Dragon (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dragon shipped its final printed issue, number 359, in September 2007. That closed a run that started three decades earlier, when the magazine backed a young wargaming hobby. The last print copies reached readers in mid-August 2007, yet the title itself did not go quiet. Wizards of the Coast, which by then held the copyright, moved Dragon online and kept the same numbering the print edition had built up. Behind that quiet ending sits a story of magazines that split apart and merged back together. Publishers traded the license more than once, and its pages helped invent fictional worlds still played today.

  Who first put Dragon into print, and why did a wargaming company need a second magazine to do it? How did control of the title move between TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and a company called Paizo Publishing? And what became of Dragon once its print numbering finally ran out?

• 2. Born From Wargaming

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  In 1975, TSR, Inc. began publishing a magazine called The Strategic Review. At the time, roleplaying games were treated as a subgenre of the wargaming industry, and the magazine covered wargaming broadly alongside Dungeons & Dragons. But within a year, the runaway popularity of Dungeons & Dragons showed that the game had spun off into its own industry, separate from wargaming.

  In 1976, TSR canceled The Strategic Review after seven issues and replaced it with two new titles. Little Wars covered miniature wargaming, while The Dragon covered roleplaying games. Little Wars lasted twelve issues before folding into Dragon, its thirteenth issue printed as part of Dragon's own issue 22. The Dragon itself debuted in June 1976.

  TSR co-founder Gary Gygax later described the decision behind naming the magazine. "When I decided that The Strategic Review was not the right vehicle, hired Tim Kask as a magazine editor for Tactical Studies Rules, and named the new publication he was to produce The Dragon, I thought we would eventually have a great periodical to serve gaming enthusiasts worldwide," Gygax said. "At no time did I ever contemplate so great a success or so long a lifespan."

  The magazine went on to seed ideas that later became official parts of Dungeons & Dragons, including rules, spells, monsters, and magic items. The clearest example is the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. It first appeared through a series of Dragon articles in the 1980s, written by its creator, Ed Greenwood. Forgotten Realms became one of the primary campaign worlds for official Dungeons & Dragons products starting in 1987, the same year the magazine's name shifted. The cover had read simply Dragon since July 1980, then changed to Dragon Magazine starting in November 1987.

  A decade later, that same title would pass out of TSR's hands entirely.

• 3. Changing Hands

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  Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and all of its intellectual property, Dragon Magazine included, in 1997. Production of the magazine then moved from Wisconsin to Washington state. Two years later, in 1999, Wizards of the Coast itself was bought by Hasbro, Inc.

  Dragon Magazine suffered a five-month gap between issues 236 and 237 as the changeover took hold. TSR kept publishing it as a Wizards of the Coast subsidiary starting in September 1997. That arrangement lasted until January 2000, when Wizards of the Coast became the listed publisher outright. Starting with the June 2000 issue, the word "magazine" disappeared from the cover, returning the title to simply Dragon.

  In 2002, a company called Paizo Publishing acquired the license to publish both Dragon and Dungeon from Wizards of the Coast. Paizo took over Dragon starting in September 2002 and tied it more closely to its sister publication. It ran articles that supported multi-issue Dungeon adventures such as Age of Worms and Savage Tide. Paizo also introduced Class Acts, a monthly feature offering one or two pages of ideas for developing specific character classes.

  On the 18th of April 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced it would not renew Paizo's licenses for Dragon and Dungeon. It chose to move both magazines online instead. Paizo published the magazine's last print editions before the license changed hands again. That August, Wizards of the Coast unveiled the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It announced that D&D Insider subscribers would get new online versions of both Dungeon and Dragon. The subscription also included tools for building campaigns and managing character sheets. In its online form, Dragon kept publishing articles for D&D players, with rules data feeding directly into the D&D Character Builder and other online tools.

  Six years later, an announcement inside the magazine's own pages would spell out how that online run would end.

• 4. Inside The Pages

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  Many of the gaming world's most well-known writers, designers, and artists placed work inside Dragon's pages. For most of its run, the magazine regularly published fantasy fiction, whether short stories or excerpts from novels. That habit faded after the 1990s, when fiction became a rare guest in its pages.

  Issue 305 offered one late holdout, an excerpt from George R.R. Martin's novel A Feast for Crows, later a Hugo nominee. Dragon also ran book reviews covering fantasy and science fiction novels, and it occasionally reviewed films, including the television movie of Mazes and Monsters.

  From its earliest days through issue 274, published in August 2000, Dragon covered articles for multiple versions of Dungeons & Dragons and other gaming systems. Issue 274 narrowed that scope, restricting content to 3rd Edition D&D and other games built on Wizards of the Coast's d20 System. When the 3.5 Edition update arrived in July 2003, issue 309 onward carried only 3.5 material, under a masthead reading "100% Official Dungeons & Dragons." The magazine narrowed again with issue 364, switching to exclusively 4th Edition content when that edition launched in June 2008.

  Underneath those edition-locked articles ran columns and comics that outlived every edition change.

• 5. Recurring Features

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  A long-running column called Sage Advice offered official answers to Dungeons & Dragons questions that players mailed in. Most of the magazine's other articles supplied supplementary game material, new prestige classes, races, and monsters for Dungeon Masters to add to their tables. Other articles offered tips and suggestions for players and Dungeon Masters. Some tackled meta-gaming concerns directly, such as how players could get along with each other at the table.

  By the end of its print run, Dragon carried four ongoing comics. They were Nodwick, Dork Tower, Zogonia, and a specialized version of the webcomic The Order of the Stick. Earlier decades had featured a different lineup of gamer-oriented strips. These included Knights of the Dinner Table, Finieous Fingers, What's New with Phil & Dixie, Wormy, Yamara, and SnarfQuest.

  Dragon's "Ecology of..." series originally spoke in the voice of Elminster, a fictional sage who examined a single Dungeons & Dragons monster in close detail. Under Paizo's editorship, those ecology articles shifted toward game mechanics and away from narrative and description. The magazine's own submission guidelines told writers that Ecology pieces "should have a hunter's guidebook approach, although it should not be written 'in voice.'" Those guidelines spelled out an exact format, leaving little room for artistic license.

  In the early 1980s, nearly every issue included a roleplaying adventure, a simple board game, or a special supplement, such as a cardboard cutout castle. Tom Wham's Snit's Revenge, The Awful Green Things from Outer Space, and File 13 all began life as supplements tucked inside The Dragon. Those bonus features grew scarce after Dungeon magazine launched in 1986 and began publishing several new Dungeons & Dragons adventures in every issue.

  During the 1980s, after TSR bought Simulations Publications Inc., Dragon carried a subsection called Ares Magazine, named for SPI's science fiction and superhero gaming magazine. Pages in that section were set off by a gray border and included write-ups of Marvel Universe characters for TSR's Marvel Super-Heroes game.

  The magazine's early years also produced five "Best of" issues, reprinting well-regarded articles from both The Strategic Review and The Dragon. Between 1996 and 2001, Dragon published an annual thirteenth issue called the Dragon Annual, filled entirely with new material.

  Behind every one of those recurring features sat a rotating cast of editors who decided what made it onto the page.

• 6. Editors And Critics

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  Tim Kask, the editor Gary Gygax hired to launch the magazine, ran it through issue 34. After Jake Jaquet took over for issues 35 through 48, Kim Mohan took the editor-in-chief role. Mohan held it longer than anyone else, across issues 49 through 114 and again from 199 through 217. Roger E. Moore filled the years between those two Mohan stretches, editing issues 115 through 198.

  Erik Mona served as editor-in-chief starting with issue 327, overseeing the magazine through Paizo's ownership of the title. Once Dragon moved online, Chris Youngs edited issues 360 through 387, and Steve Winter carried the magazine through its final digital issues.

  Reviewing the magazine in 1980 for Issue 15 of Abyss, Dave Nalle did not hold back. "The Dragon has always suffered from the stigma of its days as a blatant house organ for TSR," he wrote. "It has gotten better, though it has relapses." Nalle also criticized a tendency to aim too young and an over-abundance of advertising. Even so, he concluded, "TD is a good magazine, because it maintains a standard of quality and presents that quality in high quantity as well."

  Dragon collected the Origins Award for Best Professional Roleplaying Magazine in both 1984 and 1986, honoring the magazine's work from 1984 and 1985 respectively. It also won a Special Award for Outstanding Achievement in 1987, and Best Professional Adventure Gaming Magazine in 1990. Best Professional Gaming Magazine honors followed in 1994 and 1995, with 1995 also bringing induction into the Origins Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame. Later honors included a 2004 Origins Award for Best Game Related Periodical. In 2006, an ENnie Gold Award recognized Best Supplement for the Dragon Compendium Vol. 1. In 2007, Dragon won the Origins Award for Best Non-Fiction Publication.

  None of those honors mentioned what would happen once the presses stopped running and the servers, years later, followed them into silence.

• 7. Hiatus And Rebirth

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  In the September 2013 issue of Dragon, numbered 427, an article by Wizards of the Coast game designer and editor Chris Perkins delivered the news. Both Dragon and its sibling publication, Dungeon, would go on hiatus in January 2014, while the company prepared the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The last online issue to appear was number 430, published in December 2013.

  A new, fully digital publication called Dragon+ launched on the 30th of April 2015, succeeding both of the paused magazines. Advertising agency Dialect built it in collaboration with Wizards of the Coast. The new title broke continuity with its predecessors entirely, restarting its issue count at No. 1. It also shifted to a bi-monthly schedule. Matt Chapman edited the magazine from issue 1. John Houlihan took over between issues 8 and 13, before Chapman returned as editor-in-chief from issue 14 onward.

  Dragon+ branded itself as an app showcasing "what's new in Dungeons & Dragons, from backstory and world information to discussions about what's coming next from the creators and developers of your favorite D&D products." Its pages carried game strategies, current storyline details, interviews, an ongoing comic series, Forgotten Realms lore, fan submissions, and video content. Further material was linked out through Facebook and Twitter.

  Dragon+ ran for 41 issues before its last one appeared in April 2022. Wizards of the Coast confirmed the publication's cancellation in a July 2022 update. On the 15th of November 2022, the company announced that Dragon+ would be pulled from app stores around that date. It also said dragonmag.com would redirect, taking the magazine's content offline for good.

  Long before Dragon+ vanished from app stores, an older attempt to preserve the magazine's back catalogue had already run into trouble of its own.

• 8. Archive And Legacy

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  In 1999, TSR and Wizards of the Coast released a CD-ROM compilation of the magazine's first 250 issues, called the Dragon Magazine Archive. It packaged the run as PDF files, readable through a special viewer, and it included the seven issues of The Strategic Review that had preceded Dragon. Rob Voce directed the project.

  That archive eventually went out of print, following a 2001 court ruling in Greenberg v. National Geographic concerning the reprint rights of comic strips run in Dragon over the years. Paizo Publishing's own policy held that the creators of those comics retained their copyright, complicating any reissue. That policy stood in contrast to a statement TSR itself had printed in Dragon's very first issue: "All material published herein becomes the exclusive property of the publisher unless special arrangements to the contrary are made."

  Pyramid reviewed the archive and judged it "worth the price," though it noted that the software's Windows-only format kept users of other platforms from reading the PDFs on their own. AllGame had complaints about the interface but still recommended picking it up for browsing campaign ideas. Backstab reviewed it as well, in that outlet's 19th issue.

  Anyone hoping to read that archive today still needs a Windows machine and the original viewer software to open its PDF files.