“…Your humming has summoned up a pair of mud ghouls, Lute!”
Over at Grognardia today James mentions some pulp fantasy fiction in Dragon Magazine back in the day. I had an immediate thought I wanted to comment upon there, but rather than lay a negative on his blog, I will do it here where it belongs.
I HATED that shit in my magazines. Short stories featuring some fighter or barbarian or thief or another. The Dragon, White Dwarf, The Dungeoneer…whatever, I hated it. They could have been the greatest stories ever told for all I knew. I didn’t care, I rarely read more than a few paragraphs before turning away to look at the Anti-Paladin article or whatever for the thousandth time. I didn’t care if they were good; if I wanted to read fiction I would get a book or Argosy Magazine or something.
Tables, charts, rules clarifications, character class and alignment articles, and even comics. These were fun to read and you would read the same entries again and again, and a thousand times again. But the stories. Ugh. Who read these more than once?
I more or less stopped buying game mags by the late 80’s, but I did pick up the occasional Dungeon magazine in the late 90’s, and they seemed blissfully free of amateur fiction. I hope that is still the case today, especially if I get a hankering to buy one.
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I have to agree. I avoided reading the fiction in game mags like the plague. IT could have been the best stuff in the world, but I never would have known either.
ReplyDelete"me too."
ReplyDeleteI maybe read one or two fiction pieces in Dragon. These were gigantic page fillers.
Even What's New or SnarfQuest was more interesting. And SnarfQuest was terrible.
For what ever reason it never was a place for fiction. Even though the magazine was about developing adventures and whatnot, I didn't want to read a fictional account of an adventure even though, at the time, I was reading tons of books. Like you, the anti-paladin, archer and how much can a coffer carry was much more interesting.
ReplyDeleteSome of those pieces were long as hell too. I'd be ok with a half-page sample as an advertisement for some novel, but c'mon. Filler.
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