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[Let's Read] ARES Magazine
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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6863527" data-attributes="member: 27780"><p><strong><u>Ares 07 - Rescue from the Hive: March 1981</u></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>43 pages. Time for a little lurid pulp action, as we get a female character in a ridiculously skintight spacesuit, in need of rescuing by the rugged hero, who's spacesuit is bulked up on the body and not remotely skintight. It may be the far future in space, and we may be facing giant insects instead of a dragon, but some things never change. And one of those is trying to sell via sex, which people will inevitably try eventually regardless of the product or subject matter. Let's see if this issue'll live up to the hype, and if it'll attract any new buyers on the newsstands. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Muse: The editorial does nothing to dissuade me from the idea that they're trying to sex up the magazine a little. There's some more high quality, full-color cheesecake on the next page, and if you like it, you can buy a proper print of it from the artist. Yeah, that's some fairly blatant commercialism of a kind I'm not too keen on. Similarly, making their game boards bigger and with more pieces so they can charge more for it seems like a somewhat backwards way of looking at the creative process, and not the way I'd phrase it at all if I was trying to sell that change to people. Are they feeling the bite financially and starting to flail before they go down? The plot thickens. I'm very interested to see how this develops now. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The House of Kurin: The DragonQuest material this month is an adventure that's almost as large as the centrepiece, and the combined size of these has forced them to cut some of their regular columns. While at it's core it's still basically "party gets hired in a tavern by mysterious old man to kill bad guys and rescue people", it's more character driven and less map focussed than D&D adventures of the same era, with a long list of named characters who move around rather than sitting in their rooms waiting for the PC's to barge in and kill them. There's still plenty of random harlots though, for that authentic 1e DMG feel, and the monsters are all too familiar to any D&D player. This definitely shows it's age in terms of writing style and sexist attitudes (again, even more than the D&D adventures of the same era), and is a little bit funny because of it, but is still pretty usable, and the clear writing makes it easily converted to other systems. This still has some value to me then. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Facts for Fantasy: These columns have both stabilised at 2 pages again. Herodotus appears again twice, his popularity shows no signs of waning. Two mythological creatures that have been statted up in RPG's repeatedly also appear: The Phoenix and the Zaratan. On the historical side, we have to deal with sexism past, and examples of women who managed to accomplish great things in spite of this, the hassles of trading silk, and how mistletoe was appropriated from a pagan tradition to a christian one. Same as ever then. The problem with having the same writer every month is being limited by their sources of knowledge and personal preferences. I think they need to juggle this around a bit more. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Science for Science Fiction: While the fantasy column deals with sexism, this one decides to talk about racism, and the way people justify it to themselves. Science is merely a tool, and it can be turned to vile ideas as easily as virtuous, especially when people cherry pick the data to support their theories. They remind us that anything scientists can do can also happen naturally, such as nuclear fission if enough radioactive material is brought together, and that evolution is a provably real thing that happens, but a lot of the links are still missing. While there is some dated space info too, this month seems slightly more interesting than average to me, partly because it's not afraid to call superstitions and prejudice <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />. Considering the fight with ingrained sexism other writers on the team are still dealing with, that seems pretty relevant. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Rescue from the Hive: After the solo experimentation of last issue, it's back to good old-fashioned adversarial 2 player fun. Humans vs Aliens in a battle to rescue the <s>princess</s> ambassador's daughter before it's too late. The humans have slightly better forces, but time is against them, because if the aliens go into warp, you lose. Plus the alien queens have mind control, which always makes for unpredictable and swingy battles as you never know if you're going to be able to resist it. So as usual from SPI, this requires a combination of skill and luck, and has lots of little details packed in to reward tweaking, repeated play and system mastery. The play board isn't as impressive as some of the ones they've produced, but it does the job, and looping the edges to represent a cylindrical layout with artificial gravity adds some more interesting tactical choices. Once again, I can definitely see myself playing this at least once. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>DragonNotes: Since we've already had a full DragonQuest adventure this issue, this column is only a single page, and not that interesting. Half promotion of their upcoming products, and half Sage Advice. We're getting an expansion for the magic system, the monster book they sourced contributions for a few months ago, an expansion for random dungeon generation, and a regional sourcebook full of adventurable locations, with plans for more adjacent to it that'll eventually make a whole campaign world if successful. Once again, they're showing the results of better customer service than TSR, which focussed on adventures for ages, and didn't do a dedicated magic sourcebook until 2e. How many of these actually got released? The rules quibbles seem all too wearily familiar. Caster vs non caster balance, and adjudicating the effects of shapechanging powers. Those always seem to cause problems no matter the system. So they're making some of the same mistakes most designers make with their first RPG system. This is the problem with going back and playing old school games without updating them. You have to deal with problems you thought you'd left behind all over again. This makes me feel very very tired. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Media: This column is once again in a cynical mood about the details of the movie-making industry. This time, it's about the ephemeral nature of movies. Celluloid is not only highly flammable, but also prone to cracking and fading, so even movies that are only 10 years old already show noticeable deterioration. Copies are always at least a little worse than the master, and this only becomes more obvious the longer the chain gets. How are we supposed to take movies as a medium seriously when they literally won't last? Another of those problems we've gone a long way towards solving these days, as digital allows for perfect copying once something has been captured, and our array of clean-up and editing tools is vastly greater than it was a couple of decades ago. While it's still possible for things to fall through the cracks and be lost forever, it's much much harder when everyone can have thousands of full HD movies in a single hard drive, and all it takes is one person to care enough to preserve something and redistribute it to thousands for free. So while their doom and gloom may have been justified then, it definitely isn't relevant anymore. It's nice to be able to point out how things have got better over time. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Designers Notes: This column is a big promotional piece for Universe, their new Sci-fi RPG. And it has to be said that it looks quite a bit like a bigger, more open-ended version of last issue's BSM Pandora voyages, with a lot of emphasis on providing systems to generate your worlds and the weird and wonderful creatures that live there, so the DM doesn't have to think too hard to create adventures. And with tons of classes and even more skills to choose from for your characters, and lots of spaceships to buy and customise, you aren't going to run out of room to advance anytime soon either. This looks interesting, and also means they can increase the amount of game material each issue while still sticking to one article per line. And so they move a little further from wargaming and towards RPG's. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Games: The other review columns take a break this month, leaving us with only this one. It decides to do the oriental adventures thing, reminding us that TSR was actually pretty late to that party, and several other systems got books out years in advance. There's a huge amount of material to draw on, both mythological and modern, that's very gameable indeed, and not too hard to buy if you know where to look. It's not surprising at all that it would prove to be popular not just once, but repeatedly. Lets see how good these implementations of the idea are. </p><p></p><p>Bushido gets a quite complexly mixed review, as they liked some elements, but disliked others, and are willing to go into quite a bit of detail on which should be kept and which should be changed. They think they could do better, and since they do have quite decent editors, it's quite possible they could. I have no doubt they would have done an oriental supplement for DragonQuest if they'd lasted a bit longer. </p><p></p><p>Land of the Rising Sun is the oriental version of Chivalry & Sorcery. It's still far too slow and crunchy for the reviewers tastes, but he's willing to admit that the rules have been tightened up a fair bit in the rewriting, and the new setting information is pretty well researched too. If you liked it before, you should like it even more now, and even if you didn't, you might at least be able to understand the system clearly this time around. Can't say fairer than that. </p><p></p><p>The Compleat Fantasist gets an exceedingly vicious slating indeed. A shoddy unofficial conversion guide between a whole bunch of roleplaying systems that doesn't really do any of them justice, and wastes a load of page count on wishy washy waffle? Yeah, I'd warn people away from that too. There's always been cheap cash-in crap, and thankfully most of it gets washed away by the tides of history. Don't let false nostalgia fool you into thinking things were better back then. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Feedback: Since they now have a full year to look back on, the questionaire sorts through the different kinds of articles, and asks which was your favourite in each category, as well as which issue was overall best. The games they're asking to you to consider for production have also cycled to a completely new set, most of which will unfortunately never come out, despite sounding pretty interesting. I once again feel a little frustration on how much work they put into this area, and how little they'll get out of it. Good customer feedback should be encouraged, and reality doesn't seem to reflect that. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The dramatic uptick in game material in this issue made it much easier to to write about than the last few, as I had things I could actually analyse rather than just making purely subjective judgements. It actually feels like a gaming magazine, rather than just a magazine that happens to include a game in it. And since that trend will probably continue, hopefully I will be able to move a little faster. Seems like a promising development. Let's see what next issue brings in turn.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 6863527, member: 27780"] [B][U]Ares 07 - Rescue from the Hive: March 1981[/U][/B] 43 pages. Time for a little lurid pulp action, as we get a female character in a ridiculously skintight spacesuit, in need of rescuing by the rugged hero, who's spacesuit is bulked up on the body and not remotely skintight. It may be the far future in space, and we may be facing giant insects instead of a dragon, but some things never change. And one of those is trying to sell via sex, which people will inevitably try eventually regardless of the product or subject matter. Let's see if this issue'll live up to the hype, and if it'll attract any new buyers on the newsstands. Muse: The editorial does nothing to dissuade me from the idea that they're trying to sex up the magazine a little. There's some more high quality, full-color cheesecake on the next page, and if you like it, you can buy a proper print of it from the artist. Yeah, that's some fairly blatant commercialism of a kind I'm not too keen on. Similarly, making their game boards bigger and with more pieces so they can charge more for it seems like a somewhat backwards way of looking at the creative process, and not the way I'd phrase it at all if I was trying to sell that change to people. Are they feeling the bite financially and starting to flail before they go down? The plot thickens. I'm very interested to see how this develops now. The House of Kurin: The DragonQuest material this month is an adventure that's almost as large as the centrepiece, and the combined size of these has forced them to cut some of their regular columns. While at it's core it's still basically "party gets hired in a tavern by mysterious old man to kill bad guys and rescue people", it's more character driven and less map focussed than D&D adventures of the same era, with a long list of named characters who move around rather than sitting in their rooms waiting for the PC's to barge in and kill them. There's still plenty of random harlots though, for that authentic 1e DMG feel, and the monsters are all too familiar to any D&D player. This definitely shows it's age in terms of writing style and sexist attitudes (again, even more than the D&D adventures of the same era), and is a little bit funny because of it, but is still pretty usable, and the clear writing makes it easily converted to other systems. This still has some value to me then. Facts for Fantasy: These columns have both stabilised at 2 pages again. Herodotus appears again twice, his popularity shows no signs of waning. Two mythological creatures that have been statted up in RPG's repeatedly also appear: The Phoenix and the Zaratan. On the historical side, we have to deal with sexism past, and examples of women who managed to accomplish great things in spite of this, the hassles of trading silk, and how mistletoe was appropriated from a pagan tradition to a christian one. Same as ever then. The problem with having the same writer every month is being limited by their sources of knowledge and personal preferences. I think they need to juggle this around a bit more. Science for Science Fiction: While the fantasy column deals with sexism, this one decides to talk about racism, and the way people justify it to themselves. Science is merely a tool, and it can be turned to vile ideas as easily as virtuous, especially when people cherry pick the data to support their theories. They remind us that anything scientists can do can also happen naturally, such as nuclear fission if enough radioactive material is brought together, and that evolution is a provably real thing that happens, but a lot of the links are still missing. While there is some dated space info too, this month seems slightly more interesting than average to me, partly because it's not afraid to call superstitions and prejudice :):):):):):):):). Considering the fight with ingrained sexism other writers on the team are still dealing with, that seems pretty relevant. Rescue from the Hive: After the solo experimentation of last issue, it's back to good old-fashioned adversarial 2 player fun. Humans vs Aliens in a battle to rescue the [s]princess[/s] ambassador's daughter before it's too late. The humans have slightly better forces, but time is against them, because if the aliens go into warp, you lose. Plus the alien queens have mind control, which always makes for unpredictable and swingy battles as you never know if you're going to be able to resist it. So as usual from SPI, this requires a combination of skill and luck, and has lots of little details packed in to reward tweaking, repeated play and system mastery. The play board isn't as impressive as some of the ones they've produced, but it does the job, and looping the edges to represent a cylindrical layout with artificial gravity adds some more interesting tactical choices. Once again, I can definitely see myself playing this at least once. DragonNotes: Since we've already had a full DragonQuest adventure this issue, this column is only a single page, and not that interesting. Half promotion of their upcoming products, and half Sage Advice. We're getting an expansion for the magic system, the monster book they sourced contributions for a few months ago, an expansion for random dungeon generation, and a regional sourcebook full of adventurable locations, with plans for more adjacent to it that'll eventually make a whole campaign world if successful. Once again, they're showing the results of better customer service than TSR, which focussed on adventures for ages, and didn't do a dedicated magic sourcebook until 2e. How many of these actually got released? The rules quibbles seem all too wearily familiar. Caster vs non caster balance, and adjudicating the effects of shapechanging powers. Those always seem to cause problems no matter the system. So they're making some of the same mistakes most designers make with their first RPG system. This is the problem with going back and playing old school games without updating them. You have to deal with problems you thought you'd left behind all over again. This makes me feel very very tired. Media: This column is once again in a cynical mood about the details of the movie-making industry. This time, it's about the ephemeral nature of movies. Celluloid is not only highly flammable, but also prone to cracking and fading, so even movies that are only 10 years old already show noticeable deterioration. Copies are always at least a little worse than the master, and this only becomes more obvious the longer the chain gets. How are we supposed to take movies as a medium seriously when they literally won't last? Another of those problems we've gone a long way towards solving these days, as digital allows for perfect copying once something has been captured, and our array of clean-up and editing tools is vastly greater than it was a couple of decades ago. While it's still possible for things to fall through the cracks and be lost forever, it's much much harder when everyone can have thousands of full HD movies in a single hard drive, and all it takes is one person to care enough to preserve something and redistribute it to thousands for free. So while their doom and gloom may have been justified then, it definitely isn't relevant anymore. It's nice to be able to point out how things have got better over time. Designers Notes: This column is a big promotional piece for Universe, their new Sci-fi RPG. And it has to be said that it looks quite a bit like a bigger, more open-ended version of last issue's BSM Pandora voyages, with a lot of emphasis on providing systems to generate your worlds and the weird and wonderful creatures that live there, so the DM doesn't have to think too hard to create adventures. And with tons of classes and even more skills to choose from for your characters, and lots of spaceships to buy and customise, you aren't going to run out of room to advance anytime soon either. This looks interesting, and also means they can increase the amount of game material each issue while still sticking to one article per line. And so they move a little further from wargaming and towards RPG's. Games: The other review columns take a break this month, leaving us with only this one. It decides to do the oriental adventures thing, reminding us that TSR was actually pretty late to that party, and several other systems got books out years in advance. There's a huge amount of material to draw on, both mythological and modern, that's very gameable indeed, and not too hard to buy if you know where to look. It's not surprising at all that it would prove to be popular not just once, but repeatedly. Lets see how good these implementations of the idea are. Bushido gets a quite complexly mixed review, as they liked some elements, but disliked others, and are willing to go into quite a bit of detail on which should be kept and which should be changed. They think they could do better, and since they do have quite decent editors, it's quite possible they could. I have no doubt they would have done an oriental supplement for DragonQuest if they'd lasted a bit longer. Land of the Rising Sun is the oriental version of Chivalry & Sorcery. It's still far too slow and crunchy for the reviewers tastes, but he's willing to admit that the rules have been tightened up a fair bit in the rewriting, and the new setting information is pretty well researched too. If you liked it before, you should like it even more now, and even if you didn't, you might at least be able to understand the system clearly this time around. Can't say fairer than that. The Compleat Fantasist gets an exceedingly vicious slating indeed. A shoddy unofficial conversion guide between a whole bunch of roleplaying systems that doesn't really do any of them justice, and wastes a load of page count on wishy washy waffle? Yeah, I'd warn people away from that too. There's always been cheap cash-in crap, and thankfully most of it gets washed away by the tides of history. Don't let false nostalgia fool you into thinking things were better back then. Feedback: Since they now have a full year to look back on, the questionaire sorts through the different kinds of articles, and asks which was your favourite in each category, as well as which issue was overall best. The games they're asking to you to consider for production have also cycled to a completely new set, most of which will unfortunately never come out, despite sounding pretty interesting. I once again feel a little frustration on how much work they put into this area, and how little they'll get out of it. Good customer feedback should be encouraged, and reality doesn't seem to reflect that. The dramatic uptick in game material in this issue made it much easier to to write about than the last few, as I had things I could actually analyse rather than just making purely subjective judgements. It actually feels like a gaming magazine, rather than just a magazine that happens to include a game in it. And since that trend will probably continue, hopefully I will be able to move a little faster. Seems like a promising development. Let's see what next issue brings in turn. [/QUOTE]
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