This month's SHADIS produced a fair amount of controversy around the SHADIS offices this month. Specifically, the fact that we were publishing both a KULT adventure and a Hol adventure - two systems which aren't renowned for their family values - came across as a bit foolhardy to some. The Powers That Be don't like us printing anything that could result in the office being burned to the ground, and both these articles seemed to qualify for the "angry peasants with torches" level of controversy. Needless to say, we had some reservations.

So why would we undergo something that antagonizes our meal-ticket while simultaneously providing fodder for the ravening hordes ready to tear us apart? In the first place, both articles are pretty good. A Hol Lot of Trouble, in particular, is some kind of warped masterpiece, and we would be remiss if we didn't do everything we could to bring its genius to our readers.

But more importantly, they bring up some issues of adulthood in gaming, and who exactly the role-playing audience is. Dungeons and Dragons, and lately Magic have always been good at bringing young players into the industry - players who presumably "shouldn't" be looking at stuff like KULT.

But youngsters aren't the only gaming fans out there; on the contrary, they're just one segment of it. Role-playing covers a wide variety of tastes, interests, and enthusiasm levels. And if we let ourselves appeal to a single segemtn of that audience we end up limiting ourselves to a very small playing field.

Gaming has always suffered under the perception that it's immature. But in the past few years has made great efforts to expand beyond that. The remarkable success of White Wolf and the similar work of countless smaller companies have moved the industry away from the 10-14 year-old set into new areas. In order to do that, they have had to take some chances, run some risks, and treat their audience like adults. If they hadn't, role-playing would have been a worse place for it.

Prison Break and A Hol Lot of Trouble are good articles. They are also designed for a certain level of maturity, or at least a sophisticated sense of humor. They're certainly not for everyone. But if we were to cut off or refuse to print them simply because of that, then we'd be destroying their creativity and inspiration - or at least limiting their audience to the point of nil. That's not just unfair, it lowers the quality of the magazine. Which does a disservice to our readers our writers, and ourselves.

There's a chance, of course, that we're blowing this a bit out of proportion - that our paranoia-fueled minds are creating mountains out of mole-hills. It could just all blow by without raising so much as an eyelash. But if someone out there is taken aback by the material in this issue, then we owe it to them to explain our intentions as best we can.

We're not trying to hurt anyone; we don't want to traumatize children or cause mental breakdowns or ignite ramapaging mobs demanding our heads on pikes. We're simply trying to put out the best magazine we can. This time around, they've included a couple of slightly different articles. We hope you agree that SHADIS is a little better because of them.

Weasel games - Gone Fishin'

Lester Smith has temporarily fled the SHADIS pastures for the highways and byways of Europe. His column should return soon, provided he escapes the clutches of the Odessa mob alive.

Errata:

Last issue, we erroneously reported that the AD&D CD-ROM supplement has a suggested retail price of sixty dollars. In fact, no retail price has been suggested by the manufacturers; hunt around, and a good price should show up.

The Edge regrets the error, and wishes to assure a no doubt panicked populace that such an occurence will hardly ever happen again.

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com