Gaming Magazines Reviews

Dragon #342 (April 2006). Grade: E. To be fair, there are almost 50 pages of good/useful material in this issue, but with a page count of about a 100, that means half of it is fluff/filler. If it was a 50 page magazine, I’d be giving this an A.

Dungeon #134 (May 2006). Grade: C-. Even by the same harsh standard I just applied to Dragon, Dungeon has always stacked up much better. But this is not the same Dungeon of 10 years ago. The layout is much harder to follow than the old adventures. The main adventure is so densely written that I can’t even spot a “Players Start” section!

Whether it’s art, ads, or bad articles, a wasted page is a wasted page. Any way I look at it, I have half a magazine I don’t need or want. This is why, when the library was still subscribing to Dragon, I would just photocopy articles I wanted.

It was the “Age of Worms” adventure I was referring to. If I can’t follow the adventure by skimming its contents, then the writer didn’t organize his material well enough. I didn’t even get around to mentioning how lame I felt the “beetle herding” adventure looked, so the C- grade is based purely on the potential of the other two adventures.