Revenant Runes Pre-Launch Thread

[calithena]

Revenant Runes

for Fantasy Role Playing Campaigns with Pencil, Paper, Dice, Miniature Figures, and Your Imagination

a quarterly fanzine for the old-school Renaissance

Ignatius Umlaut, Publisher and Editor


Revenant Runes is seeking:
- Adventures
- Dungeons
- Monsters
- Treasures
- Magical Spells and Artifacts
- Characters and Character Types
- Mass Battle Rules and Simple Fantasy Wargames
- House Rules
- Maps and Tales of Your Fantasy World
- Exciting Adventure Writeups
- Fantasy Fiction
- Reviews of Books, Music, Films, Gaming Products, and other Cultural Products relevant to the enjoyment of Fantasy Gaming
- Art

and anything else cool that’s in the spirit of the magazine.

Articles published in Revenant Runes will be system-neutral, yet easily usable with a wide variety of popular game systems from the seventies and early eighties.

In submitting to Revenant Runes you are granting us the right to keep your submission in print in the issue of Revenant Runes it is originally published in in perpetuity. Authors and artists retain sole ownership of and all other rights to their submissions, including republication rights for all other venues.

Price $x.xx print from lulu.com, or $1.00 pdf. Purchasers of the print edition may receive a free pdf with their purchase.

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1. What else does that ad/teaser above need, if anything?

2. Is the "Revenant Runes" monicker a good one? Once we go to print it will have to stick.

3. Any other questions, suggestions, opinions, etc. etc. appreciated.

[calithena]

Oh yeah - font suggestions? Something similar to the wacky fonts they used in the old days, but maybe a little more legible?

[calithena]

My idea for the cover - B&W line art with a tombstone, saying something like "Old School Gaming, RIP 1974-... " The end date is illegible because reaching up out of the grave is a single skeletal hand, freshly burst forth from the earth, with a d20 and a d6 clutched in its bony fingers...

[Zulgyan]

According to what you are looking for, I would divide the mayor sections of the magazine this way:

Men & Magic
- Magical Spells
- Characters and Character Types
- House Rules

Monsters & Treasure
- Monsters
- Treasures
- Artifacts
- House rules

The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures
- Adventures
- Dungeons
- Mass Battle Rules and Simple Fantasy Wargames
- Maps and Tales of Your Fantasy World
- Exciting Adventure Writeups
- House rules

Other sections could have the rest:
- Fantasy Fiction
- Reviews of Books, Music, Films, Gaming Products, and other Cultural Products relevant to the enjoyment of Fantasy Gaming
- Art


I would have a section dedicated to dedicated to "why is OD&D so cool" - the kind of stuff that usually pops in the philosophy forum. For example: "In defense of the original HD", "OD&D had the best take on monsters", "The freedom of OD&D", etc.


Font: We can use the one used by Dungeoneer magazine, the Strategic review, early TD.

[Zulgyan]

Where does the name come from?

[Zulgyan]

Name suggestion:

FIGHT ON!

[calithena]

The name is something I made up with Rengate for our supplement. I'm not wedded to it, I think it's cool, but I can imagine someone coming up with something better.

"Fight on!", while cool, might be taken as an explicit claim to the mantle of other people's trademarked property. Have to mull that over.

Zulg, your suggestions are great, but as far as internal organization goes I'm going to let the articles actually submitted determine it issue by issue. Rather than have departments to fill, we'll publish the best stuff that comes in, and make the departments grow out of that.

[badger2305]

Editor: Ignatius Umlaut?



You ought to get the rights to re-print Poul Anderson's profile of Karl Georg Johann Friedrich Augustus Wolfram.

[Zulgyan]

"OD&D Discussion" could also make a good name.

[Gynsburghe]

As far as fonts go, I'm really partial to using Masquerade for my homebrew stuff's titling (it's VERY close to the old official font for the books... a little off but not much). I like American Typewriter for internal text because it looks so old school, really old school...

I actually like the "system-less" focus - it has been a LONG time since I've seen articles not written for specific systems. This doesn't mean that we can't write for what we love best, it just keeps the arse-end out of ye olde fryolator, eh? Reminds me of 80s classics like the Arcanum or Mayfair's stuff, where it was obvious what it was for... just no one said it

I'd also be interested in chiming in on music from time to time, which is an area I think a lot of gaming magazines missed. I barely ever game without background music, and I tend to collect stuff that would be good for such occasions!

You got my gears a'turning...

Gynsburghe

[foster1941]

Futura!

[Melan]

How will an interested outsider know this is a fanzine specifically for 1974 era fantasy games?

BTW, give my kindest regards to Mr. Umlaut; he has an excellent name.

[calithena]

Melan -

Word of mouth, and we'll promote it as honestly as possible. The fact that it's for the 'old school renaissance', that it was started here, and that it generally uses attributes, spells, derived scores etc. that fit in the broad family of '70's RPGs will probably let people know what the intended audience is.

Worst case scenario is that people who don't like those kind of games buy an issue for not much money and then don't buy it again.

[Zulgyan]

Maybe the MAG name should hint something about it's contents.

- "Roots Gaming".

- "RPG Roots"

[Finarvyn]

Maybe something simple like D74 for a name? Or ODD74? Maybe "Finarvyn's World of Gaming" :-)

Have to ponder this.....

[Zulgyan]

Finarvyn:

How about a special forum in these boards dedicated to the development of the fanzine and all the comments and reviews, etc. about it?

[Finarvyn]

zulgyan said:

Other sections could have the rest:
- Fantasy Fiction
- Reviews of Books, Music, Films, Gaming Products, and other Cultural Products relevant to the enjoyment of Fantasy Gaming
- Art

We might want to ponder this part a little more.

1. Fiction in a gaming magazine has never been my favorite way to fill pages. I don't read it much and don't find it enhancing my game at all. Now, if we were looking at Svenny's stories of of the Original Blackmoor Campaign or something similar, that would be worth the space used.

2. Same for reviews, unless the plan was to review only products from the 1974-1979 era or new "retro" games that have a similar theme. I don't see much use in reviewing another d20 product or the latest Bon Jovi album in a gaming magazine. There are plenty of movie review threads on DF and I'd rather devote space to rules and things more eternal, rather than the "flavor of the week" movie/book/whatever.

3. Artwork should be filler to help articles fill up space efficiently. I would avoid big artwork and maybe stick to little cartoons and fun stuff, but as much fun as cartooning is I'm not sure if I want to see a large percentage of space devoted to this kind of thing. Dragon had Finneous Fingers, Wormy, and other comics, but it was also decent in size (30+ pages?) and only filled maybe 2 pages with comics.


Bottom line:
I'd rather be more like the Strategic Review than like Dragon. SR looks like a newsletter off of someone's typewriter, is stuffed full of goodies, and lacks that high-tech polish that Dragon evolved into.

I'd rather have a short and frequent newsletter than an occasional professional publication, but that's just me.

[calithena]

If I'm to be running the fanzine, I'd like the name of this forum changed so it doesn't say "OD&D Discussion" Fanzine.

I'm not going to run a bandit publication for a system someone else owns. What RR (or whatever we call it) will be will be a 'generic fantasy' magazine, which is broadly compatible with OD&D, the Arduin Grimoires, Empire of the Petal Throne, Warlock, Thieves' Guild, and a number of other popular systems from that time that all used broadly similar mechanics.

(Oh yeah, monster abbreviations - I think we should use WD for Wound Dice, wp for Wound Points, DC for Defense Class, and damage can just be damage, because that's descriptive.)

Incidentally, we're already up to 15 pages of submissions for the first issue, a lot of which looks cool and usable. Most of it is really awesome house rules, which is what everyone loves to write, but boy I'd like to see some mini-adventures and encounters come in.

Fin raises some good points. I agree with him about art (except maybe cool covers when we can get them). I agree about reviews also (we'll only accept reviews that speak to the community interest; I think that's a little broader than Fin does but the general point I agree with, that we want things that are going to be interesting to old school gamers).

As to fiction, I'm thinking two angles there:

1) If we can get it, dungeon encounter flashfic (<1000 words) would kick ass. Short action driven stories with one or two twists you can fit on a page. No-one writes this well and those who do sell it for real money, so we won't get any, but if we did, I'd print it.

2) Short fiction in support of a dungeon, minigame, campaign description, whatever.

I don't see it as a primary angle but I wouldn't rule it out either. But only for short-short stuff, longer than that we just won't have the space in a 'zine of this size.

[Finarvyn]

calithena said:

If I'm to be running the fanzine, I'd like the name of this forum changed so it doesn't say "OD&D Discussion" Fanzine.

Easy enough to accomplish.

By the way, one problem with Revenant Runes as a title is that some may assume it's related somehow to the Runequest RPG. Just a thought.....

[jrients]

Cal, will you accept hand-drawn maps?

[Zulgyan]

Let's go against the grain and include hand-draw maps only!! They got a charm that no other maps can achive!

[kesher]

My idea for the cover - B&W line art with a tombstone, saying something like "Old School Gaming, RIP 1974-... " The end date is illegible because reaching up out of the grave is a single skeletal hand, freshly burst forth from the earth, with a d20 and a d6 clutched in its bony fingers...

Okay, I'll admit, at first I didn't like the name much. However, this image did a good bit of work towards changing my mind. I didn't quite get the connection of the title to the fact of it dealing with a rebirth of ODD gaming; maybe I'm a little slow...

That being said, I really like Fight On! as a title, too, though I can understand the reservations. However, if it were used, I'd suggest changing the cover image to, say, a normal hand bursting from the ground clutching a sword, with the dice etched on the blade and the blade itself obscuring the date of deceation (I just made up an ugly word...)

If we can get it, dungeon encounter flashfic (<1000 words) would kick ass. Short action driven stories with one or two twists you can fit on a page. No-one writes this well and those who do sell it for real money, so we won't get any, but if we did, I'd print it.

This is a brilliant idea. I'll take a stab. That doesn't mean I think I'm brilliant.

Now, if we were looking at Svenny's stories of of the Original Blackmoor Campaign or something similar, that would be worth the space used.

This is, I think, something well worth considering.

Also, I can draw, and so am wondering what submission format you'd like for illustrations. I imagine this'd also be a good question for maps, hand-drawn or otherwise.

Lastly, cal, I'm sure you've been Exalted! for this already, but have another from me.

Aaron

[calithena]

Zulg has it. I will take hand-drawn maps for sure, comp-aided will have to be considered. Though you're welcome to use graph or hex paper.

I'm open to different names. I suppose Fight On! isn't really a phrase that has had any meaning for D&D more generally for about three decades now, and it's got the right spirit in all kinds of ways.

Any other naming suggestions?

[Zulgyan]

How about...

"THE ORIGINAL GAMER"

?

Sounds a bit elitist maybe...

[jrients]

Personally, I think Revenant Runes is a-okay. Fight On! works, too. I think the name is a lot less important than the content. Of course, this is from the guy behind the imaginatively titled "Jeff's Gameblog", so maybe I'm not the best person to consult.