TAGS Fest: Finding Your People in Edinburgh's Small Press Revival

There are fewer and fewer spaces where people can come together, especially for free. It's the sort of observation that hits differently when you're sitting at home, alone, wondering when you last had a conversation with someone who wasn't delivering a parcel. Scotland's small press community has weathered chronic underfunding whilst watching local creative spaces vanish beneath spiralling costs. Convention tables that foster careers have become unaffordable, many of the stepping stones that turn hobbyists into professionals have simply ceased to exist. Which makes what's happening at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket on the 25th and 26th of October, all the more significant.

TAGS Fest - Tabletop and Graphic Storytelling Festival - returns for its third year, expanded to a full weekend and bringing together over 50 independent creators, speakers who've built careers outside mainstream publishing, and a Board Game Zone curated by Leith's Ancient Robot Games.

“It's so encouraging seeing folk come back to the show year after year, to meet local authors, play games, and hang out”

Brian Tyrrell, co-organiser and publisher at Stout Stoat Press.

The casual "hang out" is doing quite a bit of work in that sentence. For those whose social circles have contracted to the size of a Discord server, the prospect of being around other people who understand why you'd spend six months hand-binding a zine about medieval grimoires, can feel unexpectedly vital. Co-organiser, Eve Greenwood of Quindrie press doesn’t beat about the bush:

"The independent publishing scene here in Scotland has seen a lot of hardship recently."

Eve Greenwood, co-organiser and founder of Quindrie Press

Both publishers have built their operations around creators and stories that don't fit mainstream appetites - Tyrrell explicitly champions queer, disabled, and entry-level TTRPG creators, whilst Greenwood's press exists for passion projects too personal or too strange to find homes elsewhere. Which is why they've now joined forces with Faye Stacey of Glasgow's Sequential Scotland to form Small Press Scotland CIC - a Community Interest Company that requires any profits to be reinvested into the community it serves.

The weekend's speaker programme reads like a manual for building creative careers without permission:

• Ashling Larkin, co-founder of CHIP Collective, turned personal grief into a publishing mission - after her mother's cancer diagnosis, she and collaborator Cat Laird created informational comics that make complex health topics accessible to everyone.

• Gustaffo Vargas's Peruvian Cyberpunk comics blend pre-Columbian mythology with hi-tech dystopia in ways that refuse to fit any established genre box - he left Peru in 2014, spent time in Germany, ended up in the UK working full-time in a print shop, and created an entire subgenre that now appears in Marvel and Image anthologies.

• Paolo Greco of Lost Pages left academia ("frustrating as hell"), built games from a desk made of loudspeakers and a cabinet door, and now publishes some of the most beautifully strange RPG material in circulation - his aesthetic sits somewhere between 17th-century pamphlets and medieval grimoires.

These aren't people who waited for permission. They found their audience one convention table at a time, and they'll all be in conversation throughout the weekend, moderated by La Belle Adventure comic shop.

The Board Game Zone, curated by Ancient Robot Games, offers a library of titles available for drop-in play or bookable sessions run by volunteer stewards. If your primary gaming experience involves Discord voice chat, sitting down at an actual table with actual humans might feel peculiar, novel, or potentially anxiety-inducing - all valid responses. The point is the option exists. The market is free to attend, requires no tickets, and exists to do something increasingly radical: give people a reason to leave the house and meet other humans who make things.

Stripped of the marketing language, It's an opportunity to see that there are others nearby - not online, not in some distant city, but in Edinburgh, right now - making similar work, facing similar challenges, sharing similar doubts about whether any of it matters. The creators will be there, the games will be there, the talks will be there. And odds are, so will people who've been wondering if they're the only ones still making things for the sheer bloody-minded joy of it. You might find your people. They've been looking for you too.

Tags Fest is at The Fruitmarket, 45 Market Street, wheelchair accessible with free entry and runs from 10am to 5pm on both Saturday October 25th and Sunday 26th.