RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
Nothing. Well, postage. But otherwise it didn't cost anything. It was something called an "APAzine" for "Amateur Press Association." Meaning, these weren't professional guys, just guys with creativity and access to a mimeograph machine.
The only way to get a copy of an APAzine was to submit your own 'zine to include in the issue. You received a copy of any issue that your 'zine showed up in.
The magazine never showed up "in the stands." It seems like everybody who became an influential designer in the RPG space was a contributor -- it was the equivalent of a nationwide Internet forum, in an era before the Internet was widely used. And the people who contributed did a lot of thinking about RPGs and what they wanted from their RPGs. Steve Perrin, who designed most of the mechanics of RuneQuest, did his brainstorming in the pages of A&E. Mark Rein•Hagen, designer of Ars Magica and later the various World of Darkness games, did his brainstorming in the pages of A&E*. About the only designers who didn't participate were the guys from TSR.
* Upon reflection, I'm not sure if he was a regular contributor to A&E or The Wild Hunt (TWH), a similarly-influential APAzine.
EDIT: Correction. From the A&E website (which hasn't been updated to indicate A&E is defunct), "The cheapest way to get A&E is to contribute. A contributor pays per page of the contribution and gets that issue free and the next issue for postage only." So, they actually did pay to be included in the 'zine, and got that issue and the next one for free.
I'm still mad at myself for not buying more digital issues while they were available. At one point, I was toying with my finances to see if I could offer Lee Gold $1,000 to acquire a copy of every digital issue at once (... I could not). I'm sad this bit of important gaming history is probably going to disappear.
