Printing RPG zines at home

A lot of the most-loved indie tabletop RPGs of the last decade ship as A5 saddle-stitch zines: Mothership, MÖRK BORG, Solitary Defilement, and a long tail of OSR and NSR titles. The format suits the medium: 24 to 48 pages of dense, opinionated rules, designed to be carried to the table and handled rough. Most are sold as PDFs alongside (or instead of) print runs, with the expectation that buyers may print their own.

This guide is about the print side: what makes RPG zines different from other zines you might run through Zine Creator, the settings that fit them, and the paper and stapler choices that pay off.

What makes RPG zines different to print

Heavy ink coverage

The RPG-zine aesthetic, especially since MÖRK BORG, leans hard on black. Solid black backgrounds, white-on-black text, full-page illustrations with deep shadows. This has two practical print implications:

• Pigment ink beats dye ink, if your printer supports both. Pigment sits on the surface of the paper instead of soaking in, gives noticeably blacker blacks, and resists smudging when a booklet gets thumbed through at the table. The printer guide covers ink-type tradeoffs in detail.
• Show-through becomes the main paper-weight concern. A page that is 60% black ink will show through 80 gsm office paper noticeably enough to make the reverse side hard to read. 100 gsm is the floor; 120 gsm is more comfortable.

Full-bleed covers and spreads

RPG zine designers often use edge-to-edge artwork on covers, and full-bleed spreads inside for evocative double-page layouts. This makes two things matter that text-zine workflows can ignore:

• CropBox handling. If the PDF was exported with bleed (a CropBox inside a larger MediaBox), Zine Creator honours the CropBox so the bleed does not leak into the adjacent slot. Most professionally laid-out RPG zines export this way.
• Printer borderless capability. If your printer cannot print borderless, full-bleed art ends with a white edge. You have two options: accept the border, or print on oversized paper and trim. The printer-settings guide covers the dialog options.

Page counts in the saddle-stitch sweet spot

Most RPG zines land between 24 and 48 pages, exactly where saddle stitch works best. Below 24 the booklet feels thin and floppy; above 48 the stack gets thick enough that creep becomes a visible problem and the staples have to work harder. If you are printing something at the upper end of that range, the stapler matters more than the printer; see below.

Spreads designed to read across the fold

Rules sheets, region maps, oracle tables. A lot of RPG zine content is laid out as two-page spreads that the reader looks at as a single composition. That argues for the gutter creep-compensation mode rather than spine: keep the interior page margins intact (so the text stays readable across the fold) and let the cover take the small shift instead.

Recommended Zine Creator settings

For a typical A5 RPG zine PDF (the most common format):

• Layout: Half-fold booklet.
• Sheet size: A4. Produces an A5 booklet after folding. (Letter on A4 paper is awkward; if your source is Letter-sized, use Letter sheet size as well.)
• Scale to fit: On, unless your source is already exactly half-A4.
• Margin: 5 mm to start. Drop to 3 mm if your printer is reliably borderless and the cover art bleeds; raise to 8 mm if you plan to trim the open edge after binding.
• Gutter: 2 to 3 mm for 24 to 32 page zines; 3 to 5 mm for 48 page zines. Keeps content clear of the staples.
• Edge flip: Long edge by default. Switch to short edge if back pages come out upside-down (the FAQ has the symptom-first explanation).
• Creep compensation: paper thickness 0.13 mm for 100 gsm interior, 0.16 mm for 120 gsm. Strategy: gutter, so interior page margins stay intact across the fold.
• X offset: dial in per-printer after one test sheet. Print, measure how far off-centre, enter the offset, reprint.
• Cut marks: On if you plan to trim the open edge after binding.
• Fold marks: Marks in the margin if you want spine guides without lines printed through the content; Lines if you want the guide all the way across.

Paper picks for RPG zines specifically

The general paper guide covers gsm and finish in depth. For RPG zines specifically, three picks worth calling out:

• Cover stock: 200 gsm matte. Heavier covers protect the contents and stand up to actual table use without curling. Matte instead of gloss because matte does not fingerprint visibly and reads well in low light (most RPG sessions are not under studio lighting).
• Interior stock: 100 to 120 gsm matte. Below 100 the heavy black areas show through enough to distract; above 120 the booklet gets bulky and creep starts to compound. Matte for the same readability reason as the cover, plus matte takes pigment ink better than gloss.
• Match the coating to your printer. Paper sold as "for inkjet" is coated to absorb water-based ink and may smear or look dull on a laser printer; "for laser" is calendered to take fused toner and may bead up inkjet ink. Generic uncoated matte works on both but is the compromise pick.

Stapler choice for thicker booklets

A 32 page RPG zine on 100 gsm paper is 8 nested sheets; a 48 page zine is 12 nested sheets. Most regular office staplers will not even reach the spine of an A4 landscape sheet, never mind staple cleanly through that many sheets. Three options that do:

• Long-arm stapler with a 200 mm or greater throat. Reaches the fold of an A4 landscape sheet comfortably. The cheap option, and fine up to about 8 to 10 sheets. Above that, alignment starts to slip.
• Saddle stapler (sometimes called a booklet stapler). Built for exactly this job: the staple legs come out straight rather than clinching against an anvil, so they pierce thicker stacks cleanly. Worth the money if you are printing zines regularly.
• Swivel-head stapler (90-degree office stapler). Works in a pinch up to about 6 to 8 sheets, but the head twist makes precise fold alignment harder.

The tools guide's stapler section covers the alignment tradeoffs and pre-folding tricks in more detail.

What this guide is not

This is about printing an RPG zine that someone (you or someone else) has already designed. It does not cover designing your own RPG, laying out a zine from scratch, or export settings from InDesign or Affinity Publisher; those are different crafts with their own dedicated communities. If you wrote your own RPG and want to lay it out, your layout tool's saddle-stitch documentation is where to start, and the imposition guide explains what Zine Creator (or any other imposition tool) will do with your exported reading-order PDF.

Related guides

• How to make a half-fold zine from a PDF - the practical end-to-end workflow.
• How imposition works - the page-order rule, including edge-flip and creep.
• Choosing paper for zines - the full paper guide; weight, finish, and colour.
• Useful tools for making zines - stapler, bone folder, paper trimmer.
• Printer settings for duplex zines - duplex modes and troubleshooting.
• FAQ - symptom-first answers when something prints not quite right.