Stone Soup

With just a little extra seasoning, this soup will turn out delicious.

Jan 2, 2025 — 3 min read

Statue of a monk and stone soup (sopa da pedra) in Almeirim, Portugal (Wikimedia Commons)

Lurching into 2025 after working through the Christmas period, I had a sizeable backlog of RPG blog feeds to catch up on. The resulting furious reading session likely contributed to the mental stewpot that then started to congeal, and extracted from the cooling mess was this crystallised thought: clear, beautiful, but sharp and ready to make you bleed (for art or play - what's the difference?).

Now just past 50 years from the published birth of the hobby, big corpo Hasbro are doing their darnedest to further monetise and commodify brand-name Dungeons & Dragons: the world's most commercial roleplaying game. In any sane copyright law, a creative work over 50 years from publication would be in the public domain. Fortunately, since the first tentative steps of the OSR (Open Source Roleplaying) through retroclones, the inalienable right to dream with plastic icosahedrons and silly voices has been proper battle-tested. Try and send the Pinkerton's around for stealing the keys to your own imagination.

This is obviously somewhat hyperbolic, but it's with purpose: amidst not just the glossy reboot of Dungeons & Dragons, but even the rising indie production values and impending Zinequest crowdfunding campaigns, I don't want to lose sight of the rough-and-ready photocopied-zine folk traditions of this hobby. Much great creativity and community is shared on blogs, but I don't find the translation of that material to the gaming table occurring as often as it should.

Therefore, consider the following - a challenge, a proposal, a resolution - whatever cognitive frame you gotta squeeze it into to manifest this tulpa:

Build-an-Elfgame

Claim an old (but nice enough) shoebox, evict the erstwhile occupants.
Take pencils, sharpener, eraser and index cards from the office or store; pay if you must.
Cobble together a mismatched set of dice; if you only have neat matching sets, fix that by melting some in your microwave, or hurling over your neighbour's fence.
Use whatever P/OSR-adjacent rules you already have in your head or are broadly interoperable with the exisiting corpus of play material. If you need brain fuel: BFRPG, OSE SRD, and Cairn 2E all are free and gratis. Searchers of the Unknown is only one page and hence a lovely fit, while Crack! has just the right anti-consumerist energy. Pick your poison (save).
Collate printer-friendly bi-fold one page mini zines (zinis): adventure sites, monsters, treasure, carousing tables, whatever.
Release your own zinis, whether adapted from your existing blog posts, or arising from play at the table, or created bespoke as its own diverting lonely fun. Make them by hand, make them digitally, whatever works - to quote the Bakers: "to do it, do it."
Play, make, create.

No Rights Reserved

I'd advocate the default be a CC0 copyleft statement for these zinis. This not only makes the strongest statement about the community-ownership of fantasy medieval adventure gaming, but has a practical benefit over the more prevalent CC-BY 4.0: in this small format needing to cite/attribute other sources is somewhat onerous. We're making stone soup here - no need to sign the rocks.

Why zinis?

Why printer-friendly one page bi-fold zinis? I honestly harbour an irrational love of the format, but I could proffer the following incentives:

They pack away nicely in a box and evoke that early "3LBB" vibe.
They let you play with an eye-catching front-cover, and have an "inner" and "back-cover" for structure.
They present a very approachable scope for both producing and consuming: my experience has been a double sided sheet can be quickly whipped up but easily gives a session worth of play.
They are the second simplest print-and-play at home format (after just one-page kept flat).
They can be intermingled with larger staple-bound A5 zines that are probably the favourite format for the indie RPG hobby-space.

For my part, I'm presently working on a couple of such Zinis, which I look forward to sharing soon. I hope others might join the vanguard: with just a little extra seasoning, this soup will turn out delicious.