Dragon 395 & Dungeon 186 Magazine Tables of Contents Finally Up

[AbdulAlhazred]

Swamp dwelling halflings? To close to Bayou halflings for comfort, <shudder>.

lol, to each his own, I have a mini-campaign setting to work on that features.... TADA swamp living halflings . So hopefully this will have some use for at least one of us.

 

[Mummolus]

I like that there's a certain amount of overlap between the articles, provides a bit of additional support from perhaps unexpected places.

Athas' halfling ardents are having a good month.

 

[erf_beto]

"Bases and Strongholds" ??? Awesome!

And I like the new format. You can actually see what the article is about, and people can then rant over it on the internetz.

 

[Klaus]

Soooo.....One non-essentials article.

Where has all the meaningful content gone?!?

Class Acts: Ardent
Primal Spirits of Athas
Bases and Strongholds
Channel Divinity: vecna
Godly Images
A Little Help From Your Friends

In fact, only Class Acts: Knight and the accompanying Design & Development are specifically Essentials-geared.

 

[Jools]

I like the look of the articles. Surprised that today got nothing though. That didn't happen before, did it?

 

[smtwtfs]

"Essentials Uber Alles"

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLqEu4mUOU]YouTube - California Uber Alles (Dead Kennedys)[/ame]

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I like the look of the articles. Surprised that today got nothing though. That didn't happen before, did it?

Not too many times since the calendar schedule changed to a daily format. It used to be Mon/Wed/Fri only.

 

[TerraDave]

Actually looks pretty good.

HMMM...

 

[MrMyth]

• Um, primal spirits of Athas is pre-essentials.
• I would say that all the Dungeon content qualifies as pre-essentials (even if they are using monster vault monsters, you get the statblocks in the adventure).
• Modrons certainly are not essentials.
• The A Little Help from Your Friends article published today was a series of backgrounds (definitely pre-essentials).

I'm not sure that 'A Little Help from Your Friends' is really what you want to bring forward as an example of 'meaningful content'.

For myself, the Essentials content doesn't really bother me - after any release, stuff tends to focus on that product for a while. But the question of meaningful content? That's a tricky one. As it is, we've got one article on an Essentials class, one article on a non-Essentials class, a Channel Divinity article, a Primal Spirits article, a Godly Images article, and an article on Strongholds.

Compared to some of the months we saw early, with tons of actual player content, that feels a little light - but not enough to actually get upset about. At least... not yet. What worries me is how much use those articles will actually be? The Godly Images article sounds like it might just be another 'how to reflavor stuff for your character' article. The Channel Divinity is about Vecna - that could be awesome, but how useful will that be for players, who are discouraged from serving evil gods?

Basically, I remain worried that we keep seeing stuff in Dragon that should really be in Dungeon, and we get more and more articles that are just basic roleplaying advice. And I think there is a place for those, but when they displace genuinely useful articles, it is somewhat disappointing. I get the sense WotC is overcompensating for all the 'need more fluff' requests, and hopefully will soon hit a more balanced stride.

But I don't think it's out of line for someone to find this month relatively lacking in meaningful content. One should certainly wait until all the articles are out before making that claim, of course, and no month is guaranteed to be useful for everyone. But compared to some of the offerings in the past, December content definitely came up short, and looks like January has the potential to do the same.

All that said, right now I'm hopeful that Primal Spirits, CD: Vecna, and Bases & Strongholds will impress me, and I'm looking forward to Modrons and am somewhat intrigued by Boss Laughter. So for now, I'm willing to wait and see.

 

[MrMyth]

I like the look of the articles. Surprised that today got nothing though. That didn't happen before, did it?

According to the weekly schedule (which was posted buried in some developer's blog hidden in the community section of the website), today is supposed to have an article on female villains. I don't know if that is the "Campaign Workshop: Villains" article, or something else, or if it has been delayed, or there was just an update glitch.