I posted about The Insectiary, a wee little zine full of awful bugs, by Andre Novoa and Pipo Kimkiduk last year. This is their follow up, a quite tall zine (5.5” x 11.5”) about awful plants, called The Plantiary (2021).

Novoa gets right to the point in the short intro, casting this as a tribute to both the mysterious Voynich Manuscript and the fictional books imagined by Jorge Borges. Ostensibly, these 20 plants are intended for some flavor of D&D, but in practice, they’re really more an exercise in glorious weirdness and creative collaboration first. Any sort of utility is secondary — that is a feature, really. It gives the zine its energy. Anything else would be too calculating and rote.

As with every Games Omnivorous publication, it is both gorgeous looking and feeling — the odd shape feels neat in the hand, the paper is thick, the printing lush. And the plants themselves are horrific but beautiful, a combination you can see in something like a pitcher plant, but here dialed to 30 on a 10 point scale. Your players will not enjoy encountering any of these plants.