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I received a letter from Paizo Publishing today, concerning my subscription to the magazine. I ordered my subscription through Amazon.com. I was told I would have to wait the roughly 6 to 8 weeks it takes to process such orders.

But then today I received a letter that left me baffled and upset.
I will summarize its contents below:

After thanking me for my interest in one of your publications, you state:
“Because of your status as an incarcerated prisoner, we need you to read and sign this form…”

It goes on to explain that (probably for security reasons) “prisons have varying policies on what inmates receive”.

Then it says that by signing the document I agree to indemnify Paizo Publishing, LLC and not hold them responsible for the delivery of the “subscription or any premiums sent with or outside of the magazine” or demand that they replace any missing issues or premiums.

I was very disturbed by this letter. I have never been incarcerated; have never been found guilty of committing any crime punishable by federal law. I have never even been to a trial.

According to Paizo, what felony have I committed? In what prison am I incarcerated? The address the letter was sent to is not the address of any known prison. It’s a street address.

As an undergrad, I visited a prison for humanitarian purposes. Much later, as a graduate student, I worked with young men in a youth correctional facility in Passaic County, New Jersey. Prison, and anything related with it, is not something I would take lightly.

I am going to assume the letter was sent by an honest mistake. I sincerely hope it’s the correct explanation, as any other possibility is simply distressing.

Normally I would have just crumpled the piece of paper and tossed it to the trash. However, in the letter is stated that my subscription to Dungeon Magazine is conditional on signing the agreement.

If this letter is some type of joke (or some sort of role-playing test you guys send to aspiring subscribers) I find it of very, very bad taste. Not only not funny, but downright offensive.

Please clarify whether I do have to sign this letter to finally start receiving the magazine subscription I have spent my hard-earned money on, or if it can be disregarded completely. In the latter case, I would need a timetable that lets me know when to expect the arrival of the first magazine.

I want to subscribe and I would be willing to renew my subscription for years to come. But if I need to sign this letter as if I was some sort of prison inmate impersonator, you can certainly count me (and my money) out.

As I stated previously, I hope this is all a simple misunderstanding. I know Paizo and the magazines it publishes have many fans, and I have read dozens of posts where customers constantly praise your service and devotion to them.

Feel free to write me an email to if you need me to provide you my name, address, etc. If you don’t have my email, I can give it to you through this very post.

Your would-be customer,
Maximo D. Contreras

I started playing the game 20 years ago. I started playing with the D&D Basic Boxed Set rules (the red box with the cool Larry Elmore cover depicting what looks like a barbarian fighting a red dragon) with my brothers. From the start I was the DM of our games. In fact, in 20 years I’ve been purely a player only twice. That will change soon, as one of the players will DM a Warcraft campaign a few weeks from now.

We are currently playing in my own homebrew campaign, a setting called Gyrnia. The setting is a melting pot of fantasy themes I’ve liked for years. It has elements of high fantasy and steam age technology. I would describe it as a mix of Eberron tech with Forgotten Realms high level adventure (without the ever-meddlesome gods). It includes the Iron Kingdoms, developed by Privateer Press, as one of the planet’s northern continents.

If you’ve played Final Fantasy VII, you’ll get a pretty good idea of how the world looks like. In fact, we have played with two innovations straight out of Final Fantasy: A materia system and a limit break system. The materia concept is very similar to the drangoshard idea used in Eberron. They grew more powerful as the characters gained levels. If you’ve read Weapons of Legacy you’ll get the idea. After playing with it for a while, we concluded that materia is game-unbalancing powerful or redundant with existing magic items and abilities, if weakened.

Limit breaks, on the other hand, have been enjoyed immensely by my players. I think they work, if tweaked enough. However, DMs have enough to worry about with abilities characters possess, as well as the extra bookkeeping work necessary to keep track of characters’ limit break bars/gauges.

I’ll be more than happy to share the mechanics for both experiments with those who wouldn’t mind to tinker with them.

There’s another thing I’ve devoted some time to develop for my Gyrnia campaigns: The Adventurer’s Academy. I’ve seen settings like Eberron employ the idea, but the authors have given them very little substance. The Gyrnia Adventurer’s Academy is a world-encompassing organization with vast resources at its disposal.

To quote my own description: “The Academy’s primary mission is to foster and encourage adventuring throughout the world. To this end, their complexes contain some of the most advanced training facilities found anywhere in the world.”

What I like about using the Academy for the SCAP is that it can serve as a limitless resource of would-be adventurers, should any of the PCs die (as I expect they will). If enough people are interested - more than one ;) – I can post my description of the academy right here. It’s a Word document about 5 pages long.