[Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

RogerBW and myself have committed a fanzine, and because one crime isn’t enough, it’s entirely about GURPS. Issue #1 was written by Rory "Refplace" Fansler and the editors, with artwork from Kurt "Quarkstomper " Wilcken, Dan Smith and Dover Books. It’s free for the downloading, from https://tekeli.li/path-of-cunning/, in PDF and ePUB.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Nice! Been waiting for this to come to the light. Looks great.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Very cunning indeed. Do you have a release schedule?

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

We're looking at about 3-4 times per year, depending on the amount of material we get.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Yay! Reading now!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

OK, I've bookmarked that page on the assumption that the links to new issues will also be there. Thank you for doing this.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Not bad. It's got that 'fanzine' vibe. My only recommendation, and it's a 'makes it better for me' recommendation, is to better delineate when an article ends or begins. There were a couple of spots where as I skimmed past an article I had no interest in I stopped to read because I thought another article was beginning, when it was just another 'chapter' header of of the article I was skimming past.

Maybe some sort of header/footer scroll work used when a chapter begins or ends, or even just increasing the article titles another font size or two?

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I also think that that would be quite helpful, please.

Having now read the first issue, I think 'The organisation and regulation of magic in the post-war world' is probably the most interesting article for me. Could be useful as a reference in other modern or nearly-modern 'Emergent Magic' settings, like the Modern Earth in Five Earths.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I've downloaded the pdf and done some skimming. Interesting - and I too feel that the layout could use some work. Consider underlining article titles, italicizing sub-titles, in addition to making the font larger (for article titles,) as suggested above. I might also go with a smaller font size for the body text - it feels like you're using 12pt, drop that to 10pt. Consider using page breaks to always force article titles to be at the top of a page as well.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I too found it the most interesting read, but also one that poked the most at my pet peeve: yet another setting which makes magic look more like psi in Babylon 5's Psi-Corps than as *magic* in magical settings.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Can you explain this a bit? I've never watched Babylon 5 - it appeared after I had given up TV - so I'm not sure what you mean.

The setting the article is about has both magic-as-powers and several schools of ritual magic.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

That was not the impression that I got, so I am also curious about how you came to that conclusion - and I have seen a lot of Babylon 5.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Some hallmarks:

• Huge involvement of secretive government organisations in the topic of magic.
• Witchhunt apologia.
• The suggestion of a register which is suspiciously similar to the psi-corps register: on paper you're not forced to join, but in practice the coercion is implied to be huge.
• Plans for wide-scale governmental recruitment and implicitly the accompanying propaganda.
• Hints of the governmental magical organisation lacking transparency and public accountability.

These are some of the things that are big differences between how magical settings tend to treat magic and how B5 treated psi (though lately I've seen some fantasy settings that imitate B5 in its treatment of magic, such as Dragon Age).

Unrelated to the above, but related to the fanzine in general: why are all words spelled like this?
It's hard for people, hard for software, and super-hard for people using accessibility software.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

What reading software are you using to produce this result? (Might be best taken to PM.)

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Huh, this is interesting.
I discovered it by simply trying to search for a word in Sumatra PDF, it not coming up, me trying to copy a word and discovering that the text has spaces between each letter like that. I've been using Sumatra for years and I haven't seen that happen with other PDFs (e.g. SJGames' or PHS' books).

The issue doesn't come up in Acrobat, so now I wonder what's so peculiar about this PDF that it makes the usually-reliable piece of software stumble like that. But if it happened to one, it might happen to others. I mean obviously it's not your fault, as you can't be expected to test all possible combinations, but it's still an issue that's of some interest to look into.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

This is odd. I use Sumatra, and I'm not seeing that. What program were you pasting copied text into?

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Notepad, Windows Run, the browser's text boxes (Vivaldi) all had the same effect. I'll check for updates and see if that changes anything. Yep, updating the version fixed it.

I'm very curious why this specific document had this issue and whether it's a thing that can affect other software.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Well, this is a GURPS campaign set during WWII, where the PCs and their opponents have been in intelligence services, special operations units and the like. There was no public awareness of magic being real at the start of the war and Appendix A really was the first public statement acknowledging it by any government. The secretive government organisations are the only ones with any practical expertise.

Several adventures have been about amateur occultists who'd made up their own systems of ritual magic and got themselves killed or otherwise created major trouble using them. The paper isn't talking about magical training exclusively for government service, but training as part of the general education system, so as to allow magic to become part of society without lots of accidents. It isn't "witch-hunt apologia" but trying to avoid people getting killed by their neighbours' unwise experiments.

There's no deliberate parallel to the B5 psi-corps, because I didn't know of that. I don't see where you get large-scale governmental recruitment, though this may be a terminology issue: the British police of 1945 weren't under the direct control of central government, but under local government.

There isn't a governmental magical organisation described: the implication is that the various branches of government will recruit their own magicians if they can, but nobody knows how many magicians there will be, so making plans isn't practical yet.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I suspect that something was fooling Sumatra into copying text to the clipboard in two-bytes-per-character format and labelling it as one-byte-per-character format. I can't find anything in the Sumatra release history about this, but that document does not list every change. What was the previous version you were running?

The PDF was generated from Libre Office: Roger knows more about that than me.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

It was 2.something, now it's 3.1.2 ×64; I wonder why the two-byte copying happened specifically with that document though.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

The second issue of The Path of Cunning, apparently still the world's only GURPS fanzine, is now available for download.

It was written by Paul Blackwell, Phil Masters, Sean Punch, Bill Stoddard, Roger Bell_West and John Dallman. Artwork by Kurt Wilcken, Dan Smith, Wikimedia Commons and Dover Books, with letters from Onno Meyer, Vicky Molokh, David L. Pulver, Dalton Spence and Dave Waring.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Where? I followed your link, and could only see issue 1.

Sorry, had to reload. Got it.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Nice work. I especially like David Pulver's letter where it broke down so much.
The Astral section of the Infinite Cabal was interesting.
All three designers articles were also highly appreciated.
The dogfighting article was also very nice.
The others mostly lacked personal appeal due to genre or something rather than quality.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Awesome, I just downloaded it - off to read...

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Interesting reading, even if nothing big immediately leaps out as useful to what I'm doing at the moment. The stuff on the astral realm has given me ideas about how I might represent Duat, should my players go there.

Some of the smaller things are more relevant, like the Amateur perk. Something like a jack of a few trades talent.

The Path of Cunning at FnordCon
 

Neither Roger nor myself will be at FnordCon, but we'd like to provide some printed copies for people there.

We'll pay for the printing, but we'd like to enlist help from someone who will be going to the con to get the copies there, and make sure they get put somewhere that people can pick them up. This really needs to be someone who lives near Austin, or will be driving there, since any significant number of copies will be a bit cumbersome to take by air as luggage.

Can anyone help?

Re: The Path of Cunning at FnordCon
 

I've messaged Doug he'll be there and we both know someone nearby who you could ship it to.

Re: The Path of Cunning at FnordCon
 

Thanks very much!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Need to reread it when more awake, but what I saw was interesting.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

The third issue of The Path of Cunning, the world's leading GURPS fanzine, is now freely available from https://tekeli.li/path-of-cunning/

Articles by James P. Howard, II, Matt Riggsby, Anders Starmark and the
editors, Roger Bell_West and John Dallman.

Artwork by Wayne Peters, Dan "Smif" Smith, and public-domain sources.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Started reading that, and got to 'Blowing up Blip.' Carnot is a scary and disturbing person, IMHO. Yikes!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Downloaded; and thank you.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Would you like to expand on that a little in a letter of comment? I'd like to respond in the letter column.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I'm sorry, I would if I could, but what I'd be able to send wouldn't be much longer than that.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

You've prompted a paragraph in the final Infinite Cabal article, anyway.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I honestly cannot wait for the next issue!!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Dang, I thought you were announcing a new one when this thread popped up. Looking forward to it!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Same here.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I have five questions. Three questions.

1) Are you taking submissions?

2) If you are, how do I submit an idea for an article?

3) What's the air speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow?

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

1) Yes!

2) See the writers' guide (on the zine page), and get in touch with either of us either at the email addresses given in every issue or by any other means you might happen to know about (such as forum messages), though we mostly work with email.

3) The magnitude is not my business, but the direction is largely parallel with gravity.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Thanks for the help!

My swallow thanks you too.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Issue 4 of The Path of Cunning is now freely available, from the link below.

• Writers include Shimmin Beg, Sean Punch, Matt Riggsby, Jean Sexton, Phil Masters, Paul Blackwell, William H. Stoddard, Carolyn Stein and Stephen K. Stein.
• Artwork by Dan "Smif" Smith, Jeff Dee, Wikimedia Commons, Dover Books and other public-domain sources.
• Letters from Ingvar Mattson and David L. Pulver.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Very nice, thanks for sharing it!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Thanks man.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Oh... that was fun. Ta muchly.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

On the Designers Notes for Broken Clockwork World... Yes, its being used by at least one game. Its one of the Lost in Dreams games, and its probably the most prominent world in that game.

The plot centers around the city of Thuroma, the traditional seat of the Mighty Ink-Thur. They aggressively raided America (Their portals only seem to open in north America) for captives, holding them for ransom, and especially hoping to get technology like modern medicine and nuclear bombs.

The PC is a world-jumper with the ability to use any magic he comes across, after some practice. He has been using his powers to investigate what broke the world and talk with the Gods. In exchange, Thuroma has agreed to various concessions, like letting the prisoners they hoped to ransom go.

This is not what I planned, and I had to think up a reason everything is wrong. So now this "Skerry" has four worlds, including a divine realm intentionally rendered hostile to gods until the emergency is over, and a previously unsettled world most the Gods are roughing it on essentially as mortals. The Divine leadership is off somewhere else trying to deal with a mysterious threat that can impersonate even Gods, and their divine realm has been turned off and made hostile to divinity until that happens.

We've had lots of mechanical horses, Priests and Generals playing politics, and some very-much friendly but less-than helpful national guard units.

Its been a ride, and its not over yet. Hopefully that helps.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Glad to hear it's proving useful!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Wow, I could have used the Libraries for GURPS article last month, when our Autoduel/Urban Fantasy campaign took us to a sizeable university library... I'll be keeping the article handy for the characters' next visit.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Let me know if it does turn out useful - and if not, what would. I'm hoping to do some more library-related GURPS, if there's enough interest.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Absolutely, there's going to be a lot more research for the characters to do, and this solves a lot of handwaving and arbitrary rolls.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I'm enjoying the issue! I've read a few of the articles so far, and have more to go!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Ok, I'm sorry folks, but I clearly missed how to actually write for this 'zine. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Someone may have a better idea, but I suspect your best bet would be to contact an editor/publisher directly. Their email addresses are listed on page 2 of the latest issue (#4).

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

There's a writer's guide on the web page. Link in my signature.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

See? I told you someone might have a better idea!

Seriously, thanks for mentioning the link to the writer's guide. I'd missed that myself!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Thank you both.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

The fifth issue of The Path of Cunning, the world’s largest GURPS fanzine, is now freely available from https://tekeli.li/path-of-cunning/.

• Written by Shimmin Beg, Josh Kilburn, Phil Masters, Sean Punch, Roger Bell_West and John Dallman.
• Artwork by Dan Smith and moltenraven, plus Wikimedia Commons, Dover Books and other public-domain sources.
• Letters from David L Pulver.

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

Another enjoyable issue-thanks! I particularly appreciated Sean's Designer notes and the "easter egg" he included! ::grin::

thom

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

I just downloaded it--look forward to reading it!

Re: [Fanzine] The Path of Cunning
 

The new article on Libraries made me think of the sub-setting Bookhounds of London for Trail of Cthulhu.

It was focused on the rare book trade and the seedy side of between-the-wars England. Had a “punk” jaunty take on magic.