A Lore Game Book for the End of the World
Bubzium – The Guidebook to Postapoland is a full-color Lore Game Book by Bartosz Zaskorski, published by Hollow Press in 2025. Framed as the orientation manual for a newborn mutant entering a ruined parallel Poland, it reads less like a rulebook and more like a tourist brochure recovered from an alternate dimension — one where the tourism board has been dissolved and the attractions are mostly hazardous.
The Lore Game Book Format
The Lore Game Book is not a conventional RPG rulebook. It carries no mechanics, no stat blocks, no resolution systems. What it provides instead is a setting rendered in fragments: bus routes across toxic plains, monuments to failed uprisings, improvised shrines, half-functioning infrastructure, and the strange inhabitants who maintain all of it with varying degrees of conviction. Each chapter functions as a destination. The reader — or player — moves through Postapoland as a visitor who has arrived without context and must piece together the logic of the place from what they find.
The content combines short texts, maps, diagrams, and dense drawings. The drawings carry most of the weight. Humour and bleakness coexist without resolution, which is consistent with the weird-core register Zaskorski has developed across the broader Postapoland universe. The tone is deadpan. The world is cruel. The guide remains helpful.
System-Agnostic, Setting-Specific
Because Bubzium is system-agnostic, it functions as a worldbuilding toolkit regardless of what game, if any, surrounds it. Game tables can use it to run sessions in Postapoland without additional conversion. Comics readers can treat it as an atlas. Collectors of artist publications and art books will find the production values consistent with Zaskorski's other work: offset full color printed on heavy Magno usomano paper, bound as a 17 × 24 cm hardcover with UV spot finish and stitched binding. The object holds up physically to the kind of repeated, non-linear use a reference book invites.
Within the Postapoland series, Bubzium occupies a distinct structural position. Where Weird Tales of Postapoland and Terrotic: Love and Terror in Postapoland operate through narrative and image sequence, the guidebook imposes a cartographic and encyclopaedic logic on the same territory. It is the same world, approached from a different angle of entry. The result is a publication that sits comfortably in the Artbooks & Artist Publications category without being reducible to it.
About Bartosz Zaskorski
Bartosz Zaskòrski is a Polish artist, writer, and sound-maker whose practice moves between drawing, comics, audio pieces, and game-related projects. His work centres on strange futures, rural horror, and dead-end technologies — registers that inform every corner of Postapoland, the ongoing parallel world he has built from scrap metal, folklore, internet debris, and after-the-fact propaganda.
Zines, records, and books all feed into the Postapoland universe, in which mutants, ghosts, and exhausted infrastructure coexist under conditions of low-grade permanent crisis. With Bubzium – The Guidebook to Postapoland, Zaskorski turns that world into a structured itinerary, using the Lore Game Book format to invite readers and players to treat Postapoland as a place they can visit, inhabit, and further corrupt.
