Erik,
My glory days of Dragon were between 76 and 118 (my first purchase was #86). Some of the finest issues ever were between 107 and 118 (and are essentially 3rd edition in the flesh). Now look what you've done, I've got to go dig out my Dragon CD's to relive my past
I really loved the list/blocks of mercenaries in 109 (etc.) and the cover done by my favorite fantasy artist, Daniel Horne. Here's a list:
Greyhawk stuff (cuz' it had so many open-ended adventure strings and 'that Greyhawk feel')
The classes: incantatrix, duelist, barbarian-cleric, the witch (114..cover mostly)
109-Locals aren't all Yokels, Hooves & green hair
118-Hero points (nuff said)
116-All about Thieves
Later issues also had stuff on "how players can help the DM" and "how the DM can help the players 'role'-play." I liked those a lot.
148: Deck of many things
To sum it up: I like those little charts of useful information that I can clip and stick on my DM's screen to help aid an adventure. I always wish that Bizarre of the Bizarre and the like would have put the new magical items in a format that I could do the following with:
1. Sorted by low/med/high level instead of all mixed together, leaving you to 'guess' if an item might work. All of the articles should have worked more towards 'fitting' the stuff into a campaign at level variances..just like DUNGEON does with their adventures. Wow, I can already see how this would fit into DUNGEON...
2. "Boxed" or something so that I could copy off the page, cut out the description of the item and just HAND it to the player instead of having them have to hand-write out the description..which ALWAYS ended up being just the bonuses and NOT the history of the item (which is what really makes the items cool).
I was neutral on the following:
Princess ark..interesting, but not something I felt like sorting through
On the wrong end, I never found any practical use for the following:
The over-done, numerous, redundant, useless, space-wasting, surplus YEARLY articles on Dragons. Christ, 90% of regular campaigns have maybe TWO dragons in them per player LIFETIME but Dragon always chewed up an ENTIRE issue every year.
jh
..