Why RPG zines need more than genre labels

Cyberpunk tells you something about BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home. It does not tell you that Rae Nedjadi connects that setting to Filipino folklore, uses a token-based system, and offers play with or without a moderator. Each description answers a different question a reader might bring to the publication. Collapsing them into one genre label makes the game harder to choose. The creator’s description of BALIKBAYAN

This is a recurring problem with small RPG publications. A label can refer to the imagined world, the procedures used to play, the shape of the object, or the community through which it circulates. Those are related features, but a reader searching for one cannot reliably infer the others.

The examples here come from creators’ current descriptions, checked in October 2026. I am proposing a way to compare publications, not issuing a cataloging standard or claiming to have tested these games with readers.

Several questions inside one title

BALIKBAYAN’s premise follows escaped elementals whose magic has been exploited as labor and power. Its return to Earth gives homecoming a specific place in the fiction. The listing identifies Belonging Outside Belonging as its rules lineage and supplies beta files. Those facts belong in a description alongside its thematic language; the listing alone does not establish a finished print edition.

The combination matters. A person interested in cyberpunk’s treatment of exploited bodies may find the premise relevant. Someone looking for dice-based combat needs a different piece of information. A researcher studying Filipino imaginative work has another reason to look. The same publication can answer all three searches without being reduced to the terms of any one of them.

Girl Underground presents a different combination. Hedgemaze Press describes a curious girl’s journey through a wondrous world, names Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as story comparisons, and identifies Powered by the Apocalypse as the system. It also gives a group arrangement of one game master and three to five players. The literary comparison, procedure and participation requirement are independently useful. The publisher’s description of Girl Underground

Calling both publications fantasy would not be false in an ordinary broad sense. It would leave a prospective reader with most of the choosing still to do. Calling one folklore and the other literary adaptation would introduce further questions about what those terms imply, since inspiration, incorporation and adaptation are not interchangeable relationships.

Good description allows these distinctions to accumulate. A brief note can name an influence as an influence, preserve the publisher’s phrasing about play, and identify the actual file or edition held. Precision need not make the record long. It requires each field to do one clear job.

A boundary case makes the structure visible

sorcha.ni calls This is/is not a love letter a zine-game and describes prompts for writing a love letter or its opposite. Its listing includes both journaling and Solo RPG tags, while its file is prepared for printing and play. The creator’s compound description is useful evidence about how the work is offered. It does not compel every reader to settle the boundary between reflective writing and roleplaying in the same place. The creator’s listing

If a collection permits only one top-level identity, this publication may force an unnecessary choice. Place it under games and a reader looking for writing prompts may miss it. Place it under writing and someone exploring solo play may never encounter it. Multiple routes can describe the same object without pretending those routes mean exactly the same thing.

Bowker and Star’s account of classification helps explain the problem. Categories are made and maintained for particular purposes; cases that sit awkwardly within them can reveal assumptions that routine use conceals. Their argument gives a reason to examine a local scheme’s consequences, rather than treating every inconvenient publication as a defective example of its assigned class. The introduction to Sorting Things Out

For RPG zines, I would begin with a small set of independent questions. What is the publication about? What does it ask someone to do? What other rules or materials does that activity require? What form does this copy take? Which words does its maker use? The answers can overlap, but each question protects a distinction that a reader may need.

Description should survive an actual search

Here is a proposed working model for a local reading guide. It is deliberately modest enough to test against a few real publications before expanding it.

A public library can test the guide with questions that occur at the desk: a solo activity, a game for a particular group size, a short publication about a desired subject. An academic library can add research questions about lineage, language or publication history. The test is whether the description supports those searches, including cases where the answer is that more examination is needed.

The model also makes unknown information easier to handle. An absent page count stays unknown. A publisher’s suggested duration remains attributed. A system label does not become a promise of compatibility with every game carrying related terminology. Clear gaps are more useful than confident guesses that a later reader cannot distinguish from observed facts.

The best genre description gives a reader a place to begin. Additional fields let the reader continue toward a particular object and activity. BALIKBAYAN, Girl Underground and a letter-writing zine-game show why those routes should remain open: their differences are much more interesting than the single label that could contain them all.