Accessory - Dragon Magazine #230, MAGAZINES, Dragon Magazine
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Tough Times
It’s the year of a presidential election, and things are tough
all over.
No, this is not the beginning of some great contemporary
fictive opus that I am writing. It is merely my assessment of the
way things are.
I’m not going to say that things would be better if we had
more Democrats in Congress or a Republican in the White
House or a quick demolition of the two-party system. I have
my own opinions on these matters, but this is not the place for
them... but still, things are tough all over, and that affects
D
RAGON
® Magazine.
Paper costs keep rising, mom & pop game shops close, and
you, the gentle consumer, have fewer dollars to spend than
your parents did when they were your age.
Nobody said life was fair, and there is not much we can do
about it — except for D
RAGON
Magazine, that is. If you have less
money to spend, then it is up to us to make the magazine even
more worthwhile. We can’t control the costs of production or
the selling price in the market. The only thing that we can con-
trol is the value of the magazine itself, and that is our objective.
We want every issue of D
RAGON
Magazine to sing with
playable materials that you can’t wait to bring to your next
Saturday night dungeon crawl. We want you to be wowed by
color and black and white art the likes of which you can’t find
elsewhere. These are the direct responsibilities of Editor Dave
Gross and Art Director Larry Smith, and both of them are
exceptional at their jobs.
We want D
RAGON
Magazine to be as important to you as The
Wall Street Journal is to a businessman. We owe it to you, and
in tough times, that’s the least we can do.
babes” or “why don’t you just give it away for free.” In the best
of all possible worlds we would accommodate all of your
desires, but unfortunately we are neither Aladdin’s genie nor
Bill Clinton, and times are tough.
If there is something we can do to make D
RAGON
Magazine
better for you, let us know. More G
REYHAWK
® setting, more art,
more fiction, more really ugly NPCs — none of it is out of the
question.
Unlike Congress, we are not deadlocked... and we care.
(I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize for
any inconvenience you might have experienced in obtaining
copies of the past few issues of D
RAGON
Magazine at your local
hobby shop or book store. The distributors/chain retailers with
whom we do business have embraced what I consider to be an
unfortunate and ill-advised buying system philosophy called
“just-in-time,” whereby they order as few copies up front as pos-
sible on all titles, expecting to be able to re-order more inven-
tory instantaneously when they sell out. Magazine print runs
are based on initial orders, and since a new issue appears each
month, reorders are usually non-existent.
We will always try to estimate the print runs with enough
margin to cover your demands, but it is very hard when our
distributors/chain retailers are being short-sighted and conser-
vative. In the long run you, the consumer, are the one being
most inconvenienced, and of this I am sorry. Once again, I
never said that life was fair.)
But the buck doesn’t stop there. It’s a
two-way street. You have to tell us
what you want, and I don’t mean
“lower the price” or “more hot
Brian Thomsen
Associate Publisher &
Ogre
Publisher
TSR, Inc.
Associate Publisher
Brian Thomsen
Editor-in-Chief
Pierce Watters
Dave Gross
Larry W. Smith
Associate editor
Anthony J. Bryant
Associate editor
Michelle Vuckovich
Subscriptions
Janet L. Winters
Cindy Rick
U.K. correspondent/advertising
Printed in the USA
D
RAGON
#
230
3
Editor
Art director
U.S. advertising
Carolyn Wildman
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