The RPG fanzines that an old-school history leaves out

The May 2009 second issue of The Rap Sheet calls itself a small, irregular fanzine supporting Pelgrane Press’s GUMSHOE system. Its main article proposes an optional initiative procedure. The introduction asks readers for help and feedback. Here is recognisable fanzine activity organised around investigative roleplaying. The two-page issue

A history assembled only from publications that describe themselves as old-school would be unlikely to recover this example through that label. The omission would follow from the search method, even if the resulting history described its selected publications accurately.

The question is how to enlarge the comparison without pretending that every gaming periodical is a zine. I use one fanzine and one explicitly different kind of journal to examine the limits of an old-school frame. These examples establish other editorial purposes, not their prevalence across the field.

A house rule can belong to several traditions

The Rap Sheet traces its initiative article to a discussion during an Esoterrorists session. It offers a more mechanical procedure while acknowledging that the ordinary approach may be sufficient in many situations. The article also notes that one optional modification increases the bookkeeping required.

That is a specific form of design reflection. A group encounters a problem, a writer proposes a rule and the publication invites response. The evidence is the author’s account and the printed proposal. It does not show how many groups adopted the rule or whether those groups preferred it.

The case also prevents a simple opposition between old-school combat rules and other games’ narrative concerns. This GUMSHOE fanzine discusses combat procedure. The relevant difference lies in the system, the problem being addressed and the editorial context, rather than a clean separation between publications that care about rules and publications that care about stories.

The contents of Fight On! issue 2 offer a useful comparison. They place adventures, rules, maps and an interview within an anthology that explicitly uses the old-school description. Both publications make room for readers to work on games. Their labels and formats help explain different settings for that work.

A collection gains something by placing them in conversation. It can ask how a proposed rule is justified, how the reader is expected to use it and what kind of response the publication invites. Those questions are more revealing than making either title represent everything outside the other.

Criticism has its own publication history

The publisher preview of Interactive Fantasy issue 3 identifies the 1995 publication as a peer-reviewed, quasi-academic journal concerned with interactive narratives. Its contents include discussions of gender, a blind gamesmaster and language education. It belongs beside a history of RPG-zine culture as related publishing context; its own description should not disappear for the convenience of a larger category.

Andrew Rilstone’s editorial in the preview challenges the dominance of combat and military themes. It also uses gender assumptions that require attribution and historical scrutiny. The text is evidence that these questions were being argued in that publication. It is not a present-day statement of what women, men or all players prefer.

That distinction improves the history. An earlier critical text can be worth reading because it raises a consequential question and because its framing reveals the limits of its own position. Historical relevance does not require turning the author into an uncomplicated precursor of current thinking.

Only the preview is examined here. Its contents page identifies articles that would be worth pursuing in the full issue, but a title alone cannot establish the article’s argument. A catalogue or teaching guide should preserve that boundary rather than supplying a summary from a suggestive heading.

Selection makes a history possible and partial

Hope Olson’s analysis of how subjects are constructed examines the relationships and categories through which knowledge is organised. For this comparison, the practical implication is that a search category helps constitute the set of publications a researcher will see. The category deserves examination alongside the results.

An old-school collection can have a clear and valuable scope. The problem arises when evidence from that collection is presented as though it describes all RPG zines. A defined subset supports conclusions about that subset, with wider claims requiring further material and a different search strategy.

I would make a comparison set around editorial purpose as well as movement language. House-rule discussion, campaign reporting, game criticism, complete game design and visual experimentation can appear in different combinations. Recording those combinations gives the reader several ways to understand a publication’s place.

For an academic exhibition, the catalogue can state how titles were selected and identify areas not covered. It can include a small number of adjacent publications where they explain a relationship, while clearly naming their different forms. That is more useful than silently expanding the word zine until it includes every object in the case.

Let the comparison change the enquiry

A public-library collection can use the same approach when a reader asks for small RPG publications beyond dungeon adventures. The enquiry might lead toward an investigative-game supplement, a solo game or a publication about play itself. The recommendation should follow what the reader wants to do, with system dependencies made clear.

A teaching session could compare the opening problem in The Rap Sheet with a selected Fight On! contribution and the argument in Rilstone’s editorial. Students would identify different kinds of evidence: a reported play problem, a published rule and a critical claim about a field. Each deserves a different kind of evaluation.

The wider history emerges through those specific comparisons. Old-school publishing remains an important subject within it. Other fanzines and related journals become visible through their own problems, methods and readers, allowing the history to describe more of the work that RPG participants have actually put into print.