Get ready for Zine Month's Second Wave
14 awesome TTRPGs creators releasing their games on the same day, check out all these cool projects!
“This is a community submitted press release.”
If you’re a regular reader of Rascal no doubt you’ve noticed: this month is Zine Month! Every February, a lot of TTRPG creators make cool games and release them via crowdfunding on their favorite platform (Kickstarter, Crowdfundr, BackerKit or Itch.io...).
We've already seen a lot of exciting launches since the beginning of the month, but brace yourselves: this Tuesday February 11th is the arrival of the Second Wave of our favorite TTRPG zines!
There are no less than 14 creators launching on the same day: Arlin Ortiz, Ava's Adventures, Carson Brown, Deep Dark Games, Ella Lim, Greedy Gorgon Press, Jacob Wolf Lefton, Kelly Whyte, Quinn Blackwell, Nick Bate, Nimaël, Pidj Sorensen, Plane Sailing Games, and Richard R. Rook! Read on, we’re sure you’ll find a cool new project that you’ll love.
The Games
(presented in random order)
Salt the Earth
Salt the Earth is a brutal, narrative-driven OSR/NSR-inspired TTRPG where survival is carved into flesh and written in blood. Drawing from Cairn, Mörk Borg, and Into the Odd, it delivers lethal combat, minimalist mechanics, and a world that never forgets the scars you leave behind.
Magic lingers on the breath of the dying. Survival is a ritual of Flesh, Blood, and Salt, where every choice is a gamble and every battle takes its toll. This is not a tale of heroes—this is the story of those who refuse to be forgotten. Those who rise from the dust and carve their names into the bones of a world that grinds the weak to ash.
Emergence: an escape funnel
In Emergence, players take on the roles of inmates at the base of an underground prison facility. It’s a funnel adventure, so each player runs four characters trying to escape the prison. They learn the nature of the prison as a cloning lab and how the facility’s scientists and guards control them. The failing power system, rising groundwater levels, and horrors emerging from within inmates makes this 28-page zine an action packed meat grinder. Made for Mothership, the sci-fi horror RPG.
Lineages of the Long White Cloud, Volume 2
Lineages of the Long White Cloud is a series that introduces Aotearoa's (New Zealand's) native wildlife into 5e as playable lineages. Volume 2 brings even more options, including our only native mammals, the pekapeka, the iconic pūkeko, the stunning tukutuku (harlequin gecko), and many more. Each lineage comes with unique art and tokens for use in your virtual tabletop game.
Growing Thylacine
In Growing Thylacine, the whole table embodies one cloned Tasmanian Tiger. Take on roles (TEETH, LIMBS, STRIPES and POUCH) and roll d6s to steal narration. Dream of a pre-extinction life across four scenes. Then break out of the lab in a timed, breakneck conclusion!
This is Pidj Sorensen’s fifth crowdfunded zine. It will be printed using the beautiful, environmentally-favouring method of risograph as a gate-fold pamphlet zine. It is a no-prep game designed for 30min - 2 hour one shots, with shared narrative control based on an easy to learn 5d6 system. Best for 2 - 5 players (including an optional GM) but can cater for more with rotating roles and shared responsibilities.
Monster Pamphlets Reprint: Issues 1-7
Monster Pamphlets are a series of Risograph printed art zines that feature strange and absurd fantasy creatures. Each zine includes five illustrated monsters along with playful descriptions and stats. Discover unique creatures such as the: Wrought Iron Hound, Timber Beast, Brick Golem, Crystal Owl, and many more!
Adventurers beware!
BROKEN OATHS and other small games
Nimaël is funding the physical versions of 3 small narrative TTRPGs they made in 2024.
In BROKEN OATHS, explore a dark temple and try to escape this carved from Brindlewood micro-mystery.
In THE VALIANTS' CIRCLE, travel as a squire with an order of knights and take care of them as they brave daily dangers.
In SMOKE A CIGARETTE IN YOUR LOVER'S ARMS, smoke a cigarette while trying to share a secret.
Follow this project if you are interested in small indie TTRPGs and/or want to see some art handmade with love!
Against Time and Death
Locked in a total war for all of time and space, you fight for one of two factions that strive to reshape reality in their own image. You are their best operative, a true virtuoso at manipulating the weave of the multiverse.
You’re about to meet your match.
Against Time and Death is a two-player tabletop RPG by Nick Bate about the forbidden relationship between two elite operatives on opposite sides of an epic time war. Inspired by the acclaimed science fiction novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, the game’s simple playing-card mechanics create intimate stories that ask whether two rivals can find meaning together against the backdrop of a war whose stakes are nothing less than the entire multiverse.
Will you reach out for a better world, knowing that it might cost you everything?
Silver Age
Welcome to Hattie, Texas, 1991: A nowhere town somewhere between the low peaks, mesquite-covered hills, and dried-out oil fields. Just 900 residents, 200 inmates, and one pack of werewolves.
Hattie let the monsters in a long time ago, and they’re starting to prowl the night: private prisons, Air Force colonels, and corporate chemists turned country preachers. The little town of Hattie is your pack’s turf, and you have until the next new moon to keep it safe. You don’t have much to work with, but you do have silver—the precious metal that breaks your skin, fuels your frenzy, and gives you power.
But all power comes with a price. Can you pay it before your time is up?
A Mark of the Odd Game of small towns, werewolves, and the sacred metal that welds them together.
Pick up the pregens and preview rules on DriveThruRPG and Itch.
A Perfect Rock
Your home planet was destroyed.
You are aboard the last starship with the sole survivors of your people, and you must find a perfect rock: a new planet to call home.
A Perfect Rock is a planet-building adventure RPG about finding a new home.
Gameplay is a unique blend of adventure and world-building. You will navigate a sprawling star map, uncover secrets in the stars, and build planets from rocks (🪨 real rocks!) you've collected. And on your journey, you will explore your starship and remember the home you left behind.
Will you find a perfect rock?
Heavy Metal Monster Manual!
A sourcebook bringing together the two best things to come out of the 70s!
Heavy Metal Monster Manual gives you the chance to fill your adventures with 100 homebrewed Hard rockin' monsters, from an Iron Man to an Iron Maiden, a Talking Heads to a Red Hot Chili Pepper and 96 others in between.
For those of you following Greedy Gorgon Press for the last year and a half, you know our jam. We take your favourite bands, albums and songs, and use them for inspiration for monsters, spells, feats and items. The Heavy Metal Monster Manual is a jukebox of giants, an album of aberrations of and a mostpit of monstrosities!
Bowels of the Forest
A Monstrous Evil lurks within the Gulmilin Woods, haunting the imagination of locals and travelers for generations. In this dnd adventure, players are tasked by the villagers of Hogsholme with rescuing a child, Rosa Greene, who went missing in the woods after making a horrific discovery. Along the journey, players will uncover the corruption that plagues the forest and the sinister cult that feeds it.
Tail-End Charlie
This is a solo game about the strange dichotomy of Bomber Command. When not on missions you were going to the village pub, playing sports, cycling in the country and taking women out to dances and more. But then you strap yourself into the tail of a plane, fly for 5-8 hours in darkness at -40 degrees and try to spot the night fighters who want to shoot you out of the sky while dodging searchlights and flak.
Playing cards are used to guide your recreation and romance in downtime, and the success and danger of operations.
Roughly 50% of the tail gunners survived a tour of duty. Can you?
A Song for a Serpent King
The serpent king lay down to rest in the Ravenous sea, causing his giant body to split the sea in two. His spine became a causeway that people found a home on.
He begins to wake every hundred years and must be lulled back into his deep slumber by a song.
You are a songsmith, with songs in your heart and music in your blood. Travel along the causeway and compose a song to sing to the serpent, gathering words as you go. The song must be right otherwise the serpent king will awake and swallow you whole.
Out here on the causeway, the sea touches the sky. The horizon is an unbroken line.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out. The taste of salt, the sun burning in the sky, and the melody of a song.
A slumbering king.
Craft your song wisely, songsmith.
Games for an Ordinary Life
Games for an Ordinary Life from Jacob Wolf Lefton is a poetic art zine of short, sweet and dangerous games, many of which were written during the 36 Word RPG Jam in January 2025. The collection includes solo games, theater games, autobiographical games, real-time, philosophical and art games. There are a few sketches and studies of systems and ideas for future games, several of which can be previewed on Jacob’s itch.io, and a blog post discusses concepts behind a few of the games. The zine will also include several original linoleum block prints from Jacob, available as standalone art prints.
