Dragon Magazine Annual Volume 1: A 4th Edition D&D Compilation Review

Back in the early days of the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, the "Best of Dragon" collections were among the coolest supplements. Loaded with new character classes, monsters, and treasures, these books delivered great bang for the buck when it came to expanding a campaign.

In that spirit, we have a "Best Of" annual edition in hardcover format, collecting articles for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons game from the online version of Dragon magazine.

Like those original collections, this one delivers a lot of character options, including two new PC races plus character class options for assassins (one of several versions that exist in the current rules framework), star-pact warlocks (presented in a wonderfully Lovecraftian style!) and gladiators. Even more options are presented for higher-level characters, including a collection of new epic destinies related to planar travel.

Dungeon Masters get some nice goodies here too. In fact the most immediately out-of-the-box useful article was a collection of new kobolds along with ideas for kobold tactics. Wizards of the Coast has done an admirable job of releasing material right from the start to cover all character levels, but at times this has happened at the expense of providing a good range of challenges for low-level parties. Articles like this kobold one are always welcome, as it provides a solid low-level challenge and can easily be worked into encounters for mid-level parties as well.

There are also a couple of nice ready-made long-term villains for a campaign to be found in an article on Yeenoghu, the Demon Prince of Gnolls. Articles on the Ashen Covenant (a cult of Orcus) and the Bloodghost Syndicate (a mafia style gang of urban bugbears) also have the potential to be the basis of long-term campaigns or just quick villains that can be dropped into a setting.

I thought a few of the articles were a bit over-simplistic and spent too much time stating the obvious. The article on intelligent magic items contained a lot of unnecessarily simplistic advice for the DM (although the example items were quite good), and the article on assassins wasted a page on the age-old argument about whether assassins are evil-aligned by definition, a discussion that served mainly to highlight the weaknesses of D&D's alignment system (and this coming from a DM who normally likes alignment, at least as a tool for use with NPCs).

One other thing I liked about this book was the "Behind the Curtain" series of short sidebars containing notes from the designers on the thought process that went into the articles. Although these kinds of articles from a design perspective are seen online in various forums, they made for an intriguing bit of added flavor in this book, and they are worth at least a look by anyone interested in writing material for D&D.

In spite of the hefty $30 price tag, I recommend this book to any DM looking for options of a 4th Edition campaign. The mix of materials presented here could easily see more use than some of the more specialized hardcovers like the Adventurer's Vault series, which focuses almost entirely on treasure.