Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 1308941" data-attributes="member: 2174">One of the reasons we dropped down to four Mini-Games per year was to open up a little space for support for d20 Modern, Star Wars, the Living Greyhawk Journal, and other d20 Industry news and support (this is where the Freeport adventure falls). I'm eager to see how people feel about #107, because it's representative of one direction we might be taking the magazine (there are a few others currently under discussion). The Dark•Matter Mini-Game appears in issue #108, which is already at the printer. It's really, really lovely, with solid game design by Andy Collins and some absolutely killer art from original Dark•Matter artist Ashley Wood. I suspect people will like this one a lot.The "Monster Hunting Guide" in #107 also supports d20 Modern, as does the 2-page Global Positioning map feature. We're doing our best to support d20 Modern, but Dungeon is first and foremost a D&D magazine, and if we're going to err, we're most often going to err in favor of our "core constituancy," if you will.We've been trying to play a pretty delicate balancing act for more than a year now with this magazine, and it continues to be a struggle to satisfy all parts of our audience, D&D freaks* and d20 Modern/Star Wars enthusiasts alike.In a perfect world, the content currently in Dungeon would be split between three magazines (anyone remember Star Wars Gamer?), but that world ended a while ago. And it wasn't particularly profitable.So we'll continue to tinker until we find a formula that works. In the meantime, I'm happy to report that Polyhedron's purpose has largely been fulfilled. When I shifted the magazine's focus away from a strict RPGA house organ to a more commercially viable "anything goes" experimental d20 magazine, the d20 market was largely crowded with monster bestiaries and dwarf books. Nowadays, it's not just Joe Goodman cranking out strange, off-kilter d20 products. Fantasy Flight even went so far as to co-opt the Mini-Game concept in their own "Horizon" line, and more power to them, so far as I'm concerned. Weird games like X-Crawl have popped out of the woodwork, and d20 companies like Green Ronin are even producing a healthy amount of support for d20 Modern. Oh, and everyone got yet another version of Gamma World.I'm not sure what role, if any, the experimentation and editorial voice of the last couple years of Polyhedron had in any of these developments, but the fact remains that the contemporary d20 scene is FAR more varied, and far more experimental and innovative than it was when Polyhedron started down the "definitive d20" pathway. Despite the fact that we produce fewer Mini-Games than we did in the past, there's simply more material in the marketplace for fans of off-kilter ideas than there has ever been before.And, at least from the perspective of this self-styled jack of all gaming trades, that's a good thing for everybody.--Erik MonaEditor-in-ChiefDungeon MagazinePS> What we've got cooking for Dungeon #112 is going to blow everyone away. Mark my words. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />* I mean that lovingly, of course. I count myself in this august body.</blockquote>

Verification