Gaming Frontiers is a quarterly publication devoted to "all things d20." Not really a magazine, it clocks in at 140 pages (160 for Volume 2) and a price tag of $17.95. It is perfect bound with a cardstock cover. The pages are full color, with lots of artwork and backgrounds. It is very nice to look at.

So it doesn't have the look or price of a magazine. The content, however, is laid out like a magazine, with articles features, adventures, Interviews, Non-Player Characters, Editorials and Reviews. It also has short stories, three in Volume One and two in Volume Two. (In fact, the editorial in Volume 2 is all about the complaints they received about deciding to include fiction in the magazine, and how they are dedicated to including it.) Most articles are 2-5 pages and the reviews are either half a page or one full page.

Graphically, this book is beautiful. It is full color and glossy throughout. The graphic design is attractive, although there isn't a consistent "look" to the articles. One will be done in one style, and the next in a different style. It's also hard to tell the articles form the advertisements. Many of the articles are written by a game company, so that company's name and logo are at the front of each article. Also, the magazine is so art heavy and colorful, that the advertisements don't stand out like they do in most magazines. Volume 1 had some problems with illustrations (one article using the same piece of art three times over three pages!), but this seems to have been fixed with Volume 2.

What makes Gaming Frontiers different from most magazines (besides its format) is that 80% of the articles are contributed by Game Companies, rather than by individuals. All of these submissions are required by Gaming Frontiers to be unique (ie. they can't be excerpts from one of their published books) but can be set in their unique campaign settings. This makes for a very eclectic collection of articles, ranging from generic fantasy to science-fiction to steampunk fantasy to modern espionage. On the one hand, this can be rather disconcerting and can mean that many of the articles are of no use to you, but it also allows the reader to get an idea what the many d20 companies are doing without having to buy a full adventure or campaign book.

And this is my major problem with this magazine. The publisher is beholden to his advertisers for 80% of the magazine's content. What if someone writes a really bad article? Are they going to feel obligated to publish it? Who is really in charge here? Seems to me that it's the people with the money.

In fact, they've already had a run in with this topic. Here's a letter to the editor from Volume 1:

As if expecting these comments, they wrote this in the reviews section of Volume 2:

So they say. Let's take a minute to look at the reviews. Volume 1 had 17 reviews:

• 5 received 5 stars. 3 companies did not advertise. 2 companies did advertise.
• 3 received 4 1/2 stars. 2 companies did not advertise. 1 company did advertise.
• 5 received 4 stars. 3 companies did not advertise. 2 companies did advertise.
• 1 received 3 1/2 stars. This company did advertise.
• 1 received 3 stars. This company did not advertise.
• 1 received 2 1/2 stars This company did not advertise.
• 1 received 1 star. This company did not advertise.

So, of the companies that advertised in this issue, none of them got rated at less than 4 stars. Some companies did get good ratings without advertising. We could give them the benefit of the doubt, or we could point out that all of the products that received 5 or 4 1/2 stars that did not advertise in that issue, were from large companies with large advertising budgets . . .

Volume 2 was similar, except that there were only 5 reviews:

• 1 received 5 stars. They did not advertise.
• 2 received 4 1/2 stars. 2 companies did advertise.
• 2 received 4 stars. 2 companies did not advertise.

Of the three companies that did not advertise, 1 was Wizards of the Coast, and the other two were White Wolf partners.

I kind of got off the track while looking at reviews. Lets look at that last quote again:

But if the game companies are being paid for their work, that kind of blows a hole in my arguments, doesn't it? Not really. According to their website (http://www.unitedplaytest.com/gamingfrontiers/index.html) this is how they're paid. Authors are paid 4 cents a word for articles. But if the author would like to buy an ad in the magazine, they can use their article payment as credit toward to cost of the ad, but with a value of 6 cents a word. However, you can only pay for 50% of an ad with credit.

So let's say that a full page ad cost $500 (there were no rates on their website, so this is just an example). The company D20RUs wants to buy the ad, so they have one of their staff writers put together a 4200 word adventure (their maximum submission size 10,000 words) and send off a check for $250. Good deal for D20RUs. It's a good deal for Gaming Frontiers too, because if I had written the same article, they would've had to pay me $168.00. Instead, they made $250, a difference of $418. So, from the CFO's point of view, they don't want to take submissions from the public, at least not until they fill up their ad space.

Now, in this day and age, maybe I shouldn't be concerned about this. I mean, most game magazines are House Organs, owned by a company to promote that company's games. Magazines like Dragon and White Dwarf. All of the independent magazines have died out over the years and I guess that must be for a reason. But if all we can expect out of gaming magazines in the 21st century is House Organs, I think that it should be clear to everyone that that's what we're getting.

You'll never see an article in White Dwarf going on about how independent they are, and we shouldn't have had to see that here.