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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6056953" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 300: October 2002part 2/10Scale Mail: As with issue 100, they decide to skip the letters for an extended Q&A session. With the shift in management, a lot of people are asking the same things over and over again. This is a bit tiresome, so they just want to get it over with. Most things are staying the same, although they may do the occasional OGL article if they can get them, and they're thankfully bringing back sales of back issues. Fiction submissions are still all going in the bin though. They just don't want to deal with that any more, despite it's popularity amongst both readers and submitters, because their focus is now on doing D&D stuff, and doing it well, and if they're getting more fiction submissions than everything else put together, reading through them all just eats up too much work time. Once again, it underlines that their scope is a lot narrower than a decade or two ago, where even if an individual issue was all D&D, they didn't rule out doing a themed issue on another system next time if enough cool material came along, or even switching to another system entirely if another RPG came out that eclipsed D&D. Turning into their own company does not appear to have increased their creative freedom much. After the editorial, this just deepens my pessimism. Zogonia is full of quiet wit. D&D Previews: Our gamebook, pretty unsurprisingly for the issue's theme, is the book of vile darkness. Monte Cook confuses diabolical with gross-out, showing that while their editorial policy might not be as bad as the days of Lorraine, they still aren't really ready to tackle heavy duty philosophy of morality. And of course, he introduces the ur-priest. The problems that prestige class causes. True system mastery is still a way away. FR & DL each get a novel. Divine Hammer by Chris Pierson and The Thousand Orcs by R. A. Salvadore. Can you guess which belongs to which world. Oh yes, belongs. Keep slaving away, long-term hacks. Up on a soapbox: Gary takes a break from actual play stories this month, and instead tells a story that could have been, but wasn't. Wastri, the demigod of frogs and human supremacy, never did get an official adventure devoted to him. After all, he's not sexy like the Drow or grand and sprawling like the temple of elemental evil. But he could still appear in your game, and do some pretty cool stuff plotwise. This is basically a pagelong set of plot hooks for your game, showing you that vaguely innsmouth-esque frog people can be effective and scary if you write them well enough, and don't have to just lurk in their own little town gradually growing more degenerate over time. Don't wait for an official version, just take the ideas here and do something with them yourself in that good ol' DIY spirit.</blockquote>

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