Revision of 31 January 2021
Roger Bell_West
So you think you might like to write for Drive Relaxation Great! We’d love you to join us.
The crass commercial side first: we won’t pay you. But you do retain copyright on your piece; we just want to put it in our fanzine, and possibly also in later compilations.
If you’ve got an idea for an article you think we might like, talk to us. Probably we’ll say “yes, that sounds like a good idea” – or we’ll ask for extra content for something specific. We’re not limited by word counts or per-issue budgets.
Our main recommendation if you haven’t written a piece like this before is: start with an outline, the first and second-level headings, and make sure everything you want to say is covered by that outline. This is a great way of making sure before you start writing that you’ll put in everything that the article needs.
Our brief is anything and everything for the 2300AD setting, in any of its various incarnations.
No AI.
This section is inspired by Steve Jackson Games Authors’ Guidelines on Editorial Style, which we also recommend for general game-writing tips. We tend to follow the latest Economist Style Guide but reserve the right to make exceptions.
None of this is set in stone, but the more closely you stick to it the less we’ll have to edit or ask you to rewrite.
Please don’t send us a long article when you could take the time to make it shorter. We’re not constraints by the bounds of a print magazine, but the readers’ time is limited; we’re aiming to provide usable game materials more than beautiful discursive essays.
Particularly where game rules are concerned, we’d rather be over-formal than over-casual. 2300AD is a complex game, and it’s easy to misunderstand an unfamiliar rule; a formal style helps make it less ambiguous.
If someone’s sex is not germane to the point you’re making, singular “they” is actively encouraged.
Any widely-understood dialect of English (UK, American, Australian, etc.) is acceptable, but we ask that you be consistent within a single article.
The term 2300AD, and titles of 2300AD books, should be italicised.
Including web links is OK, but please don’t rely on them for vital parts of the material, because they can go away. Also note that in the rare cases when we produce a print copy the link won’t be visible. Using them for supporting or background information is fine.
We favour hyphen - for ranges (4-15), en dash – where a component of a compound term is itself compound(“non–self-governing”), and either en dash or em dash — in pairs for a stronger than normal parenthesis. Nested parentheses should generally be avoided.
Use non-breaking spaces (“ ”) for spaces where you want to avoid a line, column or page break between words. There are several examples of this below. Characters that show up in grey while editing the document will look normal in the finished PDF of the fanzine.
Use non-ASCII punctuation characters rather than multiple-ASCII-character constructs: “…” rather than “...” or “. . .”, “–” rather than “--”. We have a reasonably modern system and can cope with these strange multi-byte character things.
We assemble the magazine using Typst and it’ll be easiest to send things back and forth if you use it too, but we can read most formats. (This is not a challenge.)
Illustrations can be bitmaps (PNG/JPEG), but SVG is better if possible.
We very much encourage you to use hierarchical headings: named styles tend to be things like "Heading 1", "Heading 2" etc. Articles will be reformatted to follow our house template, including paragraph spacing and fonts (if you feel you need a specific font, ask us). Spacing is handled by paragraph and text styles, so please don’t leave blank paragraphs; if you need a large blank space, talk to us. Similarly, there shouldn’t be two spaces or tabs next to each other.
If you use unary minus signs (e.g. “-20%”) within text, using a non-breaking hyphen ‑ will help to ensure that they don’t get left at the end of a line with the thing they refer to at the start of the next one.
Notes that are not to be included in the published manuscript should be inserted as “comments”. If necessary, We’ll also use these for passing comments back and forth with you during editing and revision.