A lot of my game design and writing these days is a reflection of my fondness for the weird publishing moment of the 90s. Though entirely unsustainable as a business model, you have this rush of high quality print products hit the market seemingly all at once. Bookstores were awash with magazines covering every subject under the sun. 

And the boxed sets! Not just the gaming ones mind you, but for some reason, they made boxed sets for all sorts of things. Any sort of experimental packaging to get you to spend some money at Waldenbooks while you wandered the mall was tried. It is probably the reason I ended up studying graphic design as well as fine art in college.

One item in particular caught my imagination during this time, and hasn’t let go. That was the venerable, and now sadly dead, Dragon Magazine. If you have read my first issue of Yggdrasil MGZ, I wax poetic on the subject. Today I want to talk a bit about the particular issue that got me into this mess and how it in particular is influencing the material I am working on for issue three.

I didn’t know what D&D or even gaming was in 1991 when I stumbled upon this cover. Ravenloft meant nothing to me. I read fantasy magazines and thought when people talked about D&D books, they meant the Dragonlance books I had read. Most importantly though for this moment, I was obsessed with the macabre and ghost stories, leaning more gothic than slasher in my affectation. It was also the fall, so Halloween, my favorite holiday, was around the corner.

So I bought it. I still own it. In fact, even though I got rid of most of my physical copies I still kept every Halloween themed issue I ever owned.

Flash forward to today and I find myself working on the third issue of my own gaming magazine, which happens to land firmly in the fall release timeline. Of course it will have a horror theme for the season. Of course it is both a struggle and a delight to pull together.

But enough poetic waxing on the subject. Let’s talk about what is going into it.

The first and most obvious thing is the second half of the comic that is in issue two. That exercise has been fun and frustrating, and will be a subject of a different post, but outside that I wasn’t sure what else to do for at least a month.

Do I continue my fiction serial for this issue? Do I theme it with something macabre? Do I let it wait until issue four?

Do I fill the issue with monsters and ghosts for Torchbearer? How does that play against this newsletter?

Do I write an adventure and model the issue on Dungeon Magazine instead? Do I even have the skills to write and test an adventure effectively, let alone a horror themed one?

As with most moments like this, I decided to just start writing. Whatever comes out will either clear the cobwebs or become the thing I do. So this is where it landed so far:

• An article on the Order, an undead hunting bunch of fanatics that enslave people with the potential to be necromancers to use as weapons in this secret war. Your classic good people doing bad things for good reasons, but is all ultimately bad. This article is the meat of the issue and includes two new classes (Grey Guardian & Bound Necromancer), new necromancy spells, and new magic items.
• A new class based on the main character of the comic, the Ghost Speaker. I wrote this character up for the second issue, but held it back as it is the main character of the comic. I think it has baked enough at this point.
• Ghosts, ghouls, and goblin entries. I think any Halloween issue needs to have things to be afraid of that aren’t people.
• An article about running games specifically to be spooky. I have written about it before, but at this stage I think I have a formula that works pretty well to merge the character and player/person stakes nicely.
• Skipping the serial story for this issue. I dislike when they would shoehorn into the Voyages of the Princess Ark themed stories. Never felt right.

Outside that, I am wrestling with the cover. I want to maintain my Art Deco sensibilities, but also want to reflect the theme. More on that in my next paid post.

Thank you again for supporting me in this work. It means so much.