These indices categorize articles from a variety of roleplaying magazines, with an emphasis on indie magazines and magazines about my favorite games, such as Ars Magica, Pendragon, RuneQuest, and Traveller. They were written between about 1995 and the present day. The oldest indices were written for USENET and still exist as TXT files. More recent indices have either been written for HTML or updated to HTML.
These indices are all released under a cc-by-4.0 license. That means you can reuse them as you see fit provided you credit me. You can host them on your own websites, incorporate them into your Wiki, print them in your book, or anything else that meets the sole requirement of attribution. Some of the older TXT files say they may only be used non-commercially. That is no longer a requirement. Everything is available under cc-by-4.0. If you need me to update a specific file to say that before you're comfortable using it just tell me.
This repo exists mainly so that you (and I) can easily download these indices to local machines and keep them up-to-date.
If you've installed GitHub on your machine, you can download the files with:
git clone https://github.com/shannona/rpg-index.git
You can later pull updated files within the rpg-index directory with:
git pull
Yes, I am happy to accept pull requests to modify the content of this repo. PRs can include, but are not limited to:
- Fixes for mistakes in the index, especially issue and page numbers.
- Additions of missing covers.
- Improvements to the CSS.
- Improvements to the HTML.
- Improvements to backgrounds.
- Changes to your name if you prefer a different name nowadays.
Particularly for the CSS and HTML, my work is largely pragmatic, so I'd be thrilled for improvements.
You may note that the one thing not on my list is indices of new issues (or new magazines). I am very precise in my indicing, with my style of categorization intended to be consistent across all of these different magazines (and particularly across magazines for the same game system). It would be very difficult for someone else to match that style, and I'd hate to waste your work, so I don't suggest it. But, if you think I'm wrong and you'd like to give it a shot, please index one issue and no more and then submit a PR, and I'll tell you what I think.
Here's some other roleplaying-related repos that I think are aligned with some of the topics of my roleplaying indices:
- The Traveller Map — source code for travellermap.com
If you're interested in showing support for the RPG Indices, the best things you can do are:
- Help me get ahold of magazines that I'm missing, particularly missing magazines or issues for my two prime focuses right now: Glorantha and Traveller. If someone is selling copies, I'm happy to pay appropriate amounts.
- Take a look at my other projects such as the original Designers & Dragons books and my Designers & Dragons patreon for my future works