Dragon Magazine Was Our Internet

It’s difficult to get teenagers, or even twenty year olds, to care about things that happened four decades ago. I get it. Forty years in the modern world might as well be a hundred, and the speed with which we develop continues to its inevitable terminal velocity. Talking about anything more nuanced and complicated than the music of the 1980s will send most Millennials screaming from the room.

But it’s interesting to me because—and this is a micro-example of the larger questions being posed to mass media today—our sources of information were extremely limited. We had three or four channels, if we were lucky: ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was also PBS, in case you needed help with your reading. And you probably did, because there was a lot more of it. Magazines and newspapers were still everywhere. What’s worse, you had to BUY them. With MONEY.

Sure, you could get online, but that was a phone call, which logged you into a BBS, and you could leave a message there, in the hopes that someone would read it and respond. It was fascinating in that it was primitive and also cutting edge at the same time. The digital equivalent of sending a message in a bottle.  There was no corporate online presence. There were no press releases that got tweeted out to the general public. There were no blogs, vlogs, or even websites. There was only meat-space and brow sweat.

If you wanted to play D&D with people, you had to know people. They had to come over to your house, or vise versa.  And if you wanted to learn more about D&D, you had to read Dragon Magazine. Nearly all of the “straight” news was opposed to role-playing game…well, that’s not quite fair. They were far more interested in showing the local Baptist church youth minister organizing a “Fire Sale” where the children are encouraged to burn their D&D books and rededicate their lives to Christ than to do a news story about four local youths who develop social skills and make friends and learn to talk to their peers while playing this weird game with funny dice. On the evening news, fire is way more sexy, and will sell more advertising. We knew this, and so we didn’t really expect a fair shake. When those stories appeared on TV or in the news, there was always someplace we could go in our minds, and that was Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

I would read the hell out of that. Oh, wait.I did!

Dragon magazine was sold right next to the rest of he D&D products at that hobby shop, and it was this amazing thing; a magazine devoted to gaming, and in particular, D&D. Every month brought rules variants, new monsters, treasure, and spells, the occasional short adventure, and even a smattering of other games and supplements for them, too. Dragon was also a marketplace, the only way to find out about companies that sold more of the stuff you wanted. There were even jokes and comic strips, all designed and executed around gamer humor.

I know what everyone under the age of forty is thinking right now: “Big whoop. We’ve got that now! It’s called the Internet!” Yes, it’s true that the Internet has become that. No question. But there were a couple of important differences that make this magazine so important. For one thing, it was monthly. The DMsGuild sends me a daily update on the new stuff at their website. 96% of it is stuff that I don’t need, can’t use, and aren’t particularly interested in. But it updates every day, and that constant influx of new content that I don't want tends to dilute the strength of the overall content that I potentially do want.

Dragon, by way of content, was also vetted by editors, and written by people who had a hand in making the game. Early on, this was a huge advantage. We had alternate content available to us; it was one of the great things about the hobby—that hands on, do-it-yourself vibe, and while some of the companies making new stuff up for D&D were good to great, they did not have E. Gary Gygax writing material for the game. Dragon did. That’s what I mean when I say it was a lifeline, moreso than at any other time in the game’s development.

The cover art was almost always evocative.

My first issue of Dragon Magazine that I actually bought with my own money was this one. It sticks in my head because in the middle of the magazine was a pull out section that you folded, assembled, and stapled to create a lexicon for Thieves’ Cant. Now, back then, we didn’t understand that Thieves’ Cant is more of a coded jargon, and apparently, neither did the author of the pull-out section; he just made up another language. So, as cool as that was, it was quickly rendered useless for playing in-game—except, you know, it was an example of how to construct a language. This was all stuff that went into my creative hopper.

There were great articles that emphasized theory, as well. The new monsters were great, and all, but figuring out the volume and mass of gold coins so that you could accurately describe treasure chests and how much they weighed? Dude. That was useful stuff. And here’s what’s so funny: it was MATH! The thing I was never good at in school! I couldn’t solve for X to save my life, but I could calculate how much gold could fit into a two foot by one foot by six inch coffer in my head! Because that was important, real-world stuff and I would one day need that for when I got a job working alongside Gary at TSR, creating new monsters for Monster Manual seventeen.

Okay, maybe not. Still, there were interesting articles, essays, and even artwork from names we recognized in those hardcover books we desperately tried to memorize. What was published in Dragon looked right, and felt right, because it was passing under the watchful (well, maybe not all the time) gaze of people who were making D&D.

Later issues of The Dragon featured new voices, fiction, and an expanded world-view, talking about new content for new TSR games like Star Frontiers and Marvel Super Heroes. Some people began to derisively call Dragon a “house organ,” and while they tried initially to slip and dodge the term, eventually they embraced it.

Part of Phil Foglio's great monthly strip. I discovered
Larry Niven based on the tip from this strip right here.

As fifteen year old gamers, in a place as far away from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin as it was possible to be and still be in the country, we did not care. Even issues of Dragon that only had one or two really useful articles in them were great, because they had one or two useful articles in them! That’s one or two more articles than we’d seen in a month. All of this shit that’s available now, for downloading, at a second’s notice? That was being made, one article at a time, in the 1980s.

Tramp was one talented so-and-so. He may
go down in history as the greatest D&D artist.

We have an embarrassment of riches now. It’s a great time to be a gamer. But in having access to all this stuff, the signal to noise ratio is so high that it tends to strangle and bury a lot of worthwhile things in favor of saying, “Look at everything!” Dragon Magazine was a focus, a way to hone in on exactly what we were interested in seeing and talking about. I was introduced to new authors, new games, and a bunch of things that became part of my homebrew campaign. Moreover, it was a place where the jargon of gaming was allowed to develop and spread nationally—things like “homebrew” and “Monty Haul” campaigns and other vocabulary words that we use all the time now.

Dragon that they put out is NOT Dragon magazine. It’s a press release with nice artwork. I miss the real thing, on paper. I miss “What’s New, with Phil and Dixie.” I really miss Trampier’s “Wormy.” I miss the regular monthly columns like Sage Advice and "The Ecology of..." series and the great Jim Rosloff artwork that seemed to be a monthly occurrence. I miss the letters page, where thoughtful discussion was curated and sometimes ran for two or three issues. There was something about it being a monthly event, rather than a daily or an hourly event, that forced us all to sit down, pay attention, and take it all in.

Not the same thing, not at all. 

I miss it, to be honest. That digital Dragon that they put out is NOT Dragon magazine. It’s a glorified press release with nice artwork. I miss the real thing, on paper, despite their appropriating the column names like "Sage Advice." You can't kid a kidder, guys. I see what you're trying to do, and it won't work, not like you think it will. 

I miss “What’s New, with Phil and Dixie.” I really miss Trampier’s “Wormy.” I miss the regular monthly columns and the Jim Rosloff artwork. I miss the letters page, where thoughtful discussion was curated and sometimes ran for two or three issues. There was something about it being a monthly event, rather than a daily or an hourly event, that forced us all to sit down, pay attention, and take it all in.

Oh, and the irony of you reading this on a blog is not lost on me, either. This isn’t a “computers are bad” rant. I just think we have a different relationship with media that’s delivered online versus something that came in the mail and was a physical object. Dragon used to be the monthly event that started a conversation and changed the game. We don’t really have that kind of thing anymore, not like we used to, back in the day.