Dragon Reflections #87

Dragon Publishing released Dragon #87 in July 1984. It is 100 pages long and has a cover price of $3.00.

The cover is called "The Enchanted Forest" by Jack Crane and is a colourful scene featuring adventurers under attack from hostile vegetation. Crane painted six covers for Dragon and has a whimsical style that reminds me a little of Jim Holloway. Interior artists include Ruth Hoyer, Roger Raupp, John Pierard, Harry Quinn, Dave Trampier, Jerry Eaton, Bob Lilly, Clyde Caldwell, Kurt Erichsen, Keith Parkinson, and Larry Elmore.

This issue's special attraction is "Whiteout" by Merle Rasmussen, a Top Secret adventure set in the desolate expanse of Antarctica. The mission revolves around the activities of an ultra-survivalist group known as the Children of Neptune (CON). Agents are tasked with infiltrating Atlantis II, an isolated research station controlled by CON, to thwart their plans for world domination. It is an ambitious free-form adventure that details 50 individual CON members and the entire 72-room Atlantis II facility. The unforgiving Antarctic weather is key, especially on the initial approach. It could be a terrific adventure, but it requires a skilled referee.

"Beyond the Dungeon: Part 1" by Katharine Kerr encourages Dungeon Masters to explore outdoor adventures. The article provides practical rules for handling aboveground scenarios, including movement, visibility, terrain, and mapping. Kerr's goal is laudable, and she gives some valuable suggestions, but the whole thing felt overly pragmatic and finicky (such as the table telling you that tall grass decreases your speed by 10 feet per minute). I would have preferred advice on creating evocative landscapes or suggestions for interesting overland encounters.

"The Ecology of the Dryad" by Shaun Wilson continues the popular ecology series by examining this well-known forest creature. As usual, the article has two parts: the first is a fictitious lecture on the dryad by a sage, and the second is various AD&D gaming notes. The fiction is a little dry this time, helping me appreciate Greenwood's gift for making the prior entries less didactic. This article was Wilson's only RPG publication.

"The Legacy of Hortus" by cover artist Jack Crane provides a humorous and magical reimagining of common plants. For example, dandelions are stealthy, carnivorous creatures with leonine heads. Each entry comes with a whimsical illustration, and Crane also depicted several of the plants on the cover. It's a fun and lovingly illustrated article, but I'm surprised the editor didn't include AD&D statistics for each creature.

Author John E. Stith brings us "Simon Sidekick," a coming-of-age story in which a shy boy learns the value of relationships in a lunar colony. The author creates a believable world and a compelling and sympathetic protagonist. However, the plot is too predictable, and the conflict too neatly resolved for this to be an entirely satisfying story. Stith has written many science fiction novels and stories, and his book "Manhatten Transfer" is currently being turned into a pilot starring Casper Van Diem and Walter Koenig.

"Gods of the Suel Pantheon" continues Len Lakofka's series with entries for Kord, the god of strength and courage, and Phaulkon, the god of the open air. As with the previous article in the series, this one asserts the copyright belongs to Gary Gygax, which makes me wonder how much he contributed to the creation.

The Ares Section has 14 pages of science fiction content and includes three articles:

• "Freeze! Star Law!" by Kim Eastland details the interstellar police in Star Frontiers.
• "Luna: a Traveller's Guide" by Marc W. Miller describes the Moon in the universe of Traveller.
• "A Field Guide to Lunar Mutants" by James M. Ward has information on the macrobes and plants of Tycho Center in Gamma World.

There are two game reviews in this issue:

• Stalking the Night Fantastic by Tri-Tac Inc. is an investigative RPG blending horror and urban fantasy. Players are agents of Bureau 13, sent to find and fight the paranormal creatures that threaten the world. The setting is intriguing, but the system suffers from complex mechanics, scattered rules, and unbalanced gameplay. Reviewer Jerry Epperson concludes, "It's not a terrible game, just a very near miss."
• The Forever War by Mayfair Games is a tactical infantry combat wargame loosely based on Joe Haldeman's novel. While it features fast-paced gameplay and customizable scenarios, it omits key elements from the book, like time dilation and space battles. The high price further diminishes its appeal. Reviewer Steve List concludes, "...it is reasonably fun to play... But neither the quality of the components nor the design justifies the $17 price tag."

And that's a wrap! There are no standout articles for me, but I probably liked "Whiteout" the best. Next month, we have Elefant Hunt, falling damage, and the ecology of the rust monster!

 

[R_Chance]

Are you middle-school me?

I loved issues with monster articles, spell articles, magic item articles, and deity articles. This issue was a hit for middle-school me!

I liked issues like this too. Of course I was 25 year old graduate school me at the time... You people are young

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I love, re: the Forever War, talking about the 'high price' of $17. I think most of us would be happy to pay $17, but... that was a different value for when this issue came out.

 

[Voadam]

I spotted the Dande-Lions and Snap Dragons from the cover. Not sure what the vine snakes would be.

 

[Nikosandros]

I bought a copy of Bureau 13 back in the early 90s (I think). It probably was the 3rd edition and I remember that combat was monstrously complex.

 

[M.T. Black]

I love, re: the Forever War, talking about the 'high price' of $17. I think most of us would be happy to pay $17, but... that was a different value for when this issue came out.

It would be about $50 in today's money. That is still pretty cheap, but if you look at the components, they were fairly simple: The Forever War

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have a hard time imagining publishing a Forever War game without time dilation. At that point, it's just a generic science fiction war game, isn't it?

 

[R_Chance]

I have a hard time imagining publishing a Forever War game without time dilation. At that point, it's just a generic science fiction war game, isn't it?

The time dilation aspect only really shows up between battles when they go home. Everything is different and keeps getting stranger and stranger to the protagonist every time they "go home." It exaggerates the real life disconnect between combat veterans and the civilian world they return to. The reservation world they go to after the war ends is full of veterans. People who have, to use the 19th century term "seen the elephant." Best possible place for them.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I have a hard time imagining publishing a Forever War game without time dilation. At that point, it's just a generic science fiction war game, isn't it?

The review is wrong about that anyway. Time dilation during interstellar travel is reflected in the game by varying tech levels for opposing forces - it's quite possible for a garrison that's been sitting on a planet for a few months to be decades behind the cutting edge of technology already. "Future" tech is better at killing outdated stuff, a gap that widens the more tech levels there are separating two forces. In compensation, lower tech stuff costs fewer points out of your scenario budget, so you wind up with an advantage in numbers and/or amount of heavy weaponry.

For most of the war there wasn't much in the way of revolutionary technological change, just incremental evolutionary improvements, so the game gets away with using the same counters for most tech levels. Near the end of the war (and at the final tech level) that weird semi-stasis field appears, at which point the whole game changes to forcing defenders to retreat into their field bubble and then going in after them with primitive melee and ranged weapons - swords, axes, bolas, darts, bows - since standard energy weapons are useless in the field and it's nigh-invulnerable from the outside.

I wouldn't have called it a great game even when it was new, but it is surprisingly faithful and accurate when it comes to modelling combat on the hellish iceball "portal planets" in the book, and it has quite a bit of replay value thanks to DYO scenarios and a point system that covers multiple tech levels, letting you experiment with quality versus quantity. The "field bubble" game is less varied, but there's still enough variety to give it some potential for re-use - and there's something novel about people fighting in super-advanced armored vacuum suits on airless iceworlds under artificially distorted rules of physics while using swordplay and archery to kill the enemy.

What is missing is combat anywhere but those iceballs (so no raids on habitable planets) or space combat, but if you read the book those raids incidents were extremely rare (and basically one-sided slaughters) or for space combat, boring as heck to game out since you're mostly just waiting in a gee-compensator tank to see if your automated combat tech is ahead of teh enemy's or not. I'll forgive a $17 game (which was comparable to AvHill stuff at the time) for not trying to do more than this did, and of the series of "literary adaptation" games Mayfair did this is actually one of the best in terms of replay value and faithfulness. It's vastly better at getting the feel of Forever War's bloody, pointless attritional combat across than (say) the Hammer's Slammers game sells you on the way high-tech professional mercs massacre backwater low-tech armies, and either of them are much more versatile as games than the company War or Dragonriders of Pern were.

That said, if you wanted a game that did the FTL time lag thing as a central mechanic, see if you can find a copy of Nova's old Timelag game. It's small, ugly in an abstract sort of way, and the component quality is poor, but it does the best job of showing how combat forces will fall out of synch with the cutting-edge tech back home of any game I've seen. You could also emulate the feel of what little space combat there is in Forever War by using Warp War (which was free online last I looked). It's very much a game of eggshells with bazookas, and includes tech level rules that are almost savage enough to fit.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

It would be about $50 in today's money. That is still pretty cheap, but if you look at the components, they were fairly simple: The Forever War

That jigsaw mapboard was actually rather elaborate for its time, and geomorphic in theory (the one in Hammer's Slammers was notably more versatile in terms of how it could be put together). It (and the license) definitely drove up costs a bit, although the whole range was still about on par with contemporary Avalon Hill products.

Now, whether going with jigsaw cut was in any way a Good Idea, that's debatable. It certainly was pointless on the fixed-layout games like Dragonriders of Pern and Company War.

 

[M.T. Black]

The review is wrong about that anyway. Time dilation during interstellar travel is reflected in the game by varying tech levels for opposing forces...

Apologies - that was my mistake. I just checked, and the review says that the treatment of time dilation is inadequate - not that it is omitted entirely.