Campaign Components

[Magius]

In a query to Dragon I once proposed a "campaign components" article, like the "war", "spies", "knights", "swashbucklers" and I think a few other articles, involving all the different elements required to make thematic campaigns. The response was "check in with dungeon on this one".
I was wondering whether such an article, which would obviously help DMs a ton, could ever appear, as the responder said, in dungeon, in place of the usual fourth article, usually a backdrop, bonus adventure or somesuch. It would come up probably less than once per year; it would be a highlight. Though this is more dragon-esque, I think it fits as a Dungeon issue and dragon seems to have passed the ball over.
I know the space is little but I think every single CC got hugely positive reponses; the magazines with those articles are considered major classics and are extremely memorable. It could be another one of the staples of dungeon.
Just a thought.

[James Jacobs]

When did you propose this query to Dragon? I ask because for a short time after the relaunch, Dragon wasn't accepting proposals aimed more at DMs. Those times have changed, though.

For Dungeon, the first and formost focus are the adventures. Unless a backdrop ties directly into an adventure, we likely won't be interested in running that article as a Backdrop.

So in short, I'd re-pitch the query to Dragon.

[Magius]

I sent the query on the 28th of October, 2004 and recieved the following reply on December 1st (the query first, then the response):

>
> Campaign components: Pirates. Though not as long as the old
> twenty-page articles, this 8 to 10 page article (I haven’t finished
it
> yet, but that’s my estimate) shows how to launch a pirate campaign,
> whether the players are the actual pirates or pirate-slayers (think
> Deudermonte from The Halfling’s Gem or Passage to Dawn). It provides
> a history of pirates, explains the role of each class on a ship, and
> gives new ships, uses for skills, feats, equipment, and rules for
> running a campaign on the ocean. It will also have a small section
> for DMs to help them get a pirate campaign up and running.
>
>

You may want to pitch this one to dungeon.

So, you can understand why we (me and my brother sent the query) then sent it to dungeon. When we pitched the idea to dungeon, we suggested that an adventure of that theme to show how it is implemented (like having an urban espionage adventure after the "spies" CC). We never got a reply and let it die, since we realized it was a little over our heads...we had never so much as written a critical threat for dungeon or dragon and now we were proposing both a backdrop and adventure.
So I started thinking recently that while I may not be able to write such a thing it would be a great addition to the magazine in general.