From photocopier to shelf - the zine revolution

June 1975, a living room in Los Angeles. Lee Gold is gathering stacks of typed pages, sent in by dozens of players from across the country: house rules, session reports, arguments about what Dungeons & Dragons is actually supposed to be. She collates the sheets, staples them together, and carries the bundles to the post office. The publication is called Alarums and Excursions, and it is the monthly conversation of a hobby that has only just officially begun to exist.

Fifty years later, stapled booklets of forty pages sit on game store shelves next to forty-euro hardcovers, and win awards there. This is the story of how the hobby's smallest format never gave up.

A hobby held together by staples

Roleplaying games and hand-stapled booklets have belonged together from day one. D&D itself arrived as thin booklets in a box, as we told in our chapter on the birth of the roleplaying game. And the conversation around it ran through the mail: Alarums and Excursions was a so-called amateur press association, a kind of paper forum where every participant submitted their own pages and the whole was bundled and sent around. Even Gary Gygax took part, calling it an excellent source of ideas in 1976.

The publication kept going until April 2025, five hundred and ninety-three issues in all. Anyone who ever played through letterbox and postage stamp will recognize the family resemblance: this is the thoughtful cousin of the age of play by mail.

Small is a choice

A zine is not half a book. It is a form of its own: a handful of pages, photocopied and stapled, made by one or two people without anyone's permission. Cheap to make, cheap to buy, and therefore free. In a zine, an idea is allowed to be sharp, half-baked, or outright strange; no publishing house has to make a living from it.

That freedom made the format the natural home of the Old School Renaissance, which we covered in our chapter on the OSR: a movement of blogs and house rules that started printing itself out. What fit on a blog fit in a zine, and what fit in a zine fit in an envelope.

February becomes zine month

In February 2019, Kickstarter gave the format a stage: Zine Quest, an annual invitation for makers to launch a small, stapled roleplaying project. Small budget, short campaign, low risk. It did not become a gold rush but something healthier: hundreds of small successes. In under five years, nearly twelve hundred projects launched, more than nine in ten reached their goal, and together they raised over six million dollars. The typical project had about a hundred and fifty backers - not a bestseller, but a printed booklet and a maker who dares to continue.

How crowdfunding became the engine under the modern hobby is a story we tell in our chapter on crowdfunding; Zine Quest is the smallest, most stubborn room in that house.

From staple to top prize

That a zine does not have to be a stepping stone but can be a destination, Mothership proved. In 2018, Sean McCoy released the Player's Survival Guide: forty-four pages of sci-fi horror, stapled, with his own illustrations. A year later that booklet won the Gold ENnie for Best Game, in among the thick hardcovers. The supplements stayed zines - Dead Planet, A Pound of Flesh - until a 2021 Kickstarter raised a seven-figure sum and the game appeared in 2024 as a full boxed set. The staple became a box, but the soul stayed zine.

Mausritter walked a similar path: a digital zine by Isaac Williams in 2019, a physical edition in 2020, a Gold ENnie in 2021. And the format simply lives on: Kelsey Dionne still packs her adventures for Shadowdark as Cursed Scroll zines, three volumes now, each exactly big enough for one discovery at a time.

The other side of small

Fair is fair: the zine wave has a frayed edge. Shipping costs weigh nowhere as heavily as on a five-euro booklet, and it is precisely the smallest makers who sometimes drown in the logistics that begin after a successful campaign. Not every project arrives on time, and some never arrive. And now that the label sells, more and more "zines" appear in deluxe full color with hard covers - where the word has mostly become marketing for a thin book. The form is a promise of modesty, and not everyone keeps it.

And today

Still, the core is unchanged since that living room in 1975: someone has an idea too small for a publisher and too good to leave in a drawer, and between that idea and a reader stands nothing but a photocopier and a stapler. One concrete thing, one desire - Lee Gold needed no more, and a zine still needs no more. The only difference is that the bundle no longer lands only with subscribers, but on the store shelf too.