Folks,
I'd like to thank Brown Jenkin, our lovely human-faced Lovecraftian rat, for posting a summary of the "Paizo on the Mike" Origins seminar. He did a great job covering the basics.
I'm currently in the process of getting up to speed on the Dungeon "side" of the magazine, learning the process by which adventures are accepted and developed, and training in our new Associate Editor, James Jacobs (whom you may remember from such adventures as Flood Season and the Porphyry House Horror). Part of this "getting to know the magazine" process involves evaluating newsstand reader, retailer, and subscriber comments in an attempt to improve the magazine.
It's clear to me that the last year or so has been a rocky one for many of our readers due to some of the business-motivated decisions that have been made about the magazine. I'll do my best to listen to the concerns of our readers and make changes to the magazine's format based upon those concerns. I advocate a bit of patience, here, as any change I make won't start to seep into the magazine until issue #104 at the earliest. We just sent 102 to the printer today, and the content for #103 is largely set in stone (although I have made some adjustments based upon reader feedback).
I should note at this point that I won't possibly be able to please everyone with these changes. I will not, for example, be getting rid of Polyhedron to please those readers who don't care for it.
For the foreseeable future, Dungeon and Polyhedron are linked. That's not going to change. We are going to get rid of the "flippy" format, and will be giving Polyhedron an interior cover rather than producing two different print runs just to satisfy the post office. Although we believe Polyhedron "deserves" its own cover, the flippy is just more trouble than it's worth.
We'll also be scaling back Mini-Games to roughly 4 per year (certainly no fewer) instead of roughly 6 per year. This isn't because we're running out of genres (far from it!), but because we want more room to devote to exciting games like d20 Modern, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, and support for our own Mini-Games (issue #102 has follow-up material for both Pulp Heroes and Iron Lords of Jupiter).
I want to get away from forcing our readers to remember which is a "big" Dungeon month and which has more Polyhedron content. Figuring out whether to buy an issue of Dungeon shouldn't be an intense memory/math exercise. Up until now, a lot of readers have looked at the Dungeon/Poly split as some kind of contest. It isn't. When Poly has a Mini-Game, it'll only have a Mini-Game, and that game might take up the bulk of the issue. The other 8 months of the year, Poly will be as large as it needs to be to cover the topics we want to cover, but it won't take up more than half of the issue by any means.
The Dungeon side of the magazine _must_ be about the adventures. Notice that I used the plural form. It'll be a long time before the readers get a Dungeon with only one adventure in it again. That was an unhappy cosequence of the shift to monthly while the editors had been planning for a bigger bi-monthly book, and I'm happy to say we're past that rocky stretch and don't plan to return any time soon.
Look for more adventures per issue. For the most part, that'll mean shorter adventures. How am I going to work this? That's what I'm trying to figure out. But I'm committed to giving our readers a number of choices each and every issue. If I can work my magic correctly, we'll still have room for huge adventures like the Adventure Path, but I'd rather that be the exception than the norm.
I know a lot of you are not incredibly pleased with the recent direction of the magazine. I'll do my best to address those concerns by making changes (some subtle, no doubt) to the magazine's editorial mix. For those of you considering dropping your subscriptions, I ask you to take a look at the cherished issues of past years and give us a little time to woo you back. For those of you who are pleased with the current direction of the magazine, especially fans of Polyhedron, stick with us. We've got a lot of incredible stuff planned for you.
Lastly, I urge all interested readers to drop me an email at
polyhedron@paizo.com with suggestions on what you like or don't like about the magazine. What do you want to see in Dungeon? What are you tired of seeing in Dungeon? Drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.
Thanks,
Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dungeon/Polyhedron Magazine
