Advice on the good and bad in Dragon Magazine?

[Scorpions__]

I just came into possession of a ton of Dragon issues, including 274 - 350.

I don't have much experience with Dragon, but I've heard some scary things about how broken the content can be.

So I'm looking for good issues to look into and/or traps/broken bits to avoid, anything that comes to mind regarding that much would be appreciated.




DM[F]R

[Big Fau]

Classes, feats, and races are generally unbalanced on either end of the spectrum. Paizo had about as much of a clue about those as WotC did for Dragon Mag. Magic items are very iffy.

The adventures are good though (although your players need to be decent optimizers to prevent them from being floored by something like the Age of Worms). That was always Paizo's strong point.

And class variants are all over the place. Some make no sense at all (Wild Shape Monk isn't really a Monk, just a Druid sans Spellcasting and Animal Companion, for example), and others are good (Mystic Ranger).

[peacenlove]

If you liked dragon compendium and/or are a DM looking for ideas then dragon magazines are decent to very good overall.

Balance: Lets just say they are suitable for all kinds of play and leave it there :smalltongue:
However most of their material fall into Tier 3 or less category especially on their earlier issues. On par with WotC really.

Fluff: Excellent. From their write up of the far realms to the demonomicon this is their strong suit. Only letdown for me their drow society writeup. Too chaotic stupid for my tastes.

Another strong point is that they support all WotC products minus Tome of Battle.
Lastly double check anything from those magazines before allowing it for players. A feat or 2 won't hurt alone but there are very deadly combinations out there with WotC material.