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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6210434" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 342: April 2006part 1/674 (100) pages. As we begin the runup to the 30th anniversary, it looks like we have another run of dragons on the cover. First up, a white dragon (that's tinted purple on the cover, and blue on the inside) ensuring that any adventurers who want it's treasure can be stuck with it, permanently. It's not quite genie level of sophistication in ironic humour, but it'll do for a start. Let's see if they have any better gags inside. Scan quality: Blurry, low res, Indexed, ad-free scan. In this issue:Editorial: Erik's editorial this month is once again him wrestling with how much humour to put in this issue. And after way too much thought, he once again goes with one joke article to placate the die-hards and keeping the rest sensible. After all, it's a lot harder to make players take a joke scenario seriously than it is to add a few amusing twists to an otherwise serious adventure. Greyhawk is still trying to get people to overlook the terrible pun names and adventures like WG9, while Dragonlance has so much comic relief baked in that people still debate if it's possible or desirable to reboot it. Do we really want that to happen to the magazine? Probably not. So they will continue their trajectory of gradually becoming more focussed and serious until they can't go any farther in that direction. Maybe if they do it gradually enough, people won't notice. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Call me again in 10 years time and we'll see. Scale Mail: Our first letter points out that Solomon Kane used a magic staff, and he certainly wasn't a wizard. There's plenty of precedent for more physical characters to choose that as their weapon of choice, particularly in the martial arts genre. The second one is equally nitpicky, complaining about using a lovecraftian phrase when most of the issue wasn't devoted to him. Given how many issues recently have been, I shall give a resounding <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" /> to that. We do have a fair number of heavily positive letters though, with two from long-standing players who are very happy with what the magazine has done, and continues to do for D&D as a whole. Since so many of their writers are now part of the WotC staff, they can hardly help taking ideas and reusing them. And this will only become more true next edition, with everything in the magazine going through exactly the same development process as the books. Finally, they stir the pot by including a letter from someone who thinks the LotR movies were a dull and unfaithful adaptation of the books. Just because they weren't perfect, doesn't mean they aren't technically superior in many ways to the fantasy movies of the 80's and before. I think the extensive behind the scenes documentaries in the extended editions make that very clear.</blockquote>

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