Today I renewed my subscription I think for at least the sixth time to this magazine. Those of you who don’t play D&D or other tabletop fantasy RPGS, you better stop reading, this won’t interest you. Especially those who I keep seeing at work glued to WoW day-in, day-out. For my fellow DMs/GMs,Dungeon is a must, even if you don’t like D&D but prefer the competition like RoleMaster and GURPs or the d20 variants (Iron Heroes, Conan and Arcana Evolved). As a DM, I just don’t have the time to write an original adventure complete with plot, villains, allies, monsters, treasure, etc. These magazine is a $40/year crutch that has proven to be worth every penny because it’s easier to stitch the published adventures into my overall campaign than to build it from scratch. Ever since the magazine went monthly in the last couple years, it has become even better.
Yeah, this sounds like a puff piece and I’m being a whore for Paizo Publishing (WOTC sold the magazines off several years ago). But let’s be realistic. The great, original modules that introduced White Plume Mountain and the Tomb of Horrors to D&D 25 years ago aren’t going to happen anymore. The economics of publishing sadly ended this in the 1990s (if you have a gaming group of five to seven people, only one person buys them). WOTC and the S&S Alliance have slowed their output to a crawl. Outside of buying PDF downloads of those past greats (which you’ll have to convert to the 3.5 rules too), scavenging through your local Half-Price Books and getting outbid on eBay, where else is there to go to get your “module fix?”
To be fair, not all the content is solid in my opinion. I tend to glance over the three rather weak comics since the A-list strips are online anyway (The Order of the Stick, PVP and Dork Tower). The columns can be hit or miss but if it’s written by Monte Cook, Ray Winninger or Sean Reynolds, it’s likely I’ll read even if I disagree. They used to have Wil Wheaton but he disappeared without an explanation, no biggie though since he does a videogame column for The Onion now. Lastly, not all the adventures work for me, especially if they involve Eberron and Forgotten Realms. However, the good easily outweighs the awful. There are my friend Lazz’s great maps (they tend to be illustrations), gaps filled in on old Greyhawk legends [Dragotha and Kyuss have appeared recently] through adventures and it’s filled with plots you can easily drop in for your own home-made campaign or world or with any of the numerous published settings. If you’re just a player though, don’t peek. That’s cheating.