I was a little bored today, so I finally looked at one of my recent FLGS purchases, the very last issue of the venerable gaming magazine, Dragon (issue number 1, depicted above).
Shrouded in a clear plastic wrapper, was the final issue #359 (September 2007) of Dragon magazine. Inside the cover had the words “FINAL ISSUE!” on the banner at the top, this sucker had a recommended cost $12.99 Canadian/$10.99 US. The Larry Elmore cover has a busty quasi-Aztec-Amerindian female with a horned green dragon on the cover. “Giant Poster Inside!” screamed a white star-burst on the upper R hand corner. Below the banner was Elminster vs. Raislin - Demonomican – D&D Mysteries and Villains. You can find a description of the interior contents here.
This was all back at the time where it seemed every issue of The Dragon had a goody; a dungeon or other scenario, a free table-top board or fun game, etc. With other game magazines also on the racks; The Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (which I did get a subscription for), Different Worlds, White Dwarf, the Space Gamer, etc, ditto umpteen and uncounted RPG fanzines from the UK, the 1980s was truly the golden age of RPG magazines and ‘zines.
The magazine name was subsequent changed to Dragon Magazine, then just Dragon, and I stopped buying it regularly after issue 122 or so, having diversified in my gaming tastes (Dragon had turned unashamedly into a pure house organ by then), and having no spare cash when I went on to university. Around 2000 or so I picked up the compilation CD that included the first 250 issues of the magazine as scanned PDFs, and when D&D 3.0 came out I would pick up a coupla issues off the shelf per year.
Fast forward several decades and Dragon, now published by Paizo Publishing over the last 5 years, and one of the last general dead-tree gaming magazines with wide circulation, has finally ended its many year run. The news and controversy WOTC yanking the license about this came out over the summer, and I remembered reading much about it in the blog-osphere and made my own posting about it too.
Leafing through this Paizo Publishing bit of gaming necro-memorabilia, I was reminded why I hadn’t picked up too many issues over the last 7 or so years even before Paizo took over. The high price to usable material ratio was a bit off-putting, ditto the lack of anything other than WOTC products. The glossy pages made everything look like the advertising (half for computer games) that was filling up every other page per issue. The comics were okay, if a little superfluous.
I guess for me my reasons for not picking up copies of Dragon on a regular basis was the lack of anything that didn’t fall solidly into the two categories of what some gamers term crunch and fluff. I don’t know what you would call such stuff I’m looking for, meat and potatoes’ articles on gaming, or “gaming stodge”. By this I mean mainstream middle-of-the-road material that would promote the hobby as a whole, and not just WOTC or Paizo’s own stuff.
Much reduced from Dragon from its heyday was material that would fall in the middle ground of between official D&D rules items (spells, magic items, stat blocks for villains) and D&D setting verbiage. This would be material on setting up a gaming campaign, materials for genres other than fantasy, scenario ideas that could be easily dropped into play, interesting variants of the rules, both sensible and advanced suggestions from one GM to another, ‘how-to’ articles for running a tighter game or building a game-room or how to run a RPG wiki, reviews of other RPGs or similar materials, fantasy and SF book recommendations, etc and so on. Essentially materials for busy GMs and players who have far too little time to come up with much stuff on their own.
Can dead tree versions of gaming magazines make it today? They have a lot of competition from free on-line sources. Game reviews and news comes out pretty darn quick for free from places like RPG.net, and the now quickly becoming redundant gamingreport.com. The forums of such places have largely superceded the need for letters columns, which is what I always found interesting. Nearly all game magazines out there left standing (Signs & Portants, White Dwarf) now are house organs, with perhaps the just okay Polymancer being the only stand-alone.
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