DargonZine is a strictly noncommercial electronic magazine that prints original fantasy fiction by aspiring Internet writers.

DargonZine began life in 1985 as FSFnet, one of the first science fiction and fantasy magazines on the Internet. FSFnet printed not only original fantasy stories, but science fiction, book reviews, and other articles.

At the end of its first year, several FSFnet contributors began writing in a common milieu, sharing their characters and setting: a medieval duchy called Dargon. Thus was the Dargon Project born.

Over the next four years, stories based in Dargon increasingly supplanted the other articles and stories that also saw print in FSFnet. In 1988, FSFnet ceased printing anything but Dargon Project stories and was rechristened DargonZine.

With more than twenty years of publishing history, DargonZine is one of the largest and most robust anthologies ever written. We are also proud to be the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet.

The Dargon Project is an online writers' group, where many authors write in a common milieu, sharing settings and characters. Our stories take place in a medieval fantasy world that is predominantly human, at a late medieval technology level, and where magic is rare and wondrous.

The project was designed to use the Internet to give aspiring fantasy writers a forum where they could meet and improve their craft through mutual contact and collaboration. By having their stories printed in DargonZine, our writers also gain exposure and feedback from a representative body of fantasy readers.

The fictional Duchy of Dargon is a small, out-of-the-way holding, situated in the extreme northwest corner of the Kingdom of Baranur. It is separated from the rest of the kingdom by a vast wood and a range of hills, and is ruled by Lord Clifton Dargon II. Dargon Keep stands on a hill overlooking the town and port of Dargon, which lie at the mouth of the River Coldwell. The port is Dargon's only link to the more populated south, and the town is an active and busy place. Adventure can be found both within the city's walls and in the surrounding wildlands.

In addition, if you are reading the Web version of one of our stories and come across a person or place that you don't know, we've made that citation into a hyperlink that will conveniently take you to its Online Glossary entry.

There are two kinds of subscriptions. You can have each complete issue emailed to you in plain-text when it comes out, or we can send you a brief email notification when issues are published, so that you can obtain the issues at your leisure from our Web site.

Both subscription types are completely free of charge and free of advertising. You can sign up by filling out the online subscription form at <http://www.dargonzine.org/subscrip.shtml>.

You can add DargonZine's RSS feed to your My Yahoo! page, your LiveJournal friends page, or any other RSS-capable news reader. Once you have done so, you will automatically see notifications whenever a new issue is released. The RSS feed URL is <http://www.dargonzine.org/dargonzine_rssfeed.xml>.

For more information, see the "DargonZine News Feed" page on our Web site at <http://www.dargonzine.org/rssfeed.shtml>.

Issues are distributed irregularly, whenever sufficient material is available. There are usually four to eight issues per year, with a new issue coming out every three to eight weeks on average.

Issues usually are between 1000 and 2000 lines long (75-100k in plain-text). Users of email systems like MSN, HotMail, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL may find that they are unable to receive issues due to arbitrary disk quota or email size limits on their systems. If you suspect our issues may be too big for your email system, we recommend that you obtain a "notification-only" subscription and retrieve issues via our Web site or FTP.

The easiest way is to start at the "Archive" page on our Web site, at <http://www.dargonzine.org/backish.shtml>, which contains links to all our issues in both HTML and plain-text formats.

Back issues of both FSFnet and DargonZine in plain-text format are also available via anonymous ftp at ftp.dargonzine.org.

The easiest way to give your feedback is via our Reader Ratings system. Every HTML-formatted story on our Web site has a box that allows you to rate the story and provide a textual comment. You can also see all the ratings and comments from other readers, as well.

Additional comments and feedback can be sent to the editor or directly to individual authors by email; however, be aware that a writer's email address may have changed since a story was printed; the most reliable place to find their addresses is on their bio pages, which are listed at <http://www.dargonzine.org/bios.shtml>.

New writers are always enthusiastically welcomed. Writers who are interested in joining the Dargon Project should read the DargonZine Writers' FAQ, which is available on our Web site at <http://www.dargonzine.org/writers.shtml>. That document lists some of the benefits of writing for DargonZine, as well as the time committment and other things we expect of project members.