I've been wanting to pick up an issue of Loviatar for a couple months but only now was financially-able to take the plunge. Yeah, I know, $3 isn't much, but there you have it. The descriptions of the first three issues have intruiged me and issue number four certainly did not let me down.
Well, it did, but only a slight little hiccup. More below.
What is Loviatar? It's a great little digest-sized hardcopy magazine in Old School fashion. Don't take my word for it; head on over to the website and check it out for yourself. Christian did a nice job with this and was very accomodating with my shipment request. He was also quite kind when I started crying about losing some content...but again, more on that below.
The picture really doesn't do it justice; the cover is a great, striking yellow (perhaps canary?) but unfortunately the color scanner is down at the office and this is the best I could do. I hope you'll forgive me, Christian.
This issue provides some GURPS support, which, since I don't play GURPS, is not what I got the magazine for. However, I think I can use the material there in a couple different games I'm planning.
There was also some X-Plorers material, which will come in handy when I finally get around to unboxing my Limited Edition Boxed Set. (Kudos to John Adams at Brave Halfling Publishing, by the way...but that's another post.)
And there's a bit of AD&D 2E that can always be useful. All in all, the material was well-thought out and well-presented...pretty quality stuff which is hard to get for that money. It was also great to actually hold something, something someone took the time to produce; in this electronic age, it's hard to find any more.
What I'm a bit saddened by his Christian's decision to remove Pathfinder material from the magazine. That's what I was most looking forward to, truth be told. He says it's just for the present, and who knows, maybe it'll be back. But this is just a minor hiccup and, honestly, I was always a bit curious why Pathfinder material was included in what otherwise seemed to be an OSR digest. (Not that I am complaining, of course.)
Truly, however, well worth the money. I'm already planning on purchasing some back issues on pay day.
Introspection time: Honestly, what really sold me on it was a bit of nostalgia. In high school, all those many years ago, I was one of the three editors for the Literary Magazine. I was also, unbeknownst to all but three students, one of the co-editors of the ALTERNATIVE Literary Magazine, the Cro-Magnon. We only put out three issues that I can remember, but it was truly a great piece of work.
I'm not saying that it was great material, it was--for the most part--pretty childish and crude.... A wanna-be Monty Python-esque bit of prose and verse, plus a little random line-art included.
But it was fun. It was rebellious. It was a bit of counter-culture in an otherwise straight-laced world. And it was, like Loviatar, a small digest-sized black-and-white interior with a colored cardstock exterior. And like Loviatar, it was fun. I said above that it was hard to find things like this that someone actually took the time, the care, the passion to put together. It's even more rare to find something that truly takes you back to the early days of the hobby, back before the prevalence of "slick" 300-page manuals. Truly good stuff. [Wipes tear from the corner of eye.]
Kudos, Christian. And may you have many more issues in front of you. If you do, I'll be buying them.
1 comment:
Right on! Some people "get" zines and others don't. You clearly see the point. It's great to get something in the mail, something which is a throwback to the era of true zines, which were spit out by a copy machine and stapled between cardstock covers. Man, I wish people still wrote rpg zines. Some of the OSR guys could come up with pretty unreal stuff, I bet.
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