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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.
