Well, to begin with, I'm
old-school enough that I don't consider the current
online incarnation of Pyramid to be a
magazine. Magazines are on
paper, they have a
table of contents, they include those irritating
subscription cards, you can buy them in
bookstores, you can read 'em in the bathroom without having to set your machine up next to the potty. The online Pyramid is a
subscription website, and calling it a "
magazine" doesn't really make it a
magazine.
Nevertheless, I've been subscribing to the Pyramid site for the last several years, and their
tagline--"
The Best in Gaming"--is
spot-on accurate. They publish
games,
adventures,
variants, and
supplemental information for just about every
genre of
roleplaying games and for just about every major
game system. They publish quite a lot of material for
GURPS, which is owned by
Steve Jackson Games, but it's not
uncommon for several weeks to go by with
no material for GURPS.
One of Pyramid's best points is the strong
crossover factor of most of their articles--a
fantasy scenario will often include
pointers on how to convert it to be played in a
science fiction game, a
modern military game, or a
secret conspiracy game. Likewise, their many articles on
historical and
technological minutiae are useful to a wide variety of
gamers--an
overview of 12th-century
Constantinople can be used by
fantasy,
historical, and
time travel gamers, while stats for
World War II weaponry can be useful for
espionage and
military campaigns, as well as for just about any campaign set after WWII. Of course, Pyramid also has a
reputation for publishing
funny stuff, including articles about
cheese magic,
mutant chickens in the
Wild West,
vampire pigs,
Lovecraftian superheroes, and
who's really buried in Grant's Tomb.
If any one feature is absolutely worth paying for (aside from the comics--
John Kovalic's "
Dork Tower" and
David Morgan-Mar's "
Irregular Webcomic!" are both wonderful), it's got to be
Kenneth Hite's "
Suppressed Transmission" column, which focuses on the
weird, the
esoteric, the
horrific, and the
Illuminated. Topics can range from
William Shakespeare,
Jack the Ripper, and
James Forrestal to
Coca-Cola,
Emperor Norton, and
the Philadelphia Experiment. They're always
entertaining,
thought-provoking, and minutely
researched.
The
downside of Pyramid is the
discussion boards. The users of the board call themselves "Pyramidians", and they are, in general, a pack of
gibbering,
pretentious,
moralistic nimrods. They often
congratulate themselves on being "
better and smarter than Usenet"; strangely, however, they still
indulge in as much
flaming, baseless
egotism,
partisan-blinded
hypocrisy,
thuggish
bullying, poor
scholarship,
backstabbing,
racism,
bigotry,
bizarre pro-
KKK rants, and
bald-faced lies as
Usenetters do. They also like to trumpet themselves as a
community, but many is the time I've seen
Pyramidians rebuked and reviled for (A) fretting over troll-issued death threats, (B) worrying about the possibility that their subscriptions would be
revoked (Don't ever joke about
copyright theft on those boards;
Steve Jackson gets way pissed about it), or (C) not worshipping at the altar of
Joss Whedon/
J. Michael Straczynski/ the
Wachowski Brothers/
Glen Cook. (Although
sci-fi author John M. Ford's posts were always worth
reading, as all of his sig lines were
unique,
original, and
howlingly
funny) The best reason to read their discussion boards is to be reminded how good we have things here on E2.
In summation,
read it and
love it for the
articles.
Skip everything else.