Reviews

Among the gaming commnity, there is a lot of variation from group to group regarding what sort of source material is allowed. Some people play with any and every sourcebook on the market. Others only play with material published by certain companies. Then there are the diehards, who only play with the three core rulebooks. Somewhere in the middle of this are those who simply don't know which books to use and which to disallow.

In this age of the world wide web, many gamers purchase their books from the internet. The problem with this is that it's often hit or miss, since the buyer doesn't actually get to browse through the book. We here at The Dungeons and Dragons Archive hope to help remedy this by offering you, the reader, a place to voice your praise or criticism towards various d20 books in the form of reviews. Perhaps your comments will help prospective purchasers to make the right decision with their money.

Let's face it, music plays a large part in the overall Dungeons and Dragons experience for many people. Some people like to have an epic soundtrack playing in the background during their game sessions. Many prefer sound effects over music. Others use music to help them focus while they're writing up a character history or planning the next big adventure. Still others simply like to listen to certain kinds of music to help inspire them.

In an effort to help broaden the horizons of gamers everywhere, we here at The Dungeons and Dragons Archive offer this as a place to share your thoughts on various artists, soundtracks and the like. We realize that everyone is not going to have the same taste in music (and we hope you, the reader, will realize this as well). Some people may prefer film soundtracks, while others like industrial mixes. Regardless of the style of music, artist or the like, each critique here deals with music as it pertains to D&D.

At some point during their time behind the screen, most dungeon masters will eventually use pre-published adventures. While some elitist DMs may sneer and claim that they'll never run anything other than their own creations, the majority of us can see the benefit to having a ready-made adventure or three as a backup for when the players suprise us with an unexpected twist.

But which adventure is right for you? This is the question we hope to help you answer by allowing other dungeon masters that have run through an adventure to critique it, listing the good points as well as pointing out the rough spots. We hope this will help you in your search for the next great adventure, and perhaps when you've finished running the party through it, you'll come back and write your own review.

Many dungeon masters recieve monthly or quarterly periodicals that contain game information. For example, Dungeon magazine is a quarterly periodical that contains four pre-made adventures that a smart DM can tailor to his own game. Another of Paizo Publishing's periodicals, Dragon magazine contains new game mechanics, maps and advice columns gear towards helping the player as well as the dungeon master.

However, there are many out there that either cannot afford to maintain a costly subscription or simply don't want to shell out the money for a mazagaine that might not contain anything that interests them. For these people, we here at the Dungeons and Dragons Archive have opened the reviews to include gaming periodicals to help give the gamer a better idea of which issues are worth spending him money on.

We here at the Dungeons and Dragons Archive have tried to maintain a direct link to the Dungeons and Dragons game at every opportunity. With this motivation in mind, we didn't want to use a basic generic 1-10 rating system for our reviews. Instead, we settled on a system utilizing many of the basic die rolls from the Dungeons and Dragons game as ratings. Additionally, we've tried to use rolls that might actually occur with some frequency in the average game. For more information concerning our rating system, please check out our Review Ratings page.