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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9251556" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron 94/153: Sep/Oct 2002part 6/10Table Talk: We’ve had one big shakeup after another lately with barely time to get into a routine before it’s all change again. Now here’s another one, as WotC’s periodicals department is cut loose to form Paizo in yet another cost-cutting exercise. No longer can they rely on the big Hasbro dollars to prop them up, they’ve got to swim or sink under their own power. It would be ironic if that one day leads to them creating their own company that sometimes actually outsells it’s parent, and gets a lot more critical acclaim for their worldbuilding. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> They won’t be changing how the issues look on the front end, but I already know from the Dragon run that no longer being part of the same office results in the WotC and Paizo staff cultures gradually diverging in some quite interesting ways.  One of those points where history could have gone very differently if someone else had been in charge or sales went a little differently. Now it’s time to experience it all over again from a slightly different angle. Bolt & Quiver discover the terrible truth behind the Tomb of Doom. Surprise! It was capitalism all along and everyone has to pay at least a little.  News From the Top: Following straight on from the editorial, the big shakeups in how they organise things continues. They introduced a free tier of memberships a few years ago. Then they tried to take it away last year. That must have backfired badly, because now they’re making ALL the memberships free! There goes any pretence that the RPGA supports itself rather than being a loss leader for WotC, which is very odd considering they’re doing the exact opposite with their treatment of the periodicals department. They are of course trying to avoid alienating people by converting their existing subscription money into Chessex goodies, but they don’t explain their motivations any more than they did in Dragon and I’d be very interested in knowing what was going on behind the scenes that led to these decisions. As with the Paizo business, they do say they’ll try to keep things going smoothly on the front end and continue to develop their GM training program, but I’d trust the word of people who were on the ground at the time more than pronouncements from the top. There’s a lot of drama that gets buried under forced positivity going on at the moment from the looks of things.</blockquote>

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