Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 104: December 1985

part 1/3

104 pages. Well, it looks like the meteoric rise is over. We get another look at their sales figures this month, and they're pretty much the same as last year, just a few thousand less. The magazine has reached it's commercial zenth, and now it's time for the long slow decline. We also have yet another D&D controversy to help that on its way. Ahh, the joys of misrepresentation. Anything can be done wrong. And a lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth has got it's boots on. We ought to know by now that most games are just harmless fun, not some unhealthy obsession. (says the guy who's spent several hours nearly every day for a year reading and writing about D&D, ahahahahaha! gibber!) So lets not stress too much. We can't change the past, all we can do is learn from it. So lets keep on learning. Looks like we have a thief special this month, with three articles devoted to them. Been a while since we had something like that. Still, I'm sure we will again.

In this issue:

Letters: We get a letter from the UK, pointing out the anachronisms in the city beyond the gate. I am not surprised at all. The author of the module replies that he based it heavily on reading the Borribles series, ( Hee, although I have to say I liked those books as well.) and he knew the police didn't have guns, but he put them in anyway so they could still be a challenge to the PC's. He also didn't do his research about decimalization, despite it being 15 years ago now. Dear oh dear. Shoulda run it past a real english person beforehand. This would be rather less likely to happen these days. Ahh, the joys of the internet. And that's our lot for now.

The forum: Richard W Emerich turns up for a third time, this time to chime up in favor of allowing PC's to pay to have magic items recharged. After all, once they're into the teen levels, and have the power to do this kind of thing, they also ought to have the money to get other people to do the tedious bits of maintaining the adventurer lifestyle for them. You should never miss an opportunity to streamline your magical capabilities, for it will save you much time and irritation.
Mark Deseck takes the time to introduce us to two new weapons, the sword-breaker, a real life example of a screwage counterweapon, and the pilium, a javelin designed to stick in shields so you can use it to make them useless. See the evil tactics you can do even without magic.
William Bond Jr thinks that no-one is perfect. Even paladins wind up doing neutral stuff sometimes. Don't judge them too harshly.
John Maxstadt contributes a fairly long piece, spread over three pages in different parts of the magazine. Ahh, the horrors of formatting without whitespace with the old technology. Still, at least they try, unlike 4e. Anyway, he makes the case that if anything is going to kill D&D, it's oversophistication. Something that still might turn out to be true. He also has lots of contributions on the morality in fantasy debate.
Nick Jamilla talks about media misrepresentation, and the crap that TV people go through to get good stories. They've got problems and pressures of their own. Is it any wonder that things turn out slanted. This is why you shouldn't believe what you see on the TV. Everyone's got an angle and a reason why they're doing something. Remember to read between the lines.

The well-rounded thief: Ahh, the thief who steals from their own party. Not a problem I've had to deal with, but obviously common enough back then that it needed addressing. So here's a look at some of the more common motivations for your characters that don't involve them being a complete sociopath with no regard for anything apart from personal enrichment. Maybe they want revenge. Maybe they want to look cool. Maybe it's just a job, and they're as loyal to the gang as anyone else, because no-one likes a snitch or turncoat. Maybe they followed their parent/elder sibling into the profession, and just want to make them proud. This definitely falls into the category of roleplaying advice that I've heard plenty of times before. Break out of the stereotypes, and play an individual, etc, etc. They obviously think it's still interesting enough to put in pole position. Can't say I agree.

Race is ahead of class: The roleplaying advice continues, with this examination of how the average thief of a demihuman race will differ from a human one. Info gathering elves, technically inclined dwarves, mischevious gnomes, thuggish half-orcs, home comfort loving halflings lured away by curiosity. Once again, there's no great surprises here, if you're already familiar with the basics of the races. Whether your character adheres to those tendencies or not, is of course, up to you. Once again, this is pretty solid, but superceded by later works that went into greater detail. This is the problem with starting off later and then going back to things. It doesn't have the impact it had to first time viewers.

Was it worth the risk?: And finally, we get some new crunch to finish off the themed section. If your thief wants to supplement their income by doing a little pickpocketing while in town, roll on this random table to see just who's pocket you pick. This of course has quite substantial dangers. During the daytime, you have an 18% chance of getting someone with significant class levels, or a disguised monster, that is capable of being a serious problem if they catch you. At night, this goes up to a whopping 35%, with demons and undead roaming the city streets. This is why thieves guilds are essential in D&D. Without that backup, 1st level characters trying their luck at larceny wouldn't survive their first day. Even the dungeon is safer than this. I find this very amusing. The table for what you get if you do make a successful lift is equally amusing. (yay for rubik's cubes) It's amazing what crap people keep in their pockets, most of which isn't very valuable. In general, this is a rather old skool article, which is best suited to mischievious and sadistic DM's running high fantasy games. It certainly makes an entertaining read, and would probably make for interesting (if rather lethal) games as well. The players won't be getting cocky anytime soon if they see you break out this one.

Oriental opens new vistas: They've been promoting it heavily for several months now. Just in case you hadn't noticed, here's a piece by David Cook, essentially giving a synopsis of what's in it. 8 new classes, tons of new weapons, martial arts, spells, monsters, plus the campaign world (or at least continent) of Kara-tur. Buy it, and you'll have tons of new stuff to play with, both as players and GM's. And you don't even need to stop your regular game to do so. Traveling, picking up new characters and dual-classing will allow gajin to experience the joys of the lands of the east as their players do. While if you do want to play a native, we have tons of everyday setting stuff to help you build a well characterized and integrated character. While obviously a pure shill piece, this is a good shill piece, that makes what they're selling seem desirable. I am rather tempted to pick it up second hand so I can make a more informed commentary. After all, it was rather popular.

 

[LordVyreth]

Several hours? Really? Now I'm curious about your process for these updates.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 104: December 1985

part 2/3

Three challenges in one: A second, shorter promotional piece follows. As they've said several times before, Module X10 involves the standard D&D rules, the War machine from the Companion set, and the new Battlesystem rules. This really pushes the boundaries of what you can do in a roleplaying game. No longer do you need to fudge things when armies become involved. Instead, you can scale inwards or outwards as needed, to create a truly epic overall game where you can command nations. Use the War machine to quickly build up your countries, and their armies. In short, this becomes much more than just a bit of promotion, as it really challenges you to step up your game, take it in new, bigger directions, and makes it seem like a fun and achievable prospect. A single campaign can go from dungeon crawling, to wilderness exploration, to diplomacy, to comedy, to domain management, to personal introspection and relationship drama, to war, to other worlds, and even to godhood, while still retaining continuity. (aardvarks are optional) Do you have what it takes to pull that off? Or are you just going to pick one milieu and stick with it. If you do, don't be surprised if I get bored and leave you behind. This is much more successful as a mind broadener than the preceding OA piece.

Meeting of the minds: Another 1 pager here. Do you wish you got more psionic monsters in your random encounters? Roll here then. Be very afraid, because your chance of encountering a demon lord, primus, slaad lord or similar unique monstrosity that terrifies even 20th level characters is better than 1 in a thousand. man what. They put creatures like that on the random encounter tables back then? What happens if you kill them, then the DM gets that result again? This is definitely another attack of serious old skool design I'd be rather wary of using in actual play, for though it might be entertaining, lots of horrible deaths would result. This is why they started designing CR appropriate encounters and all that goes with it.

Leomund's tiny hut: It's been quite a while since we heard from Len. What's brought him back into the fray? Specialization, and its effect on game balance. Cue annoying average damage per round calculations. Yes, it makes fighters more powerful. That was the point. They're still seriously limited in options that can change the whole course of a battle compared to spellcasters. And if you determine the treasure your players get randomly, the benefits will balance out in the long run because chances are, they won't get magic weapons of types they know how to use as often, making the theoretical twinky synergies unlikely. Yet Len still wants to nerf weapon specialization further, making it harder to learn, and less beneficial if you do get it. Once again, I find myself at odds with his design choices. You need to be giving them more options, not reducing their power.

The ecology of the ochre jelly: Now there's a monster you don't see much anymore. Which is curious, as they're one of the least screwage inflicting of the oozes and their relations, like slimes, molds, and puddings. Elminster delivers a rather clever tale of turning the quirks of the monster to your advantage, and using it to devastate your enemies. Gotta love that division power. Which is a kind of story we haven't seen here before. I strongly approve, as this is the kind of stuff it's great fun to see your players try, and hopefully reading this will inspire them to do likewise. Drama, realms lore, some rather well researched physiological descriptions, character ingenuity. Once again Ed has pushed his own limits and come up with a new trick to keep me interested. How very pleasing. He's continued to surprise way long after most writers become predictable. And hopefully will continue to do so.

Assessing, not guessing: Hmm. Looks like we're getting a third article introducing a new subsystem this month. This is an interesting trend. This time, it's one for when characters try and figure out how much something is worth. After all, it's unrealistic for them to automatically know what it's value is. For that matter, it's unrealistic for gems and other valuable items to have a fixed value in the first place, but enough about D&D's monolithic price fixing cartels, and their desperate need for a union-breaker. Anyway, this is another efficient and easy to use article that reminds us that independent subsystems aren't neccacerily a bad thing, as they can be tailored to the needs of the matter at hand more precisely, it's just that learning them and keeping track of them becomes more fiddly when there are hundreds of different parts. Still a fun read, though.

Sudden dawn: It's been getting articles every month for over a year. Now the Marvel superheroes game gets it's first module. As it's christmas, it's a full 16 pager. Venture to 1944, either using the pregenerated characters, or by concocting a reason for your regulars to go back in time, to save New york city from nazi ubermensch and a vampire with a nuclear bomb. It's a bit of a railroad, with a bunch of cool scenes, but very little opportunity to manipulate the plot. It's certainly an interesting experiment, and would make a decent pick-up game, but I can't see myself using it as written with a regular group. They'd refuse to cut the scene where it says and go off to investigate and mess it all up. A bit of a disappointment, really, despite the strong presentation. It'd make a good actual comic book story, but as we've found, what makes a good story and a good game are very different things.

Spy's advice: What happens to an agent who quits and sets up their own agency. (Watch your back, especially if you found out important secrets before leaving. )
I want my agent to use heavy weaponry. Pretty please. ( You'd better have a better justification than that.)
I want my agent to use lasers. (Tough. This is a modern day game, so they do not exist, so they have no stats. Doesn't matter how highly cleared you are. Can't have something that doesn't exist.)
If you shoot a car, how do you determine where you hit. (see page 38, and use common sense. Hitting what locations would produce these results?)
I want more info on uzi's. (zzzzzzzzz. Oh, alright.)
At what point does an object go from being really hard to conceal to impossible. (good question. )
How hard is it to shoot two guns at once. (depends how many shots you do with each. Recoil adds up quite dramatically.)
If you kill someone with a full burst, can you retroactively not shoot the extra shots (no. Chaos of melee and all that.)
Does increasing your charm also increase your deception (yes)
What guns did the use on the man from U.N.C.L.E (Walther P-38's)
Can you use fortune and fame points to escape excecutions and explosions. (people certainly survive them in the movies against impossible odds, so yes)
Can assault rifles be scoped. (yes. Most guns can. It helps with some more than others though. )

 

[(un)reason]

Several hours? Really? Now I'm curious about your process for these updates.

Believe me, it does take quite a lot of effort.

In rough order, First I skim through the magazine, putting up the titles for each article. (I've actually done this part for the entire run now, so I have it all neatly listed and ready to be filled in when I get that far. ) If anything particularly leaps out at me, then I'll write down stuff for that article straight away. If not, it's then a matter of nibbling away at the magazine (I usually find myself working from the front and back inwards), until I've managed to get info and opinion stuff on all of them. This generally starts of fairly quickly, and then slows to a crawl for the last few articles, usually boring filler ones that I really struggle to find an opinion on.

I usally write the preamble before starting on the magazine, and the postscript after finishing the articles, but if one or two of them are being particularly troublesome, I may start on it before doing them. If there's any references to previous magazines I check up on them, make sure they're correct.

It's tricky to measure exact times, because I usually have several things open at once and flick from one to another as I get bored, but at the moment It's generally taking me around 3-4 days per issue, working for the majority of the evening. This has pretty much replaced watching tv and general reading for the past year.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 104: December 1985

part 3/3

Profiles: Looks like this is gonna continue for a while. We get two profiles this month. Harold Johnson is the director of game design. This means you don't see his name as often as you do the writers, but he's a critical part of the organization, running from one department to another, getting them to all co-ordinate on a project. He also wrote C1, and is responsible for the hiring of lots of TSR's famous names like Jeff Grubb and Tracey Hickman. Obviously it'd be a different company without him.
David "zeb" Cook is a rather more famous name, having been responsible for designing lots of cool stuff of various kinds, from big stuff like Oriental Adventures and Star frontiers, to little games like Escape from new york. His favourite word is Wahoo!, and he subscribes to the philosophy that the person who dies with the most toys wins. Ok then, I suppose that's a pretty good philosophy for a game designer. He seems to be quite the prankster in general, really livening up the TSR offices. Unless that's just what they want you to think. Still, he's designed plenty of classic stuff, so he must be doing something right.

TSR Previews: The number of new releases per month continues to plummet. Guess the leadership struggles and layoffs to deal with their debt problems are really starting to bite. So to fill the page, they once again devote a big chunk of it to recent and distant releases, rather than stuff shipping now.
The new Lankhmar series gets it's first module, Swords of the undercity. Three short adventures in the seedy underbelly of the place that can be combined to create a larger arc.
The Super endless quest series gets renamed, in a blatant attempt to boost sales by tying it more closely to the AD&D wagon. It's also rather topical, with the latest adventure being Test of the Ninja, in which a samurai is tempted to join the secret society of the ninja. Will you accept, or fight this treacherous scourge?
And regular Endless quest gets book 31: Tarzan and the tower of diamonds. Once again, they crossover their properties in various combinations in the hope that'll help. Ho hum.
I shan't bother reiterating the already out stuff. However, the more distant releases teased are: February, the start of the new Dragonlance Legends series. The immortal level boxedset, A1-4: the updated collection of the slaver series, and part two of the greyhawk adventures series in the spring, and Agent 13: the midnight avenger in may, plus two more unnamed surprises. What are we to make of this?

Star law returns: Looks like this is getting yet another follow-up, as people take the original description and expand on it in different ways. Once again, this is a definite attempt to turn down the freewheeling nature of the original for a more sensible and realistic game. Which is about as easy as doing so for star trek. Yes, there obviously has to be an infrastructure behind the scenes, but too much worldbuilding constricts your fun, as canon nitpickers show up to complain. One of the most important things you can learn as a creative type is when to stop and move on, because further additions and tinkering will just be a waste of energy, and possibly even make things worse. And this is one of those cases. Sigh.

Hexes and high guard: Jeff Swycaffer gives us a set of optional rules for traveller. Tired of your ship combat being just a slugfest with only the most abstract rules for positioning. Well, this is the article for you sir! This puts your ships on a hexgrid, and gives the needed adaptions that result from this change, so the reserve rules make sense, and you know how far you can go in a round. Since it's space, this may involve a bit more bookkeeping as you handle gravity, acceleration and deceleration. Be thankful it's a lot simpler than real world 3D space maneuvering. Once again, he's turned in pretty good work. This all seems pretty well thought out and easily integrated into a running campaign.

The exterminator: Ha. Gamma world gets a rather topical monster this month. The Exterminator. No, not ripped off from a certain recent movie starring Arnold Schwartzanegger at all. They do pretty much exactly what you expect, tromp around being virtually indestructible, and kill seemingly arbitrary targets. Pray your PC's aren't among them, because they really are rather good at their job. On the plus side, if you can beat them, you can get their plasma rifle, which is also pretty badass. This does rather neatly answer the question of how to challenge high level gamma world PC's, and they're not even slightly out of place here. You could even insert the whole skynet backstory without anyone blinking an eye, given the several centuries of lost history in the game between the present and then. After all, even if John Connor wins, it's still a radioactive wasteland after the war. I am amused and approve.

The kzinti have landed: Well well, it's these guys again. Welcome back. It's been years. This time, they're being given stats for the star trek RPG. Well, I suppose they did appear in the cartoon, so they are a semi-official race. The question then becomes, how do you distinguish them from the Caitians, another, fully official feline derived star trek race. Pretty easily, actually, given their rather unique societies, gender division, and psychic capabilities. There is, of course, a slight problem merging their known space history with the star trek universe, but you should be able to work something out if your players start picking at it. In addition to the basic stats, we get nice spreads for standard NPC types, plus a sample spaceship for them, which will enable you to get a crew up and running, ready to make your players lives miserable at short notice. Another pretty well handled conversion.

The marvel-phile: Jeff fills in the gaps left by this month's special feature with stats for Bucky, Baron Zemo I, and Baron Strucker. They are, of course, all dead now, but that means little in comic book universes. With children, relations, time manipulation, secret plans set in motion decades ago, and outright retcons, they can still influence present day plots. He also reveals what happened next to the pregens from the adventure, which is nice of him. A fairly satisfying entry, and a good example of joined up thinking, which makes several articles more than the sum of their parts.

Wormy realizes the benefits regenerating creatures have in wargaming, and puts out an advert. Snarf splats a giant and meets another hot woman, who looks just like all Larry Elmore's other hot women. What does he have for curly haired brunettes? Eh, I suppose as kinks go, it's fairly vanilla.

A nice mix of articles this issue. Lots of short ones and a long one. Roleplaying advice and random tables, conversions and original ideas. I find it interesting that it's the more old skool ones that I've generally liked better. There certainly seems to have been a high quotient of stuff you can insert into an existing campaign, no mess, no fuss. Which is nice. After all, if it takes ages to set up your presents, you might well not bother. In addition, with Unearthed arcana, Oriental adventures, and the temple of elemental evil out, they've finally managed to release all the stuff they said they would when they started AD&D. The game feels complete in a way. Any further expansions will have to involve bringing new ideas into the game, moving it in new directions. If you were going to have a happily ever after ending for the movie of the dramas behind the making of D&D, this would be a good place to finish the first story. Of course, real life doesn't work like that. There are some signs that rougher times are ahead, but this is still a pretty decent finisher to the year. So lets see what big changes next year brings, and if they are to my taste or not.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 105: January 1986

part 1/3

100 pages. We have another obituary kicking off the year. Paul Montgomery Crabaugh, one of our regular contributors, and the guy who pretty much single-handedly kept Dragonquest articles in the magazine over the last couple of years, has just died from cancer at the age of 29. He kept gaming right up till the day before he died. Man, what a downer to start the year on. Let us remember him, and the fact that a life can be snuffed out any time, for no reason. Make sure you live before you die, and leave behind things that make the world better. A moments silence, before we get back to the reviewing.







In this issue:

Letters: A letter asking if there are any half-wild elves or not. Kim rules conservatively. Apparently, they just don't see humans that way, unlike their poncy high and grey elf cousins.
A letter asking if Len's Archer class can gain the benefit of weapon specialization. Considering how much Len dislikes it, I'd probably say no, but Kim disagrees, and rules in the affirmative, so they can become even more twinked at shooting stuff.
Some questions about Stephin Inniss' dog articles.
A letter pointing out that the jumping system in issue 93, and the special one thief-acrobats get are incompatible and produce stupid results when put side by side. Correct. Such is the nature of and problem with arbitrary subsystems developed independently without guidelines. We have said before that it's impossible to incorporate everything this magazine does into a single game.

The forum: Cole Langston thinks that solo games are not harder to play than team ones. Ok, you have to be a lot more cautious when it comes to combat, but it makes things easier in other ways, with less keeping track of everything that's happened to everyone, and more room to roleplay.
George W Detwiler agrees with Frank Mentzer that a huge dragon is entirely a match for 25th level characters if it plans things right. All it takes is for them to strike first, and they'll be down lots of HP and possibly an annoying status effect. This is the stage where everyone has instadeath tricks. What this needs is extensive double-blind playtesting. For great justice!
James Maliszewski thinks that alignment is still important as a part of the game, and should neither be forgotten, nor played stupidly. Another pretty noncontroversial statement, unless you don't like the idea of alignment at all.

Leomund's tiny hut is once again in a nerfing mood. This time, len turns his eye to demihumans. Wild elves, Duergar, Svirfneblin and Drow are all rather more powerful than the regular PC races. This is indeed a problem. Fortunately, they have technology that works reasonably well now. XP penalties! Ok, they still won't be truly balanced, given their various level limits, and the fact that racial abilities tend to become less significant at higher level, but it's a step in the right direction. Just need to apply it with a little more finesse. The usual problem then.

Travel works both ways: Seems like random tables are on the rise again. How curious. This one is full of people and things you may run across going the other way while you're on the road. After all, it's not all monsters, and you can't just make something up off the top of your head any time a humans result comes up. This could just allow you to add a little extra flavour to your game, or it could spin off entirely new unexpected encounters. Taxmen! Nobles! Famous entertainers! A pretty good way to kick off the issue, with plenty of detail, including historical stuff. If you're playing pseudomedieval, this won't hurt at all if you don't have every detail of your campaign planned out.

Seeing is believing: Ahh, invisibility. A fantasy staple, being central to the biggest book in D&D's sources, and having plenty of mythical antecedents. But players being players, they have to ask how it works, and then start picking things apart further as a result of that answer. So this is ripe ground for an article, and I'm vaguely surprised we haven't seen one before. We start off with a description of the three different ways that things can be made unseen in D&D, with examinations of the quirks of each. We then go into a sage advice style Q&A, before introducing 2 new spells making the various types of invisibility more accessable. This switches from format to format at great speed, keeping me interested and proving that while this is a new writer, he's a pretty versatile one. This is how you handle examination of rules without boring people, and helping them make their game better as a result of the knowledge. Remember, after examining theory, you've got to be able to apply it. If it doesn't have a practical result and profit from using it, it might as well just be philosophy, which is no use at all to us.

The rest of the papers: Errata and supplementary material for the centaur papers. As this is largely about weights and level limits, it's not anything you'd miss if they didn't put it in, unless you wanted them as a PC. They seem to be doing a lot of this stuff recently. Editorial crap. This is what happens when you rush release lots of big books. Much mehness.

 

[Orius]

Letters: A letter asking if there are any half-wild elves or not. Kim rules conservatively. Apparently, they just don't see humans that way, unlike their poncy high and grey elf cousins.

Then why the HELL are they called "wild" elves?!



Yeah, I know that's not what's meant by wild, but I felt this comment needed to be made.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 105: January 1986

part 2/3

The role of books: Deep wizardry by Diane Duane gets pretty high praise. It develops the characters in the previous book further, and puts them through some rather tricky underwater adventures. It manages to sucessfully raise the bar and develop them personally. The reviewer looks forward to seeing where he takes them next.
Liavek, edited by Will Shetterly & Emma Bull is a set of shared world stories in the city of luck and wizardry. It does considerably better than Ikthar (see issue 103) thanks to it's editing, which manages to interweave the stories with common characters and plot threads despite the different authors. It also has a good, consistent magic system. Interesting to see two series in direct competition. How will they fare?
Mustapha and his wise dog by Esther M Friesner is an arabian nightsesque tale of a man stripped of his inheritance by his jealous brothers, cursed with shapeshifting, and trying to make his way in the world. As is typical of the genre, there are layers within layers, and some threads are hinted at and left undeveloped. Maybe we'll see them dealt with in later books, or maybe not.
Children of the dragon by Rose Estes is a strong attempt from one of our Endless Quest alumni to go into regular books. While aimed primarily at children, it still has enough depth to be of interest to the folks that read this magazine. Will she succeed in breaking out, or will it be back to the gaming pit with her.
A gathering of gargoyles by Meredith Ann Pierce continues on from The Darkangel. Looks like another trilogy again, and what seemed fixed is only the beginning of their challenges. The author is torn between liking it, and being cynical about the tropes it uses. A feeling I am all too familiar with by now.
Masters of glass by M.Coleman Easton is a surprisingly low-key book compared to the world spanning trilogies that are so common around here. It needs another pass through the editing process, but it's still a neat idea, that would be relatively easy to convert for gaming.
Plus a whole load of snapshot synopses of the latest books in various series. So many books, so little room. You'd need a whole magazine to really cover everything that's coming out all the time.

A well equipped victim: Hmm. Once again we have a load of random tables to determine what treasure a random victim has, should the players decide to engage in a little pointless thievery and slaughter. We had one last month. How odd. However, this time it's an Ed Greenwood production. And as we know, he can make up for a multitude of sins with his combination of light humor and incredible attention to detail. It also meshes well with the encounter table earlier on in this issue. The results from rolling on this will probably be less lethal and a lot more realistic than last issue's. Which one you use is up to you, depending on what playstyle you want. It's good to have alternatives.

Mechanoid invasion returns. More palladium fun.

A world of difference: Parallel worlds. It's been tackled from different perspectives twice in the Ares section, but evidently, it's a popular enough to get another treatment from a more D&D-centric perspective. Well, infinite worlds, infinite takes on a subject. And this is indeed a quite different take to the previous two, encouraging you to create wildly differing parallel universes that change not only the people and creatures, but also the basic rules of the universe and shape of the world as well. Remember, D&D shaped fantasy can be a tremendous straitjacket on your imagination, especially if you don't realize just how it's constraining it, and going to another universe gives you freedom to make the rules different. Not everything should work between dimensions, but that means you can give them new cool powers while they're there, and then take them away again once they go home without too much trouble. This is pretty well thought out stuff, which encourages you to really mess around with your game, and get the players strongly involved. Another definite approval here.

Betrayed! is this months centrepiece module, a 10 pager for a group between level 3-5. A search and recover mission, this has a nicely tricky antagonist, and a good amount of freedom in how you resolve it. This is one of those one or two sessioners that won't change anyones world, but is easy to drop into your game when you're short of ideas. Nothing earthshaking, but an above average example of the breed that I wouldn't object to using.

Spy's advice: Are weapon weights for when they're loaded or empty (Empty. You'll have to calculate encumbrance for the shots separately. Oh woe. )
Why does such a tiny difference in ammo caliber mess up weapons (Guns are precision devices. Just being realistic.)
Why are high explosives better against vehicles than armor piercing shots (Good question. My bad. )
How fast do .45 caliber M3's shoot ( 4 shots per phase. )
If your modifiers take you above 95% before penalties, are the penalties subtracted
before or after you determine the maximum. (before)
How much should you describe enemy guns (depends how good their senses are)
What are the stats for air guns (half normal, due to their nonlethal nature)
How many AOK's can you have (Lots and lots. Advancing them all individually is a real bookkeeping chore.)
What's wrestling value (We've had this question before. Obsolete stat from 1st ed, dropped in the streamlining. )

The TMNT RPG celebrates it's sales. (over 7000 in three weeks. Not really that impressive by most standards. Still, I guess it's enough to live on.)

TSR previews: Another month, this time slightly more full, but still not enough to make up a whole page. Dragonlance is getting the most attention this time, with DL11: Dragons of glory, another collection of epic battles showing off their new system. (at least it is getting plenty of support) It's also getting the first novel of it's second trilogy, Time of the Twins. Raistlin may be gone, but his legacy lingers like a bad smell. Guess it's up to the remaining heroes to fix things again.
Ravenloft gets converted into a solo adventure gamebook. You are invited to Strahds castle for a pleasant evenings dinner. Or is that to be dinner. Guess it's up to you.
D&D gets AC6: the updated PC record sheets. Ho hum.
Marvel superheroes gets MHSP2: Secret wars II. Play out the stories you saw in the comic. Let's hope it's not a railroad like last month's module, and you can change the outcome.
And Barbarosa and Terrible Swift Sword are finally out. Will they sell, or will they flop?
We also get a second page of stuff out in february, but I'll skip that until next month. Don't want to repeat myself too much. We also get another apology for the price raises. Oh, poor you. Don't feel guilty about needing money to survive.

 

[(un)reason]

Then why the HELL are they called "wild" elves?!



Yeah, I know that's not what's meant by wild, but I felt this comment needed to be made.

 

[Orius]

A well equipped victim: Hmm. Once again we have a load of random tables to determine what treasure a random victim has, should the players decide to engage in a little pointless thievery and slaughter. We had one last month. How odd. However, this time it's an Ed Greenwood production. And as we know, he can make up for a multitude of sins with his combination of light humor and incredible attention to detail. It also meshes well with the encounter table earlier on in this issue. The results from rolling on this will probably be less lethal and a lot more realistic than last issue's. Which one you use is up to you, depending on what playstyle you want. It's good to have alternatives.

Ed does come up with some good stuff. But what I want to know is how well do these tables mesh the 1e DMG's random prostitute tables?

You know, I went to the RPG.net thread to see if anyone else made a similar comment, and no one did. I'm rather disappointed in them.

Ah, What's New. An appropriate response to my comment. Was that a scan of one of the classic strips from Dragon? Speaking of which, don't forget the cover art for the next issue.