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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6119376" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 315: January 2004part 1/8100 (116) pages. Even Strahd says raar and forgets to cut his hair in 3.5. So much for all the cunning and dignity he aspired too when written by P. N. Elrod or Tracey Hickman. Plus this graveyard is ridiculously cramped. I see the art of setting things a little further back so we can get proper scale and perspective is still a lost one for the magazine art department, despite the issue's theme being the revival of old campaign settings. One that definitely inspires mixed feelings in me, as while it's more exciting than the class collections, it still makes this the 6th issue in a row where they're shallowly covering a whole load of topics that more than merit entire issues to themselves. Maybe this'll remind Paizo and WotC that just because they were never as popular as the Realms, doesn't mean plenty of people didn't love them, and still do to this day. They ought to give them a little more love if they want to avoid doing sequels to splatbooks just a year or two after the originals. Scan Quality: Good, Unindexed. In this issue:Wyrms turn: The editorial makes it very clear just why settings got such short shrift last year. While WotC originally killed them purely on economic grounds when they took over, there's now a substantial crop of newbies (and 1st ed comebacks who missed that era) who have no real knowledge of or attachment to them. This includes our current lead editor, who is shocked just how enthusiastic people were when given a chance to write some new official material. This explains a lot about why I've been so bored since he took over. With no finer appreciation of the many weird settings their past contains, it's no wonder the material he picked for publishing got samey faster than any editor before him. Let's hope this is a turning point for them then, not some cheap updating that completely fails to capture the varied spirits of the originals.Scale Mail is very short and homogenous this month, with every single letter apart from one being unstinting praise of issue 313. Why is it the eras I hate the most that get the most sycophantically positive letters in the magazine itself?  The only critical one that gets through is an editorial double-booking they didn't follow up on. So instead they'll just cancel it for the forseeable future, reminding us again that Paizo really doesn't have the easy access to interdepartmental resources TSR or WotC did when they want to run a competition or put out a special. It's going to be a long hard fight for them to get to the point where they start challenging WotC in sales, and right now, they still aren't quite up to it. Campaign classics: Ironically considering they're covering more settings than any other issue, including many that have never got an article in Dragon before, they start off by apologising they couldn't fit in everything. Since a good chunk of the missing settings are licensed ones that have expired like Lankhmar, Conan and Diablo, I don't think anyone's going to be sending in vitriolic letters for them. Similarly, those "settings" that were just a single boxed set or sourcebook, in many cases covering a part of some larger campaign world anyway, I find it hard to count as full campaigns, so I'm not surprised if they couldn't find anyone to write for them. The only one that feels like a big loss is Spelljammer, which apparently they did a 50 page 3e update on in Polyhedron a year and a half ago, so it's already properly catered for mechanically. Still, this is a positive start because it shows just how incredibly comprehensive they're being in their research. Now I just hope the individual articles won't be too small and shallow because they're trying to fit so many in.</blockquote>

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