Wow. Well, better late to the party than never.
When I went to the Paizo messageboards the other day, I knew that something was wrong. I think I saw something about "transitions" and I said, "Oh no... this has got to be a joke!" I read Erik Mona's announcement and got that popular "punched in the gut" feeling. I came to browse ENWorld and I found this thread. I saw a lot of anger and disappointment, and an almost unanimous agreeing with my feeling that this is possibly one of the worst mistakes that Wizards had ever made. I went to their messageboards to see if I could gain any more insight, but all I found there was people spouting even more venom than I'd seen here. So I came back to this thread, and I saw assurances from Erik Mona, Joshua Frost, and the other Paizo staffers assuring us that the sky was indeed not falling. While still notably upset about this occurance, I calmed down a bit.
I hate to see the paper magazines comes to an end. While they don't have the kind of longevity with me that they did with some folks, they did come to mean a lot to me over time. When I first started playing D&D in the late 80s/early 90s, I didn't think the magazines had much value. I figured that there were so many issues to the magazine, how would I know which ones had anything worth looking at in them, it was too much to keep track of, too expensive to get every month, and a number of other excuses for not bothering or caring. In the mid-90s, the friend who got me into D&D in the first place had lost interest in D&D and was getting rid of his books and gave me his collection of 50-odd Dragon mags. At the time, I figured it was better that I take them than let him throw them away. However, as I began to flip through them I found a treasure trove of monsters, spells, magic items, character classes, and all sorts of things that hadn't appeared in the books. In those dateless, part-time job having days, I spent hours on end obsessively compiling my own index of the magazines - I never really used the index much; but hey it kept me busy didn't it? I began looking for back issues at various local FLGS's and comic shops (many of which are no longer around), and started collecting new issues. When the Dragon archives CD-Rom came out, you know I went and bought that ASAP and still make semi-regular use of it. I collected new issues of Dragon semi-regularly (and Dungeon occasionally) as I saw fit, seeing it through the transition between TSR and Wizards, and following it through the transition to 3E and being run by Paizo. When certain columns like the Demonomicon of Iggwilv came into existence I really began to take notice, and I saw all the wonderful things that the Paizo staff was doing and basically fell in love with a thing about as much as a man can and not be too weird about it.
By this time, of course, I had been working on the internet for the Creature Catalog website, spending a great deal of time and energy updating monsters from older editions to 3E stats for a few years. While I converted creatures from practically any source, one of the places I made sure to focus on was the old Dragons which I had spent so much time looking at in years past. I even had
my very own thread for working on conversions from Dragon. A couple of years ago, when Paizo announced that they would be returning the old Creature Catalog feature to the magazine, I figured, "Hey, I already work on something called the Creature Catalog, and I do it every day for free, so why not get paid for it and get something "official" in print?" so I started sending in submissions for articles. I've had 3 articles in print so far with my writing partner Shade, plus 4 creatures in this month's Creature Catalog feature, and another article next month. When I heard the announcement about the magazines' cancellation, it hit me even harder than most; not just because I was regularly submitting articles to Dragon, but because I had essentially *just started*. I was hoping to do that for a good long time, or at least as long as Paizo was in charge of it all. (We even had one more pending submission - *fingers crossed* that it will show up in one of the last three issues.) I have a number of unanswered queries in the cooker, so who knows that WotC will do with those; I'd imagine if they want to see something from us we will still write it, but will we send in more queries? That remains to be seen. But enough about me...
From the sound of things, Dragon and Dungeon are not going to be totally thrown out, even if they are changing drastically. They'll probably become some sort of e-magazine. I hate the idea, personally. If they don't have some kind of way to preview the content, I'm sure I won't get any of it. I may not anyway, depending on how things look. I can't take any attitude but "wait and see," and my feelings are very pessimistic at the moment. I can only hope that sales numbers will lead to a return to a print format. Look at any magazine rack in any store. Does it look like they're reducing stock? I haven't seen any such thing. I guess we'll see what Wizards' has in mind, but to quote Han Solo, I've got a bad feeling about this.
Kevin "BOZ" Baase
