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The license was lost because of the (at the time) forthcoming 4E release, WotC didn't renew the license, and didn't tell Paizo until very late in the process.
It had nothing to do with quality on either party's part.
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4e had a different third-party license than 3.X and was right around the corner.
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I'll admit that my post here misses the point of the thread. But I feel compelled to comment, nevertheless.
I never liked the stuff in Dungeon in the ‘80s. Their adventures seemed amateurish to me and a waste of 3 dollars or whatever. Never spent a dollar on that magazine and put all my money in books and boxed sets instead.
Well... I can't exactly argue. Yeah, most of those adventures indeed seemed amateurish... with a few exceptions, most notably "Chadranther's Bane", from issue 18 (which came out in the year 1989). That adventure excited me so much, I ACHED to run it. I spent a great deal of time converting it to Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and drawing some of the maps in great detail. Actually running the adventure was so incredible, I described the experience at great length in this post. If that post is too long and detailed for you, here's a post with a shorter version of the story.
But OK, for the most part, Dungeon in the 1980s had room for improvement. Here's the thing, though: the next thing you say is...
But with 3E it looks like Paizo took the magazine to heights that even the books couldn’t match.
As soon as I read that, I said "Huh? You just skipped over a whole decade!"
Maybe you've never seen Dungeon in the 1990s. And if you didn't, boy did you miss out! In 1992-1997, that magazine gave us over a dozen adventures so wonderful that even after I switched to Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and later to Pathfinder RPG 1st Edition, and later still back to D&D 3.0, I felt compelled to convert many of those adventures to whatever engine I was running, usually in great detail and with a great deal of time and effort. Here's a description of some of my favorite adventures from that period.
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Whoa! I mean... whoa!
You know, when I wrote that post above, I just carelessly threw those links in there. I hadn't actually read that seven-year-old post in many years. I just re-read that long post about how I led up to "Chadranther's Bane" and how it began. That post included many details that I had long forgotten. Some of those experiences I had described in that post surprised me when I re-read them today. I'm now remembering some more of my experiences with that adventure... but that would be getting REALLY off-topic.
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And I now feel compelled to mention something else, in case you feel that my own personal opinions might not be convincing enough. I'm now looking at the 116th issue of Dungeon magazine, which came out in 2004. That issue includes a list of the 10 most highly recommended Dungeon magazine adventures. I was on the verge of copying that list into this post, but then I got nervous. That list is published in copyrighted material, after all. The moderator might delete my post for that reason. But suffice it to say, that list proves that even the Paizo staff liked many Dungeon magazine adventures from the 1990s. And as for the 1980s, they chose an adventure from the very FIRST issue of Dungeon! (I don't have that issue, so I can't speak to that.)
Whew! I just wrote a lot about something which - I admitted in the very beginning - is off the intended topic of this thread. I should stop now.
Creative Director
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Dungeon is the reason I'm here at Paizo. Not because they hired me to be an editor back in 2003 or thereabouts, but because when the magazine was first announced back at around Dragon #111 or so they put out a call for submissions and I got on it at the precocious age of 13 or so. And got my first adventure published in Dungeon #12 (which was also the first appearance of the name Alaznist!), which got everything going and showed a teen-aged James that yeah, you can get paid to write adventures!
But yeah, as a Paizo staffer who served as an editor for the last 3rd of Dungeon's print run, I can confirm that we did indeed love Dungeon Magazine. It was then and remains today my favorite magazine.
Dungeon and Dragon were great gateways for new writers into the industry, and their absence is much missed.
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It's also important to correct something from an earlier post trying to overcomplicate things: While Chris Perkins was indeed Great for Dungeon, that was the years Before Paizo -- WotC ushered the transition from the old magazines of Perkins to the era of Mona, Schneider & Jacobs: the Paizo era where Paizo's product was FAR superior to the WotC products. Perkins' work was from years earlier (though of course he helped transition from his leadership to the new Lisa Stevens leadership.). Meanwhile, (Bruce Cordell and) Mike Mearls were incorrectly named as being Paizo writers as well. Not true. Cordell and Mearls were players in Monte Cook's homegame who he encouraged to publish from his mantle of God-Creator-And-Savior of the game. They may have submitted an adventure to Paizo for consideration -- like Perkins had an adventure by Paizo celebrating #100, but they were WotC folks, never Paizo. Of course, their work for WotC came after WotC unceremoniously, unprofessionally, and foolishly flushed Monte Cook down the toilet by firing him. Their 'rationale' this time? (LOL): They were concerned about creative torpor. Again, LOL.
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Creative Director
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We published a few adventures from Chris Perkins and Mike Mearls during the Paizo era of Dungeon (the latter both before and after Mike was hired by WotC, AND after he did a short stint as an contractor for Paizo), but I was never able to get Bruce, my all-time favorite adventure writer of the 2nd edition era, to do an adventure for Dungeon. Not for lack of trying, but he was always super busy!
And also, while talking about the past, please please PLEASE resist the urge to use insulting or baiting or inflamitory language like "flushing down the toilet."
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So... James Jacobs' favorite adventure writer of the 2nd edition era is Bruce Cordell. I find that very interesting.
I myself cannot name a favorite adventure writer of any category. There are simply too many great ones. But I'll never forget my experiences with The Shattered Circle. I was just starting to wake up to the realization that 3.X was the edition for me, despite my desire to run a lot of AD&D adventures. I had converted "Clarshh's Sepulchre" (from Dungeon magazine, issue 53) to D&D 3.0, run it, and judged that I had done a good job (despite a few mistakes on my part, which I resolved to correct by learning from those mistakes). But what about a REALLY big conversion project? Would I have the patience to convert The Shattered Circle to 3.0, despite the awkward issues I had doing so? Well, I did, in a long and painstaking process. I could have taken shortcuts to make the conversion faster and easier, but I feel that a great adventure like that deserves to be run in a way that's true to the original. And I ran it in 3.0 twice.
And I regard The Sunless Citadel to be my favorite introductory adventure for 3.x. I ran it in 3.0 more than once. And many years later, I converted it to Pathfinder RPG 1st edition and ran it in a campaign. Again, I painstakingly wrote stats true to the original but compliant with PFRPG, without taking shortcuts... except one: for one of the NPCs, I grabbed the equipment from a statblock in the NPC Codex. But that's all.
And although The Gates of Firestorm Peak was too big for me to run, I used PARTS of it, at least.
So Bruce Cordell definitely holds a significant place in my heart and in the history of my role-playing life.