Daniel (@dungeondive) looks at the collage zines of a creator working under the name Jamzilla, whose care package arrived with a barbarian drawn on the envelope — one of his favourite things about running the channel.
The thesis is in the title. These sit on a spectrum from something that is genuinely a game to something that is purely an art object, and Jamzilla pushes as far along it as anyone. Lords of Bile Deep has rules, and they run to one paragraph: a narrator describes the bile lands, each champion is born of meat, magic or love, and when something is difficult you flip a coin and hope for heads — twice, if your champion was born to the task. Everything after that is roll tables and fiction that doubles as prompts. Daniel admits he may never play it and does not much care; he will read it, look at it, and use it.
The zine-rack history behind that reaction gets an airing — Tower Records, five thousand titles, collage zines that always sold — as does a sharp observation that creators in this scene keep reaching for the same public-domain source images.
The back half is a long, affectionate tangent into artist trading cards: Michael Whelan, Ken Kelly, Larry Elmore, Bernie Wrightson, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, whose card captions read as ready-made encounter seeds. He wants a set made for today’s indie tabletop artists.
Daniel buys game zines he has no intention of ever playing, purely as art. Is there anything on your shelf you own only to look at?