wyrdscience.bsky.social
The magazine for explorers of strange worlds & new horizons Issue 6 out now! Get in touch [email protected]
https://linktr.ee/wyrdscience
#RPG #TTRPG #Wargames #Boardgames #Fantasy #SciFi #Comics #CoolShit
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personally still get sent about 20 pitches a week from record labels and music PRs and I haven't written for a music magazine since covid hit)
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there are 3 or 4 bigger (but still mid sized) companies who over the past year have gotten better at hitting us up and are relatively easy to deal with but I'd certainly love it if more people were more proactive
in comparison we get about 15-20 emails a day from video game cos and PRs (and I...
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not often
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not just the audience most publishers have to, whilst somewhat understandable the ratio of please review our kickstarter page to please review our actual finished game emails we get isn't super fun
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jus came here to recommend that. absolutely wonderful book that (for the most part) is as far from bang bang bolter porn as you could hope for
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Totally. For ages we’ve wanted to do a complete WH Rogue Trader or 3rd edition battle Realm of Chaos Path to Glory campaign
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Spins wheel… and today it’s…
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excellent work, imagining your dad coming in to find your little lads have mined every inch of his tracks
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tabletop games need something at least like this, and maybe we are not the right people and someone could come in with a much more DnD focused approach and clean up, but since no one else is we'll keep on trying
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but it does mean we can keep overheads down.
we've come tantalisingly close to making this work, and that's launching amidst Brexit, the pandemic, cost of living crisis, shipping and paper going through the roof, global uncertainty and so on and so on
most of all I just think as a sub-culture
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wonderful nonsense.
now, throw in being a print mag in 2025 I knew this would never be a mass market thing, but thanks to ridiculous advances in tech I can pull together something myself that years ago would have required loads of us
now I'd prefer there to be loads if us, or at least 1 or 2 more
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games but talking about them, getting excited about art, about conventions, about the community and what it's up to. so that was my big idea and big pitch, a beautiful looking magazine that treated tabletop games seriously whilst never losing sight of the fact we're more often than not playing
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play them, but aren't you curious about them? about what they do and why?), or they're interested in the history of games, or how games influence the world around us and vice versa, whether that's music, film, TV, social history etc etc
after all, people spend all day on social media not playing
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just interested in games, they don't necessarily need/want to play everything, in fact they almost certainly don't, but they're interested in games as a subject
and so would be interested in the wider world they sit in, whether that's interviews with people behind new games (ie. you might never...
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so I bet against that, and figured what would be more interesting instead would be to treat tabletop games in (roughly) the same way that eg. a film mag like Little White Lies writes about films or a good music mag covers its subject
I'd like to think there are enough people out there who are
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yes, and why when we launched Wyrd Science we avoided it. Felt like a somewhat quixotic choice at first (still does to many people) but it felt anachronistic. The days when adventures for systems were few and far between are long gone, I could literally DL a dozen for almost any system in minutes
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are you talking about playable content though? (not that I disagree, just checking)
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Or are we just incredibly off putting and crap, or the most positive spin I can ever put on it is do we just need to do a hell of a lot more marketing
A little from column a, a little from column b and a little from column c I suspect
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On me as much as anyone. The TTRPG industry is small but it’s not non-existent and right now it’s a golden age for small press premium boutique magazines aimed at niche markets, so again it comes down to is there something particularly incurious and ironically unadventurous about our scene
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that the UK should be able to have just one mag that is primarily devoted to RPGs. Now the evidence of our bank account and the almost total lack of curiosity in Wyrd Science from large sections of the industry (let alone the wider community) suggests my faith is misplaced but that’s an indictment
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Ha, just to clear up 1 point my issue wasn’t that there were loads of MR mags on sale (proud winner of the team who won the 1985 Railway Modeller Awards Junior Modeller Cup here) but that if there’s enough people out there to support 11 monthly model railway mags, is it really that bizarre to think
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Hi Tom, is there anywhere we can read/watch/listen to the talk this pulled from?
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Yeah I’d love to read a deep dive on the economics of those
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Yeah I mean my biggest question right now is, room for model railway magazine 12?
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To be fair they had a lot of crotch lines to do
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Only when I got home did I realise it was a were 3 month old issue
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If it did ok it would transform our fortunes and basically secure our medium term future but it could just as easily wipe us out in one go.
Like you say you often go in there and stuff is never to be found or the alternative I’ve bought tabletop gaming in Waterstones before, big pile of them
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We’ve had quite a few conversations with distributors about us going into Smiths (and Barnes & Novle etc in the US) but it’s a terrifying choice as it’d cost loads, & then there’s every chance you spend 3 months stuck on the bottom shelf hidden behind pony mags, none sell, we don’t paid & game over
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Certainly none I’ve ever spoken to 🫤
And no there wasn’t any copies in this one
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Love the idea of a fishing mag announcing the hottest new trout of the summer
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Honestly I almost bought the lot, fascinated if they’re full of digs at each like mid 90s music mags in their pomp
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None officially as far as I know