How to Use the Magazine Index

1. Basic Searching

Enter any keyword related to your topic of interest. Note that searching is not case-sensitive.

• Broad Terms: Searching for orcs will find every entry in the index where orcs are mentioned, although it won't find articles about orcish mating habits.
• Partial Words: You can use partial terms. Searching for psi will find psionics, psi-powers, psionicists, and psions, but it might also turn up articles about campsites, collapsible equipment, harpsichords, and solipsisms. Likewise, searching for orc, although it will turn up articles on orcish mating habits, will also unveil articles about exorcists, motorcycles, orchids, and porcupine sorcery, which I'm to understand is a somewhat prickly form of magic. So just be ready for some chaff with your wheat. Manual sifting through the search results is going to be required.

2. Compound Searching ("AND")

If you want to find the intersection of two topics, use the word and between your terms. This will return only the results that contain both words.

3. Filtering by Magazine Category

You may narrow your search to magazines focused on a specific game system, genre, or type of game by using the Magazine Category drop-down menu, however, I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing so, because you may end up missing a lot of whatever it is you're looking for. The reason for this is that while many magazines focus on a particular game or genre, most of them will occasionally stray outside their usual subject matter. For example, although The Dragon focused on D&D and AD&D during its first couple of decades, it would occassionally publish articles for other RPGs, such as Traveller, Top Secret, etc. Suppose you're looking for Traveller articles on a specific topic, and one of them happens to have been published in The Dragon or some other magazine not specifically focused on Traveller. If you select "Traveller-specific mags only" from the dropdown menu, you're not going to see that article, because The Dragon isn't a Traveller-specific magazine. So in order to, for example, find all the articles about psionics in Traveller, it'd be best to run two searches. In the first, select "All magazines in the index" from the drop-down menu and do a compound search on psi and traveller. In the second, select "Traveller-specific mags only" from the drop-down menu and search for psi all by itself. The reason for this is that most of the articles in Traveller-specific magazines aren't tagged as being for Traveller, as they would be if they were found in a non-Traveller-specific magazine. It's just a little (but important) quirk of the index you might want to keep in mind.

4. Troubleshooting

• Beware of non-standard tags: There is no standard list of tags, so some articles are described as being adventures and others as scenarios. Likewise with elvish, elven, and elfin. Even more troublesome, tags for game systems are non-standardized, so for example, Star Trek might show up as startrek, Star Wars as starwars, or Car Wars as carwars. So try searching for things multiple different ways, bearing in mind that the person who created this had no idea what he was doing.
• Special Characters: For security reasons, the search currently only supports letters, numbers, and - . , ( ) & /. Other symbols are automatically filtered out.
• No Results? Try simplifying/shortening your search. Instead of "Dungeons and Dragons," try searching for D&D. Instead of "Teenagers from Outer Space," try TFOS. Remember, this was originally intended to be an MS-DOS program, so I was trying to keep the line lengths down below eighty characters in order to conform with the standard, MS-DOS, 80-column terminal display.