Thanks to Internet Archive and its cache of Dragon Magazines, I've been pondering this entirely unremarkable table of contents from #180, where the big big feature is a preview of trading cards, and other articles tell you ...
to have your campaign make sense, to give magic weapons backstory, to intentionally play a low-intelligence character dumb, to haul off your party cleric to perform weddings in his home town, how to raise funds for your gaming club, and please make the acquaintance of this four-horned giant battering ram - get it? - and six-legged earthquake-making dinosaur.
The real posts will resume soon, hopefully with better content than that. I'm back from an extended professional/vacation trip where real gaming took precedence over game posting.
Wheel of Time was okay for the first couple books and STNG was solid Trek (even if it did make TOS gripe about "them damn kids").
ReplyDeleteAs one who (arguably) came of age in the 1990s, I ate this stuff up with a spoon. And despite a new found appreciation for prior styles of gameplay, I still do (eat it up).
Maybe not this particular issue, but looking at quite a few Dragons of that era fills my little gamer's heart with avarice for cool toys, more character options, and slicker monsters.
Oddly, despite a love for certain aspects of 3.x, it was during the 2000s when I really started to find Dragon content something I could do without.
I hated that stuff so much that it made me consciously seek out older, rougher material. And now here I am.
ReplyDeleteThanks, horrible renfaire-style artists and useless TSR supplements!
I remember thinking, "why should I spend twice the money on this crap when I can get the old stuff with the weird pictures for cheaps at the swap meet?" Thank God I followed my Erol Otus instincts!
ReplyDeleteDid you really just criticize an April Fool's issue of Dragon Magazine by claiming that it was the standard content of the magazine?
ReplyDeleteYes. Yes, you did.
That's some really inept sophistry you're engaging in there.
The joke's on you, sir ... The Complete Bard's Handbook was an actual TSR product released that year, not an April Fool's gag. Issue 180 kept the shenanigans down to a one-page illustration (see table of contents), which was definitely not the Bard Handbook ad. I guess they had gotten sick of producing bad game humor year after year.
DeleteFunny, that list looks a lot like the standard feed at RPGBloggers.com
ReplyDelete