NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9692727" data-attributes="member: 7044704">If by "striking" you mean "showing an awful lot of skin for her environment" then sure, you bet.  Way too many evergreens and too much snow on those backdrop mountains to convince me she's comfortably warm even with a furred cloak.  Maybe its magical items at work and she's relying on that +2 Armor of Cheesecake that was so popular in the TSR days.Also not so sure that companion is an "animal" in the sense usually meant.  Not only is it carrying a weapon that appears scaled more or less to its size (her hands are far too large to wield that blade), it's got ornamental jewelry on and its own satchel.  That screams intelligent tool-user to me, not trained beastie.  Were Awakened critters a thing yet in 1985?He'd just started going by Hawke the year before this, and had already put out the first four or five Time Wars novels by the time this issue came out.  The guy was a prolific writer of hack scifi and fantasy novels throughout the 80s and 90s, dropped off a lot in the 2000s, and after almost ten years' silence cropped again in the early 2020s with a new 4-book series of scifi mysteries featuring characters named after the leads in the Robin Hood myths - which feels like a weirdly appropriate mashup of everything from Time Wars to his "historical" William Shakespeare mysteries.Pretty much a pulp magazine author who was born after his time, much like Ron Goulart (who Hawke has been compared to occasionally, which is high praise IMO).This one still stands out in my memory despite never having re-read it (it doesn't need revisiting, the central premise is all there is to it).  As I recall, [ISPOILER]the problem wasn't that the "bullets" shot straight, it was that they got perciptably larger the farther they travelled, could shoot through a planet, and had no established range limit or duration of flight.  You were effectively firing what could eventually grow to be the size of a star somewhere down range with every pull of the trigger.[/ISPOILER]It's actually the 2nd book in a five-book series, and it's really quite good, outdated review notwithstanding.  And yes, it is that Carol Nelson Douglas, the one with all the "Cat" and "Irene Adler" mystery novels.  She started off with scifi and fantasy before settling into the Midnight Louie stuff and (toward the end) paranormal mystery.This is actually the 2nd book in what is currently a 7-book series that started in 1980 with Master of the five Magics.  If you're into "hard" magic (as Sanderson would describe it - magic systems with firmly established rules) the series is hard to beat, and arguably the root of the whole concept.  43 years to write seven books isn't pulp fiction speed, but the ones I've read were well-crafted.Keeping with the theme of outdated reviews, this is the 7th of the 8-book Pelbar Cycle novels, which was a serious but generally optimistic look at human civilization gradually recovering about 1000 years after a nuclear apocalypse.  Worth a read for a more contemplative study of whether humanity is doomed to repeat its mistakes than you usually find in PA fiction.</blockquote>

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