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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6024530" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 294: April 2002part 1/10116 pages. Beefcaaaaaaake! Yup, it's a good ol' shirtless sun deity for the female readers on this month's cover. Well, it's not as funny as Phil Foglios cheesecake last year, but you can't have everything. And at least it's appropriate, as the other theme this month is deities. So it's pretty obvious they're not going to go for full-on zaniness this issue, but they may have a few jokes slipped in. Let's see if the fun and usefulness will be segregated or integrated (or maybe diffracted) this year. Scan Quality: Good, unindexed, some page foldback visible. In this issue:Wyrms turn: Another tale of the staff deliberately playing their characters stupid, and finding this actually makes the game more fun than being taking it all very seriously. Finding an obvious, easily imitable speech pattern and then using it until everyone is thoroughly sick of it. We've definitely covered that before. As a staple of 80's cartoons, I think I speak for all of us when I say that's insmurfably smurfitating, and also somewhat resmurfed. While last time I was in the mood to indulge this, this time I'm not, especially as it was an official playtest. We've all seen what happens when you let the whimsy levels get too high when creating modules. You end up with crap like WG7 or 9, and hurt the credibility and continuity of your established campaign worlds. (unless we're talking dragonlance, where another bit of comedy goofiness would be just a drop in the ocean) We all have to let off steam sometimes, but you don't want to do so in a way that messes up your future prospects. Scale Mail: Our first letter is quite happy to have more plant monsters to throw at the enemies. I'm not objecting to that at all either. The second is rather grumpier, being very cynical about the way they brought back the Saurials in the magazine, and suspecting they're going to try and sell them to us again in a book in a few years as well. Money for old rope. They point out how little rehashing they actually did in the past year. They only brought stuff back when there were multiple letters asking for it. But if that's what the people want, then eventually they'll have to give in. The next letter proves that point, with someone who loved the saurials, and has read all the novels featuring them. Get Jeff Grubb to write some more! Rather more up to date is someone asking for Chainmail tactical advice. Still probably sent a few months though, since they already started doing that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Smartasses.We have two letters supporting the magazine's overall direction and mix of article types at the moment. There may be more complainers than a few years ago, but they shouldn't let that bring them down, especially with the increased readership. It just shows they haven't become an echo chamber. A request for a Githyanki language primer. Unfortunately they've phased that regular out, and don't plan to bring it back, as they didn't feel it was popular enough. Oh well. Can't please everyone. A rather amusing suggestion that you play a one-shot using characters from your real life, only secretly involved in secret and often outlandish schemes to take over the world. Yeah, that could definitely be fun. It'd be like playing World of Darkness in your home town turned up to 11. Just don't let the stories get back to those parodied, or you'll never hear the end of it. And finally, we have another amusing letter afraid that Paul Kidd's novel versions of the old dungeon crawls are now the official way those happened in Greyhawk, and Lolth is dead for good. I think she's now a little too iconic for them to kill off for good, even for the most zealous of metaplotters. They only did it with Takhisis because Dragonlance wasn't selling enough to get it's game books renewed, so they didn't expect to have to keep on moving the timeline forward after that.</blockquote>

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