Over the years, I've done a few zine reviews on this blog. But I've never made clear my standards for evaluation (including to myself). I've also only written reviews of things that I liked, and which hadn't yet received much attention. In that sense, all my reviews were in the mode of recommendation or "signal boosting". I think it's time to move past those limitations and start reviewing zines in earnest. Every reviewer has their own angle. Here's what I'll be focusing on.
(1) Heart
Zines are labors of love produced by hobbyists, in collaboration with other hobbyists, for consumption by hobbyists, usually spread by word of mouth (digital mouth these days) in small circulations. They're not slick soulless corporate affairs. That's one of the main reasons to love them. In some zines this really shines through. You get a lot of leeway from me if your zine has a lot of heart.
Zines are labors of love produced by hobbyists, in collaboration with other hobbyists, for consumption by hobbyists, usually spread by word of mouth (digital mouth these days) in small circulations. They're not slick soulless corporate affairs. That's one of the main reasons to love them. In some zines this really shines through. You get a lot of leeway from me if your zine has a lot of heart.
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| By Studi MacBeth |
(2) Layout, Form, and Construction
There's a lot of space for pure DIY creativity in the use of the zine format. This includes innovations in construction or materials, like Jack Shear's painting little fangs on the black cardstock covers of his gothic zine. But it also might include innovative layout, or clever use of illustrations. There's a balance to be walked here. On the one hand zines are scrappy DIY affairs and they shouldn't be criticized for not being professionally put together. On the other hand, there's such a thing as making obvious layout blunders that could be avoided by anyone (on one side) or ingeniously making the most out of the humble resources you've got (on the other side). I'll especially be looking for generalizable or repeatable innovations, and also howlers that are easy to avoid.
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| By Sabuda |
(3) Conception
What is your zine all about? Is it a whole world in a bottle? Is it a mystery adventure? Is it a rules-hack? Definite bonus points for a cool concept for a zine.
(4) Imagination and Aesthetics
And no matter what the concept, I will consider the aesthetics of its execution in the broad sense. If you're going to send me a world in bottle, I'll be asking whether the world is gripping and why. How evocative is the writing? How incandescent are the ideas? How compelling is the vision and how successfully is it conveyed? As highly individual and idiosyncratic creation, zines are a place where quirky and imaginative takes on game materials can and should proliferate.
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| By Richard Sala |
(5) Utility
And, of course, I'll talk about what you actually get in the zine and to what uses it might be put. How is the zine intended to be used? Are there things that get in the way of using the zine in that way? Are there changes that would be make it more useful? Who will find the zine useful and for what gaming purposes? Here I will often say how I might use the zine myself, for example, to set up a campaign. So some of my reviews may have a bit of my own contribution in a spirit of collaboration.
At the present time I'm not soliciting "review copies", since my time doesn't permit me to even provisionally commit to reviewing anything in advance. So I'll pick up anything I'm going to review myself. Here are some zines currently on my docket to review in the near future (not necessarily in the order listed), either because I just read them, or am about to read them, or because I read them a long time ago but I have something to say about them:
- You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge!
- Genial Jack
- Pound of Flesh
- Low Country Crawl
- Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City
- Pariah
- A Doom to Speak Zinis
But if there's some other zines you'd like to see reviewed, by all means, post them in the comments below! Be warned that since this blog is a retro-gaming blog, and that's the type of play I mainly do, I'll have the most productive things to say if the zines you recommend are compatible with retro-gaming play (i.e. play focused on exploration, overcoming challenges, and open-world sandbox play, using a relatively rules-lite ruleset).
I wouldn't mind seeing reviews of some other ZineQuest zines from the past couple of years. Things like "Other Magic" and "Snomes," for example.
ReplyDeleteThose weren't on my radar. Thanks!
DeleteThis is really beautiful:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/312225/Aquilus-Issue-1
That does look beautiful. I'll check it out.
DeleteHi Ben
ReplyDeletePlease consider reviewing my PWYW procedural adventure 'Carapace':
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/261079/Carapace
I beleive it ticks the 'boxes'
:O)
I heard it reviewed on Fear of a Black Dragon and it sounded neat. I will check it out.
DeleteGR8
Delete:O)
I love this. I can see some overlap but of course that's going to be true no matter what categories you establish. Good stuff. You don't mention a scale -- are you using any kind of scoring or is it all free-form essay review?
ReplyDeleteIt would be good for me to give a numeric ranking scale because it would be potentially informative and also push me out of the feel good "promo" mode that, as a big softy and hobby enthusiast, I tend to fall into. But I think it would be harsh to rate the heart put into a zine on a numerical scale. Also for concept, I think it would be hard to scale since most zines probably fall into just a couple of well-established categories (e.g. "settings", "adventures", "thematic miscellanies", etc.). What I'll probably do is just give the zines a single total rating out of five, although I am tempted by Bryce's four descriptive categories of "the best", "no regrets", "-----", and "worst evar". I think on how exactly I'm going to do it.
DeleteI'm always happy for people to look at our mag, 'Casket of Fays' — we're a month away from putting together our next issue, so any feedback would be gratefully received.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/browser/publisher/Red-Ruin-Publishing/17264
It's for one specific RPG, Dragon Warriors.
Dragon Warriors is something I've wanted to look at for a long time, since I admire Dave Morris' work in general so much (and have played some Fabled Lands). This might be a good opportunity to take a peak at the system and your zine!
DeleteGood stuff, Ben. Let me know if you need to talk through anything.
ReplyDeleteBen---
ReplyDeleteIn addition to contemporary OSR zines, there are many old-school zines from BITD, particularly from the UK (although also elsewhere in the world too, of course). Do you have any plans to review classics like The Beholder, The Wild Hunt, Lords of Chaos, Alarums & Excursions, etc.?
For a listing of BITD zines, see https://tomeoftreasures.com/tot_fanzines/a_fanzine_home.htm and for a listing of OSR zines see https://rendedpress.blogspot.com/p/old-school-zines.html.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention our "not dead yet" mega-dungeon design zine, The Twisting Stair, too: https://grodog.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-twisting-stair-3-spring-2018.html :D
Allan.
Allan, I love the twisting stair and should review it for sure! I don't have any plans to review the zines from BITD, except for the Jorune zines.
DeleteThese are not bad principles for reviewing zines. I have had fairly similar dilemmas, and in the end, decided to review and score them on the basis of utility, imagination, and only to a very small extent production values and presentation (unless they directly impacted the former two). Having burned myself too often with good-looking but disappointing materials, I have become fairly sceptical on this account, so these are factors I note, but don't use as a basis for judgement.
ReplyDeleteIn recent years, I have also seen a growing trend of old-school products trying to skirt by on "radical" graphic design and what is called "modern" layout (typically very breezy, graphical by itself, and concealing an absence of substantial text). Sure, it flows, curls, and skips across the page, but if you use a page for two sentences, I won't consider that an accomplishment in any art except that of the grift, or perhaps as a symptom of a post-literate society.
There is also the labour of love question. In the end, I decided to judge these materials as fairly as I can, and - if I must - be critical of what I see as their mistakes. I understand the motivations of hobby publishing (I buy, and write hobby products, too, and perhaps have some heart left!), but in the end, a review is a review, and some things are good while some are bad. If that sometimes means having to submit a blog post with a sigh and a heavy heart, so be it. (And there were a few cases where I could not bear to tear apart an obvious labour of love, so I deleted the thing and never published it.)
I hear you on the graphic design issue. Good looking is certainly not enough, and it's not required. About the labor of love thing, I think it's fine for it to come into the review--it doesn't need to make the review less objective. I put it misleadingly when I said "I would cut you a lot slack if the thing has heart". What I really meant is that part of the charm of a zine for me is that it is a labor of love, so if that shows through, I'll like your zine more on that ground. But that's compatible with saying: the zine's not so great in these other ways.
DeleteBe right pleased if you would have the time to check out my wild west zine In the Light of a Setting Sun: https://sivads-sanctum.itch.io/in-the-light-of-a-setting-sun-saddlebag-edition
ReplyDeleteIt's most certainly compatible with retro-gaming play and functions off of a simple 3d6 system. It was funded during ZineQuest 2 and most folks seem to really enjoy it!
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll take a look.
Delete