I’ve been a rabid consumer of in-character publications and documents in the fest larp, Empire. From newspapers to magical periodicals, to ‘serious’ papers like The Moon, I’ve been spending a decent amount of IC currency every event on paper goods. Some people go to IC bars, some people gamble it, and I buy papers. I mean I do the other two as well but that’s not the question at hand.

I’d been heavily inspired by papers like The Moon, who are a frankly deranged Marcher publication written by octogenarians, who have never been to the in-character area of the game (the place where the player characters, all the movers and shakers of the setting go). I decided to take a run at an IC paper for E3 this year, but printing issues meant I got onsite with about 5 copies, and sold three of them all weekend.

This time I took more time to work on it, and had them printed professionally (which turned out cheaper than all the printer ink I had to buy to make this work the first time around!). My goal was to make a paper that came off as trying to tell actual news stories, but that was a bit of a shitshow internally, with odd stories creeping in. There’s some useful IC information there for folks who buy it in the field, but also some utterly mad stuff in there, with a healthy dose of good-nature snark.

I also bought a glass-fronted box with a coin slot, so people could self-serve rather than me having to sell the paper- This meant I could just leave the box out and have it ‘sell itself’ while I went and played the game. If I made my whole weekend about it I’d probably be able to make more money, but the self-service box was a good enough vending machine that I’ll definitely do another issue next summit. You can find a copy of the paper below.

Mended Wheel Autumn 387E, Anvil Edition (PDF Link)