Alarums & Excursions: a Retrospective

Alarums & Excursions (A&E for short) was an Amateur Press Association (APA) ‘zine (magazine) that ran continuously since 1975. While I believe individual months were missed here and there, it otherwise ran unerringly, monthly, until earlier this year (2025). It was distributed both digitally (PDF) and via print mailer to subscribers.

Its authors included several luminaries of 1970s and 1980s RPG design, including Gary Gygax. Gygax was at times critical of some writers for A&E, but also praised it in various interviews. Among other accolades, the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design inducted A&E into its Hall of Fame in 2022.

It focused on tabletop roleplaying games, though eventually became something much more loosely defined. It was one of the first zines to cover RPGs in gaming. According to its Wiki page, the initial aim of the publication was to prevent roleplaying games from becoming so divergent that people from different cities could not participate in games together.

Lee Gold (in partnership with her husband Barry) ran the zine and site. Lee has various design credits in the RPG industry, but the focus here is on A&E itself.

I am not a historian of the zine, so my knowledge of it is undoubtedly incomplete. However, I was a frequent contributor to the zine in recent years, contributing to 51 issues in its total run of 593 issues since its inception in ’75. My contributions spanned 2019-2025.

This article is a retrospective on this interesting bit of roleplaying and gaming lore, from someone who came into it quite late in its lifespan.

Time and Its Effects

The A&E website looks like something out of the 90s. I was initially intimidated, but soon made contact with Lee and struck up a conversation in my interest to submit material to the zine. She was informative and gracious in helping me into the community.

The zine itself was sent via email (and mail), was about as lo-fi as possible in the digital age, and outside of unique cover art each month (often submitted by contributors), made no attempts at aesthetic cohesion between submissions outside of some rough guidelines for how you could format your submission.

The discussion, too, broadened considerably. RPGs were the focus, yes, but anything adjacent to gaming or nerd culture was permissible. What’s more, most zines would include personal life updates from contributors. The zine became – or perhaps always was – the way many of its members stayed in touch. Celebrating life’s milestones was often more memorable than talking about what games everyone had played in the past month.

I ended up sharing pictures of Halloween costumes to the zine, milestones involving the masters program I finished in 2021, and personal setbacks in health or work status. All within zines that included lengthy roleplaying session writeups and ruminations on anything and everything having to do with playing or running roleplaying games. It was an extended group of friends I’ve never met, and may never meet. Strange, but cool.

As I first entered the space, I saw some other “younger” (I’m in my 40s, so younger is extremely relative here) writers, but also a lot of older folks whose history with these games and discussions went back decades. They were playing together at conventions before I knew what an RPG was! Or exploring their 100th RPG system with some group that had been playing together for years, and with friends they may have known for decades.

It was both quite modern (pleasantly) in terms of things like attention to inclusivity and consent in gaming, and also a throwback to a time before most of us remember, and sensibilities surrounding communication that felt foreign until I’d spent enough time around it.

On the Nature of Discussion

Large portions of some zines were devoted to responses to others previous zine submissions, forming a communal conversation between issues. This was strange to follow at first, but you’d get the hang of it eventually.

It’s funny what online discussion does to us. Appealing to the groupthink to get thumbs, upvotes, shares, etc. …validation, in other words.

It’s also immediate. No chance to reflect. You see something, you respond to it. How often do you consider a response to a tweet for an entire day? Or a week? How much does this color our communication emotionally when everything is immediate?

I don’t think we realize the extent to which our communication habits are influenced by these forces.

Now imagine having a conversation with someone over months, but the entirety of the conversation amounts to less than a page of writing.

Does that sound fun? Torturous? Probably the latter, to some. And I wasn’t always a fan of it at first.

I came to appreciate it, though. There was a thoughtfulness present, and a relaxed air, that doesn’t exist in plenty of online discussion.

My Contributions and Takeaways

When I started contributing, my interest was primarily in roleplaying games. I was creating digital supplements for Dungeons & Dragons, taking part in RPGGeek community contests and communal projects, and sharing a lot of what I was doing and learning.

This manifested on my website as well, though I always tried to keep A&E separate. The exception was session reports. Several campaign reports that have been posted here on Bumbling Through Dungeons were cross-posted to A&E. I’d receive comments and questions from those who would follow along, and this was great fun!

My creative efforts have leaned more toward board games in recent years, and so I often had less RPG thoughts to discuss. I’d cover movies, books and TV here and there as well, but as design crept further into my free time, my focus on A&E waned.

This was fine, but in its last year, my contributions were more sporadic. I wanted to feel as though I had something to say, not merely contribute for its own sake. This limited my submissions, but not my enjoyment at reading others’ submissions.

Drawing from an international group of contributors, the zines were (and are) always fun to read. I discovered roleplaying systems, board games, movie recommendations, book recommendations, and encountered ideas for roleplaying games that I’d not considered before.

The community lifted up the collective discussion, because there was always a shared sense of purpose in the fun of gaming. And also purpose in the human connections of gaming. In some ways it was more distanced than online communication, but at times it also felt more intimate, as though it were a series of overlapping, private conversations, and excited musings being shared to a small room of interested onlookers instead of blaring it out to the uncaring masses.

I didn’t read every session report or submission, nor every reply to every other contributor in the ongoing conversations, but undoubtedly devoured thousands of pages worth of reading in these – and related – areas. I am better for it.

Experience is Not Singular

Lee frustrated me a couple times. Our communication styles seemed to clash periodically, and while I won’t go into details, it strained my interest at times. On one occasion, I considered simply informing her I’d submitted my last zine and washing my hands of it.

Yet, here was someone who stewarded generations of gamers into fantastical realms, and was kind to me at several other points in our well-wishes at different times of the year and ongoing conversations. I will likely never meet her in person and had no reason to burn a bridge. On a couple such occasions I swallowed the response I may have written online in the heat of the moment. In this particular context, I believe I made the right choice. Our last communications to one another were kind and, I believe, sincere. She’s still around, of course (I don’t want to speak of her as though she’s passed), she’s just not running the zine anymore.

Anything expansive enough is not one thing, though. I heard obliquely of – but never saw – arguments in A&E’s mythical history. Others likely left at times due to disagreements of one sort or another. These things are inevitable, given enough time and people.

My overarching takeaway is one of thankfulness though. To Lee, and all the others. A&E is in some ways a relic, destined to be replaced in the zeitgeist by more digitally forward zines that are capable of reaching broader modern audiences. But it was also a window into gaming that few will be able to see now, and a worthwhile one at that!

There’s now a spiritual successor to A&E, featuring many of the same contributors. Ever & Anon (E&A for short, in an obvious nod to its forebear), which you can find (and download issues of) here.

It’s under new leadership (and by the chatter, its leadership will rotate periodically) but has much of the same DNA in contributors and customs. Like the Ship of Theseus, we might debate whether or not it’s retained its original form through the years of shifting contributors. But though I’d started to lapse in my contributions to A&E in recent months (for life reasons unrelated to the zine itself), I expect to contribute to this new endeavor at least sporadically, if for no other reason than to bookend my years of contributions and say hi to those I shared the zine with, and hopefully continue to support the kind of gaming discussion I enjoy with some interesting tidbits from my experience.

As I write this, I’ve submitted to the first handful of E&A issues and – while I don’t imagine I’ll contribute to each issue – I expect to follow it for years. And so the tradition continues, even if it is now in the quietest corners of the hobby.

Here’s a list of A&Eers on BoardGameGeek/RPGGeek. An acquaintance on RPGGeek and contributor to A&E is the reason I found this unique zine at all. He reached out to me, complimented my posting habits on the site, and said that he thought Alarums & Excursions would benefit from my voice. I’m grateful and indebted to him for introducing me to Lee and the zine, and thankful that I’ve been welcomed into its community in subsequent years. Here’s to many more, whatever guise its legacy travels under!