Dragon Magazine

» see paizo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

dungeons and dragons existed in turkey the way american baseball existed in turkey, which is to say not really. there was no equivalent of the friendly local game store running a weekly party. the rulebooks were not translated. dragon magazine was the in-house monthly of an anglo subculture that did not have a turkish chapter, so the closest i got was reading about gary gygax in pc-gaming magazines that occasionally explained where baldur's gate had pulled its mechanics from.

tsr started dragon in june 1976 as the successor to a smaller publication called the strategic review. the magazine ran d&d supplements and adventures every month, with comics pages that became famous later for rich burlew's order of the stick. wizards of the coast bought tsr in 1997 and licensed both dragon and dungeon out to paizo publishing in 2002. the d20 system boom of the early two-thousands was paizo's peak window, and the magazine carried it on monthly schedule for five more years.

in april 2007 wizards announced it would not renew the paizo license. the plan was to roll all official d&d content into a subscription product called d&d insider. issue 359 of dragon shipped in september 2007 and that was the end of the print line. wizards ran a digital dragon inside d&d insider until december 2013, then revived it as dragon+ in 2015 as a free promotional app. dragon+ ran 41 issues before being cancelled in mid-2022. by the time fifth edition was the dominant tabletop product in the world, the magazine that had carried d&d for three decades had no successor in any format.

~ the case file ~

~ the format ~

dragon was a working game-master's monthly. each issue had a piece of rules expansion, an adventure or two, sometimes a character class or a monster appendix, a fiction column, and back-of-book reviews of related products. the comics page ran nodwick and dork tower in early years, then rich burlew's order of the stick became the most-read webcomic-in-print on those pages. for a sufficiently committed dm, a year of dragon was a year of optional content you could pull from at the table without having to invent everything yourself.

~ the licensing carousel ~

the magazine outlasted three publishers. tsr ran it for two decades. wizards of the coast inherited it during the 1997 acquisition and held it briefly before licensing both dragon and dungeon to paizo for five years through the third-edition boom. then wizards took it back to kill it. paizo lost the d&d magazine business and used the moment to launch pathfinder, which built directly on the d20 open game license. the magazine's death financed the rise of the company that would become wizards' largest tabletop competitor for the next decade.

~ what got buried with it ~

the d&d insider plan never replaced what dragon was. insider was a paid digital subscription that bundled the character builder with the compendium. articles ran online through the insider portal too. but it had none of the monthly editorial cadence dragon ran on, and the comics and fiction columns never came back. when fifth edition launched in 2014 wizards moved to a hardcover-supplement schedule and the magazine format was abandoned. dragon+ in 2015 was a marketing brochure for upcoming products. the working game-master's monthly, the thing dragon actually was for thirty-one years, ended with issue 359.

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