Please pardon another "goodbye, Dragon" thread, everyone. This is the first time I've ever posted on the forums, and I had to.
As I was looking at the cover for the last issue of Dragon, I realized just how long I've been with this hobby.
The first contact I ever had with Dragon magazine was also my first contact with the RPG world. I was 11, walking through a hobby store with my mother, and I picked up issue 187 of Dragon just for the cover (a knight riding a griffin). I remember saying "coooool".
There hasn't been a single issue in the last few years that didn't have something invoking the same "coooool" feeling as that first time I picked up my first issue. Every single issue had something that I wanted to use in my game (usually many things). I have every single issue of Dragon from #36 to current, and while most of them are tucked away in storage, the last three years of Dungeon and Dragon sit on my main gaming shelf next to the core books.
Seriously. Almost everything in your run of the magazine struck the perfect balance between functional and downright cool. It's like you guys (Paizo and contributors) tapped into some heretofore unknown geyser of awesome. And yes, I will use "awesome" as a noun. The magazine has been that much of an awesome. You also struck the perfect balance between traditional fantasy and "weird" fantasy, and this balance is as old as D&D itself (all the way back to the first armored knight fighting a beholder).
More than that, you reminded me of happy moments of discovery in my youth. The Maure Castle and Mud Sorcerer's Tomb adventures in dungeon, the Core Beliefs rounding out old Greyhawk deities, the Spelljammer revival back in Polyhedron, the sly references and connecting threads between new material and old asides, the cosmology in the Downer comics, and Draogtha... freaking Dragotha, the original "Here There be Dragons" of D&D... You were unafraid to take the sacred cows of the game by the horns and wrangle them into a new, updated and cooler form. These were parts of my childhood, and you gave them back to me (with better art). Thank you for that.
And I know how you managed this. It seems like almost every member of the staff, from Erik Mona to Mike McArtor to Kyle Hunter, is a rabid fan of the game. You know what we like because you ARE us. And you listened to the rest of the fans and were in a position to give them what they really wanted.
The removal of Dungeon and Dragon from Paizo's creative control is a loss for both D&D as a brand and the gaming industry as a whole. It is my dearest wish that at some point, WotC's marketing department will sit down and try to figure out WHY there was such a public outpouring over the change of hands (and how it has less to do with fear of change and more to do with listening to what the customers want and being unafraid to give it to them).
You were the best. Thank you all, and I look forward to your future work.
I agree, Paizo's handling of both magazines proved to be the best periods of both of them. I still remember a time when my brother and I stopped reading Dragon altogether because it was another what we called bull$hit issue. But under Paizo, every issue is packed with new stuff.
Paizo was the best. I just hope that by stealing Nick Logue and JJ for articles WotC continues to employ the same people that made Paizo so good (and since Chris T was editor of DUNGEON at one time during Paizo's run it shouldn't be dreadful).