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Dungeon Magazine Annual, Vol. 1 (4e) $14.99
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
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by Chris H. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 06/06/2013 13:37:15

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 the practicality of that adventure. The Forgotten Realms and Eberron adventures are pretty tightly tied to the lore of those settings, so relocating them will take some work. If you’re a D&D Insider subscriber, there’s no reason for you to pick up this compilation; download the individual adventures and issues of Dungeon instead. If you’re not, you might enjoy running the adventures. Be aware, however, that the product has not been updated to reflect post-Monster Vault statistics, so running the monsters as written might result in easier fights than you’re expecting from the more mature versions of 4e monster math.

With regard to production values, the layout is attractive and the artwork is wonderful. But the product falls significantly short of expectations for a PDF. WotC did not bother to crop the pages down from printer’s sheets (so you get color bars, crop marks, etc. in the margins) and did not bother to bookmark the file. Two bookmarks exist, but they’re the ones auto-created by combining multiple files using Adobe tools, so they point to pages 1 (the cover) and 2 (the title page). This is particularly disappointing for this product, whose “table of contents” isn’t a table at all, but a series of paragraphs in Chris Youngs’s introduction.

I was never terribly excited about this book in print, and the PDF version, though costing noticeably less, doesn’t add any value beyond the print version. I’m not sure why WotC chose to roll out this book as one of the early 4e offerings at D&D Classics, but I don’t find it to be one of the more useful products in the line.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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Dungeon Magazine Annual, Vol. 1 (4e)
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