DragonMagazine402.pdf

Editorial:

Splitting the Treasure

By Steve Winter

Illustration by Slawomir Maniak

From its beginning, Dragon ® magazine* was aimed

at the entire Dungeons & Dragons ® community.

Whether you were a player, a DM, or both, you’d find

something in the magazine meant for you.

In 1986, TSR launched Dungeon ® magazine.

Dungeon ’s purpose was to provide adventures. At

that time, adventures were a hard sell. Dungeon

Masters are a small subset of D&D ® players, and

DMs who buy adventures are a subset of that group.

Reaching such a rarified audience through stores

is difficult. The solution was a magazine that could

deliver adventures directly to the people who

wanted them without being beholden to reluctant

distributors and retailers.

Dungeon had a clear mandate to provide adven-

tures while Dragon covered everything else related

to D&D. That split between the magazines made a

lot of sense.

This divide was also rooted in printing presses

and paper. Dragon and Dungeon weren’t just different

ideas; they were separate physical objects.

With Dragon and Dungeon entirely online, the

limitations of paper, distribution, and delivery no

longer matter. A subscription includes everything

that Wizards.com offers: Dragon , Dungeon , the D&D

Character Builder, the D&D Compendium, and

the Adventure Tools. So, we must ask the question:

does splitting articles into two artificial bins labeled

“Dragon” and “Dungeon” still make sense? If so, then

where should the dividing line be drawn?

If you boil them long enough, the arguments for

and against the split reduce to the following two lines

of thinking.

Maintain the Separation

Tradition: That’s the way it’s been done since the

beginning in 1986. People are comfortable with

the arrangement. The names Dragon and Dungeon

have innate value.

Mystery: Some DMs are happy to have players reading

Dragon , but they don’t want players reading Dun-

geon, because it will spoil some of the mystery and

secrecy in the campaign. Keeping that information

apart is easy when articles have obvious labels.

Reunite

It’s the 21st Century: Online publishing is fundamen-

tally different from paper publishing. Maintaining

past forms for the sake of tradition can water down

the potential of the new forms.

Recruiting New DMs: One goal that every D&D player

and DM should share is converting more players

into excellent DMs. That’s less likely to happen

when the articles that can excite players about

switching roles are walled away from them and

labeled “don’t read this!”

Augu s t 2011 | DRAGON 402

Editorial: Splitting the Treasure

We revisit this question to some degree almost every

month—which, I suppose, is a more f lattering way

of saying that we’ve been thinking about it for three

years without coming to a conclusion. It’s time for

some public debate. The options we’ll throw on the

table to get things started are:

F Stay the Course: Dragon focuses on material that

is immediately useful to players, such as character

options, common equipment, and character-

focused variants. Adventures, monsters, and

campaign backgrounds go into Dungeon . Articles

that straddle the fence lean toward Dragon by

default.

F Return to Roots: Dungeon goes back to publish-

ing only adventures. Everything else, whether it’s

for players or DMs, goes under the Dragon label.

F Tear Down the Wall: Eliminate the distinction

entirely and roll everything into Dungeons-and-

Dragons-dot-com . Articles that are specifically

aimed at Dungeon Masters could be signified with

an icon for the convenience of those DMs who

want to restrict their players’ access to potential

campaign surprises.

F Embrace the Machine: Although Dragon and

Dungeon online are now delivered electronically,

they don’t make full use of the digital medium.

Player- and DM-focused material on related topics

could be segregated AND integrated through

the magic of hyperlinking. This approach could

extend through the entire DDi system, tying

Dragon , Dungeon , and the online tools into a uni-

fied instrument. Such a format probably would

mean a shift away from PDFs and toward an

online-only presentation.

We’re reasonably happy with the current arrange-

ment; we’d have changed it already if we weren’t.

But we’re always interested in making improvements

and in seeing the opinions and predilections of read-

ers, whether they’re subscribers or nonscubscribers.

What’s your preference? Which road would you like

to see Dragon and Dungeon take? Is there an alterna-

tive that’s not mentioned here? Post your feedback in

the comments section below, in the forum, or send it

to dndinsider@wizards.com .

* The original title was The Dragon . TSR dropped the

word “the” with issue 39 (July ’80) and trademarked

the name as Dragon ™ magazine.

Augu s t 2011 | DRAGON 402

The Rise of

Bardic Beauty

By Ed Greenwood

Illustration by Eric Belisle

At Gen Con in 2010, Ed Greenwood and a room full of Gen Con attendees met

together at the Spin a Yarn seminar to create a work of cooperative storytelling. Each

person in the seminar had a chance (or several) to make suggestions. What you read

next incorporates as many of those suggestions as possible. Our advice: Don’t read this

while drinking.

When you bind a raging Waterdhavian noble hand

and foot, then toss him down a short f light of polished

wooden stairs, he makes a series of satisfyingly sharp

thudding sounds. If he doesn’t land on his head, he’s

aware enough to utter some muff led grunts of pain

through the gag you have been thoughtful enough

to provide. Grunts give way to groans once he has

reached the bottom—if you haven’t broken his neck

and thereby earned yourself some silence, that is.

How do I know this? Well, there’s a tale in that, but

to hear it will cost you.

Just a nib.

Yes, one copper. Like most folk, I can be bought

cheaply these days.

nearly empty pot that had been our only sustenance

for the last tenday, we rather gloomily contemplated

the state of our wealth.

More specifically, we were looking at just seven

copper nibs. One of them was a square stamped bit

from somewhere in the Tashalar that we doubted any

sober city shopkeeper would take as honest coin.

Ankath’s stomach rumbled.

“ That’s not going to make us fat and happy,” she

announced. I didn’t bother to nod.

We had once been young and strikingly beauti-

ful, with sweeping falls of glossy hair and long legs

that drove people wild. Nobles hired us to adorn their

arms at revels, plays, and forays through the streets,

seeking to gain the envy of poorer folk.

Those were the easy days.

All too soon, the bloom of young beauty faded, and

we slathered our faces with ointments meant to make

us look younger. We took to wearing daring lace and

tight leathers. And we worked our nights—and days—

through, season after uncounted season.

Chapter 1:

Not the Usual Sort of Masked Visitor

It all began with a forgetful minstrel.

One forenoon, Ankathra and I were still yawning

and wrapped in old robes, drying from a shared bath

that had done nothing at all to wake us up. As we sat

huddled together over mugs of warm broth from the

Ju l y 2011

The Rise of Bardic Beauty

Now, we were settling into lives we’d once

despised. We’d become “attic witches,” the aging

women who dwelt in dark, Dock Ward attics that

sweltered in the summer and grew icy in the winter.

We had seen almost thirty winters, with dagger-

stabbing cold and ice rime playing counterpoint to

summer damp and stormrain salt, and we were as

wrinkled as some of the duchesses up in Sea Ward

who had seen more than seventy seasons. We had

aches that never really went away, and pitch held a

few of our teeth in place. We never bothered looking

in our cracked mirror these days.

If we knew that the swift severity of the guild

enforcers would not trouble us, we would have taken

to brewing dragon-kiss potions long ago to make ends

meet. Unfortunately, neither of us looked enough like

the guilded potion sellers, so the ruse of strangling

them and taking their places would not work.

Believe me, we’d thought about it, and we had

even taken good close looks at all of them.

I stared at the coins, thinking. It had been a long

time since we could afford to burn fuel in our little

grate. If it hadn’t been for the meager warmth coming

up to us from the kitchens of The Naked Supper

three f loors below, we’d have frozen long ago. Even

with our arms wrapped around each other beneath

six cloaks, all our gowns, and three mangy old furs,

nights were for shivering. We reheated our broth by

balancing our little cauldron atop the Supper’s chim-

ney, waiting seemingly forever. We’d had more than

a month of the sort of weather when an elf, a dwarf,

and an orc would all huddle together to keep warm.

A sudden rap on our door jolted me out of my mus-

ings and caused Ankath to start.

No one ever came calling at this time of day. Not in

these frigid depths of winter here in icy Dock Ward.

Ankath was closer, so she kicked the door bar up

out of its holder and let the door sag open with its

usual sickly banshee squeal.

“We’ve nothing to steal,” she wearily informed

whoever it was.

If it was some snatch-sword with his blade out and

at the ready, so be it. The gods carry some of us off in

far worse ways.

Outside, in the gloom at the top of our narrow

stair, stood a lone man. Stooping because of the low

rafters, he had his cloak pulled high and a gullnose

sea hat worn low, so all we could see were his two

sharp eyes.

His eyes moved from Ankath to me and stayed,

seeming to bore right into my head. Despite the

broth, I started to shiver. Those eyes were two daggers

of uncaring coldness, casually stabbing through my

soul.

“Tace,” their owner stated, more than asked.

“You’re Veldarmatace Rordan.”

I nodded, my wet hair sending small patters of

water all over the tabletop and my broth.

“And you,” I replied, “are someone else.”

“Indeed,” came the f lat reply, in tones that warned

me not to inquire farther. “You used to tell stories.”

So I had. In my days of shimmering and glittering

on the arms of old scent-drenched nobles, I’d spun

many a fancy tale to earn chortles and extra coins.

“I did,” I replied, trying to echo his forbidding tone.

I waited, staring steadily at our visitor over my

broth. He was wearing a mask of black cloth that

hung down over his mouth, though the mask was not

the gem-bespangled things nobles wore to masked

balls. It didn’t look coquettish, or grand, or fantastical.

It looked menacing.

“Can you write?” he asked, as if in challenge.

I shrugged. “I have a fine hand, but I lack parch-

ment, ink, quills—and inclination.”

Out of the folds of his cloak came an arm clad in a

silken sleeve as fine as any noble’s. He dropped some-

thing on the table with a clinking thud: a heavy purse.

“Open it,” he ordered. “Behold your inclination.”

I sat like a statue, eyes locked on his, so Ankath

undid the strings and poured the contents out across

the table. I didn’t have to look at them to know they

were gold. Every one of them. Brightly polished,

recently minted high dragons of Waterdeep. Ankath

was counting, but I knew there were more than sixty,

probably more than seventy. That was more coin than

we’d ever had on that table. More coin than we’d

mustered for the past twenty summers.

My throat was suddenly as dry as windblown

Anauroch. I poured broth down it, swallowed, and

asked, “What do you want written? A false confession

that sacrifices our lives, a fake treaty that will start a

war, or words purporting to be those of a god?”

“I gave you seventy-seven dragons,” our visitor—our

client —replied dryly. “I do not need you to feign any-

thing. I want stories.”

“Stories? What sort of stories?”

“Unbelievably fanciful tales,” came the reply.

“Ridiculous everything-and-the-drunken-gnome

epics of silliness and overblown idiocy. Suitable for a

minstrel to pick ideas out of—to improve upon.”

“A minstrel?”

“Yes,” our visitor snapped, all ice again. “A man too

tuneless to be a bard, and too forgetful to play at min-

strelsy any longer without written tales at hand.”

“Comical stories?”

“No, hilarity you can leave to m—ah, stories with

conf lict, comeuppances, and schemers. That involve

these elements and anything you care to add.”

The hand reappeared with a list written on parch-

ment. Ankath seized it before it hit the coins, and ten

blank pieces of parchment followed. A f lat wooden

box appeared, and then came a sealed inkwell.

“I’ll return not tonight, but the next one,” our visi-

tor informed us. “If I like what I read, I’ll add as many

more dragons as I’ve given you already. Those, and all

else, are yours to keep regardless.”

“And if we just f lee? What then?” Ankath asked.

Ju l y 2011

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