The cool thing is that change is fun. It's exciting. It's like the first day of school every day. But like the first day of school, it's also terrifying. We know what we want to do. We know how to go about doing it, but as is true of all change in life, nothing ever works as smoothly as you hope. The trick is to plan for the bumps in the road the best you can.
What does this mean for Dungeon (and to the same extent, Dragon)? Well, it means that while we know where we want to go, we know the type of content we want to bring you, and we're doing what's necessary to reach that point, we're going to hit some speed bumps along the way. As I mentioned recently on one of our message boards, it would be great if we could snap our fingers and magically and instantly transition to this new format. But that just ain't gonna happen.
Issues in the Coming Months
In the intervening months between now and the release of 4th Edition, we're going to be collecting our issues a little differently from you've come to expect.
At the beginning of November, we'll be releasing a pdf version of Dragon #360 and Dungeon #151. Future issues will be collected into a single issue every two months until the release of 4th Edition. So you'll see a collected issue at the beginning of January, 2008 (Dragon #361 and Dungeon #152), the beginning of March (Dragon #362 and Dungeon #153), and the beginning of May (Dragon #363 and Dungeon #154).
Dragon #364 and Dungeon #155 are currently scheduled to be our first all 4th Edition issues, with new layouts, more content, and all fully integrated with the new D&D Insider toolset. After those first 4th Edition issues, we'll resume a monthly schedule for both magazines.
Our focus in the coming months will be to find these speed bumps, squish 'em flat, and figure these things out. We've always viewed this time between the announcement at Gen Con and the launch of 4th Edition as a period of transition for the magazines. We're learning what we can and can't do with a digital magazine (and the list of "can't dos" is pretty dang short). We're trying to get a better grasp on the content that really brings you, our fans, back to us every month. And we're also trying to prepare you for a brand new edition of D&D while simultaneously help you close out your existing 3rd Edition campaigns.
We're going to be relying on you heavily to give us your feedback on everything from the specific types of content you want to see (specific being the operative word here) to the layout of our pdfs. We're going to be changing things on a monthly, if not weekly, basis. It's not often that a magazine gets to completely re-envision itself like this, but that's what we're looking to do with both Dungeon and Dragon. Heck, that's one of the main reasons why the magazines are free during this period.
