Publishing a Gaming Magazine

[Ben Lehman]

So I've decided to publish a gaming magazine.

A year ago, I wrote a game called XXXXtreme STREET luge, which has been shockingly successful given that I haven't even produced more than about ten copies of it. It's about street lugers who vaguely resemble Vin Diesel, and microfame, and moving out of your mom's basement and it's actually really fucking fun.

So I decided, starting at the one year anniversary, that I was going to publish a magazine about it. Mostly this is because I came up with a really great name for the magazine: XXXXtreme-o-phile. I asked people who had played and liked the game to provide me with articles, and shockingly, they did. So much so that if I can hound people into writing promised articles I'll be set for at least the first two issues, maybe even more. It helps that the magazines are only 16 tiny pages long each but hey, that's the length of the entire original game. It's like if every Dragon Magazine (RIP) was the size of the Player's Handbook.

Why publish a magazine? Partially I wanted to see if I could get away with it. Partially it's to test out a new business model I have: every contributer gets the right to produce and sell the magazine for his or her own profit. That will be interesting to see how it works out. And mostly because I think producing the only print RPG magazine devoted to a single game is hilarious. (Well, maybe Fight On! also counts. In which case we're the second largest.)

XXXXtreme-o-phile issue one is here. The original game is here. For both, you can print them out double-sided, cut them into quarters, and then bind them.

I'd love it if people wanted to play the game, write articles, send letters to the editor (really need some of those), draw pictures, and so on.

yrs--
--Ben

[MatrixGamer]

I admire your enthusiasm! I did a print newsletter from 1989 to 1994 and it was a great learning experience. Please keep us updated on how it's going. The internet makes the landscape so different that nothing I did when Bush senior was president seems relevant. I did all my printing on the photo copier at work after hand cutting and pasting the original master copy.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Ben Lehman]

Hah! Thanks, Chris. Any advice would be appreciate.

The link the original game is wrong. Here's the actual link.

[Calithena]

Hi Ben!

This sounds like a fun project. I suspect you know what you're doing better than I do but if my experience is of any use to you you know where to find me.

Fight On! is actually not a magazine for one game, but it is true that many of our articles directly serve homebrewed variants of a very popular early RPG.

Excelsior!