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mnemeIf you've ever wanted a more relaxed, contemplative place to talk about TTRPGs, Alarums & Excursions' legacy continues with https://everanon.org/ _Ever and Anon_ -- a free collective/collated fanzine (also known as an APA), compiled once a month! We've been getting a lot of OSR new contributors over the last month, but APA hacking isn't really about nostalgia; it's a different flow and approach to conversation and creation, and I'd love to see more people trying it!
I started doing APAs at all back in the early 90s when I discovered fandom -- and very quickly after that, they lost massive ground even from their main sources of support (mostly fandoms and other small communities where having a written forum was a great way of community building where physical presence wasn't enough or for wider nets, even generally possible), as Usenet, BBS networks, and later, forums, mailing lists and eventually social media (like this one!) captured their best potential users.
After all, why participate in costly (APAs were originally, after all, printed on paper and even mailed out, and someone needed to cover the bills), slow (I'll get to this) exclusive way of reaching out -- when easier, faster, and cheaper or even free ways to build community were right there? Even in APAs with organization that made things easier (Alarums and Excursions was run in a semi-commercial, professional way, with accounts kept for readers to cover postage and subsidize contributor costs with per-issue costs, for contributors to cover per page printing and reproduction costs, and zines accepted in a variety of electronic forms [in the 90s, a modem to modem phone call followed by electronic transfer of a wordstar format file, although physical mailing of a stencil, a master copy, or even an appropriate number of copies of your entire zine was also acceptable; by the 2000s this had become submission by email and often in text or other MS Word compatible formats--or pre-formatted in PDF], while new contributors would arrive and stay, kept losing contributors who decided that their time and/or money was best spent elsewhere.
Still, if one thinks of the core appeal of an APA -- a forum where formatting is part of personal expression as well as the text and images therein, and more importantly, where a single contributor's thoughts can be read at length (maximum copy count in Alarums and Excursions went 16 double column pages, and some other APAs had no such limits), contemplated, and then responded to with a month between replies, and plenty of time to rethink ideas as exchanges went over months or years, the conversation just flows differently and has different qualities than faster forms of Electronic communication. Nor are the costs irreconcilable -- sure, if you're printing things to paper, someone has to cover the costs -- but in the modern day, why would you have to do that? We have e-readers, durable formats like PDF, and cheap online storage, so why not put the APA online?
Of course, there are some reasons one might not want an APA entirely online and indexable ad searchable forever. There are things people will put in an APA that's emailed to specific people and kept in physical form for a couple of hundreds of people that they really don't want on something that Google will index, that will be scanned and become part of the corpus for the next LLM.
But honestly, that leads to my real hope. I have no objections to quick and short social media like Twitter was, like Bluesky and Mastodon are -- but there are things I can only really write about here or on other slower blogs.
And similarly, the conversations I get in an APA are ones I wouldn't get even on Dreamwidth. I'd love for more people to have an opportunity to participate in APA-hacking, now that it doesn't involve showing up at someone's house for a "collation party" every month or two, now that it doesn't involve figuring out how to print 50 (or 500) copies of your precious prose without breaking your bank, but can involve just mailing something to a person who has promised to make a compilation and make it available to a select few (or the whole world, if that's how you want to go).
And more importantly, they don't have to, they SHOULDN'T be the same APA. like a forum, like Usenet, the character of an APA changes as you add more contributors (not so much non-contributing readers, though having those reading your not-that-deathless prose can be a nice carrot to contributors). Given how the essential nature of an APA &8212; deriving from the letter columns it supposedly descended from &8212; is each zine commenting on thoughts expressed in previous issues, the effort to contributing (or how much people try to comment on, or even read, every or nearly every zine in the previous issue) is proportional to the size of the APA. Add too many people, and this will discourage prospective contributors, result in them only reading a fraction of the APA &8212; or even split the APA as people group with the ones they most want to talk to; at one point there were I think at least 3 TTRPG APAs running simultaneously--one in the UK, plus two in the US, Alarums & Excursions and Wild Hunt. Or something like that.
But by me, at least, that's a success condition. Have multiple "rooms" where conversations happen and that means people can select the room they like, and the conversations in all the rooms get better and more focused on whatever people are interested in, whether (for TTRPG purposes) that's specific communities (like a focus on OSR or more modern narrativist games that may be more story game than definitely a TTRPG or LARP, or on design vs play vs hacking) or a more generalized approach to sharing ideas.
And while APAs aren't in any way immune to toxicity -- I've seen my share of VERY SLOW flame wars, compared to the modern levels, this is nothing--and for one reason or another (including self-politicing) it's been literal years since I've seen significant unpleasantness in the APAs I frequented.
I started doing APAs at all back in the early 90s when I discovered fandom -- and very quickly after that, they lost massive ground even from their main sources of support (mostly fandoms and other small communities where having a written forum was a great way of community building where physical presence wasn't enough or for wider nets, even generally possible), as Usenet, BBS networks, and later, forums, mailing lists and eventually social media (like this one!) captured their best potential users.
After all, why participate in costly (APAs were originally, after all, printed on paper and even mailed out, and someone needed to cover the bills), slow (I'll get to this) exclusive way of reaching out -- when easier, faster, and cheaper or even free ways to build community were right there? Even in APAs with organization that made things easier (Alarums and Excursions was run in a semi-commercial, professional way, with accounts kept for readers to cover postage and subsidize contributor costs with per-issue costs, for contributors to cover per page printing and reproduction costs, and zines accepted in a variety of electronic forms [in the 90s, a modem to modem phone call followed by electronic transfer of a wordstar format file, although physical mailing of a stencil, a master copy, or even an appropriate number of copies of your entire zine was also acceptable; by the 2000s this had become submission by email and often in text or other MS Word compatible formats--or pre-formatted in PDF], while new contributors would arrive and stay, kept losing contributors who decided that their time and/or money was best spent elsewhere.
Still, if one thinks of the core appeal of an APA -- a forum where formatting is part of personal expression as well as the text and images therein, and more importantly, where a single contributor's thoughts can be read at length (maximum copy count in Alarums and Excursions went 16 double column pages, and some other APAs had no such limits), contemplated, and then responded to with a month between replies, and plenty of time to rethink ideas as exchanges went over months or years, the conversation just flows differently and has different qualities than faster forms of Electronic communication. Nor are the costs irreconcilable -- sure, if you're printing things to paper, someone has to cover the costs -- but in the modern day, why would you have to do that? We have e-readers, durable formats like PDF, and cheap online storage, so why not put the APA online?
Of course, there are some reasons one might not want an APA entirely online and indexable ad searchable forever. There are things people will put in an APA that's emailed to specific people and kept in physical form for a couple of hundreds of people that they really don't want on something that Google will index, that will be scanned and become part of the corpus for the next LLM.
But honestly, that leads to my real hope. I have no objections to quick and short social media like Twitter was, like Bluesky and Mastodon are -- but there are things I can only really write about here or on other slower blogs.
And similarly, the conversations I get in an APA are ones I wouldn't get even on Dreamwidth. I'd love for more people to have an opportunity to participate in APA-hacking, now that it doesn't involve showing up at someone's house for a "collation party" every month or two, now that it doesn't involve figuring out how to print 50 (or 500) copies of your precious prose without breaking your bank, but can involve just mailing something to a person who has promised to make a compilation and make it available to a select few (or the whole world, if that's how you want to go).
And more importantly, they don't have to, they SHOULDN'T be the same APA. like a forum, like Usenet, the character of an APA changes as you add more contributors (not so much non-contributing readers, though having those reading your not-that-deathless prose can be a nice carrot to contributors). Given how the essential nature of an APA &8212; deriving from the letter columns it supposedly descended from &8212; is each zine commenting on thoughts expressed in previous issues, the effort to contributing (or how much people try to comment on, or even read, every or nearly every zine in the previous issue) is proportional to the size of the APA. Add too many people, and this will discourage prospective contributors, result in them only reading a fraction of the APA &8212; or even split the APA as people group with the ones they most want to talk to; at one point there were I think at least 3 TTRPG APAs running simultaneously--one in the UK, plus two in the US, Alarums & Excursions and Wild Hunt. Or something like that.
But by me, at least, that's a success condition. Have multiple "rooms" where conversations happen and that means people can select the room they like, and the conversations in all the rooms get better and more focused on whatever people are interested in, whether (for TTRPG purposes) that's specific communities (like a focus on OSR or more modern narrativist games that may be more story game than definitely a TTRPG or LARP, or on design vs play vs hacking) or a more generalized approach to sharing ideas.
And while APAs aren't in any way immune to toxicity -- I've seen my share of VERY SLOW flame wars, compared to the modern levels, this is nothing--and for one reason or another (including self-politicing) it's been literal years since I've seen significant unpleasantness in the APAs I frequented.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-12 08:33 pm (UTC)But I found that I was getting less enjoyment from it, as time went by. There was increasing friction between cliques, and people were tending to be nastier to each other. A number of my friends, people whose contribs I especially enjoyed, dropped out.
The last straw for me came when we needed a new central mailer. Nobody was keen on taking the job. Eventually, at a collation, one of the members offered, essentially on the basis of "well, I don't particularly want to, but we need someone to do it, and I'm willing to if nobody else will". And I think he'd have done reasonably well at it; I don't think anyone had concerns about his competence. But some people were horror-struck because years earlier, there had been cleanliness problems in his home (issues that seemed to have been resolved, so far as I could tell). "But... his house might still be like it was before! And if we make him CM, he might make us do collations there!" (Collations had always floated among the homes of members who were able to host.) And rather than waiting to see if those problems did come up, those people got together in one room and held a "vote" and "elected" a different person, without letting the rest of the members know and choose. The first guy would have stepped aside happily if the second person had expressed willingness, but instead, we got a rigged election.
The whole thing left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I decided that I'd had enough. It didn't help that the new CM, moments into the job, arbitrarily decreed that henceforth, contribs must be typed or in print, rather than hand-written. First, there was nothing in the charter that allowed the CM to make such a decree. Second, there was a long history of contribs in forms other than type/print, ranging from pictures to little jars of Marmite. Third, the decree obviously had the sole purpose of expelling a single person who always hand-wrote his contribs... a person that the new CM hated for personal reasons. (When I asked the new CM what their reason was for the new rule, they waffled and said something along the lines of "Oh, I don't know, just because...")
Rather than trying to fight for an organization that I was no longer particularly invested in, I walked away.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-12 09:41 pm (UTC)It is amazing how bad things can get, even (especially?) in small cliques. I remember one former Alarums & Excursions contributor was known (notorious, even) for sending people long hand-written letters that used multiple colors of ink -- I never got a letter from him, but I know Lisa got several and even ran a few rounds of a play by mail including him (in which he'd made up a VERY powerful character that had very little motivation to do anything, who Lisa, though game, had difficulty investing in anything resembling plot--she'd do better now, but it was still a tall ask).
I don't remember handwritten A&E contributions, but I think Lee would retype some handwritten contributions to put them in a typed format for the APA at some point, something she stopped doing once her eyesight got worse.
Ironically, the person who has been serving as OE for the last year of the successor APA, Ever & Anon, was a key part of the Disagreement back in 2000. He left for a few years after that whole thing blew over, came back some years later, and has been a key part of organizing the new project. I think he would like someone else to take the job for at least a year so we don't have a pattern of a single person doing the job indefinitely, but we'll see if someone steps up. (it being a purely electronic effort does make it easier although it also means that having decent tools is key).
no subject
Date: 2026-03-19 11:18 pm (UTC)And activity level dropped notably when Ken, the OE, retired - because he was no longer able to take digital submissions and print the copies out at work. The overseas submissions have slowed or stopped entirely. We had a year or so where we were hitting the edge of standard mail postage levels, and if it kept up we'd probably need to use the $10/envelope "priority mail," but... it's dropped from "about 60-70 pages per issue" to, well, the current mailing was 35 pages, from 6 people + the OE.
I like having a paper APA. I would like it more if it were less "guys who are holding on to the last shreds of fandom as they knew and loved it in the 80s" (or 60s, or earlier, in some cases) and more "hey what kind of conversations can we have on paper that the internet won't do?"
I'm enjoying E&A but monthly seems... very fast. I don't have time to really read it; I read in one window with my zine in another to make comments, and I don't have time to go back and re-read older ones because there is SO MUCH every month. (I don't know that there's a fix to this. Switching to bimonthly or quarterly would allow more time, but that might just be an annoying restriction on content.)
no subject
Date: 2026-03-20 05:16 am (UTC)As said, zines on paper are cool and can be really fun, but they have a lot of costs as well, not least that they're expensive and have a high cost of entry. (but also, that people who are doing zines on paper because they've been doing them for decades may also want to freeze time in other ways -- which is also honestly an issue with the main intake for E&A being the OSR groups; I want a -diversity- of views, not just endless people who think the near-epitome of role-playing games were reached in the 70s).
One thing I've wondered about regarding paper zines is doing stuff that's harder to do with modern printing -- use gel printing (with stencils!) or other older, more hands-on techniques to get results you can't get easily on a computer; I remember one folded small zine I got handed a decade or so ago at Worldcon that really played with the physicality of the format (by René Walling, who was certainly the subject of some controversy in 2012...but the zine was interesting!).
That said, the kinds of stuff I do in a zine work well online. It's very true that the volume of E&A online is...honestly even more than we had with A&E (which maxed out at 150 pages/month and was often closer to 100). I've been able to keep up without it impacting my life, but it's a thing -- the larger the APA is, the more work it is to keep up and the more you have to skip or skim to comment/read it reasonably in a month.
The ideal, really, is a natural split. At one point we had at least three ttrpg APAs -- A&E, Wild Hunt, and I'm told Pandemonium. There is, after all, no rule that says people can't make up new APAs and get their friends to join them, and if people aren't just going to do stuff in an ever-growing E&A with many readers only reading their favorites (like a weird monthly version of old Usenet with killfiles), affinity groups calving off their own APAs is going to have to happen at some point, because everyone should be able to write what they want to write, but that doesn't mean everyone wants to read it.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-20 07:19 am (UTC)Photocopies/printouts are cheaper now then they ever were when paper zines were in their heyday. The cost of producing 65 copies a quarter, and mailing them - and the cost of membership that covered postage of that 200-to-300 page mailing every quarter - meant that FAPA was always restricted to people willing & able to sink serious time and money into the hobby.
The most recent records I could find, from when it had maxed membership, were in the mid-80s, when it cost $15/year: $45 today, plus the cost of mailing in your own 68 copies (65 members + extras) every quarter, or just annually if you were restricting it to that... minimum of just over 2.5 lbs to mail in, for 8 pages (4 sheets).
There were plenty of smaller APAs, but the math works out the same; they were mostly "subscription cost is based on postage + a bit for emergency weirdness" so the only reduction was based on having fewer members and fewer pages involved. (And that's without getting into the hassle and cost of (access to) a hectograph or mimeograph.)
FAPA is currently $10 annual membership, with 20 copies required quarterly. It went up to 25 copies for a few quarters, and then dropped again as a few people dropped out. I'm enjoying it, but part of that is connecting to aspects of fandom that I remember from my youth and wasn't involved in; unlike E&A, I can't think of any notable appeal to younger fans.
E&A may wind up growing enough to need some kind of restriction to keep it to a level people can read & respond to, because there are now so few game-discussion areas. There's social media microblogs where the comments are in two-sentence posts and interspersed with commentary on other topics, and there's Medium and Substack blogs that are all managed by a single person - but the communities on LJ (and Dreamwidth) have mostly gone dormant. RPGnet's forums are still active but there's little outreach, and if you don't click with the regulars, it's hard to connect. (There are TTRPG forums on the other side of the political spectrum; I gather they are not thriving either, although I've reached that conclusion halfway by vibes.)
I'm glad you're opening up discussion here; as you've noted, there's a difference in the style of communication between "pdf zine" and blog posts. It's possible that E&A will need some adjusting if it gets a steady influx of new members, but I suppose that's a tomorrow problem.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-22 02:55 pm (UTC)I agree that there isn't much room for slow discussion. Some forums go on, including https://discussion.tekeli.li/ that I run myself, but they're mostly pretty small and quiet. And of course they can vanish overnight. And "Roger's blog" isn't the same thing as "a general discussion space".
I think the APA concept originated with hobby printers, so really being hobby PDF producers is just following in that tradition (even if it's not very hard, with things like Pandoc, you just need some sort of word processor).