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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ranes" data-source="post: 649884" data-attributes="member: 4826">Darn it! I was just about to go to bed...Okay, I would remove the fiction. I'd keep the FR and Greyhawk material to a minimum but not remove it entirely. I'd axe Gary Gygax's column (sorry but...), hire a sub-editor who can spot the difference between 'it's' and 'its'. (The editor makes that gaffe in the editorial of 304; I like to think that I'm paying for high quality editorial, not stuff riddled with elementary errors. While I'm on the subject, these sorts of errors have been cropping up more in Dungeon recently, too.) As another poster said, I'd like to see clearer status of Sage Advice material. On the whole, I find the majority of the content colourful, readable and useful.Somebody else mentioned moving all the ads to the back. That would never happen. Periodicals can charge more for a right hand facing page than a left hand one and more still for an ad dropped next to or within a specific article. Inside and outside back covers are also prime ad real estate. We need Dragon to generate as much ad revenue as possible. If the economics of magazine publishing in the States are anything like they are in the UK, the cover price only recoups the cost of printing. And I know that distribution in the States is more expensive than here in Britain.Finally, I'd do something about the cover. A more mature approach to art and headline writing, a return to the old days, would suit me. And I suspect it would suit Dragon more than its staff seem to believe. A publishing truism is that cover art does not make a cover art! What that means is that the cover has a function that must be fulfilled. That function is to make the beholder become a purchaser. There are so many computer games magazines today that each has to try to out-do the other with ever-busier cover designs and lowest common denominator pseudo-shock headlines. It seems to me - and a reply to a letter in a recent issue of Dragon lends credence to my suspicion - that Dragon has deliberately followed suit in an attempt to whammy the potential consumer with a critical hit to the optic nerve. Where I go out on a limb and what I have no evidence for is the proposition that Dragon does not need to do this. It has no effective competition. It does need to attract new readers but it can only do so from the D&D user base; its content is never going to reach out to anyone else and the D&D user is going to be aware of Dragon. I'd like it therefore to adopt - or return to - the appearance of a journal about games of the imagination and a have little less of the comic book influence. Don't get me wrong, I do think the cover art is good and I do think the headlines are clever, usually. It's just that their style is just a little too tabloid for my taste.Anyway, all of that and page three elves. And dwarves. And half-orcs.</blockquote>

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