500 Years Ago

The Italian painter Raphael might have stood at his easel in a candlelit Roman workshop in the early 16th century, carefully layering paint onto the canvas that would become his Portrait of a Young Man. Completed at the height of his career, the piece would remain in his studio for several years among countless others from his prolific life.

Hailed as one of the Italian Renaissance’s crowning achievements (and possibly a self-portrait of the painter himself) Portrait of a Young Man displays a mastery of form and light. Without getting to much into the weeds, the textures, colors, softness, and expression all showcase a complex and deep understanding of contexts and themes. Man and woman. Heaven and earth. Nature and humanity.

Raphael was a unique individual, even among other old masters. He had a workshop of at least fifty pupils and assistants, much higher than what was considered normal at the time. A quick look to their identities is a veritable ‘who’s-who’ of Renaissance masters, many producing their own historically relevant bodies of work. Despite this the painter would die at only 37 years old and Portrait of a Young Man would be bundled among other paintings, sketches, and self-portraits for storage or sale.

It sat in Italy for nearly 200 years.

300 Years Ago

Adam George Czartoryski was a nationalist Pole, son to a wealthy prince, patron of the arts, and at various points of his life:

• Foreign minister to the Emperor of Russia
  
• Leader of the Polish government in exile
  
• Soldier in an army corps while at least 60 years old
  
• Made a cameo appearance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

During the November Uprising, in which Russia crushed Polish rebellion and quashed any hope for Polish independence, the Puławy collection (a massive art collection started by Adam’s mother, Princess Izabela Czartoryska roughly 30 years prior) was in danger of total destruction with the confiscation of the Czartoryski properties. In response, many of the holdings in the collection were spirited away to Paris at the Hôtel Lambert.

There they stayed until 1871, when Adam’s son—Prince Władysław—fled war-torn France after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) with all the artifacts at Hôtel Lambert.

Three years later, the city of Kraków offered up a space for the works to be held and they began slowly trickling in and finally in 1878, one hundred years after his grandmother set up the initial collection, the museum as it is seen today was opened.

One of the works there was Portrait of a Young Man—purchased by Prince Adam in 1798.

87 Years Ago

On the first day of September, 1939, the September Campaign began—in which the Republic of Poland was jointly attacked by Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic (later—and confusedly before—known as Czechoslovakia, then separated into Slovakia after the Velvet Divorce in 1992), and the Soviet Union.

Family patriarch Augustyn Józef Czartoryski went to great efforts to save as many works as he could from the Czartoryski Museum. The collection was absconded to Sieniawa, but was inevitably discovered by the Gestapo led by the governor of the General Government over Poland, Hans Frank. While all the pieces were sent to become part of the Hitler’s own collection at Linz (the so-called and unrealized Führermuseum), three pieces came to decorate Frank’s personal residence in Kraków:

Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine,
Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan,
and Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man.

Despite the pieces making their way to Berlin in the early 1940s, Frank returned the paintings back to Kraków at Wawel Castle in January 1945. Here they would reside until the end of the month, when Germans fled the city ahead of the Soviet offensive. Given Frank’s attraction to the paintings, it is widely believed he took them to his own villa in Silesia.

Frank was arrested on May 3, 1945 by Americans and was executed a year later for his extensive war crimes. The Allies Commission for the Retrieval of Works of Art located many of the paintings stolen by him (with the Polish representative of the commission claiming them on behalf of the Czartoryski Museum), but 844 artifacts were missing from storage.

Though Lady with an Ermine and Landscape with the Good Samaritan were restored to the Czartoryski collection, Portrait of a Young Man was never seen again.

10 Years Ago

Adam Karol Czartoryski, the current head of the House of Czartoryski, sold the family collection at the Czartoryski Museum to the Polish nation for €100 million on the 29th of December, 2016.

A widely-criticized move—as the collection was valued to be worth well over €2 billion, not to mention public opinion that the money could have been better spent elsewhere on other cultural endeavors—the collection included a trio of ‘paintings’: Lady with an Ermine, Landscape with the Good Samaritan, and an empty frame representing Portrait of a Young Man. They hang now in the National Museum of Kraków, viewable to the public.

The management board of the Czartoryski Foundation resigned after the sale, citing that they had not been consulted, claiming the sale may have been illegal, and expressing concern over the dissolution of the collection and risk of sale to private owners.

Tamara Czartoryska, Adam’s daughter, challenged the donation with an intrafamilial lawsuit in 2018. No significant updates have been made to the dispute since 2022, other than the €86 million Adam received from the sale was wired to a private account in Liechtenstein and invested in securities.

The Polish government claims it is well-known that Portrait of a Young Man survived the war. Where the painting actually is remains a mystery. Numerous organizations, from private family collectors to global commissions, span the globe to recover and restored looted art. Meanwhile, the painting has just as much likelihood of turning up in the attic of some manor house as it does in some cottage in a quiet European village, waiting for someone—anyone—to recognize it.

Thinking about Treasure

In most fantasy adventure games, treasure is nearly synonymous with coins, gemstones, and magical items. As a transactional tool—where players invest resources and time towards risks and potential rewards—this works. This is one of the more common game loops: players head out → players find treasure → players secure treasure and return to safety → players sell or spend treasure on supplies for another excursion. Rinse, repeat.

There’s very little narrative impact on capitalism functioning as-intended, where free agents in a market buy and sell goods ad nauseum. If anything, its just bookkeeping. Once players amass enough wealth, these treasures become functionally meaningless; what does a thousand gold mean to a millionaire? What does a magic sword mean to the lord of a keep who sends out his hirelings to adventure for him?

In typical storytelling, treasure represents a transformation of the characters—a levelling-up, an axis upon which the story fundamentally changes. Think of Luke getting his lightsaber in Star Wars, or Harry Potter getting his invisibility cloak, or Thanos getting the Infinity Stones (to use mainstream examples). Each of these aren’t just +1 swords or 500 gold for each party member, they’re inflection points in their stories. They are, quite literally, treasured—something that becomes a symbol and is held dear.

You’d be forgiven if, upon seeing Portrait of a Young Man, you wondered what was so special about a picture of a guy. Yes, the painting is an astounding example of the Mannerist style and later Nazarene movements but it isn’t exactly leap-off-the-page unique. What makes it so is the story behind the painting: the status of the painting’s whereabouts, how it ended up there, who has it, etc. The painting’s legacy supersedes the objective worth of the materials and artistic intent of Raphael five-hundred years ago.

You can do the same thing in games! Yes, the players need money and coins help serve that need, but true treasure should grant them tangible authority. A royal charter, a powerful family’s missing relic, or control of a guild elevates their status and reshapes their position in the world. A lost heirloom connects players to families, guilds, and cultures who have been searching for it for centuries. Most importantly, good treasure opens up potential future branches for where the story can go.

Off the top of the dome, here are a few examples:

Crown of the River King
Forged from sea-battered bronze and a Dire Clam’s pearl, the Crown passed through noble dynasties, warlords, and conquerors alike—each convinced it validated their right to rule. Each that possessed it crumbled and every time the Srown was lost. Mermaids, fishfolk, and other waterborne denizens understand that the one who reclaims the crown may band the Riverkin once more.

Illumination of Saint Felicia
Commissioned in the twelfth century, crafted of gold leaf and rare inks, this heretical manuscript has changed countless hands since its creation by the monk cults of High Talosh. Though it has vanished repeatedly throughout history, it always manages to return to the most unlikely of hands. The current Taloshian head monk pays—and kills—to have it returned.

Chalice of the Dead Queen
A mesmerizing goblet reforged by the queendom’s Order of the Cup. The chalice gained infamy as both Queen Taralan’s drinking cup (from which she imbibed the poison that killed her) and as one of the primary artifacts warred over in the Princesses War, in which the Queen’s four daughters fought for control over the empire. The victor of the war, Erienne, had it broken into three pieces: one for each tomb of her sisters that fell to her might by war’s end.

The newest “indie” game to hit the scene in a big way is Pumpkin Spice - A Magical Cozy RPG by Acheron Games, predominantly featuring work by SimzArt. The campaign closed on March 7th with nearly 11,000 backers and a final total of €1,322,784 (over $1.4M in freedombucks) on a €10,000 goal. That’s a 13,228% funding rate, for a cozy RPG about running a magical café.

Looking through the project it’s not exactly hard to see why (if you’ve been paying attention to modern runaway crowdfunding successes): a tonally consistent, art-forward book, priced appropriately, with a bunch of little doodads you can add-on like tshirts, dice, and GM screens. The crowdfunding page is put together in a very modern way, with the bulk of the campaign being devoted to showing the objectively talented artwork of SimzArt (say what you want about the style or the subjects or whatever, but it is objectively well done from concept, framing, inking, coloring, etc.).

The game is also part of a growing genre of RPG I’m calling “artslop”.

What is Artslop?

You likely don’t need me to explain this (reading the card explains the card), but for the sake of argument we’re going to say:

Artslop — a subset of the broader -slop genre — describes TTRPG products in which the dominant substance of the book is its artwork, rather than its rules, procedures, or writing. The game itself may be functional but unremarkable; the art does the heavy lifting of making the product feel like more than it is. (Compare friendslop, where the social experience of playing together carries an otherwise thin game — Among Us being the canonical example.)

A few things that are important to say from the jump:

1. I don’t think artslop is necessarily a problem! Much like friendslop didn’t ruin video games, artslop isn’t ruining tabletop roleplaying games.
   
2. Your favorite game can be artslop! Like I said in the description, the game is likely functional—just relatively unremarkable. It may be a bit cumbersome, a bit too simple, a bit meandering, or whatever. But it may also be perfect for your group or your aesthetic preferences.

Examples of the Genre

In recent years, more and more of these games have come to the fore, and a better lens than “art-forward” might be this: artslop is when the mechanics are the least important part of the package. The art is really just the delivery vehicle for the setting (or vibes) and that is what’s actually selling the book. The mechanics are there and they work, but they’re not the reason anyone is actually getting the book.

You can spot the pattern pretty reliably. The crowdfunding page devotes the vast majority of its real estate to artwork and setting vibes. If the game is already released, reviews and forum posts lead with the art first, usually with quotes like “if you’re into this world, you’ll love it.”

When people get around to describing the actual system, the vocabulary gets very telling: “simple,” “stripped down,” “serviceable,” “not very deep.” None of those are insults, necessarily. But they paint a picture of a “game” that’s relying on a lot of “non-game” elements to do the talking.

Tales from the Loop is probably the ur-example of artslop. Simon Stålenhag’s paintings are the entire reason the game exists. The IP started as an art book. The RPG was built around the aesthetic (in fact, was a part of the initial Kickstarter campaign stretch-goals!) not the other way around. Free League bolted on a stripped-down Year Zero Engine, and the result is a game that people genuinely enjoy but almost exclusively talk about in terms of its setting.

Go read any forum thread about Tales from the Loop and you’ll see the same thing over and over. People describe the vibe (“kids on bikes, 80s nostalgia, scientists messing with physics”) and when they get to the mechanics, it’s always some version of “it’s simple / it’s not very deep / but it’s fun.” People describe it as “a great game for easy roleplay and goofing around with friends.”

One reviewer, Jukka Kauppinen, even stated “This mutual storytelling and interaction makes this game more of a campfire circle than a traditional role-playing game”.

Nobody is evangelizing the dice mechanics. Nobody is writing forum posts breaking down the way the different parts of the game interact with one another in novel ways. They’re buying the book because they want to live inside a Stålenhag painting for a few hours, and the rules are just there to give them an excuse to do that.

And that’s fine! Like I said, artslop isn’t a slur. Tales from the Loop is a beloved game with a passionate community. But if you took away the art and published those rules as a plain text PDF, I would bet that the reception would be dramatically different (if there would be any reception at all).

Pumpkin Spice fits the same mold almost perfectly. Scroll through the BackerKit campaign and count how much space is devoted to SimzArt’s illustrations versus how much is devoted to explaining what the game actually does. The art is doing the talking because the art is the pitch. The “QuickStart” (which is 60+ goddamned pages—a bugbear for another post) takes 15 pages until it gets into the actual core system, which is effectively a

In a world where a typical QuickStart is 15 pages total, an artslop book will spend 15 pages justifying its setting and vibes until it remembers it’s a game. This is the artslop fingerprint: when the conversation around a game is almost entirely about what it looks and feels like rather than what it plays like, you’re probably looking at artslop.

What Isn’t Artslop

So far I’ve stated a book being “art-forward” is a pretty telling sign of artslop. You may be wondering where the little neon yellow book fits into all this.

Mörk Borg, for its foibles, isn’t artslop for one primary reason: the rules are freely available with no artwork and, even in that format, still evoke the game’s general tone. The mechanics encode the world. Character creation is brutal and random because the world is brutal and random. You don’t need Johan Nohr’s graphic design to understand what Mörk Borg is about, even if that design elevates the experience.

In Mörk Borg, the art and design amplify something that already works on its own. In artslop, strip away the art and you’re left with a game that has very little to say for itself. The setting and the system are entangled in Mörk Borg, they’re the same thing expressed through different mediums.

In Tales from the Loop, the setting is painted on top. In Pumpkin Spice, based on what the campaign shows us, I suspect we’ll see more of the same.

Why This Matters

So if artslop isn’t an insult, why bring it up at all?

Because these books aren’t cheap. Pumpkin Spice’s campaign tiers range from about €30 for a couple PDFs to well over €150 for the big edition with all the extras. That’s real money, and the question worth asking is: what are you actually getting for it?

With a game like this, a significant portion of what you’re paying for is page after page of beautiful illustration. And if that’s what you want—a coffee table book that also happens to have an RPG in it—then great, you’re getting exactly what you paid for.

But if you’re expecting a mechanically rich system that’ll sustain a long-term campaign with the kind of depth and crunch your group craves, I have a hard time imagining there aren’t better games (for much cheaper!) by the vast selection of indie designers on itch.io.

That gets at the core issue: the modern TTRPG crowdfunding ecosystem is extremely good at selling you a vibe. Consumers (especially ones who are newer to the hobby and might not know what questions to ask) ought to have the vocabulary to distinguish between “this is a beautifully produced game with innovative mechanics” and “this is a beautifully produced book with a game in it.”

Find yourself a stack of zines. They could be from your collection or the next time you’re at a local gaming store. Any amount will do, so long as you have three or more. In front of me, I have A Pound of Flesh (Mothership), Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (Old-School Essentials), and Barkeep on the Borderlands (OSR/Neutral).

In essence, a pretty wide spread of genres and formats:

• A sci-fi horror setting
  
• A medieval-fantasy introductory adventure
  
• A hex (pub) crawl adventure

Start to turn their pages, however, and you’ll get another story. Each one, to a fault, operates as follows:

• A Pound of Flesh opens with a map, then setting context, then a faction list / who’s who
  
• Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow opens with setting context, a faction list / who’s who, then a map
  
• Barkeep on the Borderlands opens with a map, then setting context, then a faction list / who’s who…

Considering how different these are and that they’re from completely different companies with different designers and layout artists, I think it’s a safe stance to take that this format is considered default—or is as close to default as a scene like this is to stumble across.

One could argue this creates a sort of launching point for new designers; a guiding star for individuals to use as a reference as they build out their modules. But with that comes a homogeneity, a sort of sameness that causes your eyes to glaze over the more zines you back or purchase… or even make. What worked well in one zine becomes the standard, whether its how a faction was presented or how a floor in a dungeon was laid out or what kinds of tables get written.

Is the zine throttling the creativity of the scene? I think, emphatically, yes.

A Story

The graphic design program at my university was a fairly rigorous one: over one hundred and fifty students applied each year, only twenty would be allowed in. In spring 2012, I was one of those twenty.

I had spent a significant amount of time working on my portfolio, since at least two years prior when my high school art teacher convinced me that what I wanted was design and layout, not traditional art (thank god for her, truly—the fact that any of you are reading this is thanks to her). I spent the final months of high school doing perspective drawing, poster layout, learning Photoshop and InDesign, and just reading books on the general history of design.

Cut to college and I’m doing largely the same, only now I’m not the only one in class that has heard of design. Immediately I’m surrounded not by classmates, but by competition. And some of them were… way better than me. So I agonized over every piece in my portfolio, spent six months perfecting every description, noticing every fault, and preparing for the interview.

Jump ahead another year when me and nineteen others sit down for Fall semester. The professors immediately tell you to forget trends, forget what’s hot right now, and learn the basics. Form. Type. White Space. Texture. So we do—and because we’re all in close proximity to one another and the reference material the instructors want us learning from, something unsurprising happens:

All our shit looks the same. Like, so similar that you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking it was one person’s portfolio. And the professors, seeing this, are happy. We’ve learned the Utter Truth of design and have, each of us, represented it honestly. This moment sticks with me, but I have no idea why at the time.

Over the next two and a half years, each of us would eventually find our personalities shining through our work. One person, a workhorse, blows everyone away with the sheer amount of work they can do. Another, interested in the vast array of mediums art provides, does more painterly, soft work. Another, already having lined up their internship at Pentagram in NYC, is pumping out work that wouldn’t catch a second glance in PRINT Magazine.

We start to diverge, but the foundation remains—you can still see traces of those lessons in all the work we do, day in and day out. And those professors nudge us here and there, presenting each of us with career-defining lessons that furthers us along our chosen paths.

In the TTRPG space, specifically the scene that produces indie zines, I think we are squarely in the “shit looking exactly the same” phase. The zine has become our professor, pleased that we have found the Utter Truth of zine layout.

But that’s not necessarily a problem. The problem is this professor isn’t pushing us towards anything other than uniformity.

The Problem

If you go to Google and type in “zine design examples”, you may immediately notice what the problem is.

Outside of the TTRPG space, zines have creativity bursting from the seams. Unique fold lines, unique sizes and shapes, thought-provoking design, bold colors and fonts—its a buffet for the senses:

Now go to Google and simply add “TTRPG” before “zine design examples”:

Is there anything here—barring Mörk Borg’s clever use of eye-blinding neon yellow—that catches your eye in the same way the zines before did? Anything that makes you wonder what kind of content is going to be inside?

Hell, is there anything about the zines that makes you want to actually buy and read it aside from what could just as easily be put in a Google Doc?

The problem is that the thinking behind and within the zine is the same. Designers default to the same solutions as their forebears that get good reviews, thus perpetuating the design choices made years ago without any semblance of curiosity as to whether we could be doing something different.

Even PDFs—a fully digital medium that have an infinite playspace of creativity—end up just being pixel copies of their physical versions.

As much as they would hate to admit it, indie TTRPG designers are hardly different than the big dogs when it comes to this issue. Homogeneity trumps uniqueness. Uniformity beats new experiences. Familiarity sells, new experiences die on the vine. Nothing gets remade because groupthink prevents it.

Sure, a rarity like Fall of Magic comes around once in a blue moon, but its treated as a novelty rather than as a genuine questioning of the status quo or as opportunity for innovation. After all, how many RPGs-as-scrolls do you see lying around?

The Solution

Back to art school for a sec. 

The “sameness” phase ended because the work demanded it. The projects got harder. The briefs got stranger. You couldn’t solve a wayfinding system for a children’s hospital the same way you solved a poster for a real estate conference—the problem itself forced you into unfamiliar territory.

The fundamentals were still there, but they became a foundation to build from, not a box to keep ourselves safe.

The zine scene doesn’t have that pressure at all. And the reason it doesn’t is economic as much as creative.

Zines sell. The format is proven, the price point is comfortable, the production pipeline is well-trodden. A designer who makes a clean, readable, 32-page A5 module with good art and solid tables will find an audience. A designer who makes a circular zine with perforated pages and three nested booklets is taking on real risk for uncertain reward—more expensive to print, harder to ship, impossible to stock on a shelf next to everything else.

The market rewards sameness.

So the question isn’t “why doesn’t anyone try something different?” People do sometimes! The question is why those remain exceptions rather than proof that the space is wider than we’re using.

Right now, the default assumption is that a zine is a delivery vehicle—it gets content from the designer’s head to the referee’s table, and the form should be as invisible as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that instinct, but it forecloses an entire category of design thinking where the object is part of the experience:

• A zine written entirely in-fiction, meant to be handed to players as an artifact their characters found.
  
• Pages designed to be torn out during play.
  
• A module whose physical structure mirrors the dungeon it contains—you literally unfold deeper as you explore deeper.
  
• A PDF that isn’t a pixel copy of a printed page but something that uses the screen as its native medium, with layers you reveal, sections you drag open, audio that plays when you reach certain content.

None of these are hypothetical—every one of them is achievable with the tools and budgets indie designers already have. They just require us to stop treating the zine as default territory.

And to be clear, I don’t want to see fewer zines! I just want to see the default A5 zine treated as one option among many—chosen deliberately because the content demands it.

The scene that figured out how to make publishing accessible and democratic and weird has, without noticing it, become uniform. But the foundation is built. The fundamentals are learned. What comes next is the part where the work starts to diverge.

But that only happens if we let the problems get stranger.