Brief introduction
I love all things ttrpg, and I’m excited to share that love with everyone. My long term goal is to provide 2 articles per title I share. One will be general thoughts and reasons why playing it is fun, and the other being a review with a score. But as it stands I need to work on how to score ttrpgs, so while I’m doing that I decided to share some information about one of my favourite small scale ttrpgs.
Zine Zealot
To start my “Zine1 Zealot” series it only seems right to start it off with a zine that starts with a ‘Z’. Zam! Pow! Spork! (ZPS) is a low prep zine tabletop RPG (ttrpg) to the setting of 90s cartoons from Robert Turk of Wicked Clever, where you play as an under appreciated sidekick (intern) to a largely incompetent super hero. The hero’s main achievement in life seems to be the ability to market themselves as way better than they are (sounds familiar…).
The game
Everything you need to run a session is captured within the 32 page zine. The first page being the cover, with fantastically 90’s style cartoony art, and the last page being a blank character sheet. After that you have the credits and contents page. The real meat of the zine starts at page 4, where it tells you what you need to know for the game, summarising 3 important guidelines for the game. My favourite being “2. chaos is expected”. That is exactly what I am here for when playing a ttrpg.
Character creation
From there you make a number of dice rolls to determine your characteristics, but it is by no means stifling creativity. In fact it is a catalyst for it. Say for example you roll “Summoning” and “Extra body parts” you are given creative freedom, and encouraged to interpret in whatever way you like. When I run this, I award “advantage” to those who can come up with the most ridiculous interpretation of the powers. You may say that you can summon extra body parts – cool, simple and effective and will certainly hinder the opponents when you summon 8 extra legs onto them and watch them try to run while controlling their newly acquired limbs. Maybe you want to call in a favour from your holy idol, a mysterious floating arm that can summon extra arms to use as weapons. Maybe you want to be able to summon anything providing you have extra body parts on your person. Given the context is cartoony shenanigans it’s not as grim as it sounds.
In the character creation you also get to pick on a sliding scale 3 sets of 2 traits – Mundane to Marvelous, Gritty to Polished, Brainy to Brawny. Each of these represent different areas of the game you may want to succeed in. Do you want to be more Bruce Wayne or Batman? More Batman or Superman? Do you want to take these traits up to the highest degree and role play inevitably as a massive nerd or a huge edge lord? The answer to that last one is always a resounding “YES!”
Missions are generated by the group with a few more d6 dice rolls, so there really is no prep for the Game Master (GM). However I wouldn’t say this means it’s an easy time for a first time GM. Since it is so loosely defined and created in the moment you need good improvising skills. But, it shouldn’t put you off if you are a new DM since the game is very relaxed and focused upon having fun more than following comprehensive rules; if you can keep up with the chaos that will happen then you’ll all have a blast.
To summarise: this ttrpg is low on rules, high on fun, and positively stratospheric in chaos. I love it, and I hope you will too.
- Zine is pronouced “zeen”, like “seen” ↩︎
