Description
Welcome to the EZ
“Everyone in the Bureau just calls it the EZ. The densely forested area has been sealed off, mutating the land, and anything that enters its borders. You are a botanist assigned to explore and document the Exclusion Zone flora.
Get in. Discover and document. Get out.”
Exclusion Zone Botanist is a solo draw-and-journal hexcrawl. Play as a scientist exploring the EZ – the Exclusion Zone – an otherworldly phenomenon quietly taking over an uninhabited region of our world. Is it alien? Magical? Unknown. Machinery fails in its atmosphere, so collect data by hand. With a pencil and your journal, catalog the plants that proliferate, the animals that roam, and the phenomenon you encounter. The EZ is surreal and beautiful. It mesmerizes you, piques your scientific curiosity. But beware – the EZ is always at work. It blends, mutates, and refracts, re-interpreting earthly biology into something new. Stay too long, and you may not be the entity who returns through its portal.
Game requires two d6 dice, a token to mark your progress, and way to record what you find. Complete instructions include lore, a six-area hex map, and data collection processes neatly packaged in the guise of a New Agent Manual. Excellent for fans of strange places, speculative biology, and ‘Zone Core’ media like Russian novel Roadside Picnic, Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, and Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space.
Looking for a more dynamic Zone visit? Try Trespasser, a solo+ action-mystery built on survival-horror system Breathless, in which you’ll use your skills to stay alive long enough to breach the heart of the Zone and claim the miracle within.
- A5 staplebound zine, 28 pages, b&w
