Go Play NW is a small TTRPG and board game convention based in Seattle, Washington focused on creating a welcoming atmosphere for playing fun games and making new friends in the Pacific Northwest. This year, Go Play NW was held at the Centilia Cultural Center from July 18-20. 

Go Play NW events feature a mix of scheduled and ad-hoc gaming all run by attendees and volunteers. Go Play NW has a vibrant playtest community that relishes in the weird and the wonderful. And this year, there was a new feature added for attendees – The RPG Zine Zone!

The Zine Zone is the brainchild of Brendan Albano and Kate Barbaria of Pony Press! www.pony-press.com. From Brendan on the inception of the event:

“I was sitting at a big table in the hotel at Big Bad Con 2024 with a bunch of people, including Kate, Kona and Finn. Someone I’d just met was cutting out a beautiful risograph print with tiny, dull travel scissors that they’d borrowed from someone else because they’d forgotten theirs, and it was really rough going. Kate, Kona, Finn and I were all talking later about how it’d be really cool to have a bunch of zine and craft supplies in a room at the con for just such a situation! This conversation evolved into an idea of a “Zine Zone” with everything you need to make a zine. When Big Bad Con 2025 was cancelled, we got excited about bringing the Zine Zone to Go Play NW instead.”

The “Zine Zone” at Go Play NW was situated directly to the right of the entrance and registration table, fully loaded with paper of varying sizes and shapes, scissors, pens, pencils, a printer and a rack of Zines for perusing and trades. While Brendan and Kate facilitated the existence of the zone, other attendees and Go Play staff helped make it a successful element of the entire weekend experience. Finn, a game designer (www.finn.fun) helped with zine supplies, zone support and was part of the initial zine zone inspiration, and Kona acted as a staff liaison between zine zone folks and GPNW organizers to make the zone happen.

Aside from offering a space for attendees and volunteers to create, read, take-a-break from game play when needed, Brendan and Kate also offered a three-hour workshop “Make an RPG Zine Right Now”. The workshop welcomed seasoned game designers, curious attendees and newbies such as myself to sit down, grab some paper, and create on-the-spot RPG’s.

Loosely following the guidance of Nathan d. Paoletta of NDP Design (www.ndpdesign.com) from their published two-part zines on game designs, “RPG Design Zine” and “RPG Design Zine Two”, Brendan and Kate encouraged workshop attendees to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and just get creating!

From Brendan on creating the workshop:

“Making games, especially in the context of themed game jams, time constraints, or other forms of rules-for-making, is play. And it is a type of play I really enjoy! The “Make an RPG Zine Right Now” workshop was a way for me to engage in and share that form of play myself and to share it with others. Our goal was to make it feel accessible and fun to do a project from start to finish, especially for people who might otherwise be daunted by the idea of making and finishing an RPG. We had a wide range of participants, from experienced zinesters enjoying the comfort of making, to folks who were full of ideas but had never finished a game project before (and both groups made rad zines!).”

Games created during “Make an RPG Zine Right Now!” offered a wide range of play options: solo, 2-player, 4+player games loosely based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system by Meguey and Vincent Baker, games based on existing artistic endeavors, and others were cozy and contemplative. 

Orion Canning, game designer and Go Play NW enthusiast, participated in the Make an RPG Zine Right Now! workshop on a whim. Although sitting down at the Zine Zone was a spontaneous decision, Orion shared that it was “the funnest” and “most unexpected” part of the weekend. Orion created a colorful tiny RPG zine, “The Official Grandma’s Pleasure RPG” based on his other creative endeavor – co-writing, acting and producing a 90’s themed sitcom with his friends in Olympia, WA called “Grandma’s Pleasure”. 

The DIY spirit of the workshop appealed to part of Orion’s personal game design philosophy – make a game,   kill your darlings, play a game, tell a story. The act of creating games and telling stories is a very human tradition that can be stifled under the anxiety of meeting mass-produced expectations of what a game should be rather than what is imperfectly present. Even if the game is “unfinished”.

Later in the weekend, during and event called “The Donut” (an opportunity to pitch, run and join unscheduled gaming events), Orion pitched playtesting several of the zine games created in the workshop, including his own. The group managed to play three games and utilized elements of others for game play:  “The Official Grandma’s Pleasure RPG” by Orion Canning, “Trenches” by Soren Ludwig utilizing a map from “Welcome to the Sunset Home for Girls” by Kate Barbaria and “Ghost/Detective” by Finn.

When asked for final thoughts about the entire process, Orion offered, “The Zine Zone is a really cool thing. Making games was cool, but it was even cooler to play the games that were made.  More broadly, writing a game and playing it right afterwards – It should be done!”

Zines created

A probably incomplete list of zines created at the zine zone. A few of them have been scanned and uploaded to the Finn’s collection of Zine Zone zines on itch: https://itch.io/c/6072669/gpnw-zine-zone

• “Trenches” by Soren Ludwig: Players are a squad of soldiers delivering a package through a maze of dangerous trenches in WWI France. Includes a fantastically lethal twist on the typical PbtA 2d6 results table.
• “This is the second page” by multiple authors, unfinished: this zine-as-game emerged organically at the table, with each page being written by a different author, exquisite corpse style. It made it to page 5 (out of 8). We’ll have to wait until Go Play 2026 to see how it ends!
• “Welcome to the Sunset School for Girls” by Kate Barbaria: a tri-fold pamphlet introducing the grounds of the Sunset School for Girls, a fantastical boarding school setting.
• “Ducti: Selected Medieval Alphabets”: exactly what it says on the tin. Beautiful lettering!
• “Garden Coffee Lady” by Mads: A TTRPG where you cultivate a relationship and a garden to enjoy together.
• “The Official Grandma’s Pleasure RPG” by Orion Canning: This catch-phrase-based scene-framing game about sitcoms from the 90s is based on Orion’s film of the same name. When you’re not in a scene, you play the sitcom audience!
• “A Very Tiny Setting – The Picnic Blanket” by Kate Barbaria and Brendan Albano: answers the question “What is this, a dungeon for ants!?” with a resounding “Yes!”
• “Starfire” by Erik Owompyeia: A galactic-scale sci-fi setting detailing the Rakarran Empire, the Kingdom of Arkon, the Altiran Concord, and the Tersonan Union.
• “Ghost/Detective” by Finn: An asymmetric two-player RPG where a ghost must use spooky phenomena (wailing, flickering lights, sighing, creaking, rattling doors, weeping) to help a detective solve their murder.
• “Your Own Private Island” by Finn: An island-generating procedure for game prep or just for the fun of making island maps!
• “Legends in the Stars” by Finn: a storytelling and constellation drawing game for 2+.
• “An NPC For When Your Scene Needs a Soundtrack” by Kate Barbaria: what it says on the tin! With a delightful illustration.
• “What Kind of Wallpaper Does the Dungeon Room Have?” by Tony Dowler: A series of tables to generate a dungeon room’s wallpaper and to generate features of the room based on the wallpaper.
• “Dystropia” by Joseph Benkual: play an awakened artificial intelligence trying to escape their tropes in a dystopian digital world.
• “Fortune Teller” by Bee Ho: A fortune teller (or cootie catcher) featuring juicy questions to ask a character (or yourself!?).
• “Hot Magic and the Smell of Metal in the Mask” by Brendan Adkins: a question answering game played by filling in a grid of questions. 
• “Everything You Are Must be Found (Oops All Moves Edition)” by Brendan Albano: an experiment in making a game that makes a game. Start with a blank piece of paper, end up with not just a set of characters, but an entire PbtA game! Theoretically!