Murdering Empire in a Single Page?

Yeah, that guy.

    Despite having had the long weekend, I haven't spent any of that time work on this blog. I have spent some of it thinking about an actual product. It's all in a very early stage right now, but I've become enamored with an idea inspired by binge-watching Questing Beast's Zine reviews and the one-page RPGs like the 24XX family of games.

    The idea is simple:  If your rules can fit on a single page front-and-back, then you could use them as the cover of a zine.  You could make a zine about anything you like, and include a bespoke variant of those one-page rules as the cover.  If those bespoke rules are closely enough related, and the zine contents are a semi-unified setting (like Thousand Islands, for example) then you don't actually need anything else.  You can use as many of the zines or a few as you have/want. 

 

Where are the Aliens, Paizo?  Huh?

   I personally own 500-odd-page core rulebooks for some games that cover everything under the sun (or not) but they're hard to use because I may only need a fraction of the material,  and the things weigh like, ten pounds. If instead there was a zine that includes the basics of the setting (suitably anti-canonical) with basic rules as the cover, you could now play the game quickly and easily because you don't really need anything else.

    But say you wanted more.  Say, like me, you want to have spaceships a part of the game.  So you get the zine that has spaceships - and the rules on that zine's cover include starship rules while the zine has a fun adventure or something.  If the starship zine is all you have, it has enough rules to play a starship-focused game bt if you have other zines, then it adds to the available rules.  You can use as many or as few of the zines and their bespoke rules as you like.

    I'm hoping to have some more development with this idea as I blend in more of my ideas and preferences about what I like in games.  For those who are familiar with my previous body of work on DriveThruRPG or through Patreon, me working on short spats and zines should come as no surprise.