Splat 3: Touched

Splat 3: Touched is a zine focused on how romance and intimacy in TTRPGs are implemented safely and meaningfully for everyone at the table. It includes seven exciting essays about how everything, from rules or tools, to sexuality and kink, can change or shape our experience of intimacy through play and design.

Splat 3 is brought to you by Summoning Circle Press (our new name!) the team behind Splat 1 & 2 and Skill Points, and was funded as part of Zine Month #ZiMo!

What's Inside

Christina is writing about the necessity of open communication and safety tools when exploring intimacy at the table.

Jillian is writing about how you can fade to abstraction instead of fading to black to give intimate moments more narrative weight if desired.

Jonathan is writing about how separating intimacy into romance and sex can help your table dial in on what content they’re comfortable with, as well as validate players on the aromantic/asexual spectrums.

Kat will be exploring some different ways sex has been represented in games, and how this helps us challenge dominant narratives about intimacy and sex.

Max is writing about some of the lessons he’s learned in kink space and how they influence his play and design philosophies and practices.

Victor is writing about how honest and vulnerable communication creates powerful and safe environments for negotiating intimacy at your gaming table.

Yeonsoo is writing about how to end an intimate in-game relationship with care and why break-ups and relationship transitions can be extremely meaningful experiences for characters and players alike.

The zine will be approximately 32 pages in total. It will be printed in black and white as a digest-sized, saddle-stitched booklet. The PDF copy will have the same layout as the print version.

Splat 3 is co-edited by Sam Hotchkiss,  Eli Pineda, and Jillian Wakarchuk. Jesse Gazic is our logo and cover artist. G.C. Houle is our promotional artist.

Meet the Contributors

Christina Stone-Bush (@HyveMynd | she/her) is a TTRPG author, graphic designer, and layout artist who comes up with way more ideas than she ever finishes. She creates small, meaningful games – often focusing on intimacy – in what little free time she manages to find while raising an extremely active child.

Eli Pineda (@dvangeli_ | she/her) is a Fil-Can creator. By day, she edits videos , by afternoon she is a cast member on a TTRPG podcast (check out Many Realms!) and by night, she edits this zine. She also makes a mean milk tea!

G.C. Houle (@gchoule | they/them) is a French-Canadian illustrator, comic artist and designer. They love creating fun stories about queer characters, in every sense of the word. In their spare time they enjoy playing TTRPGs, often incarnating big gender weird monsters looking for love and acceptance.

Jesse Gazic (@gazictron | he/they) is an artist and designer from Toronto, Canada. He works in game and puzzle design, RPG writing, illustration, and podcasts.

Jillian Wakarchuk (@OrbWitch | she/they) is a ttrpg podcaster, supplement writer, and GM with a penchant for queer drama. They like teaching folks new games, offering really hot NPCs to ruin your characters' plans, and building up to a well-timed forehead touch or smooch in game.

Jonathan Mendoza (@RY0MASA | he/they) is a TTRPG showrunner, player, writer and designer with a love of player-driven stories and introducing new folks to their first TTRPG experience. He wrote his Master’s thesis on the usage of roleplaying games as a therapeutic intervention, and they are also a founding member of the Lesley University Academy for Virtual and Roleplaying Arts (AVRA), a graduate student research lab.

Kat Jones (they/she) is a queer Latina game designer and scholar. Kat's games explore identity and community, while offering playful social commentary. They have co-authored two games featured in Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Games: The Sleepover with Julia Ellingboe which focuses on teenagers sharing information about sex, and You Inside Us which explores a relationship between an alien symbiote and their host.

Maxwell Lander (@maxwellander | he/they) is a futurist, photographer, feminist pornographer, gamemaker and interactive media artist. He teaches VR, game design and volumetric video and likes to play games about himbos, roudy queers and ultra violence.

Victor Villavicencio (@villainvicencio | he/they) is a queer latine ttrpg performer, podcaster, designer and writer. Always looking for intersectionality in games, he finds joy in adding in all the parts of himself in everything he creates and portrays.

Sam Hotchkiss (@Hotchmoney | he/they) is a zine editor, game designer, and programmer from Philadelphia, PA. His zines focus on advice and ideas from around the games industry. Sam also wrote the larp Seapunk 2222, and is developing it into a Discord-based text adventure.

Yeonsoo Julian Kim (@yjuliankim | they/she) is a game designer, writer, and cultural consultant who creates and contributes to TTRPGs, LARPs, and interactive fiction. They love roleplaying a good angsty romance and enjoy making and running games that explore kink, non-monogamy, and communication.