Merry Christmas.
Time for news about Mythic Europe Magazine, a new pdf fanzine.
I’m concerned that there’s not a regular pdf fanzine to bring new authors into the “game of making the game”. It was the way many of the current authors entered the pool and it is useful to let new authors make themselves known to each other. In the core 40 books David assembled the teams of authors, and now that we need to find our own collaborators, some way for writers to find collaborators with complementary strengths is important. As an additional consideration, writing is hard enough for some people without the extra steps of editing, layout and online publication. There may be authors who need that first step onto the ladder to get to self-publishing and I hope to provide that.
There are two active magazines in English technically, but for good reasons both are in hibernation. Offering to edit a magazine lets me solve one problem with another, because magazine articles can sometimes either become, or be additional material to, podcast episodes.
I’m almost certain the magazine cannot pay for itself. This is what kills all fanzines eventually: the person running it loses the will to put time and money into something that seems thankless. Between Mythic Venice sales, Magonomia royalties, and money from Games From Folktales subscribers over the seven years, I can dedicate about a thousand US dollars to this project and when that runs out, the magazine pauses until something tops that up. Mythic Venice came out of that same pool of Games From Folktales subscriber money and fortunately it has paid its art costs off. This is my delicate way of suggesting that if you’ve not subscribed on Patreon, you might consider it. Speaking of subscriptions, this magazine won’t have a subscription model. It will be sold on DriveThru and similar sites as single issues. Subscription is financially a better model, but it has an administrative cost in time that I’d like to avoid. Similarly it won’t Kickstart or ransom: both are excellent ideas, but they’re time intensive.
So, time for the details
Payment is 5 cents (USD) per word on acceptance, paid over PayPal. Acceptance may include substantial rounds of revision and may include editing. Note that creature statistic blocks will not be counted, so you are encouraged to use one of the 700 in the Share-alike license. Publishers wishing to promote their own material within the share alike license are welcome to, but will not be paid for their advertisement copy.
Rights: By submitting your work you are granting me a perpetual license of use. Note that this is not a copyright transfer, but one of the things I will likely do is add your work to the Ars Magica Share Alike License. Many other publishers or podcasters will refuse to accept something that has been published in this way. Note that this deliberately does not prevent you bundling up your work to self publish at a later date.
Original Work: No AI tools may be used, beyond spellcheckers and simple grammar correction. If share alike materials or public domain materials are incorporated they must be credited. By submitting you are indicating you are the author of the work and have the right to license it.
Process: Query letters are welcome and help ensure you do not spend time on material already being covered by another author, or covered in the core 40 books. Send queries and submissions to gamesfromfolktales@gmail.com. Submissions must include your name and email address. Pen names are fine for publication, but a real name is required for submissions. As I’m a single person working on this, there may be substantial delay before I respond.
Style: Standalone works of between 500 and 5 000 words in English. There being no guarantee that the magazine will continue for a certain number of issues, serial submissions like columns need to stand as discrete pieces of work. Work should be submitted in a simple file format (like rtf, odt or docx) using a common font. Do not lay out the work, for example by using fonts to mark headings or by using text boxes to create inserts. I simply can’t afford new art and so am not requesting it.
Dispute mechanism: All legal disputes are to be handled according to Queensland (Australian) law. Note that this means you need to arrange your own tax reporting for income.
Change of terms: I may change these terms without warning, because I’m new at this and may have forgotten something obvious.
Some of the material which currently goes into the theoretically-quarterly Games From Folktales transcript pdfs will be incorporated into this magazine. “Name in the Credits” supporters will be named in the magazine.