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Who is we?
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Die kommende Ausgabe ist für 
April 2026 geplant. 
.br
.B 
Beiträge, Leserbriefe 
und Inserate an:
.R
.br
grenzland@betola.de
.br
.B Einsendeschluss : 
15. März 2026
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.B "Gedrucktes Heft bestellen bis" :
.br
31. März 2026

.B Und:
wir brauchen 
Themenvorschläge 
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