My thinking is quite close to yours, especially a structure of…
I think we have enough to get started but I’m thinking of waiting another day or two to give everyone another day or two to either express interest or suggest a direction to move in.
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I’d totally be down for Weird West (Westerns are my favorite genre by far when it comes to movies/tv).
Agreed.
I like this title the best, and maybe we could add some sort of subtitle to mention the Pit and the content that lies within.
Agreed with everything in your post. I especially like the idea of community building, that could be really cool.
I love this idea.
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@Grognard @maderschramm What do you think of this idea? This end-of-year zine would be more about everyone writing whatever their forte happens to be.
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I think it’s conciliatory and not what I’d want for the standard, regularly released zine.
It makes more sense to me to reverse it and have a once a year zine on a single topic while a normal release showcases all of what’s happening in the OSR, not just one generic fantasy setting.
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Again, I very much agree with maderschramm.
The great thing about RPGs in general, and OSR and Fanzines in particular is that they are more often than not and by their very nature, eclectic. They cover a wide range of topics and opinions, particularly if there are more than a few contributors. I think if you let people write about what they are passionate about (anything!) it will provide the most value to the readers and you will get the best content possible. Of course there has to be an editor, you need not accept or publish anything that anyone sends. But if you limit the scope (too much), I think quality, amount of contributions and passion will suffer.
Once you have say 3+ Zines with very wide-ranging topics about the OSR, you could still choose to collate some of the articles into a thematic end of year or end of season special zine, you could even request a few more articles to round out these specials.
An example, I would be excited to write about something extremely practical and niche, but still of quite a bit of importance to most (beginning) RPGers, it is something I have spend a lot of time thinking about, on and off, for decades now hehe.
The topic is:
What are the actual practical (and best) stuff you need (and bunch of things you might simply want) to begin playing?
I would subdivide that into tiers.
A “I want to spend $10 and still have a full game system, dice and everything else I need to play, forever!” B. I want to spend up to $ 50
C. $200 and up.
D. I want Iced out Dice/and the sky is the limit on what it costs!
I have to ask, in what Zine theme would this weird topic even fit? XD It would probably never come up.
Another example: I have 0 interest in the Weird West. But I would not mind in the least if one issue of the Zine featured some content relating to that! Who knows, I might enjoy the 1 or 2 articles! But if most or the entire Zine was made up of content related to that, well, i’d have nothing to contribute and likely would only scan it a bit, not read it.
Perhaps I liken my ideal Zine format/content to my favourite Punk Zines of old, they would always have band and gig and record reviews and pictures,… (= the equivalent of OSR staples, like adventures, handouts, new items and spells), but they would also always feature 2 to 6 columns or sections that were more like editorials and the topics discussed in those would range from the esoteric, to the personal to anything! interesting tangentially or totally related to Punk (OSR). And tbh, that combination is exactly what always kept the Zine predictable enough yet also fresh and providing the maximum value to the reader and also meant the widest range of readers were interested in it. It is no co-incidence that the really big Zines that printed tens of thousands of copies every month all followed this idea (Maximum Rock n Roll, Slug and Lettuce etc).
Anyway, at the end of the day, whoever does the most work gets to decide as far as I am concerned, not my call. I will just be happy if the Zine comes into existence in not too super long, in whatever form it takes. 
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I’d love to hop on with some writing/tables and very badly drawn art.
I think maderschramm and Grognard have the right idea. Run a Special Encounter edition every so often with a theme or collate past stuff into a best of…
I know I shift between science-fantasy and stone age and post-apoc with alarming regularity.
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So we run into the inevitable conflict of many chefs in the kitchen. At least 3 people want an eclectic zine and at I think around the same want a featured location.
I think you all make a good case for the “kitchen sink” approach. I’ll just a few things why it doesn’t excite me, in table form naturally.
Roll 1d6
1. With an eclectic zine, each of us will be working on something different, so it would be less collaborative.
2. If we have a lot of different systems, it will be hard for the editors to check everything. Whereas I’m guessing everyone here has system mastery of generic OSR.
3. The end product has less utility: a scattershot approach will by definition miss as many people as it hits. Generic OSR as opposed to mothership & mork borg + ose +runequest+etc is more useable by more people.
4. I don’t think it’s true that having a collective goal (a pit, say) will in any way eliminate the different ideas and personalities that reside on this board. It will in fact unite them in a way that totally separate entries might not.
5. I’d argue that the best this board has to offer is more than the sum of it’s parts, otherwise it’s essentially a pdf of assorted blog posts.
6. We’re going to give this away for free, but still from a marketing standpoint: this is a zine about (all the strange encounters in a pit, or whatever we go with) is perhaps easier to “sell” than “this is a zine where anything goes”
I don’t hate the smorgasbord zine idea at all. There is something cool about into leaning into a gonzo, anything goes approach. I think, however, that both the writing process (being able to connect our work together) and the end result (a uniform collection of ideas) will be improved by a central location. Just my 2 cents.
So it seems we’re at a little bit of an impasse. Nobody wants to force their vision onto everyone else, so the question is: how to proceed? Open it up to a vote? Roll a die? Make two different zines?
Let’s figure it out, one way or another, and get going on this thang!
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This is exactly why a varied zine is the best option. Every single one of those cooks can prepare a dish that then makes it into the finished product, which is then edited and cleaned up to make a cohesive zine. Think of something like Dungeon or Dragon magainze - the contributors wrote articles that enhanced the product as a whole, but weren’t tied to a specific setting or genre. You could see everything from short fiction to modules to tables to miniature painting.
With the other authors, maybe. With the editors it would be more so because of the point brought up in #2:
Hence the need for collaboration of the editors and the contributors.
While not everyone will gain as much out of every article included, more people will still read the zine, even for that one article they might find interesting. This boosts readership and increases the reach of The Pit, which hopefully boosts our attendance here as well.
Rather than being “just another Generic OSR Zine”, the Pit’s zine would truly be a smattering of the best and brightest contributors of all realms of the OSR gathered in one place. You might not play Mothership but reading that article might get you interested in the system, or at least get you on this forum to talk about it.
I disagree, everything will be whitewashed into one thing by the editors. It’s just a collab piece at that point. Look at Death Frost Doom (example because it’s sitting next to me as I’m writing this) - pick out what Raggi wrote and what Zak wrote - you can’t.
The editing is what pulls it together at that point. Look again at Dungeon or Dragon magazine. It’s still greater than the sum of its parts even though its parts are distinct.
The pitch is easy. To reiterate what I said above, The Pit isn’t “just another Generic OSR Zine”, it’s a smattering of the best and brightest contributors from all realms of the OSR gathered in one place. With something for everyone, the zine can bring ideas to your table or introduce you to something you’ve never heard of before.
I think we’ve both said our pieces. You’re quarterbacking this thing, so you’ll need to make a decision. Do we want a collab piece or do we want something unique that only this board could create? You know where my vote lies.
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I think this is where we need to look. We could gather up what made both of those great (and successful), compose a list of those aspects, and start pulling them directly to get people working on them.
We don’t have to restrict ourselves in anyway. We should promote OSR goodies from just about any setting or system, as if we are TSR promoting our products with the goal of getting people to jump in. That also doesn’t mean we have to restrict ourselves in dedicating a portion of the zine to a continual setting, or generic theme, that allows for people looking for creative restrictions or guidelines to fire up their drive to create content for the zine. Half the zine is dedicated to anything promoting OSR curated or created by the Pit, half the zine dedicated to a new look into our continual, exclusive setting/theme/world/concept composed of content created by us.
An OSR zine, “featuring” our setting/theme. I think that would be my vote.
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Easy solution, best of all worlds. I concur.
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I suggested it but this is a community project and any one person making unilateral decisions probably isn’t healthy.
This seems the best way. We can have a cohesive setting/adventure as the main dish but also have a bunch of entrees to go along with it. That way people can contribute in whatever fashion they desire. Good thinking!
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You’ve convinced me 
I’m definitely coming around to the idea of a more varied zine, and the more I think about it the more I like the idea.
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The best way to run something like this is to have a benevolent dictator that can be ousted at any point by anyone. No decision is worse than a bad decision, because even if a decision is bad, it’s possible to fix it.
What if everyone got a set amount of page space, to do whatever they want with? If people want to collab, they can pool their pages towards a particular topic?
Another $0.02, I love the idea of a big “feature article” with a bunch of other random things. Like a full multi-page dungeon for half of the zine, with a bunch of one-pagers for literally anything else people want.
I also think system-free main content, with system reviews, and hell maybe having a couple chunks of Joesky tax after each review for that particular system?
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Surely it’s time for a big collaborative google doc already!
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I like this. Maybe everyone gets 2 pages of A5/digest to do what they want? This should be enough for an article OR a one page dungeon OR a d100 table OR a few treasure/monster entries. Then, like Spwack said, if people want to do something bigger, they collaborate.
Maybe do a google doc where everyone posts their idea of either a bigger thing they need help with or solo project. Then people can read what everyone is doing and decide if they want to do a solo thing or contribute to someone elses project.
At some point we pick which feature project we do (IF there are enough people interested in one of them!). For example, there are two competing projects, a space magic adventure and a mutant wasteland adventure, and one of them gets more votes. We then pick the winner, and those backing the losing project join the other project or do solo stuff/smaller collabs.
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I am ever the contrarian,… but,… XD Google is pretty evil. Every day more articles come out about how powerful, privacy destroying and sneaky the big G is.
They already fucked over the OSR once (probably were not aware or concerned) by killing a service that we used a ton and so much content, discussion and history was lost. I certainly don’t want to start a holy war on the Google topic, but to my mind a lot of what Google does is the opposite of what my favourite OSR authors and products do, Google is not open source, not very collaborative in the sense that they are huge monolithic monopoly etc.
Instead of Googledoc, could we use these dudes? https://cryptpad.fr/pad/
I have found them more than adequate, in fact in some ways I like their service far better from a technical and ease of use point of view, never mind their encryption/privacy/cool company aspects.
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While I don’t expect them to just kill off Google docs, I agree that after the G+ incident the OSR community should find another place in which to store its content. We were fooled once, we should avoid being fooled twice.
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We need something that’ll support mark up, tagging, and maybe even permission roles for editors, proof readers, etc. Standard practices in publication is usually using Word or Docs with mark up changes before final is pushed to layout. In my professional life, I much prefer Word, but that’s not really an option for ALL of us.
I almost feel like The Pit itself would be a good option. We can separate articles by posts in the Zine category, use tags for specifications, and track edits by post. Have the people working on said article all watch that post for changes, person in charge composes all the content into a PDF, Doc, whatever - as long as it gets to head editor to sort it with the rest of the content going into the zine.
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This is cool! Even if we don’t use it for this project, I’m glad to know it. I also appreciate your Principled stand against google.
I think you’re right. Honestly we want the submissions before layout to be as plain text as possible. It’s going to be a pain tracking down each entry as is. It’s going to be a learning experience.
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I don’t know. There’s a 0% chance that Google will pull the plug on Google Docs, I’d wager it’s their second most used service after their search engine. It’s so easy to collaborate and make edits on Google Docs that I’m not sure I’d want to switch to another platform for this brainstorming phase. Additionally, I like the idea of keeping some discussion in the Pit but I don’t want our forums to be flooded with post after post about the zine when a lot of users aren’t participating.
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