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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6238941" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 352: February 2007part 1/686 (108) pages. From tons of previously covered settings, to a D&D take on a new one. This time it's China Mieville who gets the privilege of a full themed issue devoted to his works. Since he's an author who strays a fair distance from standard D&D fantasy, particularly in terms of tone and political stance, I'm definitely interested in seeing how they'll handle this one. Let's see how he compares to Robert Jordan, George Martin or Terry Brooks in treatment. Scan Quality: Excellent, indexed, ad-free scan. In this issue:Editorial: Like George R. R. Martin, it turns out Mr Mieville is also a gamer. And like George, while he has taken some influence from D&D, his novels also intentionally subvert a fair few D&D conventions, often with some sly humour in the process. Just as Tolkien was inspired by ancient mythology, but his stories turned out quite differently, people inspired by him produced works that were in some ways imperfect imitations, and in other reactions against what they saw as flaws in his writing. The tendency of humans to engage in this kind of dramatic generational shift is probably one of the reasons for our success, as it ensures we're always trying new things and expanding into places we haven't done before, and if some of them turn out to be mistakes, oh well, we have a high enough breeding rate and diversity to recover from them, which you can't say about creatures that evolved on one little island that get outcompeted to death as soon as rats arrive. So basically, this editorial points out that there's always going to be something coming along to shake up a stagnant scene, and expecting things to stay the same forever is foolish. So seek it out, don't wait for it to beat down your door. Your life will almost definitely turn out more interesting that way. Scale Mail: Our first letter is another one from someone annoyed they're putting so much setting material in these days. As usual, Erik knows you can't please them all, so you've just got to alternate things from issue to issue to keep people from giving up on the magazine entirely. The other two, on the other hand, are from people very keen to see regular campaign material return to the magazine. Both the Realms and Eberron have quite healthy fanbases who will lap that stuff up. The question is if doing little articles every month will get boring faster than bigger occasional ones that aren't bound so tightly to format. I certainly have my suspicions on that front after a couple of years of Class Acts.</blockquote>

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