Become a Journalist for the Travellers' Aid Society!

MongooseMatt

Administrator
Staff member
Fancy becoming a journalist for the Travellers' Aid Society?

We are currently looking for articles for a new wave of Journals of the Travellers' Aid Society, and we would like to give Travellers the chance to submit their own ideas!

In a nutshell, we are inviting you all to submit articles for publication in JTAS. Such articles can cover, well, pretty much anything related to the official Third Imperium universe. So , the following could all be possible:

* New ships, weapons, equipment or vehicles
* Background articles on worlds, military units, criminal organisations or companies
* Short adventures or extended Patrons
* Extended encounters, on planets or in space
* Additions to existing campaigns or adventures, such as the Pirates of Drinax
* Interesting NPCs or alien animals
* New playable alien races for Travellers
* Detailed locations, such as starports, prisons, or military installations
* Historical information on empires and events of Charted Space

The only requirement is that such articles have a place in the official universe (which includes anywhere in Charted Space or beyond) and so are not 'pure rules' pieces. So, a new weapon or ammunition type (say) used by a specific mercenary company would work well, but a rules article detailing how to juggle three ships' cats in microgravity would not.

We encourage you to look at the existing JTAS books to get an idea of the kind of variety possible in such articles.

If you fancy taking a swing at this, please adhere to the following points - failure to do so may result in your article being discarded (sorry, but these are easy rules to follow!):

* Articles must be submitted in .doc or .docx file formats.
* Within the document, use as little formatting as possible - use headings, tables, bold and italics text... and pretty much nothing else. Make everything as clear as you can and do not try to make it 'pretty'. Both our editors and graphics people hate that :)
* Use a 10 point font for body text (everything that is not a heading).
* Start the document with the title of your article and, immediately below that, include your full name and email address. Then start the article.
* If you are doing a new vehicle, ship, piece of equipment or weapon, please look at the tables we use for such things in our books, and try to copy their structure (columns and rows) and headings. So, for example, if you are doing a ship, Cargo should go at the bottom of that table and not before the Power Plant.
* Most articles are likely to be around 1-2 pages in length in the document - longer articles such as adventures or location descriptions might go up to 7-8 pages in length. Please do not submit anything longer than 12 pages.

Articles selected for publication will earn the journalist (that is you!) full credit in the Journal it is printed in, a free copy of that Journal in both printed and PDF form, and recompense via PayPal (this will vary according to length of the article and the amount of editing required to bring it up to TAS specifications). We are unlikely to accept all submissions, but we will work with the journalist on articles that show promise but need work.

All submission should be sent to msprange@mongoosepublishing.com

Submissions will be accepted for an indefinite period, and we will give due warning on our forums when this submission window will be closed.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!
 
MongooseMatt said:
* Articles must be submitted in .doc or .docx file formats.
* Within the document, use as little formatting as possible - use headings, tables, bold and italics text... and pretty much nothing else. Make everything as clear as you can and do not try to make it 'pretty'. Both our editors and graphics people hate that :)
* Use a 10 point font for body text (everything that is not a heading).

Matt, would you want us to format headings rather as text with larger font size (12 pt or more) or rather using Word's internal settings for headings? I know some editors prefer the former, since Word-internal headings can be tricky to deformat. Others like them as they port over to Adobe fairly okay these days.

Just an inquiry, which way you have to do less work.
 
I imagine you're looking for such articles to be written from an objective point of view:

"The IISS places caches throughout charted space and beyond for several reasons, but the main reason is never disclosed publicly..."

rather than a more personal, reporter writing a byline article:

"My friend from uni - let's call him McTavish - slowly raised his glass eye-level and said to it, "You know, we're not suppose to talk about those boxes with anyone outside the Service..."


Just curious :D
 
And yet another question:

If we submit ship designs, will there be space for deck plans in the new JTAS issues? And if so, do we have to submit these, too, or will you draw them?
 
Yes, we will have deck plans - a simple sketch and scan will do for our artists, but you are welcome to get more in-depth with graph paper if you prefer!
 
If I have illustrations for the article is that okay? and if so what format and size should they be?
 
Exciting! I have a daaark scenario ready to go and correctly formatted, it just needs play-testing.

Would you be interested in new player-races?
 
Randal said:
Exciting! I have a daaark scenario ready to go and correctly formatted, it just needs play-testing.

Would you be interested in new player-races?

Happy to consider anything!
 
Condottiere said:
I did send one, with the potential of a mini series.

We have already started going through articles, and have already commissioned some of them for the next Journal (we have filled about a third of that volume thus far). Going to be working on another wave of articles soon, and we are ready to take my submissions - getting them in before the Christmas break would work very well, if anyone is on the fence :)
 
While the first RPG writing job that I got hired for was L5R, due to lead time, Signs and Portents was my first published RPG work. Big thanks to Matt Sprange for continuing to offer people a way into the industry
 
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