The Babylon Lottery - RPG Zine Club Review - #1

 Makeshift Magpie's 

The Babylon Lottery

The cover of my copy of The Babylon Lottery. 

Introduction

    The Babylon Lottery, by Jack Fuhrmann and Aina Soley, is an entry into the growing library of story zines published under Plus One Exps RPG Zine Club subscription system. Plus One Exp defines the TTRPG story game genre on its website as games that "...focus on narrative and story. Bespoke games for telling the stories you love or popular systems like PBTA, Carved from Brindlewood & Belonging Outside Belonging." The Babylon Lottery, the RPG Zine club's April 2026 story RPG zine release, is all of these things wrapped up into a compelling setting. 

    

    I love this zine's world building, it's the right combination of bleak, bizarre, Kafkaesque, and nonsensical to resonate strongly with me. It bears a striking resemblance to how any social order works - an arbitrary system of chance governing class and social standing - albeit on a much faster period of iteration. Additionally, the way it is presented, as an isolated civilization that more or less is blissfully ignorant of the outside world, makes it easily extracted from the zine and dropped into another setting.

    The character creation system is great and reinforces the key points of the themes of the game wonderfully. The other central mechanics are pretty straightforward. However, the 'structured encounter' system, which is something I have never seen before, is a bit odd and took me a couple of read throughs to understand fully. Unfortunately, this aspect of the mechanics does not resonate with me in the same way that the setting does. That being said, I do appreciate the authors trying new things and experimenting with building what I suspect is a fully custom encounter system tailored to their vision. 

Art, Tone, and World Building 

    The world building is fantastic throughout the zine. Thematically The Babylon Lottery is a mixture of archaic stylistic elements, dystopian science fiction, cyberpunk, and a light sprinkling of fantasy bits mixed together in what I can only describe as a Kafkaesque hell city. A city ruled by 'academicians' that defend their system as one in which, "There is no fairness, no justice, merely fortune" (pg 33). Which is something of truism for any irrational, unfair, and arbitrary social order - just like the real world. This is, of course, the overarching point the zine, and the short story it is based on, are trying to make. 

    The premise is simple, "Babylon is a city ruled by a lottery" (pg 5). The city of Babylon is run on a lottery, not for the selection of officials among citizens, but for everything. The lottery is the central conceit of the entire society, an entire civilization revolving around this single premise. The Babylon Lottery is a game that examines, as a gameplay mechanic: class and its arbitrary nature in what must be a nightmare city. It's a game wherein players' socio-economic class and profession is randomly decided at arbitrary intervals on the whims of a detached caste of academics who preside over and 'interpret' the lottery. It is a game that states, regarding the quality of medical professionals in the city, "Should you find yourself in need of a physician, you should hope that they've done this before" (pg 29). Suffice to say it is a fascinating concept to interrogate through the medium of a TTRPG story game. 

    There is not a huge amount of art in the zine, but what there is, is good and importantly tonally and thematically consistent with the text. The art, by HodagRPG, is composed of black and white ink line drawings. My immediate emotional reaction to the art and the text is one of a Kafkaesque bleakness and oppression. Vast black spaces predominate the larger pieces of art throughout the zine; creating an oppressive feeling that is almost inescapable when examined alongside the text. The font selections throughout only seemed to add to this feeling of alienation and oppression for me. The only piece of art in the book where we see a humanoid figure's full face is on page 43, where there is also a discussion of  the factions of the city. One of the factions, the 'Absurdists', "a cult of worship to an unnamed God of Cosmic Absurdity" (pg 43) seems to be the one illustrated. The absurdist devotee's eyes are darkly rimmed in black and their face is contorted into what seems to be a mask of enraged madness at the insane system they are forced to endure. The feeling I get from the synthesis of the art and text is positively comparable to what I felt when I first saw the bureaucratic office scenes from Terry Gilliam's masterpiece - Brazil.    

    The world building does not stop with the end of the zine. On page 46 of the zine is a QR code linking to a website containing a long series of what are essentially setting seeds for different periods in the city's history. They are short but evocative and would make an excellent starting place for developing any sort of scenario set in Babylon. Although I tend to not like this sort of integration with technologically perishable things like individual websites, it builds on what is in zine rather than hide essential elements beyond easy reach.  

Character Options & Core Mechanics

    One of the core principals of the rules for The Babylon Lottery is that the eponymous lottery is key to character creation. Essentially, tokens bearing certain runes, which equate to social class and what are the equivalent to astrological signs, are created by the Chronicler / GM in whatever ratio they see fit. Then the players draw them randomly and what rune they draw assigns them to a social class (pg 15 - 16). Players then roll a D6 to determine type of occupational sector they are assigned. They then are given the choice of what occupation within their assigned social class and sector they wish to pursue.  Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of character creation is that, "...players may reallocate their stats at the beginning of a new lottery drawing, that is if they survive" (pg 19). I really like this extremely thematic character creation process and potential for players to adapt, a little, to their changing fortunes in a mechanical manner as the lottery occurs in the narrative.    

    Encounters are oddly structured; at least I have never seen it done this way before. The Chronicler / GM rolls a D6 to determine the length of the encounter as measured in turns. The zine refers to this as a 'clock', with each section of the clock wheel representing one turn for a player to act in. If the encounter lasts longer than a single full turn of the wheel then it has a chance to become lethal if the party guesses incorrectly on a coin toss. A system of action points is layered on top of this, creating additional complexity in what is otherwise a narrative first story game. This feels needlessly complex for a story game. That being said, I think what the encounter system could have used for improvement is a short section explaining how to implement it in a satisfactory manner within the context of the setting. Skill checks, on the other hand, are pretty straightforward, a player simply rolls a D20 and adds any relevant modifiers. They then compare the result against the target number and if they meet or exceed it then they succeed. 

    The experience point system is called 'Scars' and scars are essentially narrative rewards for a character enduring either a negative or positive 'inspiration' - physical or mental. They are accrued across multiple categories and can be spent to learn abilities associated with each category. These learned abilities are all pretty powerful and open up all sorts of interesting narrative doors. 

  

Conclusion and Recommendations

    The Babylon Lottery is written by Jack Fuhrmann and Aina Soley, and it is published by Plus One Exp as part of their RPG Zine subscription system. It is a very manageable 48 pages including the 2 page map at the back of the zine. The art, layout, and text build a detailed and evocative world quickly with limited word count. Moreover, the rules themselves reinforce the tone and themes of the game in a way that I often don't see with mainstream games. 

    I must admit I love the concept of an insular walled off civilization inexplicably run by a lottery system presided over by bureaucrats detached from the very processes they use to control the population. The setting speaks to me; I intend to use the zine as a source of material for a bleak Kafkaesque city in an upcoming game I am planning on running.

    The rules experiment with some interesting mechanics; the lottery character creation system and the structured encounter system being the prime examples. While the character creation system did resonate with me strongly the encounter system did not. It felt oddly complex and a little out of place. However, just because it did not resonate strongly with me does not mean it won't do so with you.

    Regardless of my reservations about the encounter rules contained in the zine, I still give the zine a recommendation. The Babylon Lottery contains a unique setting with interesting ideas that I doubt have been explored like this before. The setting and its exploration of these ideas alone make it worthy of adding to any collection. Moreover, I must also recommend the RPG Zine club, if only to expose yourself to ideas and voices that you would have otherwise missed, as it has done so for me.