 September 19, 2008 - 8:06pm | Hi everybody, I'm happy to announce that issue 9 of the Star Frontiersman is now available. Until we can get it uploaded over at the Star Frontiersman website, I had planned to make it available in the Downloads section of the Star Frontiersman Project. However, I just noticed that I can't post there. Instead, I'll make it available on my website, The Star Frontiers Network. You can follow this link to jump right to the home of Issue 9 if you want. Hopefully it is up to the quality you expect. I got the material on Monday. We didn't have much to work with. We had most of the fonts, images and text and a sample Word document for the interior pages. We were on our own for the cover, table of contents and classified ads. In the end it worked out okay and I even got it done by Friday like I promised. If you've never tried to lay out multiple pages you don't appreciate how difficult it is to not end up with a bunch of white space everywhere. So, it's not as nice as I'd like it but to get it any better would have delayed it even more. All in all it's not bad for my first attempt. In the end, I spent about 16 hours doing the editing and layout for this issue in the evenings when I should have been sleeping. I hope you enjoy it. I think I'll go take a nap.  The good news is that we are already partially on the way to issue 10. There were a couple stories and an rules article that we didn't include in this one that will form the basis for the next one. Send in your submissions and let's keep this going. Enjoy issue 9. - Tom Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 September 19, 2008 - 8:22pm | Also remember to send them to submissions@starfrontiersman.com. Add your Name, What the Article deals with, and the article itself. If you are submitting picutres submit the pictures and a name for credit. When I am able to get a hold of Bill and Larry I will get the issue posted to the SFMAN website and this website. I also want to ask those who are able to and have a website or know a place to upload gaming resources for others to download to do so with this issue. Maybe we can get more people by branching out this way and that could always mean more readers and submitters. Confucious Says: Man with one chopstick go hungry. Man who eat many prunes get good run for money. Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement. |
 September 19, 2008 - 8:32pm | It looks GREAT guys! Good job! Thanks for pulling it all together... I look forward to reading it more in depth after I get some sleep. -Andrew |
 September 19, 2008 - 9:38pm | The issue looks great, guys. Again, it's good to see what happens when someone steps up and treats this project with respect. I understand there are arguments for continuity with the Frontiersman magazine, but seeing what you can do, I'd support an entirely new magazine if you chose to do that. I'm also getting interested in contributing again now that I know somebody's at the controls. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan |
September 20, 2008 - 12:17am | Hey give the credit to TerlObar. He put it together all I did was made sure he had the material and the template for the articles. Confucious Says: Man with one chopstick go hungry. Man who eat many prunes get good run for money. Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement. |
 September 20, 2008 - 11:43am | Great job guys! Thanks for dedicating your personal time to this project. Much appreciated! I've just glaced through, It looks great so far. Thanks agin Terl and Gerg... At least I got to scare an alien rabbit thingy...... |
 September 20, 2008 - 9:46pm | Thanks for stepping up, Tom. |
 September 21, 2008 - 10:21am | Guys, you've done great, and you saved the revival. Come to Oklahoma, and I'll buy yas a beer. "You're everything that's base in humanity," Cochrane continued. "Drawing up strict, senseless rules for the sole reason of putting you at the top and excluding anyone you say doesn't belong or fit in, for no other reason than just because you say so." —Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stephens, Federation |
 September 23, 2008 - 9:31am | Nice work all! Looks well put together. Bill's new skill system is a certainty in any games I might do in the future. My own contribution of Artisan PSA seems redundant after that, but I guess the concepts there could be applied to Bill's system without much effort. The plant race is interesting. Not sure it would get use by players but certainly makes a great npc base. Jump tug looks like it would be useful in a campaign. Pets and Animals is a great idea. Too bad Corjay is not around any more to see it (unless he lurks still). His attitude was difficult to watch, but his contributions were good. Now my critiques, but don't worry. Very minor. Art: lacking art, art that is irrelevant to the article, or art that is so-so at best. I am not an artist, but I definitely feel that more effort should go into recruiting appropriate artwork for the articles. Order: a sense of order is lacking. The articles seem placed into the webmag in no particular order or by when they were received... which may very well be the case. Most mags use a particular order to the articles to give a sense of continuity between issues. I think future mags should try to establish some basic parameters of order to follow. This also makes apparent the need for certain types of articles, so that proper recruitment or urging can be encouraged to write articles. Also in the future, I would love to see a sense of theme applied to the magazine. Even if articles seem out of sync with a given theme, perhaps word can be sent to the author to consider tweaks to fit it to theme, maybe with something as simple as a sidebar or two, or a piece of art that ties the theme to the article. Thanks again guys, great work. So when is 10 due out?  <insert witty comment here> |
September 23, 2008 - 1:18pm | Nice work all! Looks well put together. Bill's new skill system is a certainty in any games I might do in the future. My own contribution of Artisan PSA seems redundant after that, but I guess the concepts there could be applied to Bill's system without much effort. The plant race is interesting. Not sure it would get use by players but certainly makes a great npc base. Jump tug looks like it would be useful in a campaign. Pets and Animals is a great idea. Too bad Corjay is not around any more to see it (unless he lurks still). His attitude was difficult to watch, but his contributions were good. Now my critiques, but don't worry. Very minor. Art: lacking art, art that is irrelevant to the article, or art that is so-so at best. I am not an artist, but I definitely feel that more effort should go into recruiting appropriate artwork for the articles. Order: a sense of order is lacking. The articles seem placed into the webmag in no particular order or by when they were received... which may very well be the case. Most mags use a particular order to the articles to give a sense of continuity between issues. I think future mags should try to establish some basic parameters of order to follow. This also makes apparent the need for certain types of articles, so that proper recruitment or urging can be encouraged to write articles. Also in the future, I would love to see a sense of theme applied to the magazine. Even if articles seem out of sync with a given theme, perhaps word can be sent to the author to consider tweaks to fit it to theme, maybe with something as simple as a sidebar or two, or a piece of art that ties the theme to the article. Thanks again guys, great work. So when is 10 due out? Order = random just about fits it. There were a couple of items that went together but for the most part there wasn't a lot of conscious thought on placement. It was admittedly a first attempt and a rush job. (I just hope Bill doesn't kill me for butchering his magazine .) Some of it (mainly bits of equipment) was just placed for filling space to prevent large areas of white space in the magazine. Given a few more weeks of full time work we could have edited things around in such a manner to eliminate some of the need but typically the articles all were about 1/4 page too long and no real way to cut them down. The truth was I had a bunch of free time that week. If I hadn't finished it then, it probably wouldn't have gotten done for several more weeks.Art would definitely help, I agree. I used what I had to work with. In most cases they were somewhat related to the articles they appeared in and in many cases were submitted by the article's authors. Again, sometimes images were placed to prevent having glaring chunks of whitespace. Those are probably the ones that stand out the most. I'd love to see more art. So the call goes out to everyone. Find and/or create art we can use in the magazine and submit it. If you know of an artist who does good work, contact them and see if they would like their art to appear (pro bono) in the mag and get us in touch with them. Theming, and to a lesser extent order, are a function of content volume. Issue 9 effectively contained everything we had at the time. I see only two ways to do a themed issue. Either a) declare a theme and then wait until you get enough material to make an issue (which could take months if nobody wants to write on that topic) or b) build up a huge queue of submitted materials so that you have plenty to choose from and can build a theme from the submissions. Neither was an option this time around. A theme (the Frontier from the Sathar perspective) has been suggested and if we get enough articles of that nature we can do one along that theme. However, that may take some time to accumulate so don't expect it for issue 10 unless people really get writing. There are regular features that Bill had in the earlier issues that I would like to see come back. They didn't appear in this one simply due to the time constraint. We didn't have them and didn't have time to write them. To some extent I'd like to make building the magazine somewhat more transparent. I'd like to be able to do a rough layout of the magazine (in terms of broad content categories) to begin and start filling in the categories and have that be visible so that people can see that we still need say a random location, or an adventure idea, or an Archetype character (one the features I want to bring back) in order to get the next issue out. The question is whether that should go here or on the Star Frontiersman web site. In either case we need to hear from Bill to get access to the relevant areas. My goal for issue 10 is mid November. So everyone start sending your submissions in. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
