bespoke A5 notebooks with art that I've commissioned from people with enough pockets and accessories that you could carry one notebook stuffed to the brim with gameable content from everyone I meet at conventions and get to quit my job because everyone paid me to be the middleman to get all of this done for them, that's not actually the thing I want. That's just the dream of being able to bring joy to people without having to worry about finances. And in the unlikely event that one of the like three people I know who could somehow begin the process of making something like that happen both read this blog post this far AND wanted to get a project like that going, it's something that would still largely have to be free and open source regardless, so no need for the pitchforks yet.

    No, what I'd actually like to see and maybe can try to facilitate would be something like a series of interconnected, themed jams to start - giving people specific prompts as well as templates to allow folks to start building up a body of work and then organize meetups IRL to trade them around, maybe coordinate with some friends who have their own companies to get them to give out little booster packs of event-specific content to encourage people to come to those booths, and if I was feeling like a real sicko, maybe get some buttons made to denote people who have stuff to trade at cons. I uh. I have a reputation with giving out buttons.

    The thing is, this kind of thing could absolutely be co-opted and monetized and turned into a whole corporate...thing. Like, Field Notes has a goddamn partnership with Dungeons & Dragons now. The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book (I linked it earlier) inexplicably has perforated tearaway pages, and though they're WAY too huge to paste into an A5 notebook, there's no reason they couldn't release a smaller edition in the form factor of the Ultimate RPG Campfire Questions or the Worldbuilding Guide - which, again, no shade to James D'Amato, he's out here proving this kind of thing has a market which is exactly my point. On the one hand, I'd love a premade kit of supplies to get out and mass produce this kind of stuff on the fly - like, could you imagine going to the store to pick up a kit that had one of those thermal printer sticker machines that has the app that links to your phone, a bunch of paper perforated to the right size, and just being able to snap a picture of something you sketched, print stickers of that sketch and stick them onto that paper and then just write your contact info on the back, and then that person takes it and shoves it into their Bullet Journal branded with their favorite AP series? The convenience would almost make up for the fact that you've got to use a proprietary app, and proprietary paper, and of course there would have to be a monthly subscription and you know there would be a way to sneak AI tools nobody but corporate wants into it and suddenly what started as a community project ends up tasting of ash to anyone involved from the beginning.

    I'm exaggerating and invoking a lot of negative buzzwords for effect here, but the point remains that I guess somewhere in the heart of this idea, there's grappling with the fact that the closer something like this gets to mainstream viability, the less it feels like there's a community behind it, and frankly I don't know how to grapple with that. It's something that seems to be in all the other parts of the hobby, and it's so easy for a new idea to succumb to being morphed and changed in ways that seem good at the beginning only to have them secretly be cursed the whole time. I'm gonna chew on this for a while - I'm certainly not in the place to start a whole jam movement right now, but maybe someday soon with some thoughtful help from other folks who know what they're doing. Is that you maybe? Reach out.

Outro & Citations

    I've talked about a lot of people here today. I try to be meticulous about in-context hyperlinked citations on these things, but from my old college chiptune blogging days I still have the urge to provide a bibliography for these things, particularly since a lot of folks whose material showed up in pictures didn't get talked about. If you're interested in anyone whose stuff you've seen me reference but you don't want to try to flip back up for it, never you worry.

In the meantime, stay weird out there, and if you're not already working on an Appendix N Jam entry, maybe you should go look at some of these other jams.

Stay weird out there.

Mentioned Above:

• Zach Hazard Vaupen/Emo Sludge: Bsky | Website
• Josh McCrowell: Bsky | Itch | Blog | editor for KNOCK! mag
• Reilly Qyote: Bsky | Itch 
• WF Smith/Prismatic Wasteland: Bsky | Itch | Website
• Bo Ryan Crum/Gravy Press: Bsky | Beneath The Muckfort on Itch & Cairn Press
• Adam & Jamie/72 STATIONS: Adam's Bsky | Jamie's Bsky | Infinity of Ships on Itch | Website
• Yochai Gal: Blog | Ludography | Between Two Cairns | Cairn Press
• Shing Yin Khor: Bsky | Website 
• Arnold Kemp/Goblinpunch: Bsky | Blog 
• Dead Letters Podcast is Sam, Misha, and Walid
• Feral Indie Studio: Charlie's Bsky | Alex's Bsky | Into the Wyrd & Wild Itch | Website
• Johnson² is available through Peregrine Coast Press, which has all the links
• Thrill of Dracula is by Kenneth Hite via Pelgrane Press

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.

Building The Ultimate Convention GM Go-Bag

I have a problem: if left to my own devices, I will pack the biggest, heaviest bag of stuff to lug around to conventions. This always ends in disaster because my high school marching band days are farther and farther behind me and just because I used to lug around a sousaphone back in the day doesn't mean I want to lug around a 50lb duffle bag filled with all my fancy doodads and gewgaws. I mean, I do, but my withering agèd form would prefer that I do not. Given that these days I often pay my way to conventions by running games, if I can't lug around my laptop, second screen, thick wooden GM screen, binder, and at least five different RPG books that I just brought just in case my laptop died and I needed to reference things, what am I to do?

Enter: Man Alone's ultimate solo RPG arsenal video.

I had seen this video recently and it got me thinking - sure, Man Alone is talking about building a great kit to keep at your desk or wherever it is you play your solo TTRPGs, but surely you could extrapolate this out to be a portable kit, right? And with truly very few tweaks, you could make sure you had everything you'd need to run games for yourself OR for other people. A kit for every occasion, or darn near at least.

After watching through the video again and chewing on what kinds of tools are necessary for most games, my thought process was thus:

• The notebooks, fancy mechanical pencil and notebook holder are spot on, can't go wrong there.

• Most solo games require dice, a standard American deck of 52 playing cards, a tarot deck, a Jenga tumbling block tower, or some combination thereof to play in addition to somewhere to record notes/story.
  
  
• Most multiplayer RPGs need you to have a book, your standard array of dice, a tarot deck, character sheets, or some combination thereof. Character sheets are easy enough to fold up and stow pretty much anywhere, or can be dumbed down onto notecards or even done on phones for most games so I'm not too worried there.
  
  
• Being on the go means that chargers are super important, as are some kind of headphones in case you're just waiting around.
  
  
• I always forget business cards, and sometimes I need to pretend like I know what I'm doing so I should find some way to bring those along.
  
  
• The bag needs to be small and light - under 5lbs when full if at all possible. Cross-body is preferable since I often dress fancy at cons and tiny backpacks can look a little silly. I'm allowed to be vain, okay?
  
  
• Needs to be extremely obvious that it is mine - I've learned my lessons from lugging around my ancient ThinkGeek Bag of Holding.

And so, after poking around what I had at my house and making a quick trip onto the internet to pick up a few missing pieces, I ended up with this:

I really went round and round on what bag to choose. I really wanted something cross-body, and I REALLY wanted to stay away from the TACTICOOL æsthetic, but in the end you just can't beat the efficiency of these military style bags. The fact that it came in neon purple really sold me on it though - despite being a color I like, it is so eye-blisteringly bright that it should be very hard to lose and almost impossible that anyone else is rocking around with one. And down the line if I ever feel like it just doesn't have enough space, I can always grab another MOLLE compatible bag and bolt it onto the outside.

While I appreciated Man Alone's suggestion of the nice fancy notebook case, I'm about to change jobs and needed to cut costs where I could so I ended up with something off-brand but just as effective! You may also notice something there I did not plan for originally - a small e-reader. This was something a relative got for free that they had pawned off on me because I'm "young" and "tech-y" and has basically sat around collecting dust, but it's absolutely something that can both go on the internet when needed AND download PDFs of any games I'm planning on running, which means that solves the issue of small bag, big books. In addition to holding two Field Notes journals, the mechanical pencil and the e-reader, the notebook case also fits a tiny metal briefcase with my business cards in it. 

The Horror On The Orient Express deck of playing cards was a purchase at my very first GenCon, and the Strange Beast Tarot by Shing Yin Khor was a very cool purchase at this year's SPX, so they were obvious includes. One of those power banks actually has a solar panel on the side of it to recharge with, so that's for sure getting clipped on the outside of the bag, meaning the other bank (plus another one I had laying around) along with the charge cables can all cram into a pocket together. 

The dragonscale scroll case was a little bit of a concession here and one I might seek to replace later - I really liked the little box carrier that Man Alone had in his video, but with it really only being able to hold one set of dice, I wanted to grab something I could put multiple sets in in case I need to lend some dice out to other players, or feel like playing a particularly Fireball-happy Wizard and feel the need to carry around 10 extra d6. My dream item would be something I could use to have all my dice and decks of cards in the same object, but I just couldn't find anything that fit into this small bag. Perhaps something to tackle in the future.

And so, this is what it looks like with everything crammed in there. As you can see, there's still plenty of room in there if I wanted to pack in a game with its own bespoke deck of cards like Oh Captain, My Captain or For The Queen or even something bigger like Illimat. And what's even cooler is I've still got plenty of room! There's a whole secret back pocket (which uh...came with a handgun sleeve, because this is technically like a thing you bring your gun and ammo to a gun range in I guess) plus a side pocket that haven't been used yet, pictured below. As long as I only ever buy very thin objects like zines (or like...pack a tote bag in this bag for purchases) I shouldn't really need anything else.

What you MAY have noticed, having made it this far, is that one thing I called out as being sometimes necessary for solo RPGs is missing - the Legally Distinct Jenga Tower! I actually ordered a "World's Smallest" brand one that was 2.5" tall and would have been perfect, but it got lost in the mail and they're not issuing me a refund so...y'know. Maybe if I find one in the wild. Thankfully there's a thread on Chris Bissette's Wretched and Alone Jam about using a dice roller to simulate a similar probability curve to pulling blocks so I guess I'll just have to settle for now.

So. Is this the ABSOLUTE MOST MINIMAL setup? No. I think the absolute most minimal version of this would be using your smartphone for literally everything and bringing around a charger for it. But, do I think this is the most minimal while also giving you options to actually host games for people and have a little bit of comfort while you do it? Pretty much. Do I think this is the most cost effective setup? That's...that's a real hard maybe, and that mostly depends on how much stuff you already have at your house. If I had to estimate the actual value of all this stuff, like if you went out and bought EVERYTHING new at full price? This is probably around $300-400 worth of stuff, which is ridiculous to spend all at once. For reference, the stuff in the following picture is what I actually went out of my way to buy specifically for this kit which in total is under $100, and even then you can cut that down to under $50 by having your own backpack and not buying an absurdly overpriced German mechanical pencil and a functionally lifetime supply of pencil lead and erasers. 

I think for someone who's been in the hobby for a while should have no issue basically throwing this whole kit together with things they have in their own house, and I encourage you to do so unless you're an absolute freak like myself who feels the need to optimize your kit for efficiency to prevent you from overburdening yourself because you cannot trust yourself not to go Full Packrat.

Just as Man Alone inspired me, I hope this inspires you to go make your own compact convention kit. I'd love to see pictures if you do put one together!

Stay weird out there.

-Adam