‘Domesday Book’ and Beyond: A Conversation on the Lasting Influence of RPG Zine Publishing
Kickstarter’s Head of Games Luke Crane chats with RPG historian Jon Peterson.
This week, Kickstarter announced Zine Quest, a celebration of RPG zine projects launching in February 2019. Why zines, you ask? Surfacing in the 1970s, zines like Judges Guild and Alarums & Excursions were largely influential in the early days of role-playing game fandom and publishing. Today, there’s still a thriving community of RPG zine publishers online. (Fun fact: Alarums & Excursions, founded in 1975, still publishes an online version once a month.)
Below, Kickstarter’s Head of Games Luke Crane speaks with RPG historian and author of Playing at the World Jon Peterson about the early emergence of RPG zines and their lasting influence on the Games community.
Luke Crane: How were zines influential in the early development of RPGs?
Jon Peterson: It’s hard to imagine how role-playing games could have come along without zines. Zines were the creative commons of the two communities behind early RPGs: wargaming fandom and science-fiction/fantasy literature fandom. The best analogy for our world today would be to say that zines were their internet back then: it’s where you would put out ideas, where you advertised your work for sale, where you tried to find like-minded people, where you learned about conventions or clubs, where you went for inspiration. Zines were the primordial soup where the ideas that became RPGs bounced around, combined with each other, and eventually merged into something amazing.
Zines were the primordial soup where the ideas that became RPGs bounced around, combined with each other, and eventually merged into something amazing.
Was the first published RPG just a zine collection?
Certainly [role-playing game] Chainmail (1971) was largely recycled from articles that had previously appeared in zines, hastily patched up, without much attempt at integration. But then again, the first page of the Chainmail rules says that “these rules may be treated as guidelines around which you form a game that suits you.” The same line shows up again in Dungeons & Dragons, more or less.
The earliest RPGs assumed that everyone who played would tinker with the rules, taking ideas from here or there and patching them into their tabletop experience. Some of those ideas came from zines; others [might] strike you in that crucial moment in play, maybe you will write them up for a zine later and someone else will riff off of them down the road. The rules you found in the first box set were just building blocks, partly incomplete, partly inconsistent, and partly incoherent. But it worked, and the way it worked, that’s what zines could teach you.
What did the zines look like? Were they like punk-rock zines with clipped-and-pasted art and un-ironically bad typography?
Cut-and-paste art, you’d only find that on the top shelf of early gaming zines. If you wanted to include pre-existing art on a budget, you pretty much had to redraw it yourself, with the most frustrating tools imaginable: mimeograph and ditto machine. At the time, xeroxing was expensive enough to bankrupt your zine unless you could sneak off copies at your school or workplace, so you were left with the cheapest and grungiest means of production available.
Mimeographs required you to cut stencils and left black smears everywhere; ditto machines worked with that faint pink-purple ink that will boil off the page if it’s left out in the sun for an afternoon.
And there were so many standards and varieties: don’t send someone a four-hole stencil when they need a nine-hole stencil. Offset printing with camera-ready art? That was reserved for magazines with actual money to spend. Depending on your budget, your typefaces for display fonts would be done with Letraset transfers or by hand. Body text would be your typewriter, maybe an IBM Selectric, if not something older and crustier with keys that gum together and type metal worn away like the rubber sole of an old shoe. Illegibility was the norm.
How were zines distributed during the early RPG days?
Fandom in the early days was tied together by three channels: clubs, conventions, and the mail. In a small town you might be lucky to find six or ten people to form a gaming club. In a big city, around major universities especially, you could get dozens. Maybe you would run off and collate your zines at a regular meeting of your club and then pass them around to members in person.
At conventions — which could draw a few hundred people, maybe a thousand — you could try to sell your zines, or just give them away to grow your audience. But most zines were designed for the mail, and had a subscription rate. Sometimes contributing would get you the zine for free; other times, everyone who contributed basically chipped in a little cash to get their ideas in front of everyone else.
When subscription revenue let you afford to pay writers, you were on your way to becoming a prozine, not just a fanzine anymore. Everyone wanted to run a prozine.
What was the most influential zine publication and what made it stand out?
Probably the most famous zine for the development of RPGs was the Domesday Book, which ran from 1970 to 1972. Gary Gygax started it, Dave Arneson subscribed to it, and in its pages you can find chunks of the system that would became the fantasy medieval wargame Chainmail. Both Gary and Dave participated in the Great Kingdom, an imaginary world invented for the subscribers to the Domesday Book, where people could administer their own kingdoms on Gary’s world map and squabble over territory.
For the final circulated issue of the Domesday Book, Dave sent in a description of his part of the Great Kingdom, a place called Blackmoor, where he’d begun playing around with dungeon exploration and other ideas that he and Gary would soon bring to the world through a little game called Dungeons & Dragons.
After D&D was published, a national community engaging with RPGs coalesced around Alarums & Excursions, a zine founded in 1975 that is still today — yes, today, still, though now electronically — put out once a month. Many early RPG designs sprang from comment threads in A&E, though just like comments on an internet forum today, things could get pretty heated and just devolve into flames. Or, you know, people would just talk about what they did last weekend. People learned dice notation (as in, “roll 2d12”) from its very first issue, and the list of contributors over the years is basically a who’s who of RPG design. Lee Gold, the founder of the zine, has made an online archive.
Inspired to launch an RPG zine of your own? Take part in Zine Quest, launching in February 2019.
