I keep telling you, zines are where the real heart and soul of this hobby reside. This week’s posts I think really emphasize that, but none more than WHPA Fairhaven (2021), from Get Haunted Industries. The idea here is to present a simple dice pooling skill system to power a game about public access TV personalities investigating local strange phenomenon. It is precisely as weird and cozy as you imagine, a jumbling of Pee-Wee Herman, pro-wrestling, X-Files and Weird Al’s UHF, with a distinctly Connecticut feel. The zine is perfect in its very narrow, very precise way, filled with ads and fuzzy photos. There are a number of companion books, each more silly and unsettling than the last.

This is the rare zine that would, I think, be diminished as a book. It needs that lo-fi aesthetic — it’s part of the atmosphere of the game. Are there public access TV stations any more? If there are, I suppose they are required to transmit in HD, which seems wrong somehow. The picture should be fuzzy, the color uneven, the audio popping. Same with this game. It should feel photocopied, like it would be home found among the dogwalker and lawnmower ads in a stack under the community board at the grocery store. True, weird love.