Note: I recently enrolled again in college and the following post is from a writing exercise.

In high school my ambition was to be an editor or writer for Dragon magazine, the monthly periodical by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons game to promote their products. However, life happened and that dream was not realized.

Fast forward twenty four years and I was injured in construction and out of work for four years. After being able to just get out of bed I began to focus on child care and house work to stay busy. The children aged and started school and suddenly I experienced emptiness.

In the light of a computer screen I rediscovered my high school hobby on the internet, role playing games. Except now the hobby is made up of people world-wide chatting and blogging through the internet.

In particular I had been a fan of science fiction and had played such games as Car Wars and Star Frontiers. On the web I discovered a thriving community of devotees to the old Star Frontiers game. The heart of that community was a fan magazine, written and produced by fans of the game. It was not long before my creative urges, which had long laid dormant, found validation in the pages of that magazine.

Today, six years later, I've become a major producer of science fiction content both in the areas of fiction and role playing games. I edit and write for my own magazine, The Frontier Explorer, and I develop games for a modest (currently very modest) profit through an indie game company. In one sense I'm living my high school dream.

It is ironic that it only took an injury that put me in bed for two months straight to bring about the unrealized dream. The pain I suffered was at times intense and unrelenting but it actually gave birth to the forgotten dream. It makes me wonder what the pain would have been to get to the end of my life and realize that I had never lived any dreams?

I suppose this may be the point where I would say something preachy like, "live your dreams" but I don't think it’s required. If you're reading this I sure you get the moral of the story. Truly this post is for me, to remind me to keep the dream in front of me and to live it because living a dream is to know joy even in the midst of pain.

Today I reviewed the Star Frontiersman #19 which had close to the last of the material I put together for that zine before leaving it to start the Frontier Explorer. It had a  bunch of materail I had painstakingly tracked down from lost internet sites where snapshots of those sites had  been preserved in the Waybackmachine internet archive. Many of these sites were from the late '90s and early 2000s but are now not on the internet. Its sad becasue they had great Star Frontiers content created by fans running those sites. I had combed through the best of the material and compiled it to be republished in a magazine so that it would be preserved. It was very gratifying to see that 7 months and two issues after leaving the Star Frontiersman that I'm still having a major impact on that magazine.

Now here is the thing a magazine is better than a web site because the web site can become unfunded and lost to the public. No one really saves complete copies of a website on their computer but they will save a copy of a magazine thus the content of the magazine is preserved in many places. A free fan magazine will get uploaded to a site like 4shared or scribd and then the copies of the zine will linger there for who knows how long. Plus with the Frontier Explorer being on a print on demand service it will be available for as long as the service is available.

Typically a fan website is the work of one individual (and it rises or falls on the will of that individual to keep it going) but a magazine accepts contributions and many people contribute and keep it going. Some of the community might enjoy a particular website but a magazine becomes a focal point for the community with actual community involvment.

For me this is why I invest my time in a magazine over a fan web site.

There has been some great development in the Star Frontiers setting concerning mega corp, the Frontier economy, and touching on matters involving space stations and star ships at the Star Frontiers community development site.

A hot new project has sprung up on the mega corps: http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/7216

In depth analysis of the various mega corps can be found, as well as history discussion concerning the dramatic changes that Pan Galactic Corporation under went as a result of the corporate war fought on Laco. A new PGC company logo from pre Laco War is in development as well.

Look for some fascinating things to come out of this project.

This is probably more a twist for a fantasy adventure but could work for science fiction. The party of player characters are searching for the Tomb of Dude Rex and think they find it but it turns out to be his cenotaph. A cenotaph is an empty grave created to memorialize the dead individual and his real tomb is elsewhere. In the Old Kingdom Egypt the first dynasty rulers had a tomb and a cenotaph both; one in Upper or southern Egypt and one in Lower or Northern Egypt. This occured because the 1st dynasty rulers were the ones that unified Upper and Lower Egypt thus the ruler was represented in death in both lands. The modern controversy is which is the tomb and which is the cenotaph.

Its a twitst from the real world and cetainly one that I dont remember ever encountering in an RPG.

Another twist- the true treasure is hidden in the cenotaph but cannot be uncovered without clues from the tomb- as the dead king was worried about grave robbers. Perhaps the dead king rises as a liche and forgoes killing the player characters that disturbed his slumber being anxious about his hidden treasure back at his cenotaph.