Recent content by JML

I think you miss the point. The wheels come off when people debt-finance a takeover of a modestly profitable company and the need to finance the debt means they can only do things they hope will be wildly profitable or sell off every part of the business to where they only have the bit that...

Disagree. the mandatory quests can help keep one player from running away with the game and add in an increased level of player interaction without being too detrimental. If anything should get popped out it's the Open Lord quest that makes one player immune to all mandatory quests. It's a...

Classic McKinsey/MBA-Bro/Vulture Capitalist thinking. "Yes, you're generating a profit, but it's not a BIG profit, so why bother?" The fact that it's giving people jobs, putting something creative out into the world, giving you enhancements to other parts of your company's products...why would...

I was reading quite a lot of the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books during the peak years, and while they're mostly enjoyable, there certainly is a fair amount of variance in the overall quality and it became easy to start sorting out by sticking to authors you knew a bit and liked. Weis &...

We used Vol. III the most I think, but all of them were quite good. Especially since so many of the articles were inaccessible. Back then it was awfully hard for a kid to do a back order on any of the issues...

Dragon is still a delight; there are some lulls (the early years they're still figuring out how to be professionals and the quality varies widely; as TSR fell apart Dragon quality dropped as well before a nice resurgence in 3E; have to say I found the Paizo era disappointing with the increasing...

The Dragon Magazine Shannara issue was quite good and the "High Druid" prestige class fit the world pretty nicely. (Dragon had a nice resurgence in 3E, even if it was basically a D&D house organ at that point)

I'm very fond of TSR's settings for D&D, having romped through so many of them in my early D&D years. Greyhawk was of endless fascination, especially with that Darlene map! And when Lankhmar came out we decided to stick it in Greyhawk as well, because why the hell not? lol. I think the biggest...

For me this is close to the middle, but I also am of the (seemingly rare) opinion that Dragon had a very long and sustained period of about ten years or so where the quality was incredible.

Sadly, Robin Wood passed away in 2021, having battled both fibromylogia and cancer. Many great Dragon covers, but this is probably the most iconic. I would argue that there's a still a ton of greatness coming in Dragon; the real slide into House Organ territory doesn't come for several years...