February Newsletter

It's Zinequest time again

Jan 29, 2025

Hi folx,

We’re heading into February and it brings me great joy to announce that UK TIN is heading to UKGE 2025. We’re fully paid up and looking forwards to the biggest weekend in the UK’s gaming industry.

If you’re a member of our Discord server, please check the volunteering channel to find out how you can join our moderation team as we expand it to meet the needs of our growing community. If you aren’t a member but want to help the mod team, join using the link scattered throughout this newsletter.

A video summary of this newsletter can be found here:

To support us, join our Patreon or give a one-off donation on Ko-fi.

You can also find us on Discord, on Facebook, on Bluesky, on tumblr, on Twitter, and on Instagram.

Meetups & Events

Our upcoming meetups are:

London: Thursday 6th February, 7pm (first Thursday of the month)
@ The Arcanist’s Tavern, 87-91 Hackney Road, Shoreditch, E2 8FE
Glasgow: Friday 7th February, 9am and Friday 21st February, 9am (fortnightly)
@ Beco Building, 62 Kingston Street
Manchester: Saturday 8th February, 2pm (second Saturday of the month)
@ KRO BAR, 325 Oxford Rd, M13 9PG
Leeds: Saturday 8th February, 3pm
@ North Bar, Aire Park, 3 Sheaf Street, LS10 1HD
Norwich: Thursday 13th February, 6.30pm @ Albion Games Café, 21 St Benedicts St, Norwich NR2 4PF
Virtual Coffee Mornings: Wednesday 5th February, 10.30am (usually first Wednesday of the month) and Sunday 16th February, 11am (third Sunday of the month)
@ coffee-morning channel in the UK Tin Discord server.
Creatives of Colour virtual hangout: TBC, 8pm
@ PoC-Lounge channel in the UK TIN Discord server (remember to ask a Discord mod for the “creative of colour” role for access)

Remember to keep an eye on our social media channels for any updates to these expected times or locations.

TIN Talks are on hiatus for February, but if you missed last month’s talk by Tejas Oza on “How Table Top can inform design approach”, or if you want to catch up with any of our previous TIN Talks, you can find recordings of all of our TIN Talks at the TIN Talks Archive.

Zine Quest 2025

February is Zine Quest 2025, so in this newsletter we’re highlighting some of the projects launched by TIN members and affiliates. We can only scratch the surface, so if you’re a creator with a Zinequest project (or a Pocketopia project launching in March), drop by the UK TIN Discord to tell us about it in the #self-promotion channel.

Hive Mind Games presents Beside the Lesser Travelled Road, a collection of 20 camping sites that give your adventuring party a narratively rich spot to rest their heads. Each site has been developed by a skilled indie creator and comes with its own set of plot hooks.

Teen Noir by Epistolary Richard is a tabletop roleplaying game intended for one-shots or a handful of linked sessions about a group of teenage friends turned enemies, who are all linked to a recent crime by a secret they hold. As these secrets are revealed, each teen is pushed further away from the core group. By story’s end, one will have their guilt revealed, one will take the blame, and they may or may not be the same person.

The Crawling Chaos is a zero-prep roleplaying game for 2-5 players by Mike Hutchinson. Create short tales of macabre and weird horror, where one player takes the role of a lone narrator, plunged into esoteric and uncanny mysteries until curiosity leads them to their doom. The other players act as the incidental characters and the world itself, throwing dangerous incidents, accidents and unpleasant encounters to drive them to their demise.

The Absolute Wurst by Two Snakes Games is an adventure for the acid Western rpg Frontier Scum, featuring a desolate mining settlement, horrific sausages, and either wild riches or death for the player characters.

Tail-End Charlie is a solo game by Alex White, in which you take on the role of the most dangerous position in Bomber Command: the tail gunner, often known as “tail-end Charlie”.

Using a deck of cards, determine how your tour of duty and time at home goes. Cycle through mission, downtime, mission, downtime until you either survive your 15-mission tour of duty, get captured, drummed out due to stress or die heroically.

Keep a debrief diary of each mission, and a personal diary of the highs and lows of life around the base to build your character’s unique wartime life story.

Universe At Your Door: The Traveller by Lola Johnson is a journalling game that follows the life and journey of a Traveller on a mission to investigate extrasolar planets. It is about what they find and what keeps them together, even though the record of this journey might never get back to Earth.

Realms: Etria by Princess Woy is non-traditional TTRPG for structured GM-less play using a chapter-based system. Although launched for Zine Quest, it’s certainly not a zine, and will come in a box with a 120-page rulebook and six rollbooks filled with prompts for different game themes, including sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and more.

Podcasts, Streams and Shows

Looking for practical and helpful tips on prepping your game? Black Armada Games is here to help! Check out their fantastic series of video tips, Game Prep Matters, useful for new GMs or people who've been running games for years.

You may also like the recent write-up of their previous video series on How to be TTRPG’s Most Valuable Player.

Other Bundles, Crowdfunding, & Subscriptions

Trouble on the Tempus is a co-op boardgame where you and up to four other players work together to stop your spaceship exploding.

The closer you get to the point of disaster, the more information you’re able to learn about what’s gone wrong, and how you can fix it. If things are getting too dicey, you can go back in time, but whenever you do, you risk creating paradoxes which can further complicate things!

Fans of Star Trek will no doubt love committing to the act. Sign up on Kickstarter to be notified at launch.

Wraithborn is a grim folk-fantasy setting for OSR games. While designed to be compatible with Mork Borg and Forbidden Psalm, the setting can work with any OSR game. Inspired by folk music, and magic rituals from our own world, it puts players in a world where the undead are never far from the living. This setting promises to be jam-packed with everything you might need for a new campaign, including: character classes, monsters, a campaign guide, magic system, faction system, an oracle system for solo-play, and an adventure ready to run!

UK Tabletop Industry Network has a Patreon! All contributions help us support up-and-coming creators in the tabletop industry without a paywall or other barrier to entry. Patreon funding is the main way we cover up-front fees for conventions and events. The more funding we get, the more events we can attend, and the more games by aspiring creatives we can put in front of excited gamers that might otherwise miss them.

If you support the Patreon at the £5 tier or above, you’ll get free access to a growing selection of great games contributed by our members, the latest of which is All Bastard by Sam Armstrong. Other games for Patreon members include LadyBeaste by Michael Duxbury, Drama Llamas by Yvris Burke, Biome by Black Armada Games, and Slasher by Sam Armstrong.

Contributors to this month’s edition of the TIN newsletter were Ryan Wheeldon, Jack Terry, Josh Gane, Eleanor Hingley and Stephen Morffew. If you would like to contribute to the newsletter, drop a message in the #tin-volunteering channel of the UK TIN Discord or contact Stephen Morffew via email at stepintorpgs(at)outlook(dot)com.