Gygax, Kuntz, Ward, etc. in FANZINES
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Post Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2003 3:02 pm 
 

Hi all---

Has anyone compiled definitive bibliography of fanzine publications?  Or even of individual fanzines?  I'm thinking of something along the lines of what Shannon Appel did for the RuneQuest/etc. fanzines at RPG Magazine Indices

I've been collecting bits and pieces of info written by Gygax and Kuntz in particular, with some additional info by Ward, Jaquays, etc. but would love to know that someone's already done this research :D

Gygax has a pretty long bibliography file, but it's pretty light on the fanzine and wargaming magazine articles' details.  Kuntz was a major force behind the Castles & Crusades Society's Domesday Book, as well, but I haven't picked his brain on his other early writings (yet).  

Mike Badolato discovered a 1975 Diplomacy fanzine that has a Gygax short story in it, which describes a descent into Greyhawk Castle (see greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_castle_bla ... voir1.html).

I'm sure that there are other discoveries out there like that one, just waiting to be found---perhaps in Alarums & Excursions (where some of the very early TSR folks contributed, per my email correspondence with Lee Gold), in Dungoneer (to which Jim Ward was a frequent contributor), an in other fanzines I know nothing about (Len Lakofka was a big contributor across many from what I've read).  

Anyone know where to start looking?


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Post Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2003 4:08 pm 
 

no ,but thinking of it, have almost complete runs of Storm Lords now and getting some others... let me move into my new house and I'll pull out what I've got, I like here set up I must say....



Brette:)

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Post Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2003 12:21 am 
 

What is Storm Lords Brette?


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Post Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2003 12:28 am 
 

english RPG zines, was zine thread not Gygax;)

Brette:)

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Post Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:11 pm 
 

Some bumps for additional research discovered recently:


I'm sure there's more to track here, too....


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Post Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 6:18 pm 
 

What additional info about IFW newsletters do we have?  

IO won one or more in 2005 per IFW newsletter - nice win IO! :D and Frank mentioned "The Messenger" in Domesday Book: Research Report

Were there others besides the International Wargamer, The Messenger, and The Domesday Book itself?  Anything specifically for the LGTSA?


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Post Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2012 6:56 pm 
 

The short answer is: yes, there were others besides the IW, the Messenger, and the DB. If I had to make a rough guess, I'd say there were over 50, depending on how you count. You need first to differentiate between "core" IFW zines (like the IW) and Society zines (like the DB). There were relatively few "core" zines but many Society zines, because there were many Societies. The core zines we could probably list pretty easily: the monthly (which went by many names over the years), the quarterly (early and short-lived), the Supplement (which split out from the monthly at one point) and the Messenger (reserved for the IFW Senate/leadership to communicate to itself, not more widely distributed). Pretty much every Society had a zine, some more than one, and Societies came and went pretty regularly. Some, like the Castle & Crusade Society, were proposed and formed by existing IFW members; others, like the Game Design Bureau, were formed when the IFW subsumed an existing club - they had a pretty active M&A profile for a while.

A further difficulty is that a fanzine's association with the IFW could be pretty loose. A number of fanzines affiliated themselves not just with the IFW but also with other organizations - the affiliation granted you a discount as an IFW member when you subscribed, and the IFW's membership treasury typically offered the zine some degree of support in compensation for that. There are quite a few Diplomacy zines associated with the IFW's Diplomacy Society that fall into this category, for example - many of them also affiliated with the NFFF, a science-fiction fandom group that also had a prominent (and historically, extremely important) games society. Were these IFW zines? You can find Gygax playing in plenty of them, anyway. Even the DB arguably had joint affiliation between the LGTSA and the C&CS.

A few years ago on Tome of Treasures I remember we tried to enumerate the IFW zines, but I fear we didn't even arrive at a list worth dredging up. If you want to get a good sense of them, though, I'd probably recommend consulting Phillies's index zines - the Bix Six, the Guide to Wargaming Periodical Literature and the History of Wargaming Quarterly. He indexed periodicals back in the day (covering the entire lifetime of the IFW) so you could look up articles by author, by subject, and what have you, so if you were looking to just pick out Gygax's material, those are quite valuable. Don't expect that you're going to stumble over D&D-related history in an IFW Society zine like Europe '44 (modern) or Tricolor (Napoleonic), though. Gygax did not contribute to every IFW zine.

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