Thought experiment: What’s the ugliest game book you’d still pick off a shelf if you came across it again for the first time?

Indie snobs will of course claim it’s a whole long list, but the reality is that we really do judge a book by its cover. That’s why they have covers.

Last week I watched a Netflix movie called Uglies, adapted from the YA book series by Scott Westerfeld. The director, Charlie’s Angels’ McG, chose gorgeous young actors to play the so-called Ugly kids before they received mandatory surgery to make them Pretty (it’s a whole gonzo dystopic premise, look it up). It’s his way of pointing out that when it comes to beauty it’s never enough.

I would propose the same is true of game publishing now. Has been for a while.

Least Beautiful: The Zines

Looking over my own library, I think I’m down to just a few zines I might still pick up after flicking through them, were I to find them out in the wild in a bookstore. They are beautiful enough. In all but a couple cases I’m grateful to have all these zines, no matter how they look. I’m just being real about my aesthetic expectations in this day and age.

Honestly, none of the older zines on my shelf would make the cut. I know my zine fans will tell me there’s a rough-edged “zine aesthetic,” and that might have been true in the golden age of actual music and hacking zines that were mimeographed and hand-stapled 20 at a time. It’s even still sort of true-ish with productions like Paul Czege’s long-form essay books The Ink That Bleeds and its sequel Inscapes.

I’m happy I backed all my gaming zines and I’m glad I couldn’t see them up close on Kickstarter! I only regret one or two of the zines. But on a store shelf? The “least beautiful” ones are still just gorgeous:

Stealing the Throne, a cool little story game about stealing a giant mecha. Everyone creates the setting via pick-lists, then you take turns describing how you get past the security, or stop the intruders. Really classy, minimalist design and layout.

Project Ecco: As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge goober for time travel stories. This is a solo journaling game in which you bounce around in a daily planner (pick one up cheap on clearance from Staples after the start of the school year) making notes about the days.

The Facility, a game I ran my local crew through recently. Amnesiac test subjects trying to escape a strange facility full of hunter robots and miscellaneous weird shit. Really provocative art, dense, multifunctional layout. It stands out among my zines.

Ironically, Zinequest started as an easy bridge into game publishing and crowdfunding. That was even true for a year, maybe two. Now you’ll see just astonishingly beautiful work coming out in this form factor: Notorious/Outsiders, Substratum Protocol, Fealty, you get the idea. These are not Baby’s First Game productions.

Least Beautiful: The Small Books

In terms of small book-sized games, the ugliest I would still pick up today include:

Knave, Ben Milton’s refactoring of B/X D&D. Incredibly dense layout is kind of a turnoff to my eyes, but you can’t deny there’s a lot of game packed into this tiny book. It is by no measure “ugly,” it’s just not striking except for its slimness.

Headspace, an older PbtA title from Mark Richardson. It’s basically Sense 8 in RPG form, albeit created independently of the show. If I recall, Headspace actually got published before Sense 8 first aired? Anyway, I’ve got lots of PbtA games that I would probably not pick up today because they’re not grabby productions (Uncharted Worlds, Ironsworn, The Watch) and what a shame, since they’re all very good. Ironsworn is still my favorite non-journaling solo RPG! But it’s a little plain, especially compared to its sci-fi sequel Starforged.

Sorcerer, Ron Edwards’ groundbreaking “what could you be tempted into for power?” urban fantasy RPG. Undeniably great hook, clean interior…and the cover looks like it was painted by a talented high school student.

The Least Beautiful: The Big Books

And the least-beautiful full-sized game books I would still pick off a shelf at a store:

Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, mostly on “god this is huge, what could possibly be in it?” grounds. In Chuubo’s, characters pursue self-defined goals in a cozy, magical town. This print is huge because it includes all the handout and prop materials that were supposed to be a separate production, as I understand it. But it’s an intimidating tome, no denying it.

Coyote & Crow, because the type is so dang big it comes across as amateurish, but like…there’s still a lot of game there. It could have been done with half the page count, but they made a choice! Coyote & Crow is a tribal-futurist game in which troubleshooters in a future where Europe never colonized the Americas shoot trouble, except with science and spirituality.

End Times, because as mentioned before I’m a gigantic sucker for time-travel RPGs and as soon as I flipped through it the PbtA-ness of it would be apparent. But it’s by no means “pretty.” The cool twist of End Times is that when you travel, you swap places with your life 20 years ago, or 20 years in the future.

Erryone Is This Shallow

What I’m saying is, it’s ridiculous how high the bar has gotten on game production now.

Consider the truly great games I might not pick up if I came across them in the wild for the first time:

All the OG Forge-y stuff: Dust Devils, Polaris, Misspent Youth, Don’t Rest Your Head, Universalis…honestly, everything except Sorcerer, which I’ll immediately acknowledge is an arbitrary line in my own head. Sorcerer is just as plain as the rest of them. I think none of that era of game would survive rerelease in this day and age without an expensive glow-up, despite the design chops.

Circle of Hands, Ron Edwards’ low-fantasy Iron Age foray into playing with, and around, a distinctly non-modern mindset. Edwards has eschewed production values so much he’s putting all his games out as de-arted documents now. That’s some windmill-tilting only someone with an existing name and following could attempt.

The Burning Wheel, my all-time favorite RPG, might not make it past an initial flick-through in 2024. Text-dense and old-school, confusing flow, line art right out of AD&D. That same aesthetic continues in Miseries & Misfortunes, Luke Crane’s latest project, and I gotta say it’s really hard for me to slog through it despite knowing there’s a lot of great gaming in there.

The age of the lightly laid out, just get the text into readers’ hands books is, unfortunately, behind us. And what a shame. There are literally millions of words of once-in-a-lifetime designs folks might never look at again because they’re underproduced by modern standards.

Minimum Viable Product

Meanwhile, most of the books that come to me today are just jaw-dropping. The corporate gloss of Dungeons & Dragons 5E (I bought my first slipcase set a few weeks ago to help out at my kid’s school D&D club, just in time for 5.5, yes) is the minimum threshold any more.

I got a super interesting project sent to me last month, The Crimson Realms by Trenton Payne at Gilgamesh Games. It’s a reimplementation of art assets developed for a CCG that didn’t quite get off the ground on Kickstarter. It’s not quite my normal jam, but it’s clearly expressing the lesson that one absolutely must make a beautiful book. Rather than a traditional RPG, The Crimson Realms starts with many pages of fiction set in their vampires-versus-dragons world, then a block of art, then several pages of a pretty trad RPG at the back tying it all together. The art is terrific and varied, quite distinctive. Honestly it might have been more interesting to me if they’d taken an approach like The Haunted North or some other latter-day coffee table art + fiction book.

My current reading pile on my nightstand is nothing but drop-dead-gorgeous game books, each one tugging the baseline production values higher and higher:

The Wildsea, and Storm & Root: I’ve had these in PDF for a while, even run The Wildsea at our online con last year, but holding the physical books is another thing entirely. They’re wide-format and pretty inconvenient for bedtime reading, but in any other situation it’s very much like flipping through a coffee table book. Good layout, easy to find stuff, just a top-notch production. Read my quick gloss on The Wildsea for more information.

Beyond the Pale: Paolo Greco’s Lost Pages publishing imprint puts out such nice stuff, it’s all an auto-buy for me even when it’s not something I would normally put to use (he’s mostly OSR-aligned). I got Book of Gaub from him a couple years ago, and both Beyond the Pale and the Wulfwald boxed set showed up recently. His cloth-bound hardbacks are just exquisite, like small poetry collections from the 1920s. Greco even uses a vintage typeface rescued from the Thames to round out the “already old when you found it” vibes. I don’t often buy games as pure art objects, but these are close to that. Beyond the Pale is an OSR adventure site themed around medieval Jewish communities and beliefs; Wulfwald is an OSR campaign frame about deniable, disposable criminal outcasts working for nobility in a proto-Scandinavia.

Memento Mori: Two Little Mice (of Outgunned and Household fame) recently released this three-book cloth-bound hardback set. Gilt edges, ribbons, rich creamy paper, what is going on here? The system looks fairly dense and flipping through it gave me some Fantasy Wargaming vibes. Wildly overproduced, more suitable to reading while sipping a nicely aged single-malt than furiously flipping through at a table with grubby Cheeto-dusted fingers. Stately. The game is about pursuing your life’s dream in a mythical medieval Italy while slowly dying of the plague.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland: This is a rerelease of a game about neolithic spiritual warriors by legend Jon Hodgson at Handiwork Games. His first edition, released really early in the AI-generated art era, has been pulled from circulation because, well, AI-generated art has turned out to be problematic in the commercial publishing universe. So Hodgson took a couple years and re-photographed everything from scratch. The system is based on a very, very lightweight storygame called The Silver Road, and is almost beside the point. I’ve seen lots of gorgeous OSR art-book publications over the years but this might be the first time I’ve come across a storygame art-book. Heck, I’d run it! Better still I’d just pass the book around the table and let folks soak in the vibes.

Teeth: by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies, Teeth is a game of late-18th century monster hunting in a weird, isolated bit of northern England. It’s highly representative of the sort of work Soul Muppet, Melsonian and others that use what Paolo Greco calls the “Baltic Trinity” of book binderies (Tallinn, Livonia, Standart: beautifully clothbound, bold layout, striking in every way. You would expect to find this kind of book in the “English Language Classics” section of a bookstore.

Bug/Feature

As a lifelong reader and critic of the form, I have such mixed feelings about this move toward production-forward games. I feel like the emphasis on production values is both necessary to secure funding through crowdsourcing, and not great for game design. Two wildly overproduced games that recently got here – The Revenant Society and Xenolanguage – were two of my biggest game qua game disappointments in a decade. But gosh they look great. Meanwhile, old-school productions like Magonomia (a take on similar material to Ars Magica via Fate) might have more design behind them, but it’s so hard to get them attention outside their established audiences.

Is there an answer? Is it even a problem? Or is this just wanting it all? Happily there are a lot of games that will certainly have it all: Magpie’s upcoming Urban Shadows 2E, for example, is just gorgeous in PDF and it’s iterating a known great game. Free League’s stuff is both consistently playable and consistently nice to look at (personally I am so stoked for Coriolis 2E). Inevitable and Cowboy Bebop prove that great-looking story games are still in demand.

There are also probably lots of terrific designs still coming out poured into a free Affinity template with a bit of inexpensive public-domain art on the cover. Dropped into itch.io never to be seen again.

I have no idea how we’re going to discover the really strong game designs you can’t see for all the glossy, embossed, cloth-bound, ribboned, gilt-edged, fully illustrated stuff pushing itself to the front of the line. It’s a golden age for gaming, stamped out of actual gold.