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This volume, the first and only Dragon Magazine Annual from the 4e era, contains a selection of 14 articles from the first year of Dragon Magazine’s PDF-only, 4e run. About half of the articles are really DM material, such as the articles on Yeenoghu, kobolds, Orcus cults, and the Bloodghost Syndicate. All of these articles are a lot of fun, and can really enrich any campaign’s use of the creatures and organizations described therein. Of course, the stat blocks reflect the first year’s monster math, and most DMs will want to update the math before actually using the creatures. For players, you have star pact warlocks, feats for gladiators and assassins, paragon paths for gladiators and planar-attuned characters, and so on. Several of the articles on the player side tend toward the darker aspects of D&D (dhampyr, shadar-kai, assassins), and I personally wouldn’t have chosen them for a showcase volume like this one.
If you subscribe to D&D Insider, you have all of the information in t...
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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That WotC decided never to release a second Dungeon Magazine Annual, despite the implications of the title, tells you something about sales figures, which in turn reflects the gaming public’s perception of the product’s utility. This book contains five adventures reprinted from the first year of the WotC digital edition of Dungeon Magazine. In order of presentation, these are “Menace of the Icy Spire” (2nd level, Forgotten Realms); “Winter of the Witch” (22nd level, with links to “Keep on the Shadowfell”); “Throne of the Stone-Skinned King” (15th level, Scales of War adventure path); “Storm Tower” (3rd level); “Heart of the Forbidden Forge” (7th level, Eberron). From a brief scan of the contents, you can see that the volume is best approaches as a “showcase of what D&D 4e can do.” The adventures chosen cannot easily be linked together into a campaign, nor do they even occur in the same cosmos. Dropping into the middle of the Scales of War adventure path can be quite jarring, limiting t...
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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