After actually receiving a few inquiries concerning contributing to the site, I came to the conclusion that I should write down some guidelines for article content, for later reference. Read more below, if this interests you!
First off, Knights in the North is an open collective of writers and artists. We’re primarily interested in sharing cool content we produce for our own games, and as such, we are very open to featuring your stuff on the site, as long as it meets our approximate standards, and you understand that there is no money involved.
Second, blog articles should consist mostly of playable content for tabletop roleplaying games, rather than stories or discussions. We don’t impose any system or genre restrictions (the fact that we’re mostly a DCC-oriented blog now is simply happenstance). Similarly, art contributions can be anything: if you feel your stuff would fit the blog, please get in touch.
Third, we only want your permission to publish any content you give us on the site. You reserve all rights to your stuff, and if you later want to pull your articles or images from it, we’ll gladly oblige, no questions asked. Similarly, we reserve the right to drop stuff from the site. This is all common sense, but I suppose it needs to be written out anyhow.
We may eventually work some of the blog content into a zine or similar publication, but any use of your articles or images in such a fashion is a separate discussion entirely.
Contributor basics
If you’re interested in contributing art or articles, start by getting in touch with us at knightsinthenorth@gmail.com. We’ll be super happy to chat with you.
Contributing gets your stuff on the site, your name in the contributor sidebar, and you’ll have an option to post a little extra information about who you are as blog post.
It should go without saying that you should own the copyright to anything you offer us. If we have any reason to suspect infringement, we’ll just turn you down or drop the content.
Article Contributions
We’ll gladly accept almost anything that can be used at a play table, as long as it follows the below guidelines
1) Article/blog post: 80/20
Articles should be submitted as PDF-files, along with a short blog post intro for the content. Look at previous posts for reference.
2) First page header
The header on the first page of the article PDF should contain the following information: system reference (or genre reference for system agnostic stuff), contributor name or handle, article name, and blog hyperlink. Refer to the accompanying image or any article on the blog for an example. As long as the information is there, the layout can look like whatever you feel like.
3) Writing and content quality
We’re not an editorial service. Text and content quality is primarily your responsibility, although we should be able to give you some feedback should you want some. Basic rules for academic writing should get you there (grammar, page numbers, justified paragraphs, etc.).
Art Contributions
The guidelines for image content are considerably more lax than for articles: basically, the blog eats images like a hungry demon, and we’re mostly just scrambling to fill its gaping maw.
We have an image base set up for the site. If you want to contribute art, we’ll just make you a folder there, and tell you to go nuts, upload every single doodle or drawing there, and we’ll use it as soon as a suitable article crops up. Alternately, we’ll definitely take in contributions for specific pieces, or even write up stuff based on particularly cool illustrations. Please be in touch!
We’re primarily interested in reasonably sized JPEGs and PNGs, anything that you could imagine as an illustration in an RPG publication. We do admit to a penchant for old-school inked stuff, but that’s just because we’re old, and that’s how gaming books used to be illustrated back in the day.
We don’t like watermarks, but please do sign your work with whatever flair you feel appropriate.
Cheers,
AMP