Mythic Europe Magazine : Call for Submissions

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.

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Do you have an idea for the issues' themes?

Themes are easier to do once a zine has been going for a while and has a backlog of articles. At launch, the theme might be “whatever folks submit.”

I don’t know what Timothy might be looking for specifically but authors wondering “what should I write?” might consider:

  • Mythic locations, potential covenant sites or adventure sites
  • Magi of the Order with plot hooks on how to use them in play
  • Adventures!
  • New spells and enchanted items
  • House rules
  • New hedge magic traditions
  • New mystery cults
  • Historical research you’ve done on anywhere in Mythic Europe
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Nice Christmas present, you have been plotting, which is good.

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Jason has expressed my thoughts well: generally anything which is useful for other players in lowering their prep time and improving their gameplay is suitable.

Since the "battery" for this project is a fixed and comparatively small sum of money being paid on acceptance not publication. I can't afford to, for example, put out four "themes" and work on all of those potential publications at once.

I mean, I could...I could, for example, keep working on articles around themes X, Y, Z and then invite other people to contribute once I've padded teach issue magazine with my writing to lower that upfront cost enough to spread it over the three themes. I'm not doing that though, because to do that I'd need to write an awful lot more than I do now. Alternatively I could recut the podcast transcripts into larger works and publish them, and ask other authors to jump aboard at the last minute. Ars Magica Monsters and Mythic Venice are this sort of thing in action, without that final step of me opening them up to collaborators, although you can see how that could be done - for example I could have had a collaborator sourced chapter on the Merceria in the Venice book. I have no solid plans in that direction right now, just a vague notion that there's a possibility for Ars Magica annotated editions of "The King of Elfland's Daughter" and "Lud-in-the-Mist" if I ever win the lottery.

One thing Jason is (quite patiently) not saying is that the obvious way to change this is to make that battery bigger, and I could do this either by charging more and reworking Mythic Venice as a D&D / Ravenloft supplement. I can see the money sitting on that table, but I need a break from Venice to do good work on it, and I also need to read the 2025 versions of D&D (which I was given for Christmas, as it happens).

I seem to be rambling...anyway.

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