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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6127160" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 317: March 2004part 1/893(108) pages. Weretigers again? I don't recall us ever getting a wereboar or bear on the cover. Also, the sheer quantity of promotional gumph on the cover makes it impossible to tell what the most important part is here. Looking at the contents doesn't make it any clearer, apart from a vague trend towards wilderness stuff. Exotic heroes? That's even less informative than monsters of power, or just magic as a theme. Could mean nearly anything in practice. Well, at least it's player focussed, so they can continue to appeal to most of their audience. Let's see if anyone has submitted anything genuinely weird and wonderful. Scan Quality: Excellent, unindexed, ad-free scan.  In this issue:Wyrms turn: Unsurprisingly, the editorial this month is a justification for adding so many new races and classes in the magazine these days. One thing they've noticed in their years of playtesting is that if people play the same splats repeatedly, they will tend to play them in the same way. They build up stereotypes and bits of received wisdom about how to best use their powers that can gradually turn into playing by rote. The introduction of new classes, races and monsters, even if they're not actually that different mechanically, breaks that pattern for a while, as they don't have the same stereotypes associated with them, so you have to actually work to figure things out. Of course, if you introduce a new monster of the week every episode, people will eventually become numb to that, and stop caring enough to explore their nuances anyway. I can't escape the feeling that the magazine has swung a little too far in that direction at the moment. Scale Mail: The campaign revival in issue 315 gets an absolutely rapturous response, with 5 letters gushing over it, and probably plenty more like them in the slush pile. This should make it absolutely clear to the editors that they ought to publish more stuff like this. Dark Sun gets particular attention in nearly all of them as well, which I find very curious. Is this why it was the first old setting that got revived in 4e? It's not all revivalists though, as we end with a whimsical request to do a campaign components: travelling circus article. The editor is very dubious you could make a whole campaign out of that. Maybe next april, if someone sends something really good in. It simply wouldn't fit any other month. Zogonia settle their personal differences with sudden violence. Good to see that working for a change. Now, can they beat the dragon as well? Up on a soapbox: Don Kaye's death in 1975 was something that had a pretty significant influence on the fledgeling development of TSR. Yet after his obituary in SR issue 2, he's hardly been mentioned in the magazine. So this is really the first time we find out anything about his playstyle and characters. Turns out he was the one who originally played Murlynd, gunslinger and general tech guy. And indeed, the story here has him using his items in a clever way to get the drop on the enemy and win easily. Of course, as we saw in previous instalments, a clever trick may work once, but word gets around, and next time, the enemies will develop a counter, so you can't just cheese your way through the game indefinitely. That kind of arms race is an integral part of the fun when you're playing adversarially. As this isn't another one involving the same cast, it retains it's interest, particularly as we also get to see that the characters that would later become Greyhawk gods and legendary heroes do actually retain personality traits and signature moves/items from when they were PC's. But will we ever get any first-hand Arneson stories, or have they all gone to the grave with him?</blockquote>

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