How do you organise the stuff from Dragon you want to use?

[Krug]

There's lots of great stuff in Dragon magazine, but it's not easy to keep track of what's where, or to find the info at the right time. How do you organise the stuff from Dragon magazine you want to use in your campaign?

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Good question! I was just thinking of this the other day. Fortunately I have a pretty good memory in that I can usually recall 'about' the period when I saw a good article. I have been putting little sticky notes on the cover of the mag before I put it on the shelf so I can look at the cover and then recall precisely where the article is that I want to use.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I scan it in and add it to my OneNotes program.

Here is a thread you may want to check out...

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=81852

 

[Olaf the Stout]

You could always do what I did and photocopy all of the articles you find useful and put them in plastic sleeves in a 3 ring folder. I'm not sure if it is entirely legal (my apologies if it isn't) but I figured that it would be ok since I only use the information for my own personal use. It just makes it a lot easier to find stuff when I just have the useful articles that I like to sort through instead of whole issues. Of course, unless you can do photocopying for free at work, like I can, this may not be the most cost effective way to go.

The other thing that I did was make a semi-index of all of the articles in Dragon that I liked. I went through all of my issues of Dragon and made a note of what the article was about along with the issue number and page number. This makes searching for the article that I remember was "in there somewhere" a little bit easier. It took a few hours for me to do but I felt that it was worth it. YMMV.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Wombat]

Photocopy relavent article & put it in the House Rules binder.

Pretty straightforward for me

 

[Brakkart]

I photocopy whatever pages that are of use to me and keep them in a document folder that lives in my gaming bag for just that purpose. I do the same with some rulebooks if I'm only going to be using say 1 monster from a book, I'm not going to cart a 220+ page hardback around for that.

 

[Arnwyn]

I cut out all the relevant articles I like right out of the magazine, and put them in the appropriate sourcebooks.

Yeah, you heard me. I cut up my Dragon magazines.

 

[derelictjay]

I scan them, and make them into PDFs. Though I'm a bit behind (probably because my scanner broke).

 

[Psion]

I've been known to photocopy stuff in the past.

However, nowadays I just prepped an excel spreadsheet with my favorite articles, though the one I have going now only has issues since 301. I put in issue number, article title, keywords, description, and author. Then I just use the autofilter to pick out articles that I want to use. So, for example, if I want every article on illithids, I plug that into the filter and get a list to pull from like:

308 Armed to the Tentacle: The Illithid Arsenal Feature Magic, Illithid Weapons and symbionts of Illithids
313 Brain Power Feature Magic, Illithid, Psionics, Feats, Prestige Classes Magic/Psionic mixing feats and Mind Mage class

 

[MKMcArtor]

I cut out all the relevant articles I like right out of the magazine, and put them in the appropriate sourcebooks.

Yeah, you heard me. I cut up my Dragon magazines.

...and I say "Good on ya!"

If you ever need a pristine copy of an old Dragon, arnwyn, just remember that you can find them on Paizo's website.

(Yes, that is a shameless plug. Yes, I am a corporate stooge. Deal.)