The other official Dungeons & Dragons magazine, Dungeon provides short, ready-to-run adventure modules in an anthology format for the Dungeon Master on the go, with DM advice articles added for good measure. Less celebrated than its player-centric sister magazine, Dragon, Dungeon nonetheless proved a useful game aid for over twenty years.
First published by TSR in 1986 as a bimonthly spinoff of Dragon as a platform for fan-made adventures, Dungeon went monthly in 2003 after Paizo Publishing was contracted to run the magazine by Wizards of the Coast. Paizo introduced the "adventure path" concept—a series of adventures linked between issues to provide a complete campaign—while retaining the anthology format. Dungeon's adventure paths included Shackled City, Age Of Worms, and Savage Tide. During this era, Dungeon was merged with both Polyhedron (a gaming magazine originally for organized play, later shifted to general coverage of the d20System) and Living Greyhawk Journal (a magazine specifically devoted to WotC's organized Living Greyhawk campaign); Poly was eventually discontinued while LGJ was shifted over to Dragon (and eventually discontinued).
In September 2007, Wizards took their license back from Paizo and the magazine's print run ended with issue #150 (as meanwhile, Paizo evolved the concept into Pathfinder's Adventure Path supplements, with the early APs still being designed with 3.5 in mind). Wizards continued to publish Dungeon in an online PDF format before going on indefinite hiatus in December 2013. In 2015, both it and Dragon were succeeded by Dragon+, a bi-monthly online magazine which published the same mix of content as its predecessors but restarted its numbering at No. 1.
Not to be confused with a board game with the same name.
This magazine provides examples of:
- Crossover: The "incursion" event, which crossed over between Dungeon, Dragon, and Polyhedron (then merged with Dungeon) in which the evil githyanki invade from the Astral Plane. Dungeon provided a set of adventures spanning the course of the invasion, Dragon gave players specially-designed character options for fight the githyanki, and Polyhedron provided a special "mini-game" sidestory in which players take on the role of the invaders.
- Eye-Dentity Giveaway: Issue #21, adventure "The Chest of the Aloeids". The goddess Athena, no matter what form she assumes, will always be given away by her grey eyes.
- Mascot: Unofficially, the evil dragon mastermind, Flame, who appeared on the cover of the first issue and made several subsequent reappearances.
- Monster-Shaped Mountain: A short adventure from the magazine was located at the site where a huge dragon and the flying ship it'd attacked had crashed into a pool of lava. Several of the caverns in the resulting dungeon were shaped like dragon-parts, as the lava had congealed around its skull, limbs, ribcage and tail.
- One-Word Title: Naturally.
- Television Tie-In Magazines: Provides short, premade adventures and advice for Dungeon Masters.
- Trip Trap: In #14 adventure "Master of Puppets", the entry stairs to the abandoned shrine have a tripwire strung across the bottom of the stairs, 6 inches above the last step down. Any Player Character running or walking into it must make a Dexterity check at -4 or fall down, taking 1-4 Hit Points of damage and being stunned for 2-5 minutes.
