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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6147352" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 323: September 2004part 1/8102(132) pages. Raar! Dragon rip through annoying, oft-derided whitespace! Time for another format change. Well, it has been a few years. And it's fairly fitting that the final big shift before they went electronic should be at the 9/10ths point. Since they're busy just sorting out the finer details of the new setup, they've decided not to have any other theme. They've also removed a lot of the more complex colour schemes and fonts on the inside, going for a cleaner look with lots of little regular columns. Whether they'll remain regular remains to be seen, but this does look like it could become very formulaic indeed if they don't rotate them a little.  Let's enjoy it while it's fresh, and see where it goes from there. Scan Quality: Good, some page bleed, unindexed, ad-free scan. In this issue:From the Editor: Even this bit gets renamed, which seems a bit redundant, as well as unnecessary verbiage. I hope we all know what an editorial is, and if not, a comprehensive dictionary is only a google away. Since they're trying to be clear about their motives and communication, this spells out exactly what's going to be in the issue, and future issues until they decide to do another format change based on more feedback. They've created regular columns which'll give us a little bit of every type of player centred crunch they can think of, plus a little more focus on the out of game community aspect of gaming than they used too, and book conversions to go with the minis and computer game stuff. Hopefully that'll mean everyone can find something to please them each issue. But it does seem like it makes them even more dependent on their regular writers, as they have to get x amount of x type of submissions per issue, and edit them down quite strictly. I shall have to see how many unfamiliar names are breaking in as we go along. First watch: After a couple of years absence, they bring back the previews. D&D's release schedule has now long since slowed to the point where it can't satisfactorily fill a feature like this on it's own, so they bring back coverage of third party products, like they tried for a short period back in 1998. A fairly pleasing change, given how insular they've been recently. This should help keep these last few years interesting. Unsurprisingly, our first two previews are the actual D&D releases. Frostburn sees them try a new form of splatbook, having done class, race and historical period/region ones repeatedly. Climatebooks? Sounds a little specious. Can your writers justify this one? Somewhat more likely to sell reliably is the Monster Manual 3. There's still plenty of old monsters that need converting, and it's not as if they're short of ideas for new ones either. Plenty of new options for PC races and helpful creatures as well as stuff to fight. Another release falls heavily into the Dear god, who would want this category. The audiobooks of the wheel of time, unabridged, each book spread across dozens of CD's, and in many cases lasting more than 24 hours. A lot trickier to skip through all the braid-tugging in this format. Thanks but no thanks for this particular heads up. Substantially more useful in your actual gaming experience is Tact-Tiles. You can draw on them, wipe it off, and they're modular, allowing you to create maps that fit your table quickly and easily, and change them as characters move around without erasing the whole thing. Pretty cool, if also fairly expensive. And Larry Elmore gets a little help, as his new trading card series comes out. They do seem to be covering a much wider range of products this time round. I wonder what other odd third party stuff we'll see.</blockquote>

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