As I live in Europe I haven't gotten my magazine yet, but I have read the following in a review over at ENWorld:
Savage Tidings: Demon Days, by Wolfgang Baur - The last Savage Tidings recaps each of the previous Savage Tide adventures to examine how the characters got where they are. It also covers possible allies (or even replacement PCs), as well as what could come after Demogorgon is defeated.
This troubles me. I plan to play Savage Tide when I finish my current Shackled City campaign, and this sounds like massive spoilers that players are going to read. Is that really clever?
Even if I had started Savage Tide when the first adventure was published, there is no way my group could be at a point right now where this article would not spoil upcoming adventures, and it's not like my group would not play much. In fact we play every week with almost no exceptions. Still we need 10 to 12 sessions per adventure, i.e. two to three months, so at best we could have played about half the AP.
I can only warn those of my players who read Dragon not to read that article, but I'm sure some of them already know more than they should from previous Savage Tidings articles. A complete recap plus "what comes after the grand finale" in the "players' magazine" is, in my view, a bad decision.
Contributor
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First off, Dragon isn't the player's magazine. That such a phrase was ever uttered has been long lamented by the ones who uttered it. New monsters, Core Beliefs, and Demonomicon articles are hardly for players.
That said, I don't disagree that putting in something with spoilers is less than ideal. The thing is, though, that if a player reads any Savage Tidings article from an adventure his group hasn't made it to yet he'll find spoilers. We make that pretty clear in each installment, warning away players who haven't made it far enough. At some point, we just have to assume that those who want spoilers will find them and those who don't won't.
For this particular article, we include lots of spoiler warnings at the front. From the DM's perspective, it's easy enough to tell players not to read the article. If they do anyway, there's nothing we (or you) can do about it. Besides, if they really wanted spoilers they could just read the forthcoming adventures, which are also publicly available.
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Besides, if they really wanted spoilers they could just read the forthcoming adventures, which are also publicly available.
Or they could just hit this site. I've never seen the AoW issues, but I could probably draw a map of the first half of it from reading the Campaign Journals. (This isn't a bad thing.) In the end, avoiding spoilers is on the players' honor, like not peeking at Christmas presents when mom's wrapping them - it's so much more fun when it's a surprise.