Zine Quest 2025 brings a bunch of indie TTRPGs to Kickstarter

If you’re really interested in seeing some new, experimental things in the world of indie tabletop RPGs (like our actual play of Sentai and Sensibility!), you’ll want to keep an eye on Kickstarter this month. February brings us Kickstarter’s annual Zine Quest — an open call for small-format RPG zine products, which can be anything from fully-contained games to supplements for your favorite RPG, whatever it is your favorite RPG happens to be. Zine Quest celebrates the boundless creativity of the tabletop RPG community, while also allowing smaller creators a way to reach a much larger audience and see their pet project come to fruition.

Plus, as a bonus for people who may be wary about backing Kickstarter projects that might take a long time to reach them (if at all), Zine Quest projects — as befits their nature as zine-like products — often have much lower thresholds to be fully funded and much quicker turnarounds to end up in your hands.

Here are a few Kickstarters that have caught our attention, but you’ll really want to keep an eye on the Zine Quest page to see what all is on offer — there’s so much that we could never highlight it all here.

• Starlee Davidson is a Polymorph-system game (the same single-die system used in Sentai and Sensibility, MAZES, and Pigeon’s 11) where the players play an all-female biker gang who are the inner voices of the titular Starlee Davidson, helping her through breakup trauma and spiritual misalignment — where your unique story is created by reading a tarot deck.
• Crystal Chaos is a D&D 5th Edition supplement centered around the crystalline gifts, monsters, and blight related to one Pandora the All-Giving. Pull the new monsters and Crystalmancer Sorcerer subclass out for your own game, or play the included adventurer right in your own setting.
• The Words We Leave Behind is a duet RPG (designed for two people) inspired by the novel This is How You Lose the Time War. You and another player play as Proxies — agents of change fighting a war distantly across time and space by exercising the butterfly effect to enact change over ages.
• Killers and Kittens is a self-contained RPG of kittens in a dungeon crawl. Choose one of four kitten classes, select from over 40 spells and abilities, and delve into the dungeon, where it sounds like you’ll be glad you have those nine lives to spare. Imagine the paw-sibilities in this game!
• Warped FM is a GM-less improv-style game where you and your fellow players are podcast hosts interviewing interdimensional creatures. Extremely light and funny storytelling, great if you and a friend or two have 45 minutes to an hour to kill and one of you wants to be a cosmic horror summoned into someone’s laundry room.
• Cryo Drakus bills itself as an “alien reconnaissance RPG” — think a game based on classic shoot-’em-up games like Gradius, R-Type, or Darius Twin. Pilot your spaceships into an alien hive, pushing your luck to find materials and intelligence to help humanity survive another day against an overwhelming alien fleet, and get out alive without getting assimilated.

Whatever your preferred flavor of tabletop RPG, you can almost certainly find something up your alley during Zine Quest, whether that’s a supplement for D&D or a quick and dirty game about playing wizards generated by wiki articles. (That’s real, by the way.)