Gary Gygax’s two sons Ernie and Luke, along with several other veterans of the industry, have obtained the rights to the name “TSR” and launched a new RPG magazine called “Gygax” this weekend.
I rarely get the chance to play Dungeons and Dragons (or any RPG’s for that matter), but I signed up for a subscription out of nostalgia. I had a subscription to “Dragon” magazine when I was in junior high, and it seems obvious that “Gygax” is meant to resemble the “Dragon” magazine of the early 80s.
If you go to the website, you can see the cover of Issue 1. The “Gygax” logo uses the same font as “Dragon”, the price and issue number are in a similar font and location, and there three bullet points highlighting the issue’s contents just like the old Dragon magazine.
Hopefully, unlike the old Dragon, there will be less “filler” articles. “Gygax” is only a quarterly, so I’m hoping the reduced quantity of issues means more quality content. Now if the editors could only convince artist D. A. Trampier to return and finish his “Wormy” comic…
I understand the page numbers are determined by rolling a 20-sided die, then looking up several arcane index figures and performing several minutes of calculations. They’ve killed three indexers already.
I have fond memories of Dragon magazine and the many, many hours that were spent gaming in my early teens. I went ahead and ordered a 1 year subscription. At the very least I can bag them and keep them with my single box of comics, to be sold in order to finance my retirement party or something in <mumble mumble> years.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to knock “Dragon” in my post. I had subscriptions for the issues from the #60’s up to #90’s, and I absolutely loved the magazine for that run.
There was something fantastic in each issue. Usually several things. But because it was published twelve times a year, they had to pad the space between the covers. So for every “Nine Hells” article or Tom Wham game, there’d be a “Barrels, Barrels, Barrels: Containers in Your Campaign” or “What to Feed a Finicky Familiar”.
So I’m hoping that the quarterly format for “Gygax” means that only the really good stuff gets printed.
Now, let me start by saying that I’m a total outsider to this community. My only experiences with D&D come from playing Neverwinter Nights (the BioWare game from the early 2000’s) and listening to the Penny Arcade (ft. Scott Kurtz & Wil Wheaton) D&D podcasts. And reading miscellaneous things online. Also, the only tabletop gaming experience I have is a few games of Battletech.
Having said all of that, I don’t get this. Aren’t hobbyist magazines an artifact of a bygone era? I mean, look at all the gaming magazines that are folding/going exclusively digital/hemorrhaging subscribers. It just feels like going back in time to be the last man on the Titanic as it sinks.
I’m not saying anything about the quality or quantity of the magazine, just observing that it seems like a dead-end business venture.
Ah, I see. I enjoyed reading both the ‘big’ and the ‘small’ articles, but I think in many cases our game actually got more use out of the small ones. The cantrips, material spell components, poisons, and healing herbs articles all became key references in our main campaign, for example. Whereas we never actually had expeditions to other planes, never needed the combat statistics for demigods.
The timing for this launch is certainly right. “Old-school” roleplaying is currently making a comeback. Smaller companies have been releasing rule-systems, adventures, and miniatures based on the first editions of Dungeons and Dragons for several years now. Just last year Wizards of the Coast (the company that owns the rights to “Dungeons and Dragons”) released reprints of the first-edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, and more reprints are planned.
That being said, “Gygax” will also be released in pdf form, and is only a quarterly. I don’t think the publisher is expecting to sell anywhere near as many print copies as “Dragon” did in its heyday.
Right, okay. I didn’t mean the hobbyist magazine is a dinosaur, I meant the hobbyist magazine is a dinosaur. There’s obviously a market for one that’s not beholden to a specific game’s current edition, I just meant that it would make more sense to make it a website with subscription content for e-readers & tablet PC’s/iPads.
But if they’re also distributing it digitally from the get-go, then that changes things.
But if it’s meant to include things that would actually be used as resources during a game session, like the Dragon articles I mentioned, paper is actually what you want. At least I would.
Ah, that’s a good point. Still, the odds that a given group of 3-5 players and a DM doesn’t have a suitable mobile device between them are only going to get smaller and smaller over time (and think about being able to do keyword searches to find a given piece of text or rule right away rather than having to scan through one or more pages). It just seemed like a subset of a niche to me, but again I am an outsider. I just wouldn’t be surprised to hear of them halting the physical copies in a few years and going all digital, the fact that they are doing both from the get-go shows they’re aware of the situation and adjusting for it though.
Speaking just for my group, we do have a variety of devices at the table, and could bring in more, but we still end up usually hitting the paper books. I’m not entirely sure why, but that’s just the way it seems to work out.
After two months I haven’t received my first issue of Gygax Magazine. I tried emailing their customer service a couple times now but didn’t get a reply. I checked out the Gygax Magazine Twitter account and I can see several other people complaining of the same problem: no magazine and no communication.
Oddly enough, the editors seem quite eager to quickly reply to any public tweets. Which is annoying, 'cause I don’t want to have to create a Twitter account in order to deal with this problem.
This has been quite the letdown. If it were any other game company I wouldn’t care so much (I’m only out $35 for the subscription if it never ends up arriving), but this is supposed to be TSR. Kind of a stain on the Gygax and Dragon names.
I was really excited when I made this thread. Wish I had something good to update it with, but alas, I don’t.
staggers off to drown his sorrows in old back issues of Dragon
Paper books are just easier to flip through. Since D&D books are mainly reference, it’s easy to compare tables on two pages, or quickly switch between your level up table and class abilities table. E-books and PDFs just aren’t very good at this, even with built-in bookmark and annotation features.
Super truth; I have lots of games where I have both PDF and paper book versions (And one game that I ONLY have in PDF right now and am waiting for the ‘real version’ before I try to run it) and the book is inevitably much easier to reference. Paging through a PDF file is just a nuisance, somehow.
Definitely. The best medium for digital copies is a cross-hyperlinked series of articles and lists, like this. I use that almost to the exclusion of paper books when I’m running 3.5.
I’d rather have the pdf version and print out what I think I’ll need when I think I’ll need it. Just because it starts digital, that doesn’t mean it has to stay digital.
I read the Writer’s Guidelines, and they show some thought and a sense of humor. “Please send sketched cartoon proposals only. Don’t go killing yourself executing finished comic panels before you know if you saved versus publication.”
