Shelfie #004

I’m Aaron King (they/them), a zinester, game designer, and podcaster living in Minneapolis, MN, USA. My games are at erinking.itch.io, and I cohost two podcasts:

I hope it’s omnivorous. I’ve never been a fan of just one genre or style in any art, and that’s just as true (or maybe more true) with RPGs. I love running different kinds of games, and even if I never plan on running a particular game, it can still provide me with tools and points of view that I can bring to the table or to a game I’m writing.

Up until a few years ago, I was moving every year or two, so I never allowed myself to have too many things. New acquisitions had to eventually be balanced by getting rid of stuff. But since finding some housing security in the past few years, I’ve let things come into the house without worrying about balancing the scales.

I also spent a few years working at a local game store/warehouse, All Systems Go, which does a brisk business in used RPGs. An employee discount combined with first dibs on whatever came through meant I was getting a lot of new RPGs.

Catch me on a different day and my answer would probably be different, but right now I’m saying Apocalypse World by Vincent & Meguey Baker. I’ve run so many sessions, and it’s so easy for me to get it up and running, but I’m also still finding new things in it. So many discussions around the game are based on perceived culture or hearsay, but if you approach it openly and naively, it’s such an amazing little engine.

The first bit of game I’d grab if my house was on fire would be all my zines. So many of them had tiny runs during the first Zine Quest at Kickstarter, or they’re by people I consider my friends or colleagues or honorable nemeses.

The one I want to highlight is called Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods by Christof Rochel. A local designer brought it into All Systems Go when I worked there, and I’m not sure he printed more than the 10 he brought us.

I think it’s much more impressive to develop an idea and take it all the way to a printed product using only the skills and means you have. Big crowdfunded hardcovers with polished art just feel sterile and frictionless to me. Give me something where I can tell the designer wrestled with layout or printing the way Jacob wrestled with an angel.

After years of not being able to travel much for a variety of reasons, I finally flew to Toronto in March, 2026 for Breakout, their big gaming convention. I met RTFM cohost Max for the first time in person, stayed in his basement, and went every day to the convention center to get overwhelmed. But I also met a bunch of other people I only knew as Discord user icons, and it really reinvigorated me.

The best things I got there were:

I also got Death Cut in Stone by Ryan Nox (of the Weekly Scroll podcast) in the mail recently. I ended up supplying the title when he was trying to name it, so he was nice enough to send me some copies. That’s community in action!

At one point in my childhood, my mom gave me $5 a week and took us to the mall in Onalaska, WI. I was never patient enough to save up for an actual RPG book (my eyes were always on the AD&D Monster Manual), but I regularly blew my money on issues of Dungeon and Dragon, TSR’s monthly magazines that were sitting on the newsstand at Waldenbooks next to, like, Forbes or whatever. I spent so long trying to reverse engineer D&D from these magazines.

A bunch of them were recycled or given away in the aforementioned purges, but I still have my original copy of Dragon Annual #1. There’s awesome art by R.K. Post and Tony DiTerlizzi, and you can still see my pencil marks in the Planescape article where I was trying to track and understand the paraelemental and quasielemental planes.

We’ve covered a lot of boring, traditional games on RTFM that maybe had an exciting spark or two but not much else to offer. But one that gave way more than I expected was CyberGenerations by Mike Pondsmith. It’s a direct sequel to his Cyberpunk RPG, and it’s about the kids of the jaded cyberpunks, and how they feel their parents have failed them and sold out.

You can feel Pondsmith’s regret over how Cyberpunk became a gear porn, gun violence game whose players often chose to leave the ‘punk off. Since CyberGenerations is about kid gangs, no one really gets guns or violent skills. Instead, it’s all about staying alive and opening the eyes of the people with pranks and heists. It feels way ahead of its time.

I don’t think my mind is very set on much. Even games I love for a long time get boring eventually. And games that might feel too heavy or complicated now can be perfect for slower periods in life.

I save my unchanging mind for things like opposing fascism. With games, I’m mostly willing to reassess.

I’m going with The Lovers by Adam Vass & Alyx Schroeder. Adam is known for games about serial murder and gutter punks and righteous violence, so I think it’s really special to get a straightorwardly romantic game from him.

It’s not pure saccharine; it’s a game about the sometimes complicated discussions we have to have in order to create deeper connections, so there’s bound to be some agita in there. But I love the approach, the limited color palette, and the remix of ‘50s visuals.

For mainstream traditional games, it’s organized by system and edition and era. D&Ds go in order, White Wolfs are hanging out in a pack with other ‘90s babies, and Greg Stafford gets his own shelf. Indie stuff is mostly shelved by designer. All my Aaron Lim games are together, all my Max Landers, and so on. The games I’m running are out in a stack on a stool for easy reference.

I’m a library school dropout, so my organization is boring but easy.

I think the one game I’m still looking for is Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game. It’s a late-stage TSR game based on the card-based SAGA edition of Dragonlance, which was another game that was ahead of its time.

The complication with Marvel Super Heroes is that it was a box set with lots of books, cards, etc, so finding a complete one for a normal price is hard. Sellers, get at me.

When I want to become depressed, I’ll often go to the r/RPG subreddit, and a request I’ve seen there multiple times is, “What’s an awesome setting book that’s system agnostic?” And I know those people are basically looking for an encyclopedia of a fictional world broken out by region or era, but as a staunch enemy of the wikification of stories, I always want to respond, “Buddy, go read a novel.”

And it just so happens that one of the most RPG-setting novels of all time is also one of the greatest works of fiction, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or, The Whale. It’s got setting, it’s got bestiaries, it’s got villains and skill challenges and quest givers.

It’s also another example of the strange gravity of collections, where having one or two inevitably leads to having more (see below).

I’m not a big dice person; shibboleths like “dice goblin” and “clicky clacky math rocks” make me cringe. Sorry, dice goblins. But in lieu of a real answer, I’ll tell you a story.

When I got invited to my first longterm D&D campaign, I bought a set of pink dice. My decision was based solely on the fact that my cousin used to buy a pink lighter before going to a party, because no one else had one, so it was impossible to steal with the claim, “No, this is my pink lighter, I don’t know where yours is.”

I wasn’t worried about my dice being stolen, but I figured it would make cleanup easier for me. I could just grab all the pink dice off the table. But of course it became “a thing,” and people started buying me more pink dice or giving me the pink dice out of their collections. It’s like you moved into a house with one ceramic toad on the stoop, and after years of holidays, your whole back yard is filled with toads.

Notebook and pen, all the way! For me, it’s the most direct means to turn my thoughts into symbols. But as with dice, I’m not precious about it. As someone who has been identified as vaguely “artsy” my whole life, I’ve been given more notebooks than I’ll ever be able to use. I try to just stick with one until it’s used up.

Tom Waits sang, “I never buy umbrellas ‘cause there’s always one around.” And while I’ve never found a spare umbrella, I feel like I’ve never bought a pen. Maybe it’s similar to the notebook and dice gifts. Maybe I just have a lot of kind friends. Or maybe I’m secretly a kleptomaniac.

So yeah, whatever tool gets the job done. One of my best friends has pretty severe ADHD and autism, and she likes to tell me, “What, you can just make a quick decision and not invent consequences for your small actions?” I guess I’m very lucky that way.

I’m very happy about the itch.io explosion of PDF sales. It means I can get games from designers without the means to print, or from designers in other countries where shipping costs make physical copies impossible for me to get. And you can get out-of-print games too! And charity bundles!

However, my retention has always been terrible when reading digitally. This isn’t a “screens are bad” rant; I’ve just noticed that I can read something on a computer, and it all flows out of my head way faster than if I read a physical book.

So while I’m happy to buy PDFs as a means of supporting international designers or for small projects that’ll never go to print, it’s the last place I go to actually read something, so I don’t really think of it as a collection.

Seb Pines or Will Jobst from Good Luck Press! Or Adam Vass!