Dragon Issue 49: May 1981
part 1/2
96 pages. Speak of the devil. (I wasn't looking ahead when I wrote last issue's postscript, honest) This issue is the one where Gary steps down as publisher of the magazine. Jake Jaquet moves up to fill his place, while Kim Mohan becomes editor in chief. Which mean's Gary's taking his hands off the reins of the company and going off to LA to negotiate with ghastly executives, and the D&D cartoon will be along soon, if my memory serves me correctly. Oh god. I look forward to seeing how that's treated in the magazine. (particularly in light of the roasting they gave bakshi's LotR)
Should be amusing.
In this issue:
Dragon Rumbles: Oohh. Looks like their circulation is now exceeding 150,000. Quite a growth from their humble beginnings. But they still aren't immune to delays. Nor are they ignoring the competition. It's a big responsibility, running a magazine of this size. Lets hope Kim and co are up to it.
Out on a limb: A letter with some quite substantial (and quite well substantiated) complaints directed at Len Lakofa's Archer article from issue 45. They counter with the same old canard, that it's all optional, D&D is not realistic, and D&D halflings are not LotR hobbits. Doesn't come off very well this time Kim.
A letter from someone writing a book on miniatures painting, asking for ideas and opinions to help him develop it further. I wonder if anything'll come of this.
A letter praising the magazine's recent increases in quality, and also in accesability to newcomers. The hobby needs new blood to expand, which means it needs to be easy for new people to pick up gaming. Which means keeping the number of articles using impenetrable gamespeak and discussing tedious rules minutinae down.
A letter complaining at the size of many recent articles, wondering why they don't break them up into smaller parts over several issues. They'd get more complaints if they did it that way, trust me. Plus lots of other commentary.
A letter praising them for publishing top secret modules, and asking people to send in more articles for it, as he likes the game, and knows it's quite popular in his area. As they've said before, they can't publish what they don't get.
In the interest of fairness: An article about arbitrary and bad GM decisions in tournament play, and how more needs to be done to prevent it. Cue lots of stuff about establishing standards, and objective scoring systems for acts that are easily adjudicated, as well as establishing what behaviour should lead to instant disqualification and ejection from the tournament. Not that even the strictest rules'll prevent a bad GM from making it a crap experience. But you've gotta be seen to be doing something. Once again, the serious problems with the tournament playstyle are thrown into sharp relief, as the comprises needed to make it work strike directly at the unique strengths of tabletop roleplaying as an entertainment form, openended storytelling and story creation where everyone wins as long as they have fun. This sucks.
The slave pits revisited: More thoughts on the A series, and tournament modules in general. The author reccomends that in future years they design the modules for smaller groups of players, as that reduces the difficulties in social dynamics, allowing groups of people who already know each other to join as a team and avoid the odds that your team will have some random asshat put in it who ruins things for everyone else. It then goes into a load of mathematics and logicistical discussion, proving that this would work better than the current system. Which is also tedious.
It isn't that easy: Frank Mentzer rebutts the previous article. Training up DM's to the standard needed to apply all your would be rules is not an easy task. Plus, it's hard to predict how many you'll need, particularly with the speed the hobby is expanding at. If you want to help with this, apply to become a GM at the next con you go too. We can always use the help. Ahh, reality, always getting in the way of our best laid plans.
God, that's a lot of cons coming up this year. Bigger and more frequent, the upswing in their popularity continues. Competitions, seminars, tournaments, famous people talking, exclusive stuff, they've got it all.
The samurai: Yes folks, its a second attempt at this class, (honestly. Three witch classes, two alchemist and samurai ones. Can't people come up with something more original) This bears little relation to the OA samurai, being an unarmoured fighter as comfortable with unarmed fighting as with katana, and getting stealth, supernatural illusion powers and psionic ability. Like druids, they have an overarching organization with a limited number of top level characters, so you'll need to fight your former master to get there. Really, they're more monk/ninja variants than fighter ones. But if you can get over that naming disconnect, in terms of rules they are fairly solid, and not too overpowered. (at least, compared to cavaliers, rangers, druids, and the other upper tier classes; they'll still make fighters look like the one trick ponies they are) I wouldn't say no to a player using them if I was running an old skool game.
The rasmussen files: Lots of nasty little new rules this month, mostly revolving around gun fire and its unfortunate concequences. One of those ones that includes lots of random tables to determine just what unpleasant side effects result from your hit location. Which isn't very cinematic, but can be amusingly gruesome, as rolemaster afficionados know. Still, 'tis the kind of thing I would rather not incorporate into my games.
Getting a world into shape: Now this is a fun one. Karl Horak talks about choosing a shape for your world as a whole, be it spherical like earth, an endless flat map, or some kind of more interesting shape, (such as any of the polyhedrons that we use for dice
) and then goes into detail on how to create maps that accommodate these odd geometries. Includes a neat little cut-out that can be used to make your world. Cool stuff. And yet all the canon D&D worlds apart from Ravenloft fell into the bog-standard spherical planet model (although Mystara had it's hollow interior, which added a neat spin to things) What happened? :shakes head: Bloody design by committee. We want weirdness. We want weirdness.
Giants in the Earth: This month's characters without a single below average stat between them are Poul Anderson's Holger Carlsen (now there's a character you'd think could be converted to D&D without any rules breaking, but no. :sighs heavily: ) and Hugi, and T.J. Morgan's Ellide.
Historical names make for better games: Glenn Rahman takes time out from his Divine Right writings to offer a big load of historical names from various cultures, to aid you in naming your characters. Just pick an appropriate culture and roll d20, if you're short of ideas. Much mehness.
Monster Mixing: Adapting D&D monsters to chivalry & sorcery. 23 classic monsters get conversion, including the full range of idiosyncratic fungi, slimes and oozes that were popular back then. Plus two new monsters, the mind thorns, and lemex, get stats for both systems. Pretty decent, as it also goes into some interesting discussion on fitting the monsters together into an ecology, including food chains (umber hulks like to eat ankhegs) Once again we see how other systems were ahead of D&D in quite a few ways. But it'll catch up with a vengance eventually, with the ecology of articles. Come on, any issue now.
This is what I get for posting just before going to bed, and all sorts of odd hours when I have a free moment.
