Fifty years of Alarums & Excursions

Five hundred and ninety-three issues require somebody to finish the next one. Contributors can arrive with ideas, readers can praise an argument, and a historian can later identify an important exchange, but the publication still depends on the person preparing the pages and getting them out. For Alarums & Excursions, that person was Lee Gold.

The RPG amateur press association began in June 1975 and ended in April 2025. Rick Meints’s farewell account records those dates and the final issue number. Almost fifty years of publication deserve attention for their ideas, certainly, but also for the repeated editorial work through which those ideas became available.

Scope note: This account uses editorial instructions, participant recollections and historical analysis. It concerns the documented publication and its maintenance, rather than claiming a reading of all 593 issues.

The continuity was made

Gold’s 2021 publisher page describes a publication assembled from contributions, with formatting instructions, page limits and charges. It also records interruptions for travel, surgery and conventions. Read together, these details give a more accurate account of continuity than an uninterrupted row of dates could provide. Publication took place within a life that included obligations beyond the next mailing.

The page’s account of storing back issues is especially revealing. Copies occupied domestic storage, and retrieving them required physical effort. An archive that appears online as an available run existed in particular boxes and cupboards. The distinction matters when later readers assume that availability means immediate, effortless retrieval.

Paul Mason’s history of RPGs as fan production situates Gold’s work in the exchange of playing styles among groups. That exchange supplied the publication’s reason to continue. An editor was maintaining a place where differences could be described and answered, rather than issuing a single definitive account of how everybody should play.

There is a useful tension here. A recurring issue establishes a dependable place for contributions, yet every issue has finite space and practical terms. Openness depends on arrangements that also limit participation. Page charges, preparation requirements, language and the time needed to compose a response all affect who can contribute. Those conditions should be investigated through records and participants’ accounts; the longevity of the title cannot establish that every interested person could take part.

An editor’s work is part of the intellectual history

Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder’s study of infrastructure treats it as a relationship with organized practice. Something becomes infrastructure because people depend on it while doing their work. Their study concerned a scientific information system, but its distinction helps frame a question about A&E: which recurring arrangements let contributors treat publication as something they could rely on?

The historical instructions supply some answers. File preparation, editorial correction, assembly and distribution made an ongoing exchange possible. These tasks did not determine the truth of a contributor’s argument, but they determined whether and how the argument reached readers. A history that credits only the people who proposed memorable rules leaves that enabling work unexplained.

I would therefore describe Gold as an editor and organizer within the history of RPG thought, with the actual tasks attached to that description. A generic acknowledgement of dedication loses specificity. The stronger account identifies what she maintained, what contributors supplied, how the arrangements changed, and which evidence supports each claim.

This also resists a familiar division between creative work and administration. Editing a contribution may involve spelling and layout, but deciding what fits, how separate voices remain identifiable, and when an issue is ready affects the publication that readers encounter. The surviving instructions make part of that judgment visible. They do not reveal every negotiation or justify inventing the conversations that must have happened.

Reading the end accurately

The end of A&E creates a small but consequential research problem. Its older publisher page remains accessible and speaks in the present tense. A reader following only that page could conclude that issues are still appearing. Heath Row’s contemporaneous account in Telegraphs & Tar Pits 163, preserved on PDF page 19, reports Gold’s announcement and refunds. Together with Meints’s retrospective, it supplies the later evidence needed to date the ending.

For a library, correcting the publication status is straightforward in principle. The harder task is keeping the older page useful without presenting its ordering instructions as current. A record can identify it as documentation of the 2021 arrangement and cite the later closure notice separately. That preserves both pieces of evidence and the chronological relation between them.

Meints also describes an index covering the first 200 issues. That boundary matters. A catalogue or teaching guide should name the index’s coverage rather than allow a reader to assume it represents the whole run. The existence of an index does not make the remaining issues intelligible by extension.

A collection commitment has its own labor

An institution acquiring A&E inherits work at a different scale. Staff must establish holdings, inspect physical condition, record gaps and decide how readers will request particular issues. The title’s historical importance does not settle how much of that work a particular library can sustain.

For an academic collection supporting research into game design, a phased description project could begin with the issues relevant to an existing enquiry. A public library with a local gaming-history collection might prioritize the relationship between donated issues and the donor’s documented participation. In either setting, the proposed service should specify what staff can retrieve and explain, with enough time allocated to maintain that promise.

I would measure progress through recoverable enquiries: can a reader identify an issue, understand the available run and follow a cited exchange? Counting accessioned boxes alone would miss the work that makes the collection usable. The same distinction that matters in Gold’s publishing history matters in the institution’s response to it.

The final issue ended an editorial commitment that had lasted decades. A responsible collection can document that ending, credit the work that preceded it and make clear what access it now offers. The next reader should encounter a publication with a history, including the labor and decisions that allowed it to continue for so long.