145 lines
4.9 KiB
Plaintext
145 lines
4.9 KiB
Plaintext
.\" vim: filetype=groff
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.H1
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Who is we?
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.ad b
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.2C
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.KF
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.ad l
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.LP
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.BS
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.ps 14
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.ft BMB
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.nf
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.ce 20
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Grenzland 7
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.ft BMI
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2d6 Games
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.ft BMR
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Die kommende Ausgabe ist für
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April 2026 geplant.
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.br
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.B
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Beiträge, Leserbriefe
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und Inserate an:
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.R
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.br
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grenzland@betola.de
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.br
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.B Einsendeschluss :
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15. März 2026
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.br
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.B "Gedrucktes Heft bestellen bis" :
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.br
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31. März 2026
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.B Und:
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wir brauchen
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Themenvorschläge
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für Heft 8!
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.sp .5cm
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.ce 0
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.BE
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.fi
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.vs 11
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.ad b
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.KE
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.PP
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After I finished refereeing
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.I Grenzland
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(the OD&D Campaign) this April, I needed to step back and take a break from
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gaming, and to a considerable part also from engaging in social media for a
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couple of weeks \[em] which turned into a couple of months. I checked Discord
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and other places we use (see
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.I
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Get in Contact
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.R
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in this issue), but didn't write much. Maybe this allowed me to get a bit of a
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birds eye view but maybe it was just being distanced and out of the loop for
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some time. It made me wonder: what even is this community? And before we
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consider this: is it a community at all? Or is it just some loose cluster of
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nerds meeting in some unlikely online spaces on a pretty random schedule \[em]
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with not much true mutual commitment? Also, I noticed a certain disconnection:
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there are many users on
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.I Grenzland
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(the Discord instance) who don't seem to interact much with "the community" at
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all. Some use IRC to be kind of semi connected to the Discord via some software
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tricks, but on IRC there are also channels not bridged to Discord, and some
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chatting takes place on other IRC servers. Then, there's a trickle of parallel
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talking on netnews and there's those of us who use Mastodon or some other kind
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of social networking service based on ActivityPub. These users of the Fediverse
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again share a common virtual space with others who don't have anything to do
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with
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.I Grenzland ,
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be it this here fanzine, the Discord instance or the fact of having played a
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role in the Campaign. This "Community" may well appear quite fragmented ...
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it's bewildering if you think about it.
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.KF
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.PSPIC img/alrik.eps
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.KE
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.PP
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Then again, when I recently raised the issue of which language to use in this
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zine (english
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.I or
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german, or both as before, or whether we should have alternating issues in
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english and german), I received a comment that basically said: "Grenzland (the
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zine) reflects the community. Since the community is multilingual, the zine
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should be multilingual too". In fact Grenzland has been multilingual since
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issue 2. But wow \[em] "the community" ... so apparently there is an external
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perception of
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.I us
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being a community. I'm hardly any closer to be able to describe who we really
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are, but I like that.
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.KF
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.PSPIC img/VennDiagram.eps
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.I
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The Grenzland Community as a Venn diagram
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.KE
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.PP
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From a historical point of view I'd try and describe us like this:
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Grenzland are two overlapping groups, one group of gamers playing in an
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.I "in person"
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OD&D campaign from 2016 to 2025, based in Hamburg, Germany, and another
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group of gamers who play
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.I online
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in the
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.I "Montags in Zürich"
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series of games. The overlap consists mostly of using the same Discord
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instance, but there
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.I is
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a tiny overlap of the groups too. Occasionally some Hamburg players have
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participated in "Montags" games, and on a few occasions "Montags" players have
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participated in games of the Grenzland game that were run online. I'm imagining
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this as a sort of skewed Venn diagram. I'm unsure how large the overlap between
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"Mondays Games" and "Grenzland Discord" should be. It may be close to 100% but
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... well, I'm not sure.
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.PP
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Maybe it's easier to think about what I'd like the Grenzland community to be.
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Ready for some wishful thining? Here goes: I'd love to see the Grenzland community as
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a bunch of people who read and contribute to this very zine (big smiling emoji!).
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And maybe we're not that far from it, as I see "the usual suspects" sending in
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entries. Just come to think of it: independent from Discord or any other kind
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of digital medium. No configuration files to wrestle with, no enshittification,
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just some thoughtful very slow conversation going back and forth ... And deciding
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which chat service, virtual tabletop or other system to use, can be decided
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independently from any ostensible online community.
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.PP
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Now we still need to get two organizational things out of the way: (1) in past
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issues I used this editorial to give an overview about what this issue has to
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offer. I might return to this habbit, but this editorial clearly is too long
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already. Instead I'll offer German language summaries for any English articles
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and English summaries for any German language articles. Right at the top of each
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article. This might raise interest in Grenzland ever so slightly for those who are
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uncomfortable with either one of those languages. And I'll promise to give
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English
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.I and
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German
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summaries, should anyone ever offer an article written in french!
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.Au lkh
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