What Zine Month Means to Graftbound Press

In February 2024, before Graftbound Press officially existed, Lucas Zellers and I (Emily Entner) discovered an important facet of the tabletop gaming industry in Zine Month.

Lucas had written a short one page Lasers and Feelings hack called Precious Things about being a tiny dragon who’s hoard informs the magic and appearance of the players character. Sessions play as small heists; get in, look for a suitable object for your hoard, get out.

This tiny game comes as a one-pager which can be printed out and folded into a small zine.

We did something a little different for Zine Month, they gave the game away for free. The digital copy being a PDF that was ready to print-and-play, supporters could instantly download the game and have their zine.

In lieu of a crowdfunding campaign any backer who chose to pay for the game at $7 received a sticker sheet depicting the 12 adorable and weird dragons from the game’s art, after we hit our “Itchfunding” goal.

I think this worked because of the itch sale mechanic. You can set a goal for a sale, which meant that we could build hype and see progress towards our $300 benchmark. Itchfunding was a lower bar endeavor that we had heard of through Plus One EXP and their Zine Month YouTube collection of workshops. It gave us a connection to the Zine Month culture that we felt instantly. All we had to do was say we were participating and people accepted it.

There was this overwhelming excitement about our own game due to Zine Month, especially spurred on by other creators. Unprompted Steph of TTRPGKids did a review of our game, and told us about their playing experience with their kiddo. Soon after Almost Bedtime Theater played Precious Things on their podcast with their family. The Weekly Scroll included us in their Zine Month Roundup, and maybe funniest of all we made it past Lancer on the “Most Popular” section of Itch for physical games and landed a spot on the “Games that have dethroned Lancer” itch collection.

All these things gave us encouragement and connections that later on meant we could feel like we belonged in the indie TTRPG space. It was the culture of trying anything and supporting other creatives that made us realize that we wanted to publish games together in this space.

Zine Month is a lot. It’s corporate and it's punk. It’s scrappy and it's polished. It works and it doesn’t. It’s February, which for a lot of creators comes too quickly after the holidays to feel really prepared. But it’s also what you make it. It’s a time to look for the new creators and the solo designers creating something odd and trying something risky. It’s a chance to celebrate what we have in the variety of indie TTRPGs.

The way I see it Zine Month is a great example of what makes me love being in the Indie TTRPG industry, which is that we get to choose to support and enjoy other people's art and creativity.