Gathering is a free magazine of amateur fiction set in the Dragonlance world. It is distributed via the Web in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. You can download the three issues by clicking on their cover images from the main page and then following the instructions to save the PDF files onto your computer.
I recommend that you print the magazines out so that you can read them more comfortably. The magazines have been designed with that in mind.
As for the reasoning behind all this: the Gathering project aims to collect together good-quality short fiction set in the Dragonlance world, into small magazines which are presented well enough that Dragonlance fans will want to print them out and keep them. It was my belief that quite a number of good amateur authors were interested in the world of Krynn, and their stories unjustly languished in barely-visited "fan fiction" sections of personal websites. The magazine is intended to create more exposure.
The project was started in mid '98 by mys'elf, Samuel Marshall. I released the first magazine in December '98, somewhat behind schedule, and hundreds of people have now downloaded. The second magazine was released in late 2000, and the third and final issue came out early in 2002. (This was my idea of an annual magazine schedule.)
The magazines follow the same basic design, but the typography gets progressively better (or, depending on how you look at it, less awful). The typeface used throughout the magazine is Bitstream's Caxton Book (roman and italic). Software was Adobe PageMaker 6.0 (now way out of date and almost painful to use, but since this is the only DTP I do any more there is no way I'm going to buy a copy of InDesign even though it's great), Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE (because I'm cheap), and Corel Draw 7.0 (ditto).
Web design and graphic design is by me, Samuel Marshall (leafdigital). This site is hosted on my leafdigital.com server space at pair Networks. It should be fully functional in all browsers, but looks best in a browser that fully supports the W3C CSS-1 (+positioning) standard, so at the moment your best bet is Netscape 6.2 or IE5+.
