D&D General What articles would a good & free, fanmade D&D magazine have?

Not a Decepticon · Sunday at 8:06 PM

Paul Farquhar said:
I wouldn’t read a free magazine. If someone goes to the effort to make something for free it’s because they have an axe to grind.

What a deeply cynical view of the world, it saddens me to see such opinion.

Lanefan · Monday at 9:15 AM

Paul Farquhar said:
I wouldn’t read a free magazine. If someone goes to the effort to make something for free it’s because they have an axe to grind.

Some of us still see this as a hobby rather than a profession.

As for the OP's question: there's a missing element - is this proposed magazine intended to exclusively focus on 5e and-or 5.5e, or is it intended to cover all editions of D&D at least to some extent?

One of the more interesting things about early-TSR Dragon mgazines was that they threw concept ideas - new classes, new or revised mechanics, and so on - out there as trial balloons, to be adopted, modified, or ignored as each table saw fit. This same sort of idea would seem to be fertile ground for a fan-made magazine.

Not a Decepticon · Monday at 9:57 AM

Lanefan said:
As for the OP's question: there's a missing element - is this proposed magazine intended to exclusively focus on 5e and-or 5.5e, or is it intended to cover all editions of D&D at least to some extent?

Or even D&D-adjecent games like Pathfinder or any OSR title?

Cergorach · Monday at 10:57 AM

Honestly, a generic D&D fanmade magazine would not hold that much interest for me. As someone mentioned, there's so much out there already, and so many other forms of media that fill a similar space. Also not all (fanbased) magazines are created equally, with so much media already available, do I have room for a generic (fanmade) magazine about D&D, even if it's good? Something else would have to be removed or fall off my existing list for that to happen, so it needs to be very good and/or perfectly aligning with what I'm doing at that time D&D wise...

I collected Dragon and Dungeon magazine for a long time, but even then I didn't read it often cover to cover. Even times where I bought them because I always bought them and didn't want voids in my collection... Often going back to them when they had certain themes.

I suspect that something that wasn't generic D&D, but a magazine for a specific setting would be far more useful, folks that wanted to do something in that setting would pick it up for ideas. Similar like the previous Threshold magazine previously mentioned. I'm prepping for a Dark Sun one-shot and am digging deep into the Internet (besides the official products and the Dragon articles) for fanmade stuff. Not everything is what I'm looking for with widely different levels of quality, but sometimes I get good ideas from even the low quality stuff that people shared.

There's also a reason why (free) magazines die, not enough readers vs the work being done. Realize how much work making a (free) magazine is, when you only have a very small distribution, motivation wanes and magazines quickly die...

I wish you luck!

Maenalis · Monday at 11:44 AM

Not a Decepticon said:
Or even D&D-adjecent games like Pathfinder or any OSR title?

We were only thinking 5.5.

DEFCON 1 · Monday at 11:52 AM

Reviews of WotC products? No, thank you
Reviews of DMGuild pdfs? No, thank you
Fiction book reviews? No, thank you
Anime reviews? No, thank you
Fantasy movie reviews? No, thank you
Physical product highlights? (i.e. Dicetower, minis, DM screens etc.) Perhaps
New lore to already existing settings? Story hooks or new historical events in isolated towns in those settings? Sure
New Settings? No, thank you
New crunch? (new subclasses, feats etc.) Perhaps
New monsters? Sure
New magic items? Sure
Rules variations? (New chase rules etc.) Perhaps
Community highlights (like summary of recent reddit posts or DnDBeyond forum posts) No, thank you
Short stories? No, thank you
Session reports? No, thank you

Basically, the same sort of stuff you find in a blog. The kind of things you'd find in Gnome Stew, Keith Baker's Eberron blog, or The Alexandrian. But to be honest... an actual 'zine' is less interesting or useful than just a standard online blog because the blog can be Searched more easily than packages of articles that have been bundled together into a magazine format.

Paul Farquhar · Tuesday at 9:09 AM

Not a Decepticon said:
What a deeply cynical view of the world, it saddens me to see such opinion.

Insufficient cynicism makes people vulnerable to manipulation by influencers, politicians, fraudsters, cults etc. It concerns me that people are so critical of cynicism. It's like vaccine denial.

Misanthrope Prime · Tuesday at 2:14 PM

There needs to be some kind of serialized narrative with cliffhangers that'll keep fans speculating between issues. Maybe a comic book like Snarf Quest, personally I think that someone should try combining the popularity of Actual Plays like Critical Role with the Japanese tradition of the "Replay" that gave us Record of Lodoss War: Have an author write up their most recent session of their campaign as a short story that fans can follow along with.

Misanthrope Prime · Tuesday at 2:16 PM

Not a Decepticon said:
What a deeply cynical view of the world, it saddens me to see such opinion.

bedir than · Tuesday at 2:53 PM

Paul Farquhar said:
Insufficient cynicism makes people vulnerable to manipulation by influencers, politicians, fraudsters, cults etc. It concerns me that people are so critical of cynicism. It's like vaccine denial.

Vaccines actually work, while your cynicism convinced you that EN World isn't free and isn't worth reading while you read and comment on it for free