Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5397253" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 214: February 1995part 1/8124 pages. Dark elves on the cover, even if their skin is more grey than black. But then, there's both the tedious racism issues that have resulted in alterations in the past, and the fact that grey is better camouflage against cave walls than jet black. Still, this doesn't seem to hurt their popularity, along with that of elves in general. So they're getting another themed issue. Altogether now! <s>boo</s> Yaay! Dwarves'll never catch up at this rate. Oh well. Let's see if they have any particularly unbalanced crunch to offer us. In this issue:Letters: We start off the letters page with some particularly blatant pimping by Tim Beach. Red Steel is perfect for high level games! Well, yes, but dis is still vewy vewy tacky. There is a time and place for self-promotion, and the letters and forum pages are not it. A retirement letter from Ian Reid. He can't keep doing the PbM thing due to life issues. Don't let the games we created die once I'm gone. Not likely they'll be replaced with the internet taking over at the speed it is. A letter from someone who noticed that the TSR staff have been engaging in self-insertion in their spellfire cards. This is a long cheesy tradition in the company, as Mike Nystul, Don Arndt and Dennis Sustarre have demonstrated. I just hope they wipe the cards off afterwards. <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" /> One of our regular cries of help from someone trying to find out of print books. Come on, you have the technology now. Make online downloads available, then we need never worry about this again. <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" /> A heartwarming tale of the magazine going above and beyond the call of duty to deliver to a subscriber. Good customer service does help quite a bit to keep buyers loyal. It's the difference between repeated purchases and going elsewhere. Course, some companies manage to suck at it and still keep going, because they advertise enough that there's always a new sucker. Read the feedback before you buy. Editorial: As with last issue, the editorial suggests that our staff have been made very aware by management that their sales are down, and they'd better start turning things around or face the consequences. But of course making the wrong changes would alienate people and accelerate the decline. So what Dale's asking us to do this time is explain our reasoning behind changing the magazine in one direction or another. Okay, this means that any changes will skew in the direction of the intelligent and erudite readers, which isn't always the path for maximum commercial success, but It's a mistake I'd probably make in their position as well. Better to go out with integrity than to try and produce what a committee says, and probably lose both commercial and critical credibility. So this is one of those no good answer situations. They no longer trust their own vision, and they're following rather than leading. As is often the case, this makes for uncomfortable reading in hindsight. First Quest: Harold Johnson brings a good deal of self-awareness to the writing of this column. Having noticed that many players were rather annoying when young, he one-ups them all by revealing that it's him who was responsible for the creation of Kender. Hrmmm. <_< >_> BURN HIM!!!! Add to that his was the original idea for A4, a classic instance of player screwage inflicted upon thousands, and I think he has earned his place in the deepest circle of gaming hell, somewhere between Byron Hall and the Blume Brothers. <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" /> The rest of his article is a whole bunch of firsts. The first time he played, the first time he DM'd, the first time he ran at a convention. It's so hard to choose which was most significant. It's certainly entertaining reading, and highlights that gaming is a collaborative process, with lots of people beyond the actual writers contributing to forming books. I just wonder if the other participants remember things the same way.</blockquote>

Verification