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I've been thinking hard lately about getting a subscription to either Dungeon or Dragon (both is out of the questions, money-wise). I was glad to see these messageboards, so I thought I'd add my questions. I apologize if this is a common question.
Here's my situation:
I'm a DM in the process of building my homebrew world and cosmology; I just started in January so a lot of things are wide open. I have been looking for any world-building information I can find and adapting all sorts of material. I'm looking to make this place very customized. It's a large world so I have room for all sorts of different cultures and I want to eventually delineate groups of prestige classes, feats, optional rules, etc based on region so that I can play different types of campaigns (ie, one area is all-core, one uses certain Unearthed Arcana rules, one uses Frostburn...). What I'm saying is, I'm open to ideas from anywhere. I never use pre-made adventures or settings, although I often take ideas from them.
Would Dungeon or Dragon be more useful to me in world-building? Which is more enjoyable to read? Is there a significant amount of non-adventure material in Dungeon (I lean toward Dragon for the greater variety of content)? I have been looking through Paizo's message boards and they've made me quite excited about getting a subscription. Seeing the editors post so helpfully is tremendously encouraging.
I've also read some bad reviews at Amazon and been somewhat deterred. I hope those reviews were based just on difficulties with the changeover from 2e to 3e. Do you see the quality as improving or declining? How much is directly useful to your campaigns (or would be useful to me, as I've described my needs)? I really like articles about D&D and gaming; general advice and interest is good information for me. My roommate has some older issues of Dragon (from 3e, not 2e or earlier, but also not 3.5), and they're intriguing, but a lot of the information in them I have from rulebooks published later. I don't really have access to a proper game store, and I don't know where to pick up paper copies to look through.
I like to research things pretty thoroughly before buying (limited funds), so any opinions or info would be very helpful. I can only get one or the other on my budget.
I think Dungeon is your better bet. I have actually populated a whole area of Greyhawk with towns, NPC's, settings from Dungeon adventures that I have not yet run, or may never run. The Styes for example, is a recent town that was in Dungeon that was an awesome setting. I won't run the adventure in this particular campaign, but I took and adapted the town.
There are many more examples like this. I actually look forward to chopping apart adventures in Dungeon for use of their NPC's and towns and settings and maps in my own campaign. I do run some straight out of the "box" so to say.
I personally think you're being too ambitious with your campaign world. Campaign worlds that try to have everything in them tend to be too watered down in believability, in my experience. When I have created my own campaign worlds, I have kept them more tightly controlled along a common theme (the Darksun world would be an example from print). Trying to accomodate everything makes the world seem artificial, like a theme park more than a campaign world. I think a strong common world theme gives the characters and players more things to identify with.
Since you have budget concerns, I recommend going to the public library and picking up a book on medieval culture/dress/society or something similar if another style of campaign interests you. There are many excellent non-game oriented "sourcebooks" in the library on various historical societies that you can draw on for a ton of campaign ideas that make your campaign awesomely varied, but yet consistent in an overall theme.
Hey, it's just advice....but I do recommend Dungeon for your question more than Dragon.
In short, quality is improving. Dungeon is as good as it ever was and Dragon is currently in its best run since WotC took over D&D (although it's still miles and miles beneath where it was for most of its run under TSR). Dungeon is the meatier mag for a GM by far and the better of the two overall right now, IMHO. I personally will be letting my Dragon subscription lapse in a few months, but renewing my Dungeon one.
One thing that I do, is rent Dragon from our local library, because I, too, an short on money. There was one issue, I don't remember which number(can someone tell me, please?), that had "The ecology of the Kendu" I think that was the name. That could go in your world as like a monster or a race.
One thing you could try is to buy two or three copies of each off of the news stand. Give them all a look-over, and see which you think is better.
Director of Games
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One thing you could try is to buy two or three copies of each off of the news stand. Give them all a look-over, and see which you think is better.
That is probably your best bet. Both magazines offer content that could be useful to you in building your campaign. Dungeon offers 3 adventures each month with plenty of ideas and NPCs you can mine for your use. It also offers a handy campaign workbook section and an advice article by Monte Cook.
Dragon, on the other hand, offer 3-4 features each month giving new ideas, expanding rules, and exploring the system of D&D. It also contains a host of class acts each month that customize and explore all the standard classes found in the PHB. Dragon also offers up a host of other regular features each month, like ecologies (covering one monster in detail), first watch (product previews and reviews), Bazaar of the Bizarre (new magic items), and spellcraft (new spells).
The best advice I can give it to check out both, at least on the newstand and figure out which one works for you.
Jason Bulmahn
Associate Editor of Dragon
My advice is to subscribe to Dungeon, as it has a lot more information for the DM and goes beyond just adventures, as already stated. Then, if you have a store near you that sells Dragon go in and check out each issue at the stand and decide on a case by case basis as to purchase it or not. This is what I do and so far it works out well. The only problem is when they have issues that are wraped up do to a removable map or something like that, but that typicaly only happens in Dungeon.
Another idea is to talk one of your players into subscribing to Dragon and sharing it with your whole party, or even splitting up a subscription between the group. One year is thirty something/almost fourty? Depending on how big your RPG group is each persons cut could go as low as five bucks.
Either way, as a DM, keep your eye out for the ecology articles in Dragon. In my opinion they are worth the price of the magizne by themselves. The three that I've read (green hag, kenku, and kobold) were all very high quality articles and full of insperational information. Especialy the kobold ecology, which was an oversized artilce to begin with.