Fight On! A Magazine
I'm not sure if I initially realized how great a loss it was when Dragon magazine retreated from the world of print (and newstands) to become a purely digital offering. I know in the past I've been a great fan of digital releases of RPG materials such as games and supplements, but that's an attitude I've slowly been becoming less happy with. When I first was able to buy digital games, I went in whole hog and bought a lot of them... and then barely read any of them.
I'm not entirely sure why. I like reading RPGs, I like reading things on screens - I lost several hours today reading through a set of webpages reviewing the entire run of Planetary as it's been published - but reading an RPG on a screen just doesn't work for me. And this continued with the initial (free) issues of Dragon and Dungeon magazine. I would download the issues to my hard drive when they were complete, I'd flip through them... but I wouldn't really read them. I'd just set them aside on my hard drive and let them rest.
When I discovered the game magazine Fight On! via James Maliszewski's blog Grognardia, I wasn't quite sure if I'd enjoy it. James' blog is heavily in favor of old school D&D as originally published (often called od&d) and the first bits of AD&D and the basic/expert sets, whereas I've always seen them as old, prehistoric RPGs, what people played before Champions, Gurps, Feng Shui and other more modern games were available. I've slowly been swayed by his arguments towards seeing oD&D as being a more pure expression of D&D that's been misdirected over time, and so I decided to try out Fight On! and see what it was about. Looking over the magazine, I picked out issue #3, which I've currently got the cover of showing in the sidebar at my http://www.jcfiala.net site.
Wow.
Fight On! turned out to be a delicious mixture of gaming magazine goodness, thrown together seemingly random, of different levels of detail and use. There's new monsters. There's special combat rules. There's an entire map for the old Judges Guild Wilderlands that's done up in hexes with keyed encounters taking place across many miles. There's tables for generating various random things, there's a discussion of the original Judges Guild company with the people involved with it's creation, there's several modules and legends and.... and more. It's 150 pages of pure fun.
And, at the time I post this, and until the end of the month, it's on sale - $10 for the third issue - there's a total of four available, and $7 for the same issue as a pdf. But I suggest getting it on lovely, delicious, pick it up and carry it anywhere paper. And why not check out a review of issue #2?
