Submissions
You can get a copy of these submission guidelines by sending an email to guidelines@protodimension.com. This email address is a robot and no one receives any email from it.
We are always interested in your submissions. In fact, this publication exists primarily to allow us to share our visions of the horror and conspiracy gaming genres. Should you wish to contribute, email your submissions to us at:
Content
Protodimension Magazine is looking for fan-developed content to support a variety of published role-playing game systems. Currently our target is pen-and-paper role-playing in a conspiratorial horror setting, although the occult always creeps in. For a list of the game systems Protodimension Magazine supports please see the web site at http://www.protodimension.com/zine.
Literature
We are also interested in fiction, poetry, and prose targeting our established genre. Each magazine contains about 40% fiction. We are still awaiting some horror poetry, but we’ll publish it if it meets our standards. For other prose, we are always interested in game review anthologies, movie and media reviews, discourses on settings, and generic game aids. Contact us at our submission email address if you have a question on a submission.
Art
Aaah. Art and Literature – how high-brow. What role-playing magazine would be acceptable if it did not have copious artwork? We are looking for fan art of a darker nature. Please look at one of our issues for guidance on topics. We will also respond to queries on our submissions email if you have concerns. Please send us a link to your online gallery if you have one. We know art, we just don’t know what we like.
Formats
The format of Protodimension Magazine is optimized for online viewing via a Portable Document Format reader. It is not optimized for print. For example, graphics submitted with greater than 150 dpi will be down-converted to that as a minimum. Please use paragraph headers to break up your paragraphs. This makes the presentation a lot more readable. The format of the individual pages is an A4 size in landscape mode: 297 mm wide by 210 mm high. Currently cover art fits into a ½ page with the issue’s table of contents fitting into the other. Please consider one of our issues to get a feel for what we are looking for.
Written Contributions
Written submissions should preferably be saved as rich text format (.rtf) files and contain minimal formatting, as this can make our layout tasks that much harder. We will also consider Open Document Text (.odt) files and Microsoft Word documents (.doc). Any text that is meant to be kept separately from the main body (sidebars, headers or footers) should be clearly labeled as such.
Please put your name and contact email in the file. Use a title, and preferably a subtitle and also place those in the file. Also tell us what game system the material applies. Obviously for fiction that is moot, we will figure that out. A word count would be nice, and please put a date submitted into the file. We cannot always tell from the file date. The top of you file should look something like this:
Submitted August 15, 2009
Roger P. Mazursky
maz@literarymail.org
When Darkness Walks the Earth
An Evil Twisted Adventure
For Call of Cthulhu, 3rd Edition
There is a 5,000 word limit for submissions you send us without being asked, i.e. unsolicited submissions. Let us know ahead of time, and we can accommodate larger articles. As an online format, we are not concerned about the length of the issue, other than the amount of work it costs us to get it out the door. However, we do reserve the right to edit your text for correctness or appropriateness, so please verify your references – we will. While large-scale edits will always be referred back to the author, we will try our hardest to keep edits to a minimum. We do not want to take over your work, we just want a professional publication, fan-based or not.
Graphics Contributions
Graphics preference is for TIFF format, with a resolution of at least 150 dpi, and saved with no compression. Color and grayscale images are equally welcome. We can also accept Photoshop (up to CS4) psd files. Lower clarity copies of images are welcome if you wish to send us samples of your work. We can take all sizes, but please understand that we will rescale the piece to fit our layouts. We will also up-convert or down-convert resolutions to 150 dpi.
Any potential submissions for front cover art should be sized in ½ A4 format: 148.5 mm wide x 210 mm high. We will want a higher resolution at least 300 dpi.
Licensing and Copyrights
All rights remain with the original contributors. Protodimension Magazine will make the determination of Fair Use compliance. We may come back to the contributors for additional permission to include previously published submissions in anthologies or other collections. If we decide to put the material on our web site (not part of a publication) we will seek additional rights from contributors to do that. Such rights are not part of the original terms of use. It’s your work and it should stay that way – we’re not-for-profit.
If you have additional questions, feel free to send us an email at .