added Monthly Campaign Events WIP

issue06/forward

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-Who are we?
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-.PP
-<hier kommt das Editorial>
-.Au lkh
+.KF
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 Grenzland 7
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-Traveller
+2d6 Games
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@@ -51,4 +49,96 @@ für Heft 8!
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+.KE
+.PP
+After I finished refereeing 
+.I Grenzland 
+(the OD&D Campaign) this April, I needed to step back and take a break from
+gaming, and to a considerable part also from engaging in social media for a
+couple of weeks \[em] which turned into a couple of months. I checked Discord
+and other places we use (see 
+.I
+Get in Contact
+.R
+in this issue), but didn't write much. Maybe this allowed me to get a bit of a
+birds eye view but maybe it was just being distanced and out of the loop for
+some time. It made me wonder: what even is this community? And before we
+consider this: is it a community at all? Or is it just some loose cluster of
+nerds meeting in some unlikely online spaces on a pretty random schedule \[em]
+with not much true mutual commitment? Also, I noticed a certain disconnection:
+there are many users on 
+.I Grenzland 
+(the Discord instance) who don't seem to interact much with "the community" at
+all. Some use IRC to be kind of semi connected to the Discord via some software
+tricks, but on IRC there are also channels not bridged to Discord, and some
+chatting takes place on other IRC servers. Then, there's a trickle of parallel
+talking on netnews and there's those of us who use Mastodon or some other kind
+of social networking service based on ActivityPub. These users of the Fediverse
+again share a common virtual space with others who don't have anything to do
+with 
+.I Grenzland , 
+be it this here fanzine, the Discord instance or the fact of having played a
+role in the Campaign. This "Community" may well appear quite fragmented ...
+it's bewildering if you think about it.
+.KF
 .PSPIC img/alrik.eps
+.KE
+.PP
+Then again, when I recently raised the issue of which language to use in this
+zine (english
+.I or
+german, or both as before, or whether we should have alternating issues in
+english and german), I received a comment that basically said: "Grenzland (the
+zine) reflects the community. Since the community is multilingual, the zine
+should be multilingual too". In fact Grenzland has been multilingual since
+issue 2. But wow \[em] "the community" ... so apparently there is an external
+perception of 
+.I us
+being a community. I'm hardly any closer to be able to describe who we really
+are, but I like that.
+.KF
+.PSPIC img/VennDiagram.eps
+.I
+The Grenzland Community as a Venn diagram
+.KE
+.PP
+From a historical point of view I'd try and describe us like this: 
+Grenzland are two overlapping groups, one group of gamers playing in an 
+.I "in person"
+OD&D campaign from 2016 to 2025, based in Hamburg, Germany, and another 
+group of gamers who play
+.I online
+in the
+.I "Montags in Zürich"
+series of games. The overlap consists mostly of using the same Discord
+instance, but there 
+.I is
+a tiny overlap of the groups too. Occasionally some Hamburg players have
+participated in "Montags" games, and on a few occasions "Montags" players have
+participated in games of the Grenzland game that were run online. I'm imagining
+this as a sort of skewed Venn diagram. I'm unsure how large the overlap between
+"Mondays Games" and "Grenzland Discord" should be. It may be close to 100% but
+ ... well, I'm not sure.
+.PP
+Maybe it's easier to think about what I'd like the Grenzland community to be.
+Ready for some wishful thining? Here goes: I'd love to see the Grenzland community as
+a bunch of people who read and contribute to this very zine (big smiling emoji!).
+And maybe we're not that far from it, as I see "the usual suspects" sending in
+entries. Just come to think of it: independent from Discord or any other kind
+of digital medium. No configuration files to wrestle with, no enshittification,
+just some thoughtful very slow conversation going back and forth ... And deciding 
+which chat service, virtual tabletop or other system to use, can be decided 
+independently from any ostensible online community.
+.PP
+Now we still need to get two organizational things out of the way: (1) in past
+issues I used this editorial to give an overview about what this issue has to
+offer. I might return to this habbit, but this editorial clearly is too long 
+already. Instead I'll offer German language summaries for any English articles
+and English summaries for any German language articles. Right at the top of each 
+article. This might raise interest in Grenzland ever so slightly for those who are
+uncomfortable with either one of those languages. And I'll promise to give
+English
+.I and
+German
+summaries, should anyone ever offer an article written in french!
+.Au lkh