So, I've been compiling a list of Pendragon articles from magazines, which necessitated looking through a lot of foreign gaming periodicals because, unlike Traveller, Pendragon hasn't really had a huge number of fanzines. While looking through a borrowed copy of Casus Belli #27 (August 1985), I found a Classic Traveller adventure called "Vaisseau Fantôme (Ghost Ship)" which turned out to be really clever and interesting. It occurred to me to ask if anyone's found any other foreign-language articles or adventures that were particularly good or interesting. I've become convinced a lot of really good gaming material evaded American eyes in the 80s and 90s because it appeared in foreign periodicals which never got wide distribution here.
General Foreign Magazine Articles & Adventures
- Thread starter AlHazred
- Start date
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Just having a list of non-US game magazines (and their publication languages) would be a good start! Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I can only remember seeing White Dwarf as the sôle representative of non-US game magazines in my then-local game shop.
I found another very interesting article. In a spanish fanzine called Troll!, in issue 4 (March 1987), there's an adventure "El Rally de los Terremotos" ("The Earthquake Rally") where players take part in an off-road rally race across Beck's World in an ATV. It originated as a challenge between Mercenary companies so weapons are allowed. It looks like an interesting scenario idea that combines elements of Across the Bright Face/Mission on Mithril with crazy 80s rally race movies.
So I've started making a list of articles. I started with RPGGeek, making a spreadsheet of all Classic Traveller magazine issues, and I've been tracking down what I can. You can see what I've got here, but I'm going to be very slow at it -- my daughter is almost one year old, and she takes up a lot of my time as my main priority! 
Anyway, if anybody happens to know of a magazine not on the list, please let me know -- RPGGeek is definitely not the best when it comes to non-US magazines, or magazines from the pre-Internet era.
Anyway, if anybody happens to know of a magazine not on the list, please let me know -- RPGGeek is definitely not the best when it comes to non-US magazines, or magazines from the pre-Internet era.Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Thanks for making your article list available to all. I noticed that some of the dates in the “Issued” column are “Jun-1905”. Is that the equivalent of “unknown” or “undated”? If possible, please add a “Language” column (ideally between the “Country” and “Form” columns), since some countries have more than one official language — identifying the language of an article could help when looking for translators, particularly if the language doesn’t use the Latin script.So I’ve started making a list of articles. I started with RPGGeek, making a spreadsheet of all Classic Traveller magazine issues, and I’ve been tracking down what I can. You can see what I've got here, but I’m going to be very slow at it — my daughter is almost one year old, and she takes up a lot of my time as my main priority!
Enjoy your time with your daughter as much as possible — she will imperceptibly grow older every day, but still far, far too quickly.
That's from Excel parsing dates in a manner which is difficult to predict, and me not catching it.
That's a fantastic idea. Currently, the "Country" column really means "Language," since I don't know that it's something people will sort with, except for "UK" versus "US," since some translation algorithms note a difference there (like Adobe's). Currently, I've had good luck with Google Translate, though you have to do a logic check since many languages have beautiful slang for things that doesn't translate very well.
Yeah, I've already noticed it's going faster than I would like!
Vargr Breath
SOC-13
Third Imperium was Canadian.
thirdimperiumfanzine.info
Third Imperium Fanzine
Vargr Breath
SOC-13
Vuelo Raso
www-sinergiaderol-com.translate.goog
You know, I knew about that one and forgot to include it since it's not on RPGGeek.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Thanks for the “Language” column. I’m still seeing “Jun-1905” in the “Issued” column in issues 10–13 of Adventure Gaming and all issues of The Aerial Servant, as well as “May-1905” in issue 23 of News from Bree.
For the rows that have columns A–F (“Periodical” through “Form”) filled in, but lack entries in the other columns, are you seeking data for the blank columns, or is it that you have those data, but simply haven’t entered them into the spreadsheet yet?
It does reasonably well with major languages, but not so well with minor languages — the latter is probably due to having a more limited data set from which to draw linguistic inferences. For this purpose, I’d guess that most of the articles will come from major languages. Using Yandex Translate would be another possibility for comparison, if odd translations of idioms appear when translating from a particular language.
Thank you! Fixed!
In the case of some of them, it's time -- for instance, I have all of the periodicals from the various CD-ROMs: JTAS, Challenge, MTJ, Free Trader, The Traveller Chronicle, etc. But as I said, the list started with the list of references from RPGGeek, and frequently contributors there haven't put in articles -- they'll just note that an issue has a Traveller article or whatever and leave it at that. I'm slowly going through those and the free fanzines (like Freelance Traveller, or Vuelo Raso) and will fill them in as time permits.
Others will remain mysterious. I had never even heard of The Aerial Servant until seeing it on the list. There are tons of fanzines that owners have posted to RPGGeek, where maybe 100 or 200 were printed and they will eventually be lost forever. That's especially true of the APAzines. Aside from Alarums & Excursions (Lee Gold does what she wants!) a lot of the APAzine managers I've spoken to said that the idea was always that it would be distributed to a limited audience, and they don't feel the contributors would want their articles shared to the public.
Oh, and if you like, I'll add your gmail (or whatever Google account you'd like) with read/write access and you can add articles yourself! As I mentioned, I have a daughter just coming up to her first birthday, and kids take up all available free time! And also, floor space... Shoot me a PM!
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Thanks for the offer, but I don’t use gmail, and have no Google account — and even if I did have such an account, Google probably wouldn’t let me do anything with it, due to the age of my ancient computer’s browsers. Even just viewing the spreadsheet, it tells me that my browser version is unsupported, and recommends that I install a supported version, even though I am unable to do so because I’m running the last supported version of the browser for my computer’s operating system.
I have many old Dragon magazines, so I might be able to provide the missing data for most, if not all, of the Dragon articles. I could provide those data to you in a file format of your choosing — e.g. whichever format would be easiest for you to incorporate into the spreadsheet (when time allows for you) — perhaps CSV? — by attaching the data file to a reply in this thread. (Note that the magazine was originally named The Dragon, and its name was changed to Dragon at some point in its first several years; I’ll look for the issue number where the name was changed.)
CSV is probably easiest for you, I'd imagine! It's fairly easy to reformat it to Sheets; I primarily settled on Google Sheets because it's easy for others to grab the data and sort it for whatever they're looking for -- language, adventures, etc.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Attached is a .zip archive with a UTF-8 text file in “VBSV” format — “vertical bar separated values”. (I didn’t remember whether a backslash was used to escape a comma in CSV or not, so I’d used the ASCII “|” character instead as a separator to avoid using escape characters.)
The article titles in the attachment are given as they’d appeared at the start of each article, so e.g. “Traveller” can appear in title-case or all-capitals, upright or italic, and sometimes followed by a ™ sign or a ® sign. Italics in the original are represented by surrounding the word or phrase with underscores, so e.g. “_Traveller:_” in the attachment represents Traveller: as originally rendered on the printed page. I couldn’t find any Traveller-related content in issue 26, but all of the other issues of Dragon in the spreadsheet are represented in the attachment. I’m not sure if the “Type” column in the spreadsheet only represents a fixed set of values; I’d added one or two new Type values, so feel free to correct them as needed.
The magazine’s title was The Dragon from issues 1 through 38. For issues 39 through 41, the “The” was removed from the cover, but retained in the contents; from issue 42 on, just Dragon was used both on the cover and in the contents. (There was also further title tweaking, but that happened after the last of the Traveller-related content appeared.)
On a different spreadsheet topic, I found that White Dwarf also had a Spanish-language version, so the Language column has a definite purpose now — to uniquely identify a Periodical–Language tuple!
If you have any questions about the attachment, feel free to ask.
I have incorporated the Dragon magazine articles (many, many thanks to @Kakistocrat !) and am still working through Different Worlds. I forgot how many good CT articles there were there; fortunately, back issues of DW are still available from Tadashi Ehara!
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
I found a few lacunae in my “VBSV” file above, which were reflected more visibly by your incorporation of its contents into the spreadsheet:
- the author of issue 25 was R. D. Stewart;
- the author of issue 103 was Paul Vernon, and its type should be Adventure;
- the type of issue 113 should be Careers.
Fixed! I tried to find any, and forgot to fix them before pasting! In any case, many many thanks for that! It's looking like a somewhat useful index at this point! I'm thinking of leaving Freelance Traveller for last, because that is an intimidating beast -- the longest-lasting Traveller periodical of any kind!
I've started reading through the Simufant listings. This is an RPG fanzine from Germany from the 80s; all of the issues are available as free downloads on RPGGeek, in the Files section of the respective issues, put there by the creators of the fanzine. There's some cool stuff in the first one, including a murder-mystery adventure on a ship in jumpspace; this is an idea I had myself back in the day, but I would have liked to have this to use (or at least draw ideas from). The murder victim is Andrew Keith, which just shows the author is well-read in Traveller lore!
