Mythic Europe Magazine : Call for Submissions

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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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?

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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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I think this is an excellent idea, and that Timothy is an excellent person to take the lead on it. Send him stuff!

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Some feedback from my end, as someone who isn't subscribing to your patreon yet who respects your skill as an author, is that I like knowing what my money goes towards, what I'm buying. Podcasts, for example, are of little value to me. I probably won't listen to an audio file while preparing for a game - I much prefer a text I can read and search through to find something. I also like readily usable materials and not just tales that I need to figure out whether I can adapt them myself. So while I'm currently unlikely to subscribe to your podcast-funding patreon page, the zine is something I'm looking forward to.

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Well that's interesting to know. The magazine articles do have certain structural advantages over podcast material, which can't really have tables of numbers in it. On the other hand, podcasts can be used to drop large amounts of lore on players, like the player chapter of Venice, because they can listen to them while loading the dishwasher or commuting. It's a highly experimental idea for me, so I'll see how it turns out.

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There was a character I submitted previously to issue 4 of @Doctorcomics's Peripheral Code, but issue 4 never came out and I'm not sure if it ever will (the last I heard on it was in about 2019, so I'm not particularly optimistic). Is it acceptable to resubmit to a different magazine? (@Doctorcomics, possibly one for you as well as Timothy?)

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Please submit to Timothy!

My contract at Wizards precludes me from publishing anything like Peripheral Code.

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It does rather look like much of issue 1 will be made up of pre-approved bits of the other two magazines, but that's fine.

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You mean "already written pieces which meet a certain editorial standard" - makes your life easier!

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That gives a lot a breathing room for other authors, if you have 2 issues in the can. Just have to layout and edit as required.

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I won't have two issues in the can. The funding on this is strictly limited. The only way to get to two in the can is for me to write heaps of it.

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How long do we have if we want to contribute to issue 2?

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There is still space in issue 1. I was exaggerating for effect (but only because 20 000 words I thought I was inheriting were not finished, only pitches. 8) ).

I have no idea how long the gap between issues will be.

To be clear, once the writers get paid out on issue 1 (which is on acceptance of final draft, not publication) issue 2 doesn't start accepting articles until the sales from my writing (MEM issue 1, Mythic Venice, Magonomia core rules royalties, Ars Magica Monsters Volume One, GFF Patreon) repay that outlay. It might sell fast, in which case right away, or it might not sell at all, in which case there isn't an issue 2, ever.

This really is a test of the commercial strength or the fandom. I'm putting up to 1000USD on the line and hoping the fandom reimburses me, but there's a serious chance it won't, or it will, but it may take a couple of years, in which case I start asking for articles in a couple of years.

I know people are used to magazines which say "Pay X and we guarantee 4 issues a year!" but news-stand magazines make a wedge of their money out of paid advertising and Mythic Europe can't have that. The author payment comes out of money that would otherwise go to pay down my mortgage, so I need to set a strict limit on how much I can lose. The windfall from my writing is outside my family's budget so if I lose it, we still pay off the house at the same rate and I develop some layout / editing / project management skills to use on my self-published stuff.

To clear up why the financial structure looks like this: payment on publication is a monstrous problem sometimes. I am paying on acceptance because I once wrote a 50 000 word piece that was accepted at UK commercial rates, worked through multiple revisions and then simply not published because the publisher didn't think the TV show it was tied to had the strength to carry the book. No cancellation fee either. Just 50 000 words I couldn't use for anything because it was tied to an odd sci-fi IP.

Basically for-profit subscription magazines, which pay on publication, borrow money from their readers at no interest, and content from their authors on extended terms, and only hand one to the other when they feel like it. In our tiny fan community that's a corrosive model, so I don't want to do things that way. That's why I can't give you deadlines for issues: I can't guarantee sufficient sales to predict their regularity.

That being said, send me a pitch to gamesfromfolktales@gmail.com before you work on anything, to make sure someone else isn't already doing what you're doing.

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Have you thought about approaching gaming companies to sell them advertisement in your magazine? Generally speaking, such companies do their own ad, so you only need to lay it in the document. And you can dictate different prices on Black & white, Single Color, and multiple Color ads, and based on ad size.

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Social media has killed small zine advert rates. The value proposition for advertisers on magazine ads used to be that the magazine connected you to buyers, but social media targets them better now. Small zines don't have the other pull magazines have (social proof - basically if a watch advertisea on the back of Time you know other people will admire your watch.)

So, there's not much draw there. Good luck to anyone else trying it though.

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I'd like to thank Sub Rosa and Peripheral Code for their generous support.

Mythic Europe Magazine just paid for its first article. It's an adventure in the Rhineland. Several other articles are at the stage where I've sent an edited version to the author for acceptance and payment details. Many of these are in excellent shape because the hibernating magazines have already edited the articles, and then released their authors to offer them to me.

As noted above one way for me to make the battery of money bigger is to write part of the magazine myself. I've started on an article. it's a reuse of the Lunar Realm material from Dies Irae and the ship combat rules from Hermetic Projects to stage H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds in the Stonehenge Tribunal. It's perhaps a little more radical than I'd planned for the first issue, but when I looked at it and at the first article I'd written (statues in Venice claimed to have been carved by angels) I heard the Jeff Wayne theme in my head and decided to do the surprising thing.

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