Let's read the entire run

[amysrevenge]

Regarding Dragonlance, I found the initial DL setting to be perfectly fine and fun and interesting. It was only the advancing of the timeline that I didn't like. It got more and more ridiculous with each advance. If you stuck to pre-War of the Lance stuff, it was a reasonably good, gritty, unique setting.

(I also enjoyed the kender, in small doses. I played one or two, and the group seemed to enjoy it well enough. It helped that I wasn't a dick about it I suppose. And we were really a beer-and-pretzels type group anyway, more interested in dungeons than politics.)

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 101: September 1985

part 3/3

Coming attractions gets a double page spread for the first time. Guess they're really gearing up to sell sell sell in bulk this holiday season.
AD&D gets T 1-4, the temple of elemental evil. Belated for six bloody years since the first installment, we finally get the remaining three all at once, long after any first time round players would have given up and gone on to other adventures. Was it worth the wait? If it can be judged by the number of remakes and references it's got, the answer is very definitely yes. It also gets DL9: Dragons of deceit. Our intrepid heroes have to sneak into the city of Sanctuary to find the secret to defeating the draconians.
Speaking of dragonlance, the first novel trilogy is coming to an end with Dragons of Spring dawning. However, a cash cow like this cannot go unwrung, so there's going to be a second trilogy following it up next year. Will they be able to maintain the magic?
Dragonlance also branches out to their Super EndlessQuest gameline with The Soulforge. Play Raistlin's test of high sorcery. Will it turn out like the official fiction? Only you can know for sure.
D&D gets XS2: thunderdelve mountain. A solo adventure starring a dwarf? Okay then. It also gets AC7, the player masters screen. Tired of your DM geting to hide all their stuff from you. Turnaround is fair play, and you get lots of helpfull charts at your disposal as well to reduce page flipping.
And in another case of accesorising, we have The art of the D&D game. Your basic coffee table book, I suspect many of the magazine's better cover pics will make their way into there. Much mehness.
Top secret's companion finally comes out after having been teasered in the magazine for some time. Lots of new rules, plus an adventure, this ought to freshen up your game a bit.
The Marvel superheroes RPG gets MHAC7: Concrete jungle, and MH8: Faultline. A book full of characters and another adventure.
Amazing Stories branches out from the magazine to sell full-on novels. The 4D funhouse and Jaguar! are our first two offerings. Anyone read these? How were they?
Conan gets CN2: Conan the mercenary. Our mighty thewed friend winds up having to save the world, because he's being paid too. He's a hero anyway. Where will his wanderings take him next?
Indiana jones gets IJ6: The 4th nail. Search for the titular nail from the cross and hope Ben ali Aloob doesn't beat you too it. Their current love of fold-up cardboard figures continues, with a whole bunch included.
Our solo adventure book series include one on one gamebook 3: Revenge of the red dragon. Endless quest book 29: Tower of darkness. And Crimson crystal book 4: Stop that witch! If you can't find a gaming group, that should tide you over to next month.
We also have another gaming related book. The game buyers price guide shows how much you can expect all your old out-of print stuff to sell for. If you have a mint copy of the 1st printing OD&D boxed set, you can get quite a bit for it. One for the historian and speculator.
And finally, we have a cancellation. Seems like there wasn't enough demand for
Proton Fire, so they've pulled it. After going all the way through the development process? That's gotta waste quite a bit of money. I smell the ugly hand of politics behind this. Anyone have any more info on this odd little turnup for the books.

Fiction: And adventuring To ... by Brenda Gates Spielman. Adventuring is like being a musician. Sure there may be disgustingly rich, famous and talented people at the top, but for a low level adventurer, things are pretty unglamorous, and you risk your life daily for rewards that really don't seem worth it. A story that feels very much like a low level D&D game, with clearly visible classes, spells and defined monsters. Not sure if that's a good thing or not. Guess I'll have to file this one under filler, as it's neither particularly good or bad.

The Ares section has a particularly good cover this issue. If they play their cards right, they might get a Sci-fi art coffee table book as well. Roger is rather chipper in the editorial as well. Seems promising.

Starships and star soldiers: Seems like they're continuing their push to get wargaming back on the map. Having produced the Battlesystem for D&D, now they want to try and give sci-fi wargaming properties a boost. This article lists a bunch of current systems that may do the job, and encourages us, the readers, to write in if we want to see TSR and the magazine do more mini's stuff and wargaming in general. Yeah, no agenda at all here. Unfortunately, your wish is not going to be granted. So sad to see a hobby on life-support, and people trying to resuscitate it. How long are they going to keep trying? I guess this is another thing I'll discover as we go along.

Sorry, wrong dimension: Ah, interdimensional travel. Not a very different topic to the alternate timelines one they had fairly recently. Thankfully this takes a quite different tack, giving us a quick way to easily quantify how each alternate dimension differs from earth, using a few random rolls, or not, if you already have a good idea in mind. One of those cases where I've already seen several variants on the topic, and it's interesting to see how different people do it differently. You could definitely go into a lot more detail on this one.

The marvel-phile: Beta ray bill! Sif. (no, she doesn't deserve an exclamation mark. ) We return to Thor's extended family. Another pair of rather badass characters get stats and histories. Definitely another case where there is no way this could have happened in backstory. Jeff also takes the time to congratulate Roger on becoming a dad and make a ludicrous naming suggestion for the kid. Just a normal day at the office, exchanging a bit of banter, doing a bit of work. Funny to think that kid's an adult now. How time passes.

Out of the sun: Gamma world's article this month is on the empire of the sun, aka oriental gamma world, and their giant mechas. Why am I not surprised in the slightest. Just another bit of goofiness to throw into the melting pot. Also another reminder that OA is immanent, and general interest in that area is on the rise. Once again Jim is trying to expand the scope of his his game, with mixed success. This may or may not be a crossover too far, depending on if your want Gundam in your postapocalyptic game or not. Whether you object to the premise and power creep (300d8 HD? Ouch. Not so much creep as quantum leap.) or not, it's still a pretty entertaining and well written piece, with nice fiction. Another thing that I probably wouldn't put in my game, but have no objection to them covering.

The stellar Diocese: Clergy character paths for Traveller? Is there no end to the number of career paths they can give us? I guess not. Like new classes, there'll always be demand for this, even if mechanically they're not that different from current options. And lets face it, spreading the Word is a great excuse to travel to new places, meet weird and wonderful aliens, and meddle in their affairs. Like the criminal career path they had recently, you can definitely see the plot potential in having one of these guys along. This also gives a bunch of sample religions for you to follow. Once again they've provided stuff that is both amusing and easily insertable into your game. Traveller has certainly built up a lot of options over the years. Now all they need is a wizard career path and they'll have the full D&D party covered.

Teenage mutant ninja turtles! Heroes in a half-shell, Turtle power! Official palladium RPG! My god, was it really that early? This is years before the cartoon. Were the original creators gamers, because they certainly seem to have taken plenty of personal interest in this. Fascinating to discover.

Wormy reminds us storm giants are absolute badasses virtually every monster should be afraid of, even dragons. Snarfquest gives a so far minor character a serious upgrade. Dragonmirth gives us lots of giant stuff in various scenarios.

While certainly not as spectacular as their recent celebratory issues, this has still proven quite an interesting issue. Somehow, once again, it's wound up with me breaking my own record for size of review, despite the smaller page count. Guess having lots of subdivisions within the larger articles'll do that for you. Lots of stuff that you can put easily in an existing game as well. Well, since most people will be established players by now, you don't want to have to start a whole new game every time someone comes in with a cool new idea. Just how much more diverse can D&D's melting pot get? Quite a lot, I'm wagering. The real question is, how quickly.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

So, have they trademarked "Nazi" on their Indy cardboard characters yet? (Someone was not paying attention!)

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 102: October 1985

part 1/3

99 pages. Once again we Kim bemoans how annoying the press are, painting gamers as a bunch of weirdos who spend all their time dressed up in fantasy gear and talking pseudo-medieval bollocks, when they aren't living in their parents basements invoking satan. They're just trying to get the most interesting story. The fact that bears little resembelance to the truth is just because we're not actually interesting enough. Don't sweat it too much. It happens to everyone else as well. This is another reason why the internet is so great. It allows you to easily bypass the big media outlets and talk to real people around the world about a topic. It's no wonder we're so much more cynical when it's much easier to see through the , but they keep producing it anyway. But I seem to have digressed. Lets get back to the issue at hand.

In this issue:

Letters: A letter asking how the training rules in issue 97 work. They are designed to slow you down somewhat. This was intentional. We want you to spend more time at low levels, so you don't see how much it breaks down at higher levels.
A request for Dragonchess, asking if it will be for sale soon. Unfortunately not. They couldn't figure out how to make it cheap enough for the mass market.
A letter from someone who noticed the numbering slip-up in issue 65. Very ancient history by now. But mistakes like that will live in ignomy forever. What are you gonna do.
A rather amusing question. What happens if a character playing through The city beyond the gate finds and reads a D&D book. Kim deflects the question with a joke. Guess you'll have to deal with the recursion as you see fit.
Finally, we get a bunch of Dragonchess errata. Curse you, unclear explanations. Once again, we see that Gary needs a firmer editor to turn his cool ideas to clear reality.

The forum: Dan Fejes points out that the uberpaladin vs red dragon fight in issue 99 would have gone rather differently if you'd remembered to make item saving throws for all their stuff. One breath weapon would wipe out a sizable fraction of their toys, and even if they survived, they wouldn't be as twinked as they used to be. You aren't playing the monsters cleverly enough, or taking advantage of their full power. No wonder you can't challenge your players.
Anthony Ragan gets rather heated about the idea of the druid/ranger, and how dumb it is. This makes no sense and messes up the themes of the game. Cut it out now! Hee.
Carl Seglem has a pretty simple yet profound statement. There is life after Monty Haul. Come back to the game you know.
Chris Sheldon shares the sad story of how his game fizzled out when he tried to rein back the munchkins. Already D&D is starting to lose quite a lot of the casual players to the next fad.
Mark Permann presents us with a horrible moral dilemma. What should the alignment consequences be of a bunch of adventurers showing up on earth, using magic openly and shattering our belief that we are alone in the universe. Even if they don't engage in mass slaughter, they've still completely overturned a culture. Man, that's a tricky one. I can see justified arguments for all sorts of positions on this topic. I hope we see some more on this in the next few issues.

Realms of role playing: Ha. Gary thinks that too much attention is being paid to roleplaying, and not enough to the game part these days, and it's time the pendulum swung back the other way. Considering how undeveloped the settings and characterisations are still compared to even 2nd edition, and other games of the 90's, I find this very amusing. He's definitely not keen on immersing yourself in your character and their everyday likes, dislikes and behaviours to the extent that the goal pursuing aspect of the game gets forgotten. It's not that it's bad advice, but it's obvious that his idea of a good balance between the roleplaying and the game part is rather more skewed towards the game aspect than many of the new writers. If you think it's annoying now, just you wait and see what the next decade has to offer. We also get a bit of cross-promotion. For those of you who want to see more stories of Gord, buy Amazing magazine. After all, I can't fill Dragon up with fiction to the detriment of it's intended purpose. So you'll have to buy all our properties if you want to get the full picture of what we're up too. This is definite evidence that supplement bloat and scattering metaplot through multiple books would probably still have happened had he been in charge during the 90's. Overall, this is another entertaining, but not entirely pleasing contribution from the father of the game.

All about gully dwarves: Looks like Krynn has given Roger a whole new seam to mine. Unfortunately, this means putting up with the second bloody comic relief race, gully dwarves. Still, if that means we'll be getting ones on irda and minotaurs soon, I can sit through this. At least they're not as disruptive to a party as kender. Of course, most players won't want to play them because they have crap ability scores, no special powers, and are not very glamourous either. This means that in terms of not pulling their weight in a heavily optimized party, they're probably even more troublesome. So hopefully only people who really want to play them for roleplay reasons and can handle their quirks without pissing the rest of the players off actually will. This is one area I'm particularly interested in hearing about peoples actual play experiences, precisely because as written, they do seem so troublesome and unappealing. Did anyone manage to transcend that? If so, how?

A collection of canines: Doggies! This article gives stats for lots of variants on this species, and is essentially an ecology of article in disguise. This is a typical Stephen Inniss article, a well researched expansion on an already existing part of the game, with fairly decent crunch along with the fluff. We get revisions of existing stats based on more intensive study of how these creatures compare to people, talk on evolution and domestication of wild varieties of canines, and some stuff on jackals and hyenas as well. These are assisted by some pretty nice illustrations which remind me of science books from this era. This is one of his more pleasing contributions, avoiding the dullness he can slip into when he gets too interested in little details. He's certainly continuing to earn his place here.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 102: October 1985

part 2/3

Elvira officialy endorses the Chill game with a set of adventures, Evenings of Terror. Are we seeing the start of the goth and roleplaying scenes intermingling that would reach its zenith with the world of darkness? That's certainly a pleasing sign from my point of view.

Nine wands of wonder: And here comes the most regular of all our regulars with another Forgotten Realms piece. Elminster starts using magic casually as part of his conversations. I'm guessing it's not long now until he's revealed in all his, er, glory. Anyway, this month's topic is magical wands. So we get nine of them. The Wands of Magical mirrors, of Hammerblows, of Banishment, of Armory, of Darkness, of Displacement, of Obliteration, of Teeth, and of Whips. While many of them are quirky, there's none of the cursed, or partly cool, partly damn inconvenient powers that many of his previous items have possessed. Guess even he falls victim to the desire for mechanical superiority and making things more convenient in actual play. Or maybe it's that FR wizards are quite happy to put conditional drawbacks on their companions equipment like swords and shields, due to their evil sense of humour, but want the stuff they actually keep for themselves to work smoothly. In any case, it's another well written piece, full of stuff you can put in your game easily enough, while still developing the Realms as a setting. I continue to approve of this.

Villains and vigilantes: Another superhero game now out. They do seem to be rather common back then. Trouble is, how can you compete with the two big official licenses?

Coming attractions: Oriental adventures is occupying pole position in the promotions field this month. We went years without seeing the basics of AD&D changed, and now we get two big hardbacks within a few months of each other, introducing huge amounts of new classes, items and stuff. This is a quite substantial change in developmental policy. AD&D is also getting DL10: Dragons of dreams. The epic adventure continues as they free the elven kingdom of the silvanesti from the literal nightmares that have engulfed it.
D&D also gets a pair of adventures. M1: Into the maelstrom takes you into space to save the world against an incredible evil. You know you're playing with the big boys now. If you haven't quite made it that far you can instead play CM6: Where chaos reigns. Still pretty epic, with the fate of the world once again resting in the PC's hands, and time-travelling involved. Honestly, can't we have a good high level adventure that doesn't involve saving the world? It should be big enough and ugly enough to take care of itself by this stage.
Gord's first novel is out. Saga of old city is set in greyhawk, and shows the start of the eponymous rogues rise to fame. Gary already has a quadrilogy planned out. Ok then.
Star frontiers is also doing pretty well for itself this month, with SFAC4: Zebulon's guide to frontier space (With apologies to David Cook), and SFAD5: Dark side of the moon. (With apologies to Pink Floyd) An expansion and an adventure. How will they fare in the harsh environment of the modern market?
The marvel superheroes RPG gets MHAC8: Weapons locker. Gear, gear and more gear. Don't feel your heroes are super enough with just their innate powers. Here's where you should go then.
The Amazing stories imprint releases two books this month. Number 3 is Portrait in blood by Mary L. Kirchoff. Number 4 is Nightmare universe by Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson. Yeah, there's a definite horror theme here, be it gothic or sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Endless quest is up to book 30: The fireseed. Oh no! You've been kidnapped by pirates. You must escape! How will you accomplish this?
And finally, we have two new SPI brand wargames. Barbarossa is a strategic level game covering the Russian front of WWII. An epic battle covering 5 years and half a continent. How will it go this time round? Terrible Swift Sword is a regimental level american civil war game. Now updated with the latest in civil war research, it's now more historically accurate than ever! Mmmkay then.

Now that's firepower!: Hee. Not long ago they said they'd never allow military grade firepower in the Top Secret game. Well guess what. So much for that statement. Here we have stats for machine guns and missiles, and the quite disgusting amounts of damage they can do to both people and structures. Missiles in particular are prone to inflict instakills on you, which is never good from an adventurers point of view. You should definitely use this stuff with caution, for TPK's do not a happy party make. Thankfully the writer realizes this, and puts in plenty of warnings and advice on how to help with this. If used properly, it could add to your campaign. I guess you can't have the rope needed to cross a chasm or climb a cliff without also having enough rope to hang yourself with. The more freedom you're given, the more able you are to do things wrong, and mess them up for other people. It's a definite problem with game design in general. Guess you just have to find a game which does what you want.

Valley of the earth mother: This month's module is a 12 pager intended for fairly low level characters. Despite the name, it's not actually that wilderness focussed, with the majority of the actual adventure set inside the dungeon area. It also features an anti-ranger class, the huntsman. Who are complete bastards (shock, horror, peta girl flails her hands frantically and then starts making placards.) and not recommended as PC's. Add this to the neutral rangers in Mehica, and we have variants for all morals. Might as well just get rid of the alignment restriction entirely, since your moral state is apparently irrelevent to how well you know how to (mis)use nature. Someone send a deposition to the relevant deities. Try not to mislay it in the post for 15 years. So yeah, this is a fairly typical dungeon crawl that has a few neat touches, but nothing that really makes it stand out from the crowd. Just another day at work, clearing out pests.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 102: October 1985

part 3/3

Creating a cast of NPC's: Our D&D PbM creator returns to give us some advice on creating all the many NPC's that populate you campaign. While you probably won't need the 5000+ he created to provide a diverse cast to all the different parties participating, using his methods to whip out a few hundred general peeps to fill the basic roles in your game could definitely help speed your game along, and avoid the dreaded stupid name made up on the spot problem. Don't sweat too much about the details of unimportant NPC's, just roll them up and put them on an index card. For more critical ones, determine the important details yourself, but still let random rolls play a part. It's quicker and will result in results that surprise even you, making the campaign as a whole feel more realistic than if every NPC is precision tuned for their job. After all, in the real world, very few people are. A case where even if you choose not to heed his advice, you can't dispute his expertise. This method definitely works. That's not to say others don't work as well, but do you want to stumble around figuring out by trial and error what works and what doesn't? Some of us just don't have the time anymore.

Fiction: Passing in the night by Rob Chilson. The solar system is being invaded by mysterious and hostile aliens. It's up to your crew to stop them. This is nowhere near as glamorous as in the movies, but still an incredibly tense experience. And while the science may be pretty speculative in this one, the tension is very real. Like real submarine crews, you're packed in this small space with each other for months, and if you mess up, it can result in the death of the whole crew. If people from different nationalities have to do this, it gets even more complicated. And this story captures that kind of emotional interaction quite well. Which is nice for me. Bottleneck scenarios seem to work slightly better in sci-fi than fantasy, and we haven't seen that many of them in the magazine, so this doesn't feel too hackneyed. Lets hope we don't get a ton of them all of a sudden.

What the hell is mandragora the evil-chaser doing on the cover of the ARES section? Rankin-Bass ought to sue I guess they'd just be countersued for snarf, so it all balances out.

Sticks and stones and death machines: We had some attention paid to determining challenge rating last issue. Now we get a similar article for gamma world. As the random encounter tables are not scaled for challenge in any way, you'll start off in huge amounts of danger from random crap, which then fades away. This is worth reexamining. Unfortunately, this article is too short to do the complete overhaul an idea like this needs, instead giving you a load of ideas on how you can fudge things to help keep them survivable and interesting. Which is pretty much the kind of advice we've heard repeatedly before, and will do so again. A definite filler article.

A thousand in one: Ohh. This is an interesting article. How to prevent the monoculture problem suffered when engaging in interplanetary or multidimensional games. It makes things seem shallow and stereotyped, particularly if your home region is the only area that doesn't suffer from it. You can get considerable benefits from condensing these ideas so there are several to a planet, interacting with and influencing one-another more closely. It's a simple lesson, but one many settings could benefit from. I've always been annoyed by monoculture problem in planar stuff in particular, and definitely intend to take it to heart when designing future cosmologies for my games.

The marvel-phile: Oh great. For this month's installment, we get the Impossible Man, another indestructible cartoonesque joke character. Egads, those are irritating. Able to assume any form, and bounce back from any attack, he's been a pain in the ass to the fantastic four, the x-men, Wasp, and even given Galactus indigestion. And if you get mad at him, you lose Karma. Prepare to face the wrath of thrown plushies and the like from your players. Ahh, the joys of having source material silly enough that you don't even need to try. Save it for the april fools issues Jeff.

Active duty: Once again we see people pushing what you can do with Traveller's career system. This time, it's some advice on playing characters that are still in the military, rather than retired. After all, it's not as if we're short on sci-fi series with setups like that. And the fact that you'll have to obey orders from your superiors just makes it easier for the GM to run the adventures they want without it seeming like railroading. Jeff Swycaffer once again proves that he has a good idea how to create and run good stories that imitate sci-fi shows like Star Trek or Space:1999, allowing the players a certain amount of discretion in following orders, and if they mess up, turning the punishment into it's own subplot. This opens up another milieu of play that I would certainly have no objection trying. Another thumbs up.

Silvertwin!: Star Law continues to get follow-ups in here with this pair of kick-ass custom vehicles, a space car and bike. Guess my joke about evil-chasers was more accurate than I realized. Join the twinteams, the six man sentai teams that pilot these interlocking pairs of vehicles, and travel the universe, fighting for truth, justice, and the intergalactic way. You didn't need to do this. You already had me sold on the whole space ranger thing, this is just icing on the top. Although I must admit it makes an exceedingly tasty looking cake. And since the whole way the concept pans out is pretty amusing, I'm going to have to give another positive result to this article.

Wormy shows how bad trolls are at deception. Snarfquest has an attack of concience. Dragonmirth has both racism and homophobia in it's jokes, my oh my.

Another fairly good issue, if not quite as good as the last two. Still, with their current standards, they'd have to fall quite a way to produce one I actively disliked. Lets hope they don't continue to slide downwards. Both writing and production values are staying strong. It's just the usual problem keeping things fresh when you've been doing them for this long. They could definitely be doing more themed issues. Even their specials haven't really concentrated in one area all year. I guess this is what happens when you rule your writers with a light hand. Will my desires be granted? Will they get even better? Or is this the start of the end for the classic run of issues. Guess I can't really know until I can look back and see it in context. Onwards, christian soldiers, yadda yadda yadda.

 

[dylan8405]

Regarding Dragonlance, I found the initial DL setting to be perfectly fine and fun and interesting. It was only the advancing of the timeline that I didn't like. It got more and more ridiculous with each advance. If you stuck to pre-War of the Lance stuff, it was a reasonably good, gritty, unique setting.

(I also enjoyed the kender, in small doses. I played one or two, and the group seemed to enjoy it well enough. It helped that I wasn't a dick about it I suppose. And we were really a beer-and-pretzels type group anyway, more interested in dungeons than politics.)

Wow...Not to hijack a thread, but I'm right in the same boat. In fact, just yesterday I started re-reading "Dragons of Autumn Twilight". The pre- and slightly-post War of the Lance setting was great and the AD&D sourcebook was great as well. It seemed like the authors kept trying to one-up themselves every time another series and world-changing event happened and it just got too weird for me (no magic, Takhisis stealing the world...what the heck?).

Same boat as kender as well. I played one back in the 1980s and they're kind of fun if the player isn't a jerk about it and our group of 12 to 14-year olds was definately not into politics. You can tell that they're total comic relief in the books and don't make for the best race for RPGing, but hey, that was AD&D in the mid-1980s!

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 103: November 1985

part 1/3

100 pages. Well, the price increases are back. From febuary onwards, issues will cost $3.50. The cost of everything else in their catalog is also going up next year. Buy lots of stuff for christmas, before the increases hit. (We still need to get ourselves out of debt, even after the runaway success of UA, but we're not going to actually say that. We're not beggars like palladium) So lets hope they continue to produce stuff that's worth the price. Once again their contents page looks a little sparse, which isn't promising. They really ought to do something about that. All it takes is a little formatting control and info on their regular columns.

In this issue:

Letters: A letter asking if you can still get photocopies of individual articles from the magazine. You can, but only if you're an RPGA member. Poor overworked Penny Petticord just can't handle everyone's requests.
A question about how holy flail works. This is the kind of one that really belongs in sage advice. I miss that. When will it be back.
Another rules question. Why are automatons so expensive. So you can't mass produce them, just like all the other magically created creatures. They need to be kept extortionately expensive so wizards can't alter the everyday food production setup and advance technology beyond pseudomedieval. Bleh.

The forum: David Gaw thinks the most important thing for a DM is fairness. As long as you stay fair, the players should respect your authority. In a perfect world, maybe. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. No one DMing style is going to fit all players.
Thomas E Wolff is one of those people who thinks fudging is a bad idea. Sure, you do it once, thinking it's harmless, but before you know it, your players have no fear of death at all, and the campaign loses all it's drama. Stay off that slippery slope. If the dice say you die, you die.
Brian Hook doesn't like the idea of mass combat systems, feeling it destroys your roleplaying and personal relationship with your PC's. Just abstract it away. Pah.
Richard Silva thinks that Frank Mentzer has dramatically exaggerated the lethality of a huge dragon when faced with a full team of properly equipped 25th level characters. Frankly, by his math, they would mop the floor with it if they were played with any intelligence at all. That's the rub, isn't it. At high levels, it becomes so much about how well you apply your powers as well as the straight numbers. Given how much choice both sides would have in spells and attacks, you could play this one dozens of times with very different results.

From the sorceror's scroll: Now UA is out, it's time for your esteemed writers here at TSR to start seriously considering a second edition. Of course, it will take us several years to figure out exactly what to change and how, and write it up properly, based upon the feedback of our gentle readers, so do not worry. Your views will be crucial in its shaping, and you will receive plenty of warning as to its release, so you can prepare your campaigns accordingly. Let me elucidate as too the current plans. Assassins go byebye (my oh my). Bards become an ordinary class again. Mystic, savant and jester to be introduced as new official classes. Classes from UA and OA to be put in the players handbook. Deities to be more powerful and less firmly defined. More difference between clerics based upon god worshipped. Legends & Lore to be considered one of the corebooks. Now, how do we do this without making the books too damn big for casual players? As ever, this is very interesting, particularly when you compare it with what actually happened. Some of this came to pass, some didn't, and some retained the basic intention, but the details got changed along the way. Definitely one for the historical perspective files and citing in flame wars and wikipedia. Also interesting to note that the 2nd edition would probably have been out a year or two sooner, had the crisis of leadership not happened. The massive gaps between the early editions may not have been entirely intentional.

Arcana update, part 1: Errata, errata. Serve it up on a platter. Use it to make the next printing better. Yes, not only was it flimsily made, UA was an exceedingly errata-ridden book, and it seems that TSR's Loyal Readers wasted no time in sending letters to the company pointing this out, with various degrees of added vitriol. So we have four pages of various clarifications and corrections. Somewhere between amusing and tiresome to read in retrospect, this was of course Serious Business at the time. Question is, is this extra publicity for the book a good or bad thing? I'm betting bad. It'd certainly weaken my trust in a company, finding out they'd produced shoddy goods. As ever, the opinions of anyone who was there at the time on this matter would be very welcome.

Palladium fantasy goes on the high seas.

All about krynn's gnomes: Great. Tinker gnomes. Comedy relief race number three of Dragonlance. Stop talking when I am, the rest of us can't speak and listen at the same time. (now that is a useful special power. Screw mining, super accurate throwing and infravision, I want to be able to talk constantly and parallel process multiple conversations in my head at the same time.) These guys are actually reasonably cool, differing from humanity in such a way that doesn't prevent them from each having individual personalities, and being far more distinctive than generic gnomes. But the comic relief incompetence elements are laid on pretty thick. Still, if I had to choose between the three so far, I'd take these guys. Unfortunately, it seems that my earlier hope that we'd also get articles on the non comedy relief races is not to be granted, as this is the last in the series. Once more, their editorial direction seems to be slipping away from me, as they fail to cover stuff that seems obvious. This is most annoying. I wanted to like dragonlance back in the day, I really did, but they just kept making mistakes like this. So frustrating.

A samurai riding a foo dog attacking a ninja. That's .... certainly an iconic, if stereotyped image to advertise oriental adventures with. Is there such a thing as being too obvious in your adverts? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say yes.

Games workshop advertises two modules for different games on the same page, and confuses me. How very irritating.

A dozen domestic dogs: Having given us wild canines last issue, Stephen Innis now turns his attention to tame breeds. Thankfully, he doesn't try and give individual stats to every one, instead giving us a nice matrix of size and role that should handle everything from toy poodle to rotweiler, plus some more specific notes on dogs bred and trained to fill a function. This is an oasis of calm compared to the last few articles, being completely disconnected to the larger arc of D&D's history. And steve is as reliable as ever in producing stuff that is both mechanically sound and properly researched. The magazine would be a worse product without him.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 103: November 1985

part 2/3

DC heroes! Well, I guess marvel have had an RPG out for a while. I'm not surprised DC want a piece of the pie as well. That's a lot of tm's for one page. Who will win the battle for your playing time?

The role of books: The silver Crown by Joel Rosenberg is part three of the Guardians of the flame series. This certainly isn't the end of it though, as our protagonists find changing a fantasy world rather more complicated than you'd think. The writer certainly seems to be keeping up with recent progressions in gaming technology. Where will the story take them next. Will they ever get home. Will it be exactly when they left and no-one will ever know about the things they did. Shouldn't be hard to find out.
The song/flight of Mavin manyshaped by Sheri S Tepper are parts one and two of (what else) a trilogy, set in her True Game world. Thankfully, it's not some overegged piece where the world is in danger all the time, and has good plotting and dialogue. Her world is being built up quite nicely.
The secret country by Pamela C Dean takes a different tack to the regular people transported to fantasy land trope, with a bunch of kids dealing with fairytale logic in the Secret Country. They may not deal with it in the same way as Joels protagonists, but give them a few books, and they'll be hard-bitten adventurers too.
Bridge of birds by Barry Hughart is a fantasy novel set in 7th century china. Written as the memoirs of the protagonist, it manages to engage in both adventure and world-building while staying in character, building up a detailed and well-researched world. It gets thoroughly recommended for those of you who've just bought Oriental Adventures, and want fiction to help inspire a game.
Dragons of spring dawning by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman gets a rather extensive review, also looking at the trilogy as a whole. It builds up to a nice climax, and the reviewer certainly seems to think it's a suitable attempt to match tolkien's epic scope without slavishly imitating the details. Well, it was pretty popular at the time. I shouldn't be too surprised.
Magic in Ikthar, edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams attempts to do for wizardry what the thieves world series did for rogues. Unfortunately, the shared worldbuilding aspect isn't strong enough, so the stories don't fit together that well. This is why you need editorial control. No matter how good the writers are, if they don't communicate, the result will be less than the sum of it's parts.
The Gadget factor by Sandy Landsman is your typical tale of teenage geniuses getting themselves into trouble by inventing a time machine. Amazing that I can be unsurprised by a trope that specific. Still, it's fast-paced, fun, and the computer stuff is handled in a coherent way, so it should be good fun for younger readers, who can identify with the protagonists.

The centaur papers: Or, we got two good ecology of submissions, so we decided to merge them into an extra long and comprehensive one. At 12 pages long, this is virtually a full special feature. It goes into quite a bit of detail on the oddities of their internal system, diet, ecology and culture, doesn't forget that they are chaotic, and the original greek centaurs were a bunch of marauding drunkards, and treads the fine line between bowdlerisation of the myth and being too gross with aplomb. (yay for castration as a punishment for crime) They are also given PC stats, which is nice, (although they're nowhere near as capable in this area as they were in 2nd edition) and one would certainly make a decent addition to a party as long as they weren't faced with too many confined spaces. All in all, a very good article, that you'd never know was stitched together from two writers. Which means plenty of credit has to be given to Kim's editing as well. Not often you get to say that. Poor editors. The writers take the credit while they take the blame. Many shout-outs to Kim for making the magazine as good as it was, while I'm thinking of the subject.

The actual centerpiece of this issue is considerably less impressive. Another couple of pages of UA errata, designed so you can cut the bits out and stick them over the errors in the original book. Which is an interesting gimmick. Unfortunately, even the errata has errata, as the multi-classing table isn't properly formatted and suffers line drift. Well, at least they're trying. Shame this'll just be cementing peoples opinion of their editing skills. (in complete contradiction to what I said last article, but that just makes it all the more amusing, that they can be producing works of such widely varying quality in the same pages. ) What is going on over there. This issue is going up and down like, er, no, I won't complete this metaphor. Family friendly magazine, and all that.

Coming attractions changes its name to TSR Previews, and makes it absolutely clear that there will be no third party stuff here. Boo. They also don't have quite enough new stuff to fill the entire page this month, so they recycle some of last month's synopses. This is not particularly pleasing to me either. Sigh. Lets just see what the new stuff is.
D&D gets X10: Red arrow, black shield. As mentioned earlier, this combines roleplaying of troop gathering with Battlesystem and War machine stats for the actual conflict. Not your standard module.
AD&D gets Baltrons beacon. A sneaky one where you have to get hold of the macguffin before Baltron returns to his tower. Looks like another one where straight combat is not the solution.
One-on-one game books gives us book 4, Challenge of the druids grove. Druid vs Wizard! Who will gain ultimate power?! Muahaha.
Conan gets CN3: Conan triumphant. Based on the new book by Robert Jordan, this looks pastichealicious. Powerful barbarians, evil wizards, and hack-and-slash adventure. No pretensions to high art here.
Also notable is that there's a couple more cancellations. The SPI stuff gets the shaft, and has been delayed until next year. Take that, red-headed step-children.

Profiles: Oooh. a new feature. Time to put the spotlight on the writers behind the games. They could definitely fill a few years with this stuff. Unsurprisingly, our first one is of the head of the company, Gary Gygax. He really is working ridiculously hard these days, getting up at 5 in the morning to get the creative part of his job done before anyone else even comes in. He is of course, one of the founders of the company, although lots of credit is given to Donald Kaye in helping it find it's feet in those early years, which is nice of him. Of course, the current conflicts of personality the company is going through are completely ignored, and the whole thing is presented in an upbeat, the future is going to be even bigger and better manner. Bloody whitewashes. Still, this again has good advice for any a budding creative. If you have an idea, start doing it now. If you wait until you're ready, you never will be. Don't give up, even when things get hard, and everyone is messing you around. Once again, he is an inspiration to us all. How will they follow this up? Guess after starting at the top, they'll have to do an Orson Welles and work their way down.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 103: November 1985

part 3/3

Fiction: The wages of stress by Christopher Gilbert. Ha. A story set in 2007. As usual, they overestimate the rate of technological advancement. Although curiously, this stuff probably is within our current capabilities to create and implement. And given how big business compensation culture has become, and how unpleasantly omnipresent vehicle monitoring has become, something like it could still be tried. ( To go off topic, if the government tries to push implanting RFID chips in people under some pretense, I strongly reccomend opposing them in any way you can. They already do it to homeless people in some states, and it's a step towards big brother dystopia I would really rather not see come into common practice.) This does a good job of handling the speculative side of sci-fi, without neglecting the human drama, or getting bogged down in technical details. One of their strongest pieces in a while, along with the MMORPG one in issue 97, this shows just how well they can hit points that still have emotional resonance and cultural significance a few decades later. Discovering gems like this makes all the work of doing this worthwhile.

ARES log: A rather amusing editorial this month, as they loudly proclaim their accessability to foreign writers. We have lots of people in canada, and more than a few from the UK. Don't be shy. Send stuff in. Hee. Misconceptions like this are such a hassle.

Of nobbles and men: A rather strange little article here. Do you want to know more about Nobbles, the hornless rhinoesque grazing creatures that people on Tarsus herd. Can't say I ever did. Still, as the western genre shows, cowboy is an entirely valid adventuring choice, when you're trying to make a living in a wild and dangerous land, lots of things will be there to keep your life interesting. And the nobbles are rather more challenging creatures to herd than cows. This is surprisingly pleasing, as it does open up an adventuring style they haven't mentioned here before, which could well be transplanted to other genres and systems. Fancy giving your D&D characters a thousand cows and an assignment to transport them a thousand miles? I find this rather tempting.

Starquestions is doing gamma world again. No great surprises here then.:
How fast can a vibroblade cut through duralloy ( pretty quickly. Not much resistance there. )
How do you design adventures for high level characters (Politics and new frontiers. Both ways to up the stakes and challenge level by increasing the scope. )
Why are the symbols for craters and radiation the same (because that's where the nukes hit. Make sense?)
What do you use the range ruler for. (Moving your minis around the table and shooting stuff. )
Why are grenades and fungicide resolved differently when they're both burst attacks (ease of play)
Why can flying NPC's not go as fast as flying mutant PC's. ( It's not quite like that. It's just that the writers of the mutation and monster sections didn't co-ordinate. )
Where do the gamma world modules take place (all over north america. )
What city is sanjo (San Jose. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. )

The saurians: Star frontiers gets a new race. Lizard people? Oh, what an original idea [/sarcasm] Seems like they show up in any remotely kitchen sinkish universe. So we have stats that a primarily intended for NPC's, but are more than detailed enough for player use as well. No real surprises or original spin on the idea here. Such is the nature of cliche.

Tanks again!: Looks like this issue's theme of errata is continuing into the Ares section, with an article in issue 99 getting a follow-up. A single page article of corrections, clarifications and extensions, this is another one that is probably useful, but still not very interesting to read. Another article that feels like filler in quick succession. How disappointing.

A super-powered seminar!: Ahh, this is more interesting. Stuff from a seminar in which the creators of the various superhero RPG's around at the time got together and answered questions. Jeff Dee & Jack Herman representing villains and vigilantes. Ray Greer for the HERO system. Greg Gorden for DC heroes, and of course, Jeff Grubb handling the marvel side of the equation. How they were developed, the problems they encountered, and what's coming next for them. One of those reminders that the world of RPG's is a small place, and the sci-fi and superhero genres even more so. Everyone knows each other, even if they only really meet up at cons. Guess it's like actors and awards shows. This has been pretty enlightening for me, and apparently, them as well. See what a little communication gets you. It helps you combine all the best ideas from everyone.

The marvel-phile: Jeff also gets help from the official chronicler of the Marvel universe history this month. Guess this is another plus point of going to conventions, as well as a good indicator of his positive relationship with the game's parent company. If they had to go through an extensive niggly approvals process for every little bit of writing, these articles wouldn't be nearly as reliable as they are. Anyway, this month's detailed characters are Armadillo, Count Nefaria, and Hyperion. Only the newest and best (and in one case, already dead) for our magazine. We see how Marvel is currently riffing off DC with the Squadron Supreme series. We see how they must be running out of animals to steal superpowers from. Another solid entry in a series that could probably run forever, given the rate they create new characters for the comics.

Irving tries to figure out how to land safely in wormy. Snarf becomes absurdly suggestible. Both dragonmirth jokes this month feature actual dragons.

This has been rather an up and down issue. When it's good, it's good. When it's not, it's very boring indeed. Overall, this is a definite step downwards, yet again, from their issue 100 high. Lets hope they've saved up some special features for christmas, because otherwise next month is going to full-on suck. And I would rather prefer it didn't.