Dragon
JTAS/Challenge

an occasional issue of:
White Dwarf
Shadis
Different Worlds
White Wolf (before it got screwed over/changed names/whatever)

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!I read a lot of Shadis, up until the mag started falling apart both on the page and in my hands.

Shadis was great up until Jolly left it.

As a kid I started with Dragon, later Battletechnology and StarDate (the latter was a helluva good sci-fi mag).

I had a subscription to Shadis in the mid 90's or so.

Nowadays I pick up lotsa old 80's era mags whenever I get the chance.  I love that old crap.  Different Worlds is my favorite, but I alsa dig Dungeoneer.  I've got a few old White Dwarfs and one or two JTAS and some Challenge.

I read Dragon. My library carried back issues of it, and I used to hand-copy out the various kits etc. for use in games.

I also read Inquest, and remember it as being more or less as fonkaygarry described it. It was rampantly sexist, lacked substantive commentary or thought of any kind, and yet somehow managed to be the source by which I learnt about the existence of Alternity. I can't hate the mag.

Unlike all you cool folks, I read White Dwarf _after_ it became a shill rag. I used to read it for the battle reports mainly, but I stopped when I realised that the guys playing the game were fucking awful at it - they made the kinds of tactical errors that you'd expect from new players, not guys working for the company that put out the game.

I also used to read PC Gamer, but as that magazine has gotten thinner and more packed with advertisements, I've stopped buying it more than once a year or so.

QuoteUnlike all you cool folks, I read White Dwarf _after_ it became a shill rag. I used to read it for the battle reports mainly, but I stopped when I realised that the guys playing the game were fucking awful at it - they made the kinds of tactical errors that you'd expect from new players, not guys working for the company that put out the game.

The sad part is too, that those horrid, horrid games drive development of the game line.  One of the designer's has a bad loss, declares it's because the rules are broken, and starts swinging the nerf bat about.

After they started pulling that crap with LOTR I finally just gave up on GW games altogether.

Hmmm.  One mag that I never see anymore was called Gateways - it was a general roleplaying magazine that never really caught on.

I also got a lot of AADA, Pyramid, and Dragon magazines back in the day.

I remember Shadis being a lot of fun, but never quite enough fun to get me to subscribe.

I'm trying to imagine what a White Dwarf for 2007 might look like, and I'm drawing a big white blank. Given it should be a) largely or completely non-d20, b) not a glorifed in-house mag ("Exalted plus x"), c) about games currently in print... well, I got nothin'.

Story gamers had Dedalus and now Push--quarterly or semi-annual mags with fairly substantial general articles. Even those didn't/don't seem to catch on. And the non-d20/non-WoD mainstream is both so small and so atomized into micro-constituencies now that I can't imagine an equivalent.

That's too bad, because I'd much rather read a bunch of well-written, well-edited essays in a single volume than sift through the blog blather in hopes of finding a gem.

Quote from: SettembriniThe best of them all:

Challenge Magazine.

Twilight:2000
MegaTraveller
Dark Conspiracy
Space:1888
Cyberpunk
Battletech
Star Wars

all in one Mag

Word.

I loved me some Challenge magazine back in the day.  Sadly those days are long gone now.

Other magazines I read:  

Shadis:  It started off as something different with some really good articles in there.  Even the stuff for games I didn't play was interesting.  After Jolly left it went downhill fast.

White Wolf:  Had it's ups and downs.  The killer was the whole 'Inphobia' thing.  That was bad.  But back when there were Jorune articles in there regularly it was the bee's knees.

Dragon:  Who didn't read this?  Never was a player of AD&D or D&D back then but I stole lots of adventure ideas and such from here.  Plus the Ares section was nice also.

That's all I really remember right now.

Challenge was my favorite. Then White Wolf. Then Shadis. Everything else was crap (in my mind at the time, and probably now too if I looked at one again).

Challenge had a good variety of stuff for all different systems/games and it was always available in my FLGS back then.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI read White Dwarf _after_ it became a shill rag.

I'm with you on that one.  I read maybe one or two issues before Jake Thornton took over as EIC.  Even at eleven I remember thinking that there was no way the mag could ever be worse than it was under JT.

They managed to prove me wrong time and again, though.

The Fat Bloke run was pretty sweet, I thought.  Lots of content, even if half the mag was nothing but vanity shots of Viggo and the crew.  Naturally, he's nowhere to be seen anymore and the mag is, I've heard, the worst it's been in years.

The ones that I can think of off the top of my head are:

• Dragon
• White Dwarf
• Imagine
• Challenge
• JTAS
• Dungeon
• A&E
• Shadis
• Roleplayer
• Pyramid
• Autoduel Quarterly
• Adventurer's Club
• Journeys
• White Wolf
• Rifter

Challenge.

Space gamer.

I grew up in a small town and the only magazine I had easy access to - at the bookstore in the slightly larger small town an hour down the highway - was Dragon.  I started buying that around, erm, 1983 or thereabouts.  I knew there were other mags out there but since all I ever really played was D&D and Star Frontiers, and I would have had to have subscribed to them to get them, they didn't hold much interest.

I actually just sent close to fifty issues of Dragon to the recycling depot.  They were a lot like my childhood comics - don't really read 'em any more, and they're all tattered from being leafed through for many years previous so nobody else wanted 'em, either.  I was tired of having them just sitting in box downstairs waiting to be lugged around as part of my next move, though.

What WAS Space Gamer, exactly? A very early scifi mag, yes? Strictly RPG, or wargamey, or both? Did they focus on games by particular companies? I've never even seen a copy.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityWhat WAS Space Gamer, exactly? A very early scifi mag, yes? Strictly RPG, or wargamey, or both? Did they focus on games by particular companies? I've never even seen a copy.

I've got a couple of Space Gamers sitting around somewhere. It had some Traveller and some GURPS. Greg Costikyan's article on why Traveller is not hard SF appeared in SG.

I actually prefer the net to magazines. It's cheaper and more varied.