Dear SHADIS,

I've been 'disappointed' in the quality of your last few issues. The last issue, number 50, was the last straw. I just had to write a nasty letter. So here goes.

Rant

Issue 50 was almost 50% advertisements. That's right, half of the damn magazine was ADS! No, I don't count advertisements as a routine matter - I flipped through the magazine, said to myself, "Jeez, I bet this thing's half ads", and it kept nagging at me. So I counted it up.

Look. I don't subscribe to your magazine for the advertisements [I don't think anyone does. Does anyone watch TV for the commercials?] I subscribe to SHADIS for the articles. It's hard to read the articles when I have to figure out if the picture I'm looking at is an ad, or related to the article. Ads suck. I don't want to read them.

Constructive Criticism

There are many magazines which have lots of ads which DON'T get in the way. For example, National Geographic. They put all the ads in the front and back, never in the middle of an article. So you can skip straight into what you want to read, and never see a ad for some car you'll never buy. Another example is MacWorld magazine: they have ads scattered throughout the magazine, but it's a computer magazine, and the ads actually contain information and relate to the articles - so you can read an article reviewing different kinds of CD-ROM drives, then find out where to buy them in the ad... and the ad tells you what the CD-ROM drive is like.

MacWorld also has a bunch of ads crammed to the back of the magazine; if you WANT to read them, you turn to the back pages, and if you don't, you skip it. I couldn't do that with the last SHADIS - I'm considering getting a pair of scissors and cutting out all the ad pages.

Rant

The Babylon 5 issue REALLY sucked. I have no problems with Babylon 5: the TV show - it's a TV show, take or leave it - I don't watch it, but I don't mind if you do. But a whole issue on Babylon 5? Did you consider that some people don't watch it? I guess you did, a little, because there was that article that summarized the entire series, but that wasn't enough.

If you print an adventure for some science-fiction background, I can usually convert it to fit other backgrounds, with some difficulty. The more specialized the universe, the harder it is. [A Traveller or Star Wars adventure is easier to convert than a Fading Suns adventure, because Traveller and Star Wars are more "generic". Fading Suns has a background with political intrigue and so on which need to be understood to make a good adventure.]

That's the problem with Babylon 5; to understand the adventures, you need to understand the show, and if you don't watch the show, the adventures make no sense... ["Who are the Minbari? Are those the guys with the weird hair, or the weird noses? What's going on?"]

Final notes

Dork Tower and Rulz Jockies aren't very funny. Why? Knights of the Dinner Table took gamers on their own terms. You could read it and recognize people you had played with, and it was obviously written by a fellow gamer who knew what was going on. Dork Tower takes gamers as a stereotype - that all gamers are socially incompetent nobodies who obsess about science fiction TV shows and never take baths; it seems to be written by someone who isn't a gamer and doesn't really understand gaming. KoDT takes role-playing games as games people play, while Dork Tower takes games as something that turns kids schizophrenic and makes them get stuck in sewer tunnels. No offense intended to the author - I suppose someone likes it, otherwise, why would you print it?

I also find the editor's comments on the letter page a tad... stupid [that sounds about right]. I bet there are actually people out there who expect intelligent responses to their letters instead of grade-school sarcasm. I certainly do. Yes, there are people who want the sarcasm, but when someone writes a serious letter, can you respond seriously?

All ranting aside, you did do a couple of neat articles over the past few issues. I liked issue 50's Mercenaries, and the article on vampires in North Dakota a couple of issues ago was fun, even if I don't play Vampire... but the quality is going downhill. It seems you're no longer a cool independent magazine, you're just a generic games magazine. Ick. I pine for the days of Steven Marsh, Joe Genero, Lights, Camera, Action, covers which don't fall off, and less ads (you knew I'd come back to that, didn't you?).

C'mon guys, shape it up before I decide to sigh, let my subscription run out, and start searching for another decent games magazine.

No name attached

Okay. Let me first say before I respond to your letter, that I love this sort of mail, because it really tells me what you think however incongruous with SHADIS your thinking is. With that in mind, let me try to address everything in your shotgun criticism.

You may not have noticed but issue 50 was larger than the season average - 112 pages and 44 pages of ads = 35% ads, not 50%. That was the GenCon issue - a big issue every year for any gaming magazine - and according to my records SHADIS has been deficit for many months in its ability to pay for printing, so one issue a year that is more ad intensive is just fine with us.

I am constantly receiving advice from people on how to publish this magazine. I get letters all the time telling me that we should add a few more pages and have this sort of article and that's fine. But sometimes I get a few silly requests - someone once ask us to add three pages each month so we could publish more fiction. Three! How can we add an odd number of pages... Print a spherical magazine?

Magazines are not cheap to print. I recommend that you took into the cost and work of printing a 96-page magazine on 50 pound gloss paper. Magazines that are saddlestitched (i.e. stapled in the center) are printed in 16 page signatures. A signature is a giant plate that is folded and cut to fit the magazine. Each is printed in either four colors or just one (white is not a color - it's free). Printing in four colors can be incredibly expensive, so SHADIS only prints specific parts of the magazine in color. That's why you may notice that the ads are only in certain parts of the magazine and that sometimes they have to bisect an article. We try to keep this to a minimum, but in larger issues, it becomes more and more difficult.

You say you don't watch T.V. for the commercials. Fair enough. But I assume you're sophisticated enough to know that without them, there would be no T.V. right? Without ads, this magazine would have to be $30 an issue to pay for the printing.

National Geographic is a very, very special case in publishing (their foundation pays for everything and the ads are gravy), and is the quite possibly the most prestigious journal ever. Comparing SHADIS to such a fine publication is a compliment, but we aren't even close to their level of distribution and budget. You just can't expect us to do what they do.

On the other hand, MacWorld is an industry trade magazine (the bottom of the magazine food chain in our opinion) ... So how can you possibly compare us to either? SHADIS isn't useless price guides. Each month, and for months after that SHADIS articles remain useful - try saying that about MacWorld where CD-Roms speeds are obsolete in an afternoon.

We're sorry you don't like Babylon 5. We based the decision to publish the Babylon 5 issue on a few things, one of which is that 60% of our readers watch the show, and this was its final season. However, readers either loved or hated that issue and further Babylon 5 articles will be scrutinized heavily before being published (and I hope that's the last of the hate mail regarding this particular topic).

Many issues of SHADIS are very experimental, and a lot of fun, so trying new things doesn't scare us, it only makes us better. We'd like to think that issue 49 makes up for any mistakes in issue 46.

You've opened a can of worms with the KoDT comment and I don't think it would be fair to really address "subjective" opinions about comic quality within the pages of these magazines. I will say this though about our comics vs. KoDT. John Kovalic based all of his character on real people that he games with. Crass generalizations based on stereotypes are ugly and stupid, and that's why the dorks in Dork Tower have names and identity. Gaming comics are by their nature self-referential and self deprecating. Humor is based on exaggeration and a minority group like gamers are allowed to slight their own kind. When women make fun of women, its funny. When men do it, it's considered offensive. On the other hand, we don't all play the same way. KoDT's humor appeals to those gamers that have been in those situations, but not all of our gaming experiences involve +30 swords and fire hungry mages that count threads of rope. We'd like to think that John is doing something different than KoDT, not something reciprocal.

SHADIS is (insert hyperbole) everyone's favorite magazine, and we theorize that the great content in issue 49 and 50 (which you slightly addressed) is why we are being read. Last issue we explained why SHADIS had to print an 80-page issue. This time around, we would like readers to understand the other obstacles and dilemmas we face in producing a monthly magazine.

Opinion is great and everyone should be free to express their ideas, that's why we print letters like this (even without names on them). Some of our responses are silly, because that makes that magazine light and details our attitude (we are independent; we are allowed an attitude).

Other times, we hope that our responses help readers to understand the restraints and penalties we have to deal with. We really do try as hard as we can with the materials and options we have. Believe me, there are lots of things we'd love to do differently but that annoying reality thing sometimes makes it impossible. If you think the magazine is flawed now, imagine a 96- page magazine with with 64 pages of CCG prices. Who would read that?

[How was that for a stupid response?]

Dear SHADIS,

I just wanted to drop you a line for two reasons. The first of which is to thank you again for the great magazine. I find myself setting aside my Clancy books to read it when it comes in, and I can promise you that that is a huge accomplishment for me.

My other question is due to something a person on an email list said to our group, which I wanted to check on. Was SHADIS magazine in particular, or Alderac in general purchased by Wizards of the Coast? That was a surprise, and I remember that SHADIS gave itself a complete makeover last issue, so it sort of made me wonder...

Anyway, thanks again!

--Jon

Wow! It's odd that the topic of a WOTC buyout of SHADIS could still be going on. For those of you that do not know this, AEG is the design house for a CCG known as Legend of the Five Rings which is published by Five Rings Publishing Group, which in turn was bought by WOTC in the middle of 1997. WOTC owns the publishing house that prints L5R, but not AEG. We're still (and always will be) independent. Honest! [cough] Honest!

Dear SHADIS crew,

I have been Role Playing for a good number of years, I forget how many exactly... close to a decade. And I have found your magazines, especially the back issues to be helpful. Thank you so very much for producing a product of such high quality. Keep up the good work.

--Liz from Indiana

Just the back issues! That says something about the new help.