What is zonecore?

Creating Exclusion Zone Botanist led me to search for the origins and critical works of the genre. Here are five common elements of zonecore and a list of zonecore tabletop games for inspiration.

Inspiration for Exclusion Zone Botanist

When I first thought about the game that later became Exclusion Zone Botanist (released in 2022), my primary influences at the time were “The Colour Out of Space” and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction. It was going to have progressive zones that, like in Extraction, you couldn’t return to once you closed the door. You’d have to decide how far you could push before it’s time to get out.

Then I saw an educational leaf diagram made for kids, showing the different leaf shapes and their names.¹ I wondered what it would look like if I removed the combat (which wasn’t fun anyway) and added a science component — documentation as play.

Although I’ve yet to read the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer or watch the Annihilation film adaptation, I was familiar with their concepts.² I loved the idea of going into a weird area, completing a mission, and getting back out. I listed it as one of the main sources of inspiration for EZB.

Trophy Dark tapped into a similar idea of a dark forest, separated from the world around it, and operating with its own rules. Just being in the forest was a potential source of corrupting ruin, as the game calls it.

As I was working on EZB, a friend told me it sounded like one of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. They take place in an alternate universe Chernobyl exclusion zone (“the Zone”) after a physics-defying catastrophe occurs. Stalkers go into the zone, grab what they can, and try to get back out alive.³

All of those sources and more served as inspiration for Exclusion Zone Botanist. And as I’m sure you’ve noticed, they are all similar in many ways.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had made a zonecore game.

I had never even heard the term.

What is zonecore?

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The genre has many different names: zonepunk, zone stories, picnicpunk, rust and radiation, stalkercore, and zonecore. I’m going to choose to call it zonecore throughout this post because it’s the one I prefer.⁴

I’d say it is speculative fiction about a sealed-off anomalous territory caused by an inexplicable event. The zone often has its own rules set against a backdrop of institutional or bureaucratic oversight. This is often combined with a Lovecraftian creeping horror and cosmic indifference.

Is that a definition? Perhaps.

Quite often, however, strict definitions for art are uninteresting, unhelpful, or both. Instead, I’d like to offer five elements that I feel define the genre which may or may not be present in zonecore works.

To be quite clear: I am not the first person to try to describe this genre. I’m not claiming to have invented this, nor claiming to have an authoritative view. This is me writing as a way to clarify my own thoughts and learn more about the sources. Create your own definitions and identify your own elements in a way that helps you do the same.

The roots and examples of zonecore

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To understand why I’m choosing those five elements, we need to look at four important works: The Colour out of Space, Roadside Picnic, Stalker, and Annihilation.

1. The Colour out of Space (1927)

In H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” from 1927, a meteor (or something like a meteor) crashes in the hills west of Arkham. It transforms everything nearby, ruining crops and poisoning the soil with fruit growing to an abnormal size but bitter and disgusting. Woodchucks and rabbits leave strange tracks in the snow. The hogs and cows begin to dissolve:

“The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages—and death was always the result—there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs.”

Mrs. Gardner eventually ceases to speak, begins to walk on all fours, and became “slightly luminous in the dark” similar to the vegetation. Thaddeus goes mad, whispering about “moving colours” in the nearby well. Nahum does not survive his more dramatic transformation:

“Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face.”

We never really learn what the meteor was, why it crashed, or why it eventually shoots vertically back into the sky at the end of the story. It is also left as a mystery if it is really gone or if part of it still remains. It’s spreading an inch a year and the narrator recommends bringing in botanists to study the flora:

“Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading—little by little, perhaps an inch a year.”

Ultimately the blight is unknown and probably unknowable.

As a side note, “The Willows” (1907) by Algernon Blackwood was one of Lovecraft’s favorite supernatural tales. In it, the narrator enters a strange zone filled with menacing willows. It might be the junction point for an alternate and indifferent universe: “…whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.” While I’m not sure it directly influenced “The Colour out of Space,” I do think it is worth mentioning here.

2. Roadside Picnic (1972)

Roadside Picnic (Пикник на обочине) is a sci-fi novel by the Arkady and Boris Strugatsky brothers, first published in 1972. The publication and translation history of the book is extremely interesting, but I’d like to focus on the story itself.

At the risk of spoiling a 54+ year old book, here is a high level summary:

• The story takes place after The Visitation, a global event where aliens simultaneously visited several locations on Earth over a two-day period.

• There is almost nothing known about the visitors — no physical description, no communication, no reason why they came, or why they left.

• The areas they visited have become strange, anomalous zones littered with artifacts that are so powerful that they seem like magic. The zones also contain, however, amazingly dangerous traps and deadly materials (e.g. “hell slime”).

• Official institutes are set up to study the zones, collect artifacts, and develop ways to use the new alien technology. There’s no attempt to repair the zones or even protect the public in a meaningful way.

• The public is prohibited from entering the zones, but the institute secretly uses “stalkers” — people who risk their lives to get into the zone, grab what they can, and get back out. There is, of course, a huge black market for artifacts.

• Merely being in the zone begins to change the stalkers and their offspring, leading to strangely mutated children. Even the dead awaken and start wandering around the town.

Roadside Picnic is credited with coining the term “stalker” — a term that is, as we will see below, still in use today.⁵ It also popularized the idea of an institution cordoning off the zone and studying what’s inside.⁶

3. Stalker (1979)

Roadside Picnic was later turned into the 1979 Stalker film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, the same director as Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972). The film takes liberties with the story, including significant changes to the ending. It’s been called one of the greatest films of all time and has had a huge impact on science fiction.

The film retains some elements of the book: an anomalous zone protected by armed guards, stalkers who make a living by conducting incursions into the zone, and something so powerful it allows wishes to be granted. Tarkovsky has stated in an interview, however, that the film never intended to be a faithful adaptation:

“I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel, Picnic on the Roadside [sic], except for the two words, “Stalker” and “Zone.” So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.”⁷

Tarkovsky perhaps overstates the differences here, but it is true that his goals were different from the Strugatsky brothers. Thus the same zone creates very different pieces of media and literature. As the AV Club said in A Brief History of the Zone:

“Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker sits high in the pantheon of great art-house science fiction, transforming Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic into a characteristically heady and gorgeous meditation on the director’s pet themes: art, hope, fear, water, death, and so on.”

Together, the Roadside Picnic book and the Stalker film served as inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games, beginning in 2006 with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. In the game, players enter a mysterious zone created by a second disaster inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.⁸ The flora and fauna have mutated inside the zone and even the laws of physics appear to have been warped.

As in Roadside Picnic and Stalker, scavengers in the game known as Stalkers enter the zone to try to recover powerful artifacts. In addition to tossing nuts and bolts to find anomalies, they use electronic anomaly detectors. There’s also a lot more shooting and radiation.

4. Annihilation (2014)

It is impossible to talk about zonecore without talking about Annihilation and the Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer. Many of the same hallmarks of Roadside Picnic and Stalker zonecore are present:

• Researchers (i.e. biologist, anthropologist, psychologist) launch successive expeditions into an anomalous zone called Area X. A notable difference is, however, that the explorers are both authorized to enter the zone and are armed.

• The source or origin of the zone are mysterious and potentially unknowable.

• Being in the zone can trigger mutations in both humans (called “brightness”) and the animals.

• An institution called The Southern Reach dedicated to the control and investigation of Area X.

The 2018 film, like the Stalker film, changes the story in some significant ways. The zone is caused by a crash-landed meteor and is called the Shimmer. There are mutant bear and alligator attacks and video messages left from the previous expeditions. The ending is different as well.

Jeff VanderMeer has said via Twitter post that Annihilation was not inspired by Roadside Picnic or Stalker:

“Three years since Annihilation came out and that bit about Stalker still cracks me up. Roadside Picnic/Stalker are [sic] zero influence on the novels, but definite influence on the movie. Which minorly inconveniences me in interviews. LOL.”⁹

His inspirations were more ecological and grounded in reality, including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida.¹⁰

Five common elements of zonecore

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So we can now return to the question: What is zonecore?

My proposed elements differ from the AV Club’s trinity of “the Stalker, the Zone, and the Destination.” While I agree the stalker and the zone are almost mandatory, I’m not convinced there needs to be a specific destination. The goal could simply be exploration without a chosen target location — the zone itself is the destination.

The following elements also tend to skew toward the examples listed above, but I hope they are broad enough to capture other works as well.

1. The anomalous zone

Arguably, the important element of zonecore is the zone — The Zone, Area X, the Exclusion Zone. More than being right there in the name, it is the driving force behind the story. Sometimes it is quarantined and walled off. Other times the boundaries are invisible but still exist. The rules inside the zone are different from those outside the zone.

The inexplicable phenomena resulting from the new rules exist inside the zone and are another of the zone’s defining features.

2. The non-hero stalker

Does a zone exist if there is no one there to explore it?

Roadside Picnic, once again, appears to set the standard for what a stalker is — a gritty, jaded, heavy-drinking, loner who knows the zone like the back of their hand. This makes the Annihilation and Southern Reach approach interesting because it sends not a black market loner into the zone, but a heavily armed and well funded team. Neither versions feel, however, like stereotypical heroes. They are flawed at best.

Once the stalker becomes a clearly heroic figure who always acts with justice, something feels off about it. It feels less like zonecore.

3. Inexplicable phenomena

Gravity traps, mutating plants, horrific animals, alien artifacts, and blight-spreading meteors can all be found inside the zone. They exist in a very real way and can be poked, prodded, collected, and studied — but never truly understood. We never learn the actual mechanism of the meteor’s blight in “The Colour out of Space.” There is speculation about the aliens in Roadside Picnic (giving the book its title), but there are no clear answers.

Things are twisted, turned upside down, break the rules of physics, and yet always leave us with the answers unknown and ultimately unknowable.¹¹ Often the answer is shrouded in something bigger than humanity that exhibits the indifference of cosmic horror.

4. Inevitable transformation

In Roadside Picnic, the transformation doesn’t directly impact those who enter the zone as much as it does their offspring. Children of stalkers become something strange (as in the book) or develop supernatural abilities (as in the film).¹² As noted above, the changes are direct and based on proximity in “The Colour Out of Space.” Similarly, the Shimmer in Annihilation mutates and “refracts” the DNA of explorers and animals who come in contact with it.

Direct or indirect, physical or mental, the anomalous zone permanently changes those who enter it. There is no protection from it or way to ward it off. At best, its inevitable effects can be reduced, slowed, or postponed.

5. Institutional fatalism

While this might be the weakest of the five elements, I feel compelled to include it.

There is often an agency, bureau, or some institutional power that controls access to the zone and interested in studying it. In Roadside Picnic, this is the International Institute for Extraterrestrial Cultures or just the Institute. It is the Southern Reach in Jeff VanderMeers series. In Pacific Drive (video game), the Advanced Resonance Development Authority (ARDA) was involved but then disbanded.

Adjacent concepts worth mentioning are the SCP Foundation, Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) in the Control video game, and the Fringe Division in the Fringe TV series.¹³ The list of fictional secret police and intelligence organizations is a long one. Many are similar fictional agencies tasked with controlling dispersed supernatural threats rather than controlling a single zone.

A key element is that the institutions are flawed, sometimes incompetent, and rarely seek to “solve” the problem of the zone. Instead they accept the zone as the way things are and seek to extract value (monetary or scientific). The existence of the zone is taken to be inevitable and unchangeable.

If the agency is too active, too committed to long term solutions, or too effective, it may start to feel less like zonecore.

But what about exceptions?

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I’m a fan of the quote attributed to George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”¹⁴

It is certainly possible to think of exceptions to the zonecore elements proposed above. Rainbow Six Extraction continues to feel like it should be included even though the stalkers are well-armed heroes with special powers and it lacks institutional fatalism. And there are probably examples of media that have many of the elements but don’t feel like they should be included.¹⁵

So why try to identify common elements then if everything is an exception, special case, or breaks the rules?

I find thinking about things like this to be helpful. It organizes my thoughts and creates a framework to start with when making something new. It also provides some ideas on how to mix and modify genres: What if the stalkers mutated the zone instead of the zone mutating the stalkers? What if the stalker were a powerful hero? What if the safe vs. zone areas were inverted?

These elements aren’t a recipe to be followed or a test to be applied. They are not a list of necessary and sufficient criteria.

They are a way to think about media and, in particular, tabletop games.

Weird stories and the zone

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The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an anthology of short stories edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. The 2012 Booklist review captures the essence of what I love about weird stories and zonecore:

“In the 1990s, a new kind of genre story seemed to have sprung up. It was frightening but seldom gory; either not quite as realistic as or less fantastic than it initially promised; very short on monsters no matter how monstrous it got; eerie but just about never ghostly (at least, no ghosts horned into the act); creepy even when it decided to be funny; and un-, far more than super-, natural.”

Modern zonecore is rooted in the weird stories of the past — H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Chambers, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and Shirley Jackson. In weird fiction, the horrors are ever present, but rarely clearly seen.

The same can often be said of zonecore. The zone is a source of terror and anxiety, even when it is a peaceful forest filled with birdsong.

Zonecore (and adjacent) games

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The AV Club’s A Brief History of The Zone mentions the creative appeal of zonecore:

“Artists, too, keep re-entering the Zone; Tarkovsky’s interpretation of the Strugatskys’ initial vision would turn out to be just the first of many. As an idea, a meme in the classical sense, it is plague-like—resilient, mutating, dangerous.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been infected by the zonecore plague, finding it endlessly fascinating. It’s a near perfect mix of speculative fiction, weird stories, and easily accommodates push-your-luck mechanisms. It’s everything I enjoy all wrapped up into a single genre.

I’m not the only one! There are many games out there that I think fit into the zonecore world. I’ll try to list many of them here.

The following list is intentionally not divided into TTRPG vs. board games because I think that distinction is not as clear as we are sometimes led to believe. Also, many of these games don’t include all five elements. Requirements here are loose.

• 2400: Zone by Pretendo Games

• Blackstone Highway by Snow

• Cross the Zone by Psycho Headcheese

• Decree by Phantom Limbs

• Delta Green by Arc Dream Publishing

• Eco Mofos by David Blandy

• Escape the Zone by Psycho Headcheese

• Exclusion Zone Botanist by Exeunt Press

• Exclusion Zone Botanist: Epsilon by Exeunt Press

• Expeditions by Jamey Stegmaier

• Fallen Land: A Post Apocalyptic Board Game by Sean Cahill and Jon Lonngren

• Fear in the Foundation: An SCP TTRPG by Fear in the Foundation

• FIST: Ultra Edition by Claymore

• Into the Zone by Exalted Funeral Press

• Milk Bar by Eryk Sawicki

• Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars by Free League

• Navigator byMichael Klamerus

• Niv Lova by Writefirstergames

• QZ by Jason Tocci

• RAD by ¡Hipólita!

• Rad Zone Totality by Toby Lancaster

• Reminiscence of Decay by Jean Verne

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Board Game byPaweł Samborski

• SCP: The Tabletop RPG by 26 Letter Publishing

• STAL_KORG by Psycho Headcheese

• STALKER - The SciFi Roleplaying Game by Burger Games

• The Bureau by Goblin Archives

• The Zone by Raph D’Amico

• Trespasser by Binary Star Games

• Trespasser RPG byPolilla

• Trophy Dark by Jesse Ross

• Weird Stories by Gil Hova and Amber Seger

• Zona Alfa: Salvage and Survival in the Exclusion Zone by Patrick Todoroff

• Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl by Maciej Drewing and Krzysztof Głośnicki

• ZONE by Iron Cutler

• Zones by Sasquatch Games

• ZURF by Emmy Verte

If you can think of additional zonecore tabletop game examples, please share them in the comments. Both board games and TTRPGs are welcome. I’ll try to update the list periodically to include them if they fit.

- E.P. 💀

P.S. Start your incursion into the EZ. Discover and document strange plants in Exclusion Zone Botanist: Epsilon from Exeunt Press. 🌿

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1. The chart was quite similar to the one included with the entry for Glossary of leaf morphology at Wikipedia.

2. I know. I should read the books and watch the movie. I would love them. Everyone tells me this all the time. I promise I will at some point.

3. Oddly enough, the “Exclusion Zone” part of the name came not from Chernobyl but from The Rest is History podcast series on The Falklands War. The Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) was declared in 1982 covering about 230 miles around the island. I liked the sound of the term, especially if you drop the “T” and could make it a play on the word “easy.”

4. Also because Eryk would like credit for coining zonecore quite a few years after it was in wide use. His evidence is a Bluesky post (2025) in which he doesn’t actually mention the term. If we all just sort of agree to let him have this one, that would be cool. But then of course, some object to all of these names.

5. There’s an interesting note in the afterward of the recent printing of Roadside Picnic where Boris Stugatsky explains the origin of the word “stalker” was from a Kipling story: “We took it from one of Rudyard Kipling’s novels, the old prerevolutionary translation of which was called The Reckless Bunch (or something like that), about rambunctious English schoolkids from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century and their ringleader, a crafty and mischievous kid nicknamed Stalky.”

6. The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham has an anomalous zone with a strange object at the center. The borders can be detected by using caged canaries. I don’t think it was actually blocked with a wall or barrier but I’m not sure.

7. Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews by Andreĭ Arsenevich Tarkovskiĭ, p. 51.

8. Supposedly people referred to the real Chernobyl exclusion zone as “the Zone” and those who entered it were called “Stalkers” in an example of life imitating art.

9. When a user pressed the issue, he replied: “God this is so tiresome. There are plenty of things that did, but not those.”

10. How a Rugged Stretch of North Florida Wilderness Inspired Jeff VanderMeer’s Acclaimed Southern Reach Series by Sam Worley (October 23, 2024)

11. As noted in the section about exceptions, many stories that I would personally consider to be zonecore actually do explain quite a bit. The Colour out of Space is quite clear that a meteor is a cause of the corruption. It is the mechanism of how and why the corruption is spread that is left unknown.

12. The stalker’s daughter is called Monkey in both the book and the film, but it makes far more sense in the book for reasons that would be a spoiler.

13. SCP-5405 particularly seems to fit the zonecore genre. If you aren’t familiar with the SCP stories, SCP-173 was the first. SCP-1425 and SCP-5545 are worth checking out too.

14. While the intent of the aphorism was to explain statistical models, I find the sentiment applies to game design and genre models just as much.

15. I’ve seen Frozen 2 listed as an example of zonecore literature. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if it fits the model or not.