Drawing the Line
With equal amounts of regret and relief,
we?ve come to an important decision. The
AD&D? adventure in the center of
this
magazine is the last winner from the Mod-
ule Design Contest that will be printed in
DRAGON® Magazine.
That decision is going to make a lot of
people unhappy ? especially the winners in
the categories we aren?t going to publish ?
but it?s a decision we had to make.
After looking over the entries in all of the
unpublished categories, we?ve come to the
conclusion that we can?t afford to take the
amount of time that would be necessary to
develop them into publishable adventures.
We have chosen winners, and we?ll notify
all of them by mail within the next few
weeks. In those letters, we?ll do our best to
explain to them, individually, why their
entries were good enough to win but not
good enough to print.
How can this happen in some categories
but not in others? Well, there wasn?t a
really drastic drop-off in quality; in fact,
many of the modules we have printed
needed a lot of development work to turn
them into the versions you saw. And, with
the publication of this magazine, we?ve
finally run out of manuscripts that we
thought could be salvaged in the limited
time we have to accomplish that task.
We?re not trying to embarrass anybody,
and we certainly aren?t trying to set our-
selves up as all-knowing authorities on the
art of module design. (If we were that good,
we?d be publishing all the winners, and I
wouldn?t have to write this column.) We?re
simply trying to be straight with you, and
we don?t expect to be praised for that, but
we hope you?ll all understand.
Will we hold another contest? Yes, in all
likelihood, and maybe not too far in the
future. But first we?re going to see if we can
shake some good-quality adventures out of
the world at large. (See the small announce-
ment elsewhere in this issue.) And if we do
decide to stage another contest, we?ll go into
it with the hope that we haven?t turned
anybody off with this decision. We do ap-
preciate and respect the effort that every
contestant put forth; it?s impossible to look
at a 50-page manuscript and a set of labori-
ously drawn maps without feeling gratitude
and, sometimes, sympathy for all the hours
that went into finishing that entry. Judging
the entries was never easy, because practi-
cally every module we received contained a
truckload of good, imaginative ideas. But
making those decisions on the modules
themselves was a piece of cake compared to
making the final judgment about where to
draw the line.
