Learning our trade

Before there was Faerie Wood, the gang had another project. ‘Ug!’ Magazine was a low-circulation gamer ’zine, produced as a reaction to the dry nature of our wargaming club’s official magazine. We all spent our Friday nights at a venue where the majority of people were older, historical wargamers, with roleplaying (with its greater need to be able to hear clearly) relegated to various small side-rooms.

We were like oil and water, back then: not that we had anything in particular against wargaming. Warhammer was only in its second edition, and was actually a pretty good game, before the endless cycles of ‘enhancement’ and dumbing down. No... but our wargamers were middle-aged, sensible types who played an entirely unfathomable game called ‘DBM’, or at best played ‘Fire and Fury’, the American Civil War game. If they wrote anything for the club magazine at all, it was likely to a historical piece about Oliver Cromwell, or the invention of the sandbag.

This, we decided, would have to be addressed... and with the confidence of youth, we set about it. First, I approached the youngest club committee member and asked if it would be okay for us to produce a magazine of our own. He agreed, perhaps thinking that was the last he’d ever hear about it... or perhaps he was just longing to get back to arranging his Hoplites. Poor bloke, if he’d known what was coming, he might have asked a few more questions... but I never asked him for any money, or help of any kind: just for his consent. “Steve said it was okay,” was my only explanation on the night, about a month later, when the first copies of the magazine were put on the front desk for members to take.

The existing club magazine was called ‘The Naked Sword’. What would we call our contribution? I recall that Mark wanted to call it ‘The Naked Man’, and had ideas for a parody of the ‘gauntleted fist holding sword’ logo of our rival publication. Perhaps we should have gone with that... but in the end, it was the monosyllabic ‘Ug!’ – reflecting its barbaric roots in a gamer community who understood little of the old order.

The first edition of ‘Ug!’ consisted of just twelve sides of A5, which is to say three sheets photocopied double-sided, each with a single fold. I wasn’t able to staple it, but I reasoned that newspapers don’t have staples, or covers. Eighty copies were made. Eighty times six photocopies... this was going to be expensive! Well, actually that first edition’s reprographics came courtesy of my employer, late one night. There was a scary moment when one of my superiors showed up, but she just complimented me on “working so hard” and didn’t glance at the material coming out of the copier. Phew!

The hardest job was neatly folding 240 sheets of paper. If you’ve never done that... don’t. It kills your fingertips. Once done, though, and having collated the pages (manually, of course) we were ready to go.

A proper little storm in a teacup resulted. It was very satisfying. For the first time, the young people of the club had a chance to say “this is what we do”. This is what wargaming and roleplaying mean to us. In the editions that followed, we reviewed computer games, and wrote about live roleplaying... we included ‘advertisements’ that were actually games supplements detailing equipment for use in Shadowrun and Car Wars. We had campaign reports, allowing people to learn about what went on among the mysterious group of roleplayers who shut themselves away in the kitchen, and we had short stories by friends of friends who weren’t even members of the club, but wanted a place to publish. (In the days before the Internet...)

First, though: trouble. Two of us got called before the committee, to discuss the ‘Ug!’ situation. Were our overlords unhappy? Had we offended somebody?

Not really. ‘Ug!’ was wacky, and it had a strange teenage blend of being terribly earnest while also trying to be insincere... but it never really crossed the line. The only people who might have been aggrieved would have been Games Workshop. Even then, we were reporting on the games they were spoiling, although it would be some years before their arrogance peaked when they ceased to talk about wargaming and started to call it ‘The Games Workshop Hobby’. But we took them on. ‘Ug!’ feared nobody.

From our overlords, there were no complaints about the content of the magazine. Just this: that a club can’t have two magazines. They were concerned, they explained, that if we continued to produce the rival publication, The Naked Sword might wither and die... and then what would happen if (for example) us young folks found other interests and ceased to produce our magazine?

In this, they showed foresight of the kind that you’d want in a club committee, and they were right: ‘Ug!’ managed just eight issues before its creators were scattered to universities all over the country, and publication ceased.

Before that, though, a deal was offered, in that ‘Ug!’ would appear within The Naked Sword. They’d take care of all the printing (hooray) and the combined club magazine would begin with the grown-up historical wargamey stuff, with the back of the publication for ‘Ug!’... as many pages as we wanted. (I wish I’d thought, back then, to demand the ‘double-fronted’ format that we would later use for our Faerie Wood supplement booklets, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.)

The deal was struck. The club magazine would survive, stronger than ever – and fatter than ever, reflecting the interests of all the members. And here's an example.

This is the ‘front cover’ of ‘Ug!’ in its fourth issue (actually appearing as Page 11 of The Naked Sword)... and just look at the contrast between the two publications. One minute you’re looking at an extraordinarily dull page supplying answers to a crossword you probably forgot all about, even if you attempted it... and then you get a Robsonesque pictorial mugging. Look out: ‘Ug!’ has arrived!

(Let's just pause for a moment to reflect upon the last line of that issue of the Naked Sword: “ANSWERS TO MAYS CROSS WORD PUZZEL.”

Yup. All caps. ‘Mays’ gets no apostrophe. ‘Crossword’ has apparently reproduced by mitosis, splitting like a bacterium before your very eyes to become two words. ‘Puzzel’ has been spelled in a distinctly puzzling manner.

Quite simply, we had been presented with a chance to shine. To out-produce and out-create our elders and betters... and for them to have to thank us for our contribution, and copy and distribute it. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, quite frankly. As Mark eloquently put it at the time, “We flop our c*cks out and p*ss all over the Naked Sword.”

He works as an English teacher, now.

Ah, literature. Can you imagine a horde of trolls, Starship Troopers and Cthulhu doing battle in the library at Alexandria? The chaos spread. ‘Ug!’ was official. It couldn’t be stopped. And to give the older generation credit, I must say that they never tried to stop it. I think they were taken aback by just how enthusiastically we launched into things, though.

We were fresh out of school, newly employed and with time on our hands in the evenings. No more homework! Working on ‘Ug!’ was fun compared to school, although it demanded a lot of the same skills. I’d done ‘Graphical Communication’, and here I was, editing and typesetting a magazine at nineteen. It was produced via a combination of electric typewriter, 9-pin dot-matrix printer, and Letraset rub-down lettering for titles, plus occasional bits of line drawing by hand, and photocopied abstract oddments that were included through the use of a scalpel and a pot of glue. Back when cut and paste really meant cut and paste!

The real star of the show, though, was Garry’s artwork. He understood what would survive two goes through the photocopier. (Once to copy all the pasted-together bits and pieces onto a single sheet, and then again after you’d painted out all the join lines with correcting fluid.) His pictures of the period are bold, confident and fun. There was a series of cartoons, each featuring a worm in a variety of different situations. In one, he’s an executioner, complete with a black hood, with a beheading axe clasped in his tail. In another, he’s a cowboy, with a holstered belt, six-guns and a Stetson. In our fourth issue, the ‘Science Fiction Special’, he’s Space Worm. No reason: just because.

When I look back at the copies of ‘Ug!’ (I kept them all) I have regrets. My editing was often far too heavy-handed. I simply couldn’t let something pass, back then, if I knew it was wrong. (Proper grammar Nazi, me... although I still had trouble with ‘which’ and ‘that’, here and there... as you may have observed within Faerie Wood.) I forced my contributors into a style that wasn’t right for them... and in the live roleplaying article, I cut big chunks out of it. The author didn’t write for me again.

I was learning the trade... and sometimes you have to learn the hard way.

Of all that ‘Ug!’ was, the one part that has aged well is Garry’s pictures. Perhaps he would disagree; certainly his style has evolved since... but there were some things that were simply right. Like the time I said it would be fun to have a join-the-dots picture of stars in the night sky above Stonehenge, which would reveal the purpose of the ancient monument...

 Yes, an ‘Ug!’ magazine exclusive; Stonehenge was a giant’s toilet.

This was ‘Ug!’ magazine, in its essence. I still have a fondness for ‘Sid the Snotling’, the choose-your-own-adventure serial in which readers moved between numbered paragraphs like the adventure gamebooks that had been popular in the early 80’s... only with a useless and feeble protagonist. I’m also pleased to have given young writers like Stephen Hooker and Andrea Noakes an early outlet for their creative juices. I think that the alternative rules we published for ‘Space Hulk’ were far more interesting than the official ones... but all good things must end, and ‘Ug!’ was no exception.

From Episode 2 of ‘Sid the Snotling’ - note the paste-up construction, from the days before desktop publishing

I was the first to head off to university, leaving the rest of the team with a supply of articles to ease the transition. Tony Brotherton took over the job of editor, and I have to say that he did a really good job of it. Where I’d been too heavy-handed as editor, and perhaps had too narrow a vision, he produced two issues that were genuinely fun for me to read, when I got copies in the post. At last I was in the role of reader, rather than creator, so I know ‘Ug!’ was good. After Tony, Mark Cook took on the mantle for the final two issues, and you know what they say: you should never give a monkey the keys to the banana plantation. He had some fun with it! Again, things I would never have thought to do... and which therefore needed doing. (Although I should say that Mark’s earlier contributions were also very good, such as his interview with gamebook author Joe Deaver: Mark had the instincts of a great journalist.) Mark would later edit his university’s student magazine... and if ‘Ug!’ never quite crossed the line, that certainly did. (For which, well done Mark!)

And that was it. The four of us had scattered, and ‘Ug!’ was no more. Thereafter, anything I cared to write had to appear in that other part of the club magazine, The Naked Sword. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, as two years of rivalry had caused our traditional wargaming counterparts to raise their game, and the whole thing was better produced and a lot less stuffy.

One item of note in a late issue of ‘Ug!’ was a report from Garry in which he described a new game that he was running, where each player took on the role of a diminutive faerie. I couldn’t participate in the campaign, being over two hundred miles away, but I was hearing a lot about it. Faerie Wood was born; its creator was our artist and among its earliest playtesters were my fellow editors. In some measure I think that Faerie Wood really can trace its lineage back to ‘Ug!’, the crudely-photocopied underground magazine that tried not to take anything too seriously.