Zine Introduction (+ hello!)
Sep. 11th, 2025 07:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saintofcrownsCrossposting an entry from ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
communal_creators, if that's alright. Some background: I've participated in a lot of zines of varying organization and polish, mostly fandom, and also have helped organize a zine jam every July since 2023. I am working on a TTRPG sourcebook project with friends later on next year, so I'm doing a zine for my own worldbuilding project as a warmup.
To be frank, unformatted worldbuilding is not very interesting for anyone to read. It also isn't very interesting to work on, at least for me. My ongoing project is to lay out my low-fantasy, Chinese alt history setting in the format of a museum exhibition. There be fantastical beasts and nitty-gritty cultural stuff. My setting is not associated with any particular project other than I wanted an excuse to draw lots of gryphons and research early Zhou dynasty. I like the scaffolding of metafiction and in-universe media: ie. creating subway maps and tourist brochures for a completely fictional setting. For this project, it means multimedia with writing and art in the form of artifacts, diagrams, and information plaques. Hopefully this is enough structure to keep me interested and I can (in the future) print if I want. The particular exhibit inspirations I'm drawing from are Guanghan's Sānxīnduī and Chongqing’s Three Gorges Museum.
I'm not a historian or a curator. This made me a little nervous to start this project, but fuck it. You can just do things. For the duration of the next month, I am planning to finish the art and writing for the displays on:
I'll be treating it as a zine with deliverables. Feel free to ask about it.
Resources I am using
( Layout )
( Formatting for print )
( Organization )
But really, visit the Sānxīngduī and Three Gorges museums if you ever get a chance. They are both engaging and excellent at telling a narrative. Particularly pay attention to the way halls are laid out to introduce audiences to a concept.
communal_creators, if that's alright. Some background: I've participated in a lot of zines of varying organization and polish, mostly fandom, and also have helped organize a zine jam every July since 2023. I am working on a TTRPG sourcebook project with friends later on next year, so I'm doing a zine for my own worldbuilding project as a warmup.To be frank, unformatted worldbuilding is not very interesting for anyone to read. It also isn't very interesting to work on, at least for me. My ongoing project is to lay out my low-fantasy, Chinese alt history setting in the format of a museum exhibition. There be fantastical beasts and nitty-gritty cultural stuff. My setting is not associated with any particular project other than I wanted an excuse to draw lots of gryphons and research early Zhou dynasty. I like the scaffolding of metafiction and in-universe media: ie. creating subway maps and tourist brochures for a completely fictional setting. For this project, it means multimedia with writing and art in the form of artifacts, diagrams, and information plaques. Hopefully this is enough structure to keep me interested and I can (in the future) print if I want. The particular exhibit inspirations I'm drawing from are Guanghan's Sānxīnduī and Chongqing’s Three Gorges Museum.
I'm not a historian or a curator. This made me a little nervous to start this project, but fuck it. You can just do things. For the duration of the next month, I am planning to finish the art and writing for the displays on:
- information on 3 key historical figures
- setting, including the specific archaeological site
- 4 artifacts from this specific era.
I'll be treating it as a zine with deliverables. Feel free to ask about it.
Resources I am using
( Layout )
( Formatting for print )
( Organization )
But really, visit the Sānxīngduī and Three Gorges museums if you ever get a chance. They are both engaging and excellent at telling a narrative. Particularly pay attention to the way halls are laid out to introduce audiences to a concept.
