I was just re-organizing my shelves and noticed my old Dragon magazines, and it reminded me of some of the more interesting articles I enjoyed over the years.
- Shades of Death, Dragon #298. What really interested me about this article was how it presented necromancy as something that could be good, netural or evil depending on the nature of whoever used it. Until then, I'd thought of raising undead as something only evil characters used, but this article got me thinking that there could be such a thing as a good necromancer. In a way, it felt like the article was written by a necromancer who was trying to justify his art, which was neat. The full-page picture was really cool, too.
- Alchemy Begins In The Forest, Dragon #301. It's cool to play a gnomish alchemist and have more to make than just alchemist's fire and sunrods!
- Shady Characters, Dragon #322. That guy should write more for Dragon. ;)
- The Ecology of the Adventurer, Dragon #342. Funniest Dragon article in a while.
- Domain Power, Dragon #342. A lot of the domain powers are quite mediocre and it's really nice to see such excellent abilities. They're useful and varied, and having four different ways to introduce the variant makes it all the easier to slot it into the game.
What articles do you still remember for being particularly interesting?
hmmm... my favorite would have to be "Force Magic" from #323 followed by "Grimiores" in #338...
C. Wesley Clough
:P
Wow, there are so many. Here are but a few.
All the Demonomicon articles.
Ed Greenwood's old Nine Hells articles.
All the Creature Catalogs.
Power Fantasy (issue #306).
The Swashbucklers article in issue #301.
Not For the Living: Six Haunted Templates (issue #336).
hmmm... my favorite would have to be "Force Magic" from #323 followed by "Grimiores" in #338...
I liked that article, but the author is a tad wierd. <ducks>
There are a lot of great articles. However, two recent articles really impressed me:
"Not for the Living" (#336),
"Schools of Magic" (#338)
"Not for the Living" and the domain article in the current Dragon were both very cool concepts. I also liked the article on imbued staffs in #338 and the "Arcane Ancestry" articles in #311 and #325 (which I have adopted as an integral feature of my homebrew campaign setting due to the way I envision sorcerers to come into being.) "Venom and Coil" (Ecology of the Yuan-ti, #305--I liked the old "ecology" format, with its extended and more freeform approach, much better than the new series--I'm not all that fond of the style of the artist who illustrates the new ecology articles either.) Finally, the old issues on Gnomes (#294?) and Drow (#298) were also very helpful to me in putting together my own ideas of how these two races fit into the campaign.
In general, I like articles that stimulate the imagination and give a few interesting details that bring a particular race or other aspect of the game to life, or ones that new introduce concepts and mechanics to make small corners of the game more interesting without completely changing the game. I must say I am bored with endless prestige classes--there are some good ones out there, and a few that I've adapted into my homebrew setting or that are useful when I run Greyhawk, but WotC has now effectively saturated the market. I've made up a few of my own, but they're very campaign-specific to my homebrew, and I don't think they would particularly enrich everyone else's.
I also liked the article on imbued staffs in #338...
#338 was a particularly strong issue, I thought. Between the magic schools, the imbued staffs, the Core Beliefs: Boccob article and the Ecology of the Spellweaver, it had a particularly strong set of feature articles.
That said, there have been a lot of very strong issues in the last year.
Far and away my favorites:
#321's article on the Imbued! Man oh man. That's just begging to be a campaign setting. It has the feel of high octane super fantasy like White Wolf's Exalted but with less cheese.
The ressurection of Darksun!
#315 the issue dedicated front to back to the great settings that are no longer supported. I LOVE it!
The whole series dedicated to expanding the good and evil classes, warriors and spellcasters. There's stuff in there I would buy a whole book to get at twice the normal gougariffic WotC prices!
There are soooo many!
I recently read a great 'Ecology of the Carrion Crawler' from an old issue, I forget which one.
Does anyone have the same problem I do? Where you are looking through all your oldies for a certain article because something just popped into your head and you keep getting sidetracked by all these other interesting things and then end up totally forgeting what you were looking for originally?
Or a certain article grabs your attention so much you end up obessing over it and thinking its the best thing ever then designing/creating yet another campaign that will most likely never get played?
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Well, since everyone is talking about Dragon articles (which makes more sense, probably) I have to say issue #301 was my favorite of all time, I think. It just had so much crunchy goodness with feats like parrying.
There have been other good issues. The October issue of 2005 (328?) was excellent - it included some of the best articles I've seen for a while (particularly describing the nature of different hauntings in game terms).
I dont remember the issue numbers; but as we are talking about Dragon and not Dungeon mag; my favorite articles are; a plethora of paladins -this just made good sense, and an article many years ago about how to fill up your tavern; it had menu offerings and stuff to bring your tavern to life; this article really got me doings some research and making venues for different cultural taverns and food offerings. Also, the issue about assassins with the assassin run in it was and is excellent and is great for any assassin guild. The article on poisons was good until I found one in Forgotten World that was excellent.
okay, in all seriousness, my favorite Dragon Articles have been (in no particlular order) How to Create a Monster (Issue 276), Death Knights (In LGJ in issue 290), Thunder and Fire (Issue 289), Crude but Effective (issue 199), there are plenty more, but unfortuanatly I am out of time this morning.
Whoops. I just realised I put "Dungeon" in the topic but meant "Dragon".
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Of all time?
That's like 20 years of magazines for me.
Top favorite. The one with the cut out spinner that allowed you to spin calculate ACs vs Atk with the speed factors for all the different weapons.
Second Favorite. The one with the entire cut out thieves's cant dictionary.
Third. Them's the Breaks. which was a random generation chart for broken weapons.
Come to think of it, I miss all those weird little cut out things Dragon used to publish back in the early 80's. I like gaming manipulatives.
More recently, I liked Chris Thomasson's PC Githzeri article; pretty much all of the races of power stuff issue 313 (especially the Half-Dead stuff); The staff article in 338; James' Demonomicon stuff; The Far Realm stuff from 330; oh and the seven deadly sins article with the domains. I also liked this month's issue a lot. Particularly the article on death (resurrection is my least favorite spell), and the Domain tweak articles.
The Greenwood Hell articles.
The Tucker's Kobolds editorial.
All the old Gamma World monster supplements.
101 Fantastic Locations
The Eighteen Evil Outsiders article (the one with elemental demons, battleloths and sundered devils)
The Demonomicon
Ari Marmell's undead origin article, and the haunting templates from the same article.
The Beasts of Beowulf, and for the same reason, Creature Collection V. Even though that issue hasn't come out yet ;)
For the record, "all time" for me is "the last year", pretty much.
Keith Baker's articles on Dal Quor, the Lords of Dust, the cults of the Dragon Below and the Umbragen were absolutely awesome (though if the editor of the first one is reading this, I'm curious why the Kalaraq Quori was toned down so much from the submitted version). His article on noble PC's, while not as revelatory as his writings on the various creepies of Eberron, was an excellent approach to the topic and proves he can write more than Eberron material (WotC don't seem to know what they have in that man, and it's everyone's loss).
It goes without saying that the Demonomicon is some seriously good stuff, though I found Baphomet slightly less interesting than the other three. Last October's article on hauntings was also a definite winner, as was the slightly older article on the Far Realms (Xoriat, as far as I'm concerned).
The recent Creature Catalogue was incredible; it gave me a bit of an inkling why people remember D&D's past so fondly. If the next batch are half as cool, the upcoming Catalogue belongs here too. I also liked the illithid-related monsters in the November issue, but the brainstealer dragon in particular really made that article. Between it, Zugtmoy (and her minions!) and the Lords of Dust, that issue was... oh hell, I've seen some of the issues from before my subscription (still not going THAT far back, admittedly), and while there was some great material (I'm glad I bought the espionage issue at the bookstore), I seem to have subscribed just in time for a high point in Dragon's quality.
For the record, though, the astrology issue was a "meh", as was the (September, I think) FR-heavy one, though the latter was in large part redeemed by the Charlatan prestige class that won that contest, and Amber E. Scott's contribution. The lizardfolk ecology was very interesting, and your Bazaar of the Bizarre (only I think it was called Magic Shop then) was great - not just the items, the "fluff" was really inspired as well.
I've rambled right off the topic, haven't I? I can't even see it from here. Time to pick a direction at random and hope for the best; I'll shut up, lest I start talking about Fremen or infinite-mana combos. I have a terrible sense of direction.