Dragon/WotC conspiracy article

[Monte At Home]

How strange.

Dragon has never (under TSR, WoTC or Paizo) been an independant magazine, at least in the sense that the powers that be that oversee the game Dungeons & Dragons don't also oversee/have approval over all content in the magazine.

Is this not common knowledge? (That's not rhetorical. I thought it was common knowledge. Maybe it's not.) Either way, if it's a conspiracy, it's the worst conspiracy ever.

Dragon's a great magazine and I look forward to getting my copy each month, but if you're expecting to see an article about how D&D sucks in an upcoming issue, well, get ready to wait quite a while.

 

[robberbaron]

White Dwarf and Dragon are about the same age but, yes, WD did become a single-games firm magazine way before Dragon.

If you want D&D, get Dragon. If not, get some other 'zine.

As an aside, WD did rather a lot of D&D in the early days.
It had its fair share of horribly unbalanced character classes and magic items, even before UA came out, but printed some pretty fine adventures.
Many of its reader-created monsters went into the UK-produced Fiend Folio, including the Shadow Demon (Plane Sailing take a bow here) seen in the D&D cartoon.

Just so's you know.

 

[RichGreen]

White Dwarf

Hi,

White Dwarf wasn't always a house organ. The first few dozen issues were pre-Warhammer and featured D&D, Runequest, Traveller and laterCall of Cthulhu and others. Many of the monsters in the original 1E Fiend Folio (the githyanki being the most famous) appeared in White Dwarf's Fiend Factory column. Dragon was very expensive and hard to get hold in the UK at that time (1980) and White Dwarf was doing an excellent job. Once it switched to covering Warhammer only, I stopped getting it.

As an aside, Games Workshop in 1980 was one shop in Hammersmith, London, importing games from the US and distributing Citadel Minatures. They even published the 1E Player's Handbook & Monster Manual as softbacks for £4.99. They fell to bits quite quickly

Hasn't Dragon always been D&D/TSR only? The only coverage of non TSR games I remember were Rick Swan's review column (which was very good, and did sometimes criticize TSR modules) and the Dragon Project (dragons for different RPG systems).

Cheers


Richard

 

[d4]

Hasn't Dragon always been D&D/TSR only? The only coverage of non TSR games I remember were Rick Swan's review column (which was very good, and did sometimes criticize TSR modules) and the Dragon Project (dragons for different RPG systems).

nope. back in the '80s Dragon used to have articles covering several different game systems, even non-TSR games.

 

[robberbaron]

Aside2:
Oh man, I remember Games Workshop in Hammersmith!
Every time we went in (generally once a month) we'd look at the "Imperial Dragon" - 12" or so long in metal - and wish for the sort of cash needed to own it.

White Dwarf was affordable and English, Dragon was expensive and American (quite good, though).
Guess what, we bought White Dwarf.

 

[Dark Jezter]

http://www.silven.com/adnd.asp?case=show&id=292

This article basically is the author's conspiracy theory that Paizo and Dragon are really just WotC's publishing arm; that somehow they aren't a "magazine" because they don't actually engage in journalism for either the RPG field as a whole, or even the d20 RPG field. What's more, he wishes that Dragon would just admit what it is (a magazine for just D&D) instead of trying to hide it in the fine print (apparently he missed the "100% Official Dungeons & Dragons content" section on the cover).

Honestly, why write an article saying that something so blatantly obvious is some sort of shady deal?

No way! Is the author of that article seriously saying that Dragon only covers D&D?

Yeah, right. Next thing you'll be telling me is that Field & Stream covers hunting and fishing rather than home stereo equipment.

 

[d4]

No way! Is the author of that article seriously saying that Dragon only covers D&D?

it's worse than that! Dragon only covers half of D&D! to get the other half you have to buy Dungeon also!

what a scam!

 

[johnsemlak]

nope. back in the '80s Dragon used to have articles covering several different game systems, even non-TSR games.

Just to add to that point, Dragon used ot have an insert sci-fi section called Ares, which later became an independant publication (short-lived I believe).

Dragon certainly used to support other games, such as Traveller and all the TSR games like Top Secret, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, etc.

What's being left out here is that the Polyhedron section of Dungeon does support non-D&D and even non WotC stuff. A recent Dungeon issue had a Freeport adventure, and there's support for Star Wars d20 and other stuff in Poly.

Not to mention that Polyhedron PDF promotion a few months ago.

 

[BASHMAN]

Old Dragon Magazine

Yes, but you have to remember that back in the day, Dragon DID discuss non D&D rpgs. That was before d20 cornered the market.

The more pressing issue is that I had heard that d20 threatened to take away a publisher's d20 liscence if they continued to publish non d20 material. Hence 7th Sea turning into Swashbuckling adventures. I don't know how true this is, however, because I think the company that makes Ravenloft d20 is under the auspices of White Wolf.

Maybe what it meant was that they could not publish a d20 system version of a game and still publish a non d20 system version of the SAME Game, i.e. that is why there is no Vampire: d20 Masquerade, and the 7th Sea roll n' Keep system is gone.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Yes, but you have to remember that back in the day, Dragon DID discuss non D&D rpgs. That was before d20 cornered the market.

The more pressing issue is that I had heard that d20 threatened to take away a publisher's d20 liscence if they continued to publish non d20 material. Hence 7th Sea turning into Swashbuckling adventures. I don't know how true this is, however, because I think the company that makes Ravenloft d20 is under the auspices of White Wolf.

Maybe what it meant was that they could not publish a d20 system version of a game and still publish a non d20 system version of the SAME Game, i.e. that is why there is no Vampire: d20 Masquerade, and the 7th Sea roll n' Keep system is gone.

Patently untrue, the lot of it. No offense, but you heard wrong.