Zine Month 2026 brings you lots of tabletop game projects that are small on page count, but big on fun

Every February, publishers both accomplished and new take to their favorite crowdfunding platforms to release their newest zines as part of (the event formerly known just as) Zine Quest. These zines — which can range from supplements for your favorite tabletop games like D&D or Shadowdark to entire self-contained games on their own — are usually looking for just a little contribution to get them up and running on their own; they often have more aggressive timelines and lower budgets than many Kickstarters, making them a low-risk, lower-cost way to take your first steps into the indie tabletop scene. They’re also usually extremely innovative, too; you’re going to see a lot of zines about things that will make you think, “I can’t believe someone made a whole TTRPG about that!”

Curious about what’s out there? We’ve combed Kickstarter’s Zine Quest and Backerkit’s Zinetopia to bring you some of our favorites. If you’re interested, many of these will be funded by the end of the month, so if you want in, now’s the time to pull the trigger on a pledge. Additionally, I verified as many of these as I could to have been created without generative AI; if we’re going to celebrate creativity, let’s make it about human creativity.

Zine Quest 2026 at Kickstarter

There’s always a plethora of creative zines on Kickstarter for Zine Quest, and 2026 is no exception. Let’s start with a handful of supplements meant for Shadowdark or other OSR-style games.

• Dungeon Death: 16-bit Rules for Shadowdark is essentially a background for a campaign for and 90s kids inspired by things like Jumanji, Tron, and isekai anime: you and your friends rent a weird video game cartridge and find yourself sucked into a video game that is all too real! With new backgrounds (movie theater attendant, arcade employee), ancestries (Jock, Nerd, etc.), and even a brand new class — the Gamer, who essentially uses the Power Glove they were wearing to steal powers from monsters — can you can your friends find your way back home?
• The Handbook of Magic and Mayhem offers a real boost to magic for those that want more out of their spellcasters. This zine brings Wild Magic, TOME (an Ars Magica-like way of rebuilding any OSR spell for Shadowdark), six new pact magic classes who demonstrate new ways to tie specific stats to spellcasting (want to be a Strength-based caster?), and even an adventure in which the student council of a college of magic ruined everything by releasing the demon that powered the school’s Chaos Engine.
• Demidirge is a zero-level funnel adventure for Shadowdark — a sort of gauntlet in which many will die, but those that survive will go on to become adventurers — with a decidedly heavy metal premise: “You are a tunneler. Trapped in a buried cathedral below a sentient sea of acid, your life is ruled by wraith-priests and an unseen Queen who spies through stolen eyes. Armed with rotten tools and contraband fossils, you must obey, toil, and conspire to escape – before you’re recycled in boiling fungal baths.” Demidirge goes one step further and helps GMs flesh out the weird, wild dark fantasy world that Demidirge implies after your freshly-risen level 1 adventurers escape the deadly acid-fanged funnel adventure.
• Under the Shadow of Helfast Spire, from tabletop RPG content creator Bob World Builder, expands on on a one-shot adventure (that he almost got to run for Matt Mercer) to include a hexcrawl, new monsters, thirty new magic items, a vertical dungeon crawl through the Coal Catacombs, and even four new classes for Shadowdark.

There are some fun supplements for other games, including one I’ve got my eye on because it matches a magic item in my bi-weekly D&D game. Ever wanted to summon a flock of angry loons?

• The Spellbook of Typos for 5E posits an entirely new school of magic: typo magic. Learn the ins and outs of spells like Power Word Bill (sends the target into crippling debt), Healing Sword (stab them until they feel better!), Dominate Momster (attempt to control the actions of any creature in range with maternal instincts), or Loonbeam (fills a sphere with enraged loons).
• Enjoy Scrolls! bills itself as being for Shadowdark or any other fantasy RPG, and that’s accurate: they’ve all got scrolls, but in almost no case are they as interesting as these! You get over four hundred descriptions of things Wizards might use to jot spells down for later use, including codices, tablets, and quipus — ropes full of knots representing languages.
• These Bloody Sails is a variety pack for Pirate Borg that contains lots of things you can pull for your own pirate adventures: a full adventure (a procedurally generated one, at that, so it won’t even be the same as your crew dips in and out of it) and three mini-adventures, eight new monsters, chase and travel rules, and the intriguingly-named Island of 10,000 Flamingos.

There’s also some fully self-contained adventures you should definitely check out.

• All-Cards: The Trading Card Storytelling Game is a game for one or two players whose primary means of storytelling is a deck of trading cards that you build. What kind of cards? The obvious one is cards from games like Magic: the Gathering or Lorcana, but why not some baseball cards? Or some Tarot cards, even though they’re not strictly speaking trading cards? Non-sports trading cards like the X-men ones I used to have as a kid? All perfectly valid. All-Cards will help you take old cards that you may not have a reason to play with anymore and use them for something fun and brand new.
• Potvory is a tabletop game rooted in Slavic mythology as viewed through a queer lens, where you play as normally-reviled creatures of myth and legend like the Rusalka or the Vodnik. It’s rules-light, requires minimal prep, and focuses on emergent storytelling in a part of the world that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the tabletop scene  — the perfect thing to pull out of your bag when that one guy has to bail on your D&D game but you’re already at the table.
• Aqua Tofana is a Baroque solo game about poisoning your husband, based on true stories of women in 1600s Italy helping other women escape abusive marriages by selling other women poison hidden in bottles emblazoned with the image of Saint Nicholas, waging a covert war for freedom and dignity. Aqua Tofana uses a Tarot deck to help guide storytelling through the four phases of aqua tofana poisoning, in which you decide what you’re willing to give up to take control of your own fate.

Zinetopia 2026 at Backerkit

Our favorites at Backerkit’s Zinetopia this year all are self-contained tabletop games, and you’ll find something here from one player to as many players as you can cram into a Discord server. No, really! There’s mechs, there’s mages, there’s small animals on big adventures — lots of things for lots of tastes.

• Screaming Metal: Vector Soul bills itself as a mecha TTRPG about toxic lesbians piloting living machines for exorbitant amounts of money before hyperspace itself tears them apart. From the author of the incredibly cool OSR game Songbirds, Screaming Metal can be played solo, in pairs, in groups, or in megagames featuring as many people as you want — but in an interesting twist, it’s a competitive game, not a co-op one.
• Whispering Willows is a solo, co-op, or group game about small animals in a world of wonder, magic, and adventures. Described as the space where Redwall meets The Secret of NIMH, Whispering Willows pits you as defenders of the Forest against the ever-growing threat of the Shadow, twisting what was once good into something abominable — but even in the dark, a spark of light can be found.
• Magestar is a map-creating tabletop game, in which four magically-powered characters — the Wizard, the Seer, the Witch, and the Vampire — explore the world around their home town of Two Hills in the wake of an eldritch apocalypse, the fall of the titular Magestar, that changed the world forever in unforeseen ways.
• On Call has you playing as a werewolf, but not the kind that shifts during the full moon. No, you and your colleagues are a sort of hotline to help clean up the messes that your other packmates cause when their inner wolf takes over, set in a world where supernatural creatures are a known quantity to the world at large — and you’re there to keep everyone safe.
• The Black Tower Hack is a “Six-shooter and Sorcery” game based on Black Sword Hack: Ultimate Chaos Edition which draws heavy inspiration from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. You play Gunslingers, one of only a few relics of a bygone era who possess the willpower and the skill to stand against the collapse of the world, on their way to the titular Black Tower, where what remains of the world might yet be saved.

Whether you’re looking to supplement a game you’re already playing, find something new and weird to play, or even find a solo game to dip a toe into solo tabletop games, you can likely find something to suit you at one of the crowdfunding sites.