You Should Tune in for Weird Heroes of Public Access, a Tabletop RPG for Little Sci-Fi Freaks

By Cameron Kunzelman | September 25, 2025 | 2:00pm

Tabletop Features Weird Heroes of Public Access

You Should Tune in for Weird Heroes of Public Access, a Tabletop RPG for Little Sci-Fi Freaks

The world is weird. There, I said it. There’s weird stuff out there. In your mainstream tabletop games, that mostly looks like the more Lovecraftian side of Dungeons & Dragons and the more directly influenced Call of Cthulhu game. On the indie side, there’s great stuff like Liminal_, Triangle Agency, and my personal favorite, The Big Wet. For all the weirdness that exists in the world, you can probably find a flavor that allows you to roll up some stories about it, and that’s why I have spent the last week or so rereading Weird Heroes of Public Access, a game that’s been out for a while and got a great hardcover release in 2024 that I’ve finally gotten my hands on. It is, let me tell you, weird.

I am a child of the 1990s, and because of that, I am haunted by the time before my birth and the time after. There was once a world of tapes and reel-to-reels and memorexed memories, and they lived with bulletin boards and old boxes and VA halls and calling people on their home phone numbers. I came of age in a moment where the internet was allowed to take over our lives, but it also had a heavy undercurrent: jpeg horror creatures, forum stories, pixelated aliens, and fake Weird Al songs. I am fundamentally drawn to the conditions of these worlds. I want busted-ass words, pictures, and videos that suggest that there is a seedy and terrible knowledge beneath all things, and that knowledge might also be tied up in the reality of things being dorky as hell.

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This is all to say that Weird Heroes of Public Access is built for me. It is a simple D6 system with just a few stats, but those mechanical operations are not why you want to play this game. You want to play it because you play as a public access television host who is really into your thing. You can play as Mister Penguin, the guy who makes a show about local exotic animals called, fittingly, Mister Penguin’s Experience. His day job is as a bank teller, of course, but at night…at night he comes alive. He’s got $45 in his pocket, he is about as psychic as Blaze is, he’s got several props with a value of less than $100. By teaming him up with some allied hosts who also have their own shows, he can then go out into the town of Fairhaven and fight aliens in the woods or clear out the Canals of Amontillado, so-called because of their being sealed up during Prohibition.

This is silly. I get it. What I think is so charming about Weird Heroes, and why I think it really embraces something that other games do not always go for, is that it recognizes a fundamental truth of the world that we live in: it is stupid and it is also deadly serious. Reading through the Weird Heroes of Public Access rulebook is a little like reading through Mörk Borg in the sense that it crams a lot of images and ideas onto each page. Like that game, it also has a pretty uncomplicated game system that all of those images and ideas rest on. What’s different about it is that it asks you to hold the absurdity of its concept—local TV hosts fight weird stuff—in tension with the actual writing and characterization of the world of Fairview, which seems to be a place under threat from the universe that rivals all the shit that was going on in Uzumaki.

Take, for example, this write-up of an adventure hook early on in the game: “Two 10 year old friends are missing. Teddy ran away and is living out his dream under Fairhaven’s streets as a sewer ninja, but is running low on snacks. Gordy is piloting a UFO he found in the woods and is struggling to master its controls. Strangers in black suits arrive to investigate the weird lights being reported at night. The Hosts need to catch the mischievous Gordy before the strangers do, or he will never see 11.” I think this is wonderful. It perfectly touches both a silly Goonies-esque kid fantasy, but it also has opportunity for that kind of story to go awry. There’s a window here to resolve it in a fun-loving way, or there’s an opportunity for the public access heroes to have to make some hard choices, and this is all up against the backdrop of Fairview as a town where mysterious broadcasts give people horrible dreams and time eggs are, depending on your dice roll, hatching Blood Dwarves that seek human flesh and whose only weakness is magnetic tape. I told you that the world is weird.

Weird Heroes of Public Access hits a lot of notes that I just find interesting at their core, and I feel affirmed that there is someone out there who is also disturbed and delighted by small-town weirdness that wouldn’t feel out of place in the WNUF Halloween Special or a bad late-season episode of The X-Files. If you need an RPG to get those feelings running around in your head, there’s really nothing else like this.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.