Dungeon (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeon magazine arrived in 1986 with a simple promise: every page would contain an adventure. No reviews, no editorials, no letters section crowding the table of contents. Just modules, scenario after scenario, written by amateur and professional fantasy role-playing writers alike and ready to drop onto a gaming table. The magazine was first published by TSR, Inc. as a bimonthly periodical under the full title Dungeon: Adventures for TSR Role-Playing Games, a companion to the better-known Dragon magazine that had long served the Dungeons and Dragons community. Where Dragon covered the hobby broadly, Dungeon had one job. What that singular focus produced over more than two decades is a story of creative ambition, corporate transitions, and a community of Dungeon Masters who needed more material than they could ever prepare alone.

• 2. A New Magazine Filled With Modules

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  Dragon Issue 107, published in March 1986, carried a brief notice in the editor's column about something new coming from TSR. The magazine had no name yet, only a description: a periodical "filled entirely with modules" available "by subscription only" that would debut "in the late summer or early fall" and "come out once every two months". The original editor, Roger E. Moore, gave readers a fuller picture of what to expect. He described the magazine as a place where readers could share their own adventures and scenarios from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Dungeons and Dragons gaming. Moore promised "as broad a spectrum of material as possible", naming dungeon crawls, wilderness adventures, Oriental Adventures modules, solo quests, tournament designs, and Battlesystem scenarios among the planned offerings. The premiere issue carried no date on its cover, but the cover of the following issue read "November/December 1986", and Moore confirmed that the first issue had shipped before that November. Each issue ran 64 pages and mixed adventures of various lengths and tones.

• 3. Early Praise and Sharp Observations

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  Ken Rolston weighed in on the fledgling magazine in Issue 125 of Dragon, published in September 1987, coinciding with Dungeon Adventures' first anniversary. His assessment was warm but unsentimental. The modules were, he wrote, "cheap and cheerful, full of the basic fun of D&D games", and they reminded him of "the selection of game sessions you find at gaming conventions or in old-fashioned modules". Rolston saw particular value in the anthology structure itself. He noted that it let writers "publish fine little bits" and served as "great training grounds for new writers" that offered "an opportunity to experiment with offbeat themes and tones". His review landed one gentle jab: "sophisticated gamers will find a lot to snicker at here, but there are some cute ideas." He also observed that the writing quality ranged from "young and enthusiastic to polished" but praised the layout and graphics as quite decent compared to TSR's standard module releases at the time.

• 4. Corporate Transitions

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  TSR's financial difficulties brought the magazine under Wizards of the Coast in 1997, and that company printed the next 30 issues. The long title on the cover began to shrink during this period. Issue 78, released in January 2000, dropped the TSR branding and became Dungeon: Adventures. By Issue 82 in August 2000, the subtitle was gone entirely, leaving just Dungeon. In late 2002, Wizards of the Coast decided to focus on its core business and licensed both Dungeon and Dragon to Paizo Publishing. Paizo held the titles until April 2007, when Wizards of the Coast announced that Paizo would cease publication of Dungeon that September. Scott Rouse, the senior brand manager of Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, explained the reasoning directly: "Today the internet is where people go to get this kind of information. By moving to an online model we are using a delivery system that broadens our reach to fans around the world." Print publication ended with Issue 150 in September 2007.

• 5. The Online Reinvention

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  Coinciding with the release of the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons in June 2008, Wizards of the Coast launched a website offering online versions of both Dungeon and Dragon to subscribers. The magazine carried a new subtitle, "A Dungeons and Dragons Roleplaying Game Supplement", and shifted to a landscape format intended to make reading on a screen easier. Its mandate stayed the same: adventures of varying lengths and levels, along with articles aimed at Dungeon Masters. The online Dungeon absorbed DM-focused columns and articles that had previously appeared in Dragon, positioning itself as a single resource for game masters. A column called "Dungeoncraft", written in this period by James Wyatt, was a mainstay of the new format. Content was published daily and gathered each month into PDF compilations. Wizards of the Coast stopped those compilations in May 2011, then resumed them in October 2012. In the September 2013 issue of Dragon, game designer and editor Chris Perkins announced that both magazines would enter hiatus in January 2014, pending the 5th edition product launch. Issue 221, released in December 2013, was the final one. A successor publication called Dragon+ launched online on the 30th of April 2015.

• 6. What DMs Actually Got

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  Each issue delivered self-contained, pre-scripted, and play-tested scenarios that a Dungeon Master could run as written or reshape to fit an existing campaign. The practical appeal was direct: Dungeon supplied ideas, hooks, plots, adversaries, creatures, illustrations, maps, handouts, and character dialogue, all bundled into several modules per issue at a cost significantly lower than buying individual standalone modules. From its founding through the late 1990s, the magazine supported multiple editions of Dungeons and Dragons simultaneously, mirroring the approach of Dragon. When Wizards of the Coast unified the game lines under the 3rd Edition in 2000, Dungeon published exclusively 3rd Edition material from Issue 82 in September 2000 through Issue 100 in July 2003, which then shifted to the 3.5 Edition. Between January 2002 and June 2004, Dungeon also incorporated Polyhedron, the membership publication of the Role-Playing Game Association, as a combined magazine running from Issue 90 to Issue 111. Editor Erik Mona ended the Polyhedron component in September 2004 with Issue 114, tightening the magazine back to three adventures per issue, one each for low, medium, and high character levels.

• 7. Adventure Paths and Awards

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  Beginning in 2003, Dungeon introduced a new format called Adventure Paths: episodic, multi-part campaigns designed to carry a group of characters from 1st level all the way through the game's highest tiers. By April 2013, four complete Adventure Paths had been published: Shackled City, Age of Worms, Savage Tide, and Scales of War. The Shackled City Adventure Path was collected into a hardcover edition in August 2005, incorporating revisions, new background material, and a bonus adventure added to fill a gap near the beginning of the series. The awards the magazine collected over the years reflect the breadth of its ambition. Dungeon won Origins Awards for Best Professional Adventure Gaming Magazine in 1990 and 1991, covering the years 1989 and 1990. It won ENnie Awards in 2002, 2005, 2006, and 2007. The 2005 ENnie haul alone included Best Cartography for the "World Map of Greyhawk" across Issues 118-121, Best Adventure for Maure Castle in Issue 112, Best Aid or Accessory, and Best Free Product for maps and handouts across Issues 114-122. The Age of Worms Adventure Path earned an ENnie nomination for Best Adventure in 2007, the same year the print edition closed.