maransreth said:
Anyway, my questions for everyone else - From what issue did you start your Dragon collection? From what issue number do you have the collection continuous? Do you still make regular use of older Dragon issues? Do you have a favourite issue? That sort of thing.
oldest: somewhere in the 50s, or maybe even 40s (i don't feel like going to check right now). Contiguous from #88 to something like #276, and one more issue since then.
Yep, i use older issues all the time. Roughly, from about #86 to about #150 see regular use. I rarely use the more-recent issues. Though, of course, there are exceptions, and good articles in most of them, except the last couple years. [The last 3 years i had a subscription, i had told myself that, even if there wasn't a single other useful article in teh entire year, the subscription was worth it for the RPG reviews alone. And i'd had to remind myself of that, because they'd gotten down to on the order of one useful article per issue. When they dropped RPG reviews, i wrote them an impassioned letter, and dropped my subscription.]
I don't have favorite issues, but i have favorite articles:
"Tucker's Kobolds"
"The Sunset World"
"Six Very Special Shields"
"Welcome to Malachi"
the article on spell-focusing items ["Good Stuff, For a Spell"?]
the revised bard and monk classes (still think those are the best versions, all-around, ever published for D&D) ["He's Got a Lot To Kick About" and "Singing a New Toon", i believe]
the drake article (shadow, faerie, and...something-else drakes. had a shadow drake as a PC who was another PC's familiar, once)
the scout class (though not special enough to bother converting to D20 System--plenty of other classes that basically fill the role)
"The Real Barbarians"
the whole series of Africa articles, but particularly the one on demi-human-ish and humanoid races
many, if not most, of the non-system-specific "how to" articles, such as "The DM's Ten Commandments", though that's far from my favorite--but i'm not recalling any specific titles at the moment. There needs to be more of that sort of stuff available to beginning GMs these days.
"Get Your Priorities Strait" [not sure if that's the right title]. The basis for the alignment system that i use to this day (when using alignment). Also "For God and Country", on the same topic.
"A Plethora of Paladins"
"The Ecology of the Gibbering Mouther". There were a lot of good ecology articles over the years, but few, if any, that were as great of a read.
the original "Creature Catalog" (still possibly the best overall collection of monsters i've seen published for D&D/D20 System, despite its brevity).
the landragons article
Well, i'm sure there're lots more, but those're the ones that come immediately to mind, without any digging to refresh my memory.
