The Zine Flood
The crate that arrived this cycle rattled. Not the deep rattle of miniatures — the lighter, papery percussion of staples, dice, and ambition. Inside: eight dispatches from 2024 and early 2025, the seasons when the solo RPG arrived at the archivist’s table not as a trickle but as a weather system.
This is the modern wave, and the Keeper notes its signature: small books, enormous worlds. A galaxy folds into a zine. Haunted Japan fits in a deck of playing cards. A whole weird west leaks out of a single Cairn hack and pools around the archivist’s boots. The games grow stranger and more confident — text adventures reborn on the tabletop, scientists descending to the planet’s core armed with hypotheses instead of guns — and, in the wave’s most telling development, the archivist stops merely cataloguing the flood and starts building his own boat: a design diary for a game of his own devising sits among these exhibits, filed without ceremony between the reviews.
The Keeper has shelved three decades of dungeon crawls. He recognises a genre finding its golden age while it’s still happening.
Exhibit Catalogue — eight dispatches from the wave, earliest first:
- A Solo RPG with an entire galaxy to explore (Space Aces) — shaken down twice by the same camouflaged pirates; crash-lands at a jousting tournament.
- A superb solo RPG of paranormal investigation - The Unseen World — ghost-hunting in Japan, funded by selling your evidence to magazines.
- …and the Gunslinger Followed - We Deal in Lead — a Dark Tower-shaped bounty hunt that becomes a werewolf rescue mid-session.
- 3 solo RPGs / 3 reviews / 3 play sessions — three zines reviewed as musical genres: grindcore, cosmic jazz, dark folk.
- A Land in Peril - Let’s Make a Quest (Design Diary) — the archivist turns designer; a storm-summoning wizard gets a live-rolled quest.
- Roll and Play Fiction and Fantasy - Solo RPG Tools — two table toolkits judged; ska bands allowed in space, banned in taverns.
- LOOM: The Bells of Basin City & Lore — a witch-assassin tags rooftops with burning sigils; “death to the Empress.”
- Substratum Protocol - Solo RPG (Review) — scientists descend 5,700 km with a card system other games should steal.
622 transcripts • 701 posts archived
– The Keeper
Has shelved seven hundred and one exhibits and notes, with professional unease, that the archivist has begun writing one of his own — archivists who become authors are how libraries end up haunted.