[Let's Read] ARES Magazine

[(un)reason]

Well, I'm back. It's now been a full year since I finished off Dragon Magazine for good. Still planning on doing Polyhedron if I can get a complete collection, but that doesn't look like happening soon. In the meantime, let's keep in practice with this little prequel. Anyone who read Dragon in the mid 80's will remember the ARES Sci-fi section, now it's time to find out what it was like before it was folded into the bigger magazine. Originally started by SPI, it was one of the many properties TSR acquired when they went bankrupt in the early 80's. Of course, that's the basics you can get with a minute on any search engine. The devil, as ever is in the details. So let's see what cool articles they have to offer, and just how it changes over it's lifespan, before and after the takeover.



Ares 01 - WorldKiller: March 1980



43 pages. The cover is colour, as is the game included, but otherwise it's mostly black and white. The game inside is advertised strongly, getting a larger font than the magazine title, and the promotional blurbs in general are a lot larger than Dragon at the time (although still smaller than they became in the 2000's) The general quality of the typesetting is about the same as Dragon, although the art pieces are somewhat sparser in quantity, and it looks like they're printed using the same processes. (Which also probably means they're laid out and edited by hand rather than computer) They use three column layout while dragon was mostly using two at that time. So far, it all seems competently done. Let's see what the actual content is like.



Muse: Lest we forget, SPI stood for Simulation Publications, Inc, and their first editorial reminds us of that by telling us they want not only sci-fi and fantasy material, but also more down to earth historical articles and games in their magazine. Since those rapidly became rare in Dragon magazine, I'll be very interested in seeing if they stick to that, or if they too are lured down the path of supernatural shinies even before their takeover. Other than that, it's fairly standard for a first issue editorial, telling us what they want and the format they want it in. After all, they can't do it all themselves, and even if they wanted too, it would be more expensive employing a full-time in house writing team. The future is still open and full of possibilities. How soon will it all be locked down?



Dragon…Ghost: Our first article proper is actually a fantasy one rather than a sci-fi one, and by an author who has also been seen in the pages of Dragon Magazine. M. Lucie Chin was reviewed in issue 141, and this is in much the same vein, a story taking chinese mythology, and then putting a pulp hero style man out of time from the present day into it. It revolves around the Lung dragons, and their place in the celestial bureaucracy, and what happens when one of them decides to shirk their duty. It makes for quite interesting reading, and goes into more detail than the D&D treatment of the creatures, although there are plenty of common points between them. So this is a pretty positive starter, bringing the right mix of familiarity and difference to engage me, and reminding me of the bad tendency of the D&D versions of creatures to replace their original sources in the general consciousness, as so many modern fantasy authors are influenced by roleplaying even if they don't admit it. (and all these authors are influenced by Tolkien even if they're consciously rebelling against it. ) It's good to go back and look at things from another angle, even if you'll be winding up in the same place eventually.



No, you're not going to the Stars: In sharp contrast to the previous article, this is a very didactic hard science piece about the impossibility of travelling faster than light, the hugeness of the universe, and the various ways in which science fiction authors get around that in their stories. As our space travel program is if anything, in a worse shape than it was back in the early 80's, the prophecies here are depressingly accurate. It would take a seriously invaluable discovery somewhere in the solar system, or life on earth growing far more hostile for the political will to make even interplanetary voyages appear, let alone trying our luck sending a generation ship into the void. This certainly isn't bad, having some nice mathematical formulae and tables in it, but it's negativity is a cold bucket of water on our fantasies. This is why the vast majority of games systems simplify space travel tremendously.



Gangsters: Another fiction piece filled with adventure/worldbuilding ideas for you to steal. An organised crime syndicate comes up against an alien which uses the same management model as them, only written far larger. Considering many people have said government is merely the biggest, nastiest protection racket around, this definitely qualifies as social commentary as well. Really, what are religion, politics and economics but means of exerting control? Both sides are relatable, but unpleasant, and they wind up engaging in mutual destruction at the end, which is probably the best possible outcome for the rest of the world. At least, until a worse set of aliens arrives, and the masquerade gets blown open. But that's a story for another day and subgenre.



Worldkiller: After half an issue of system-free stuff, here comes the centrepiece. SPI were primarily known for their wargames, and here's a sci-fi one of planetary invasion. The board is fairly small, but three-dimensional, and the way this is tracked is quite interesting. Similarly, they pack a lot of information into the small counters, at the cost of any flashiness in the visuals. You could easily compare it to Space Invaders, only with more symmetrical sides. (in fact, the home team have twice as many ships as the invaders, although they're individually weaker) The three-dimensional board gives you a lot of room for tactics, so I can't say from casual examination which side is actually more likely to win. A knowledge of trigonometry will give you a distinct tactical advantage, which pleases me. It's definitely aimed at more advanced wargamers than the boardgames that appeared in Dragon in the same period, and I hope that'll continue to be the case, as I found it annoying when Dragon refocussed from being primarily aimed at already experienced players to new kids. (who generally prefer it when you don't talk down to them anyway. I look forward to getting my teeth into the rest of them.



Film & Television: The second half of the magazine is entirely comprised of various sorts of reviews. Since this is a first issue, they have a lot more leeway to pick big things from recent years, rather than just what's only just been released. I suspect the portion of the magazine devoted to them will decline as they get more game material submissions. (but I certainly won't make that a binding prediction. ) Let's see how much their opinion varies from their contemporaries.

Star Trek - The Motion Picture gets a very scathing review indeed. It's ponderous, trite, and painfully derivative of 2001 and Planet of the Apes, wasting it's time and money on special effects instead of actually telling a decent story. Sounds about right. I don't think we'll see many arguments about the details, even from diehard trek fanatics, merely whether they're a positive thing or not. Certainly no surprise that they reverted to a more conventional storytelling style in the future movies.

The Lathe of Heaven, on the other hand, gets high praise. While a relatively low-budget adaption of Ursula LeGuin's book, it adapts the story well, and puts the big ideas over action and explosions. Since I've never actually seen it, I'm definitely going to check it out and see how well it holds up today.



Games: This section isn't so much analytical reviews, but more an alphabetical listing with brief notes on nearly every RPG and wargame in print at the time, plus a rating from 1 to 9. This definitely isn't something they'll be able to repeat in future issues, as I don't think 17 issues is enough to get to the publishing a big index stage of a magazine's life. There isn't really enough meat for me to provide significant commentary on each of the reviews, but I will reorganise them from best to worst, so you can get a clearer idea of their tastes and number weighting. Many of the names are familiar to me, having also appeared in the early days of Dragon, but there are a few new faces worth investigating, and it's always amusing seeing them being scathing about TSR's (lack of) editing skills at the time.

9: Cosmic Encounter, The Creature that ate Sheboygan.

8: Battlefield Mars, GEV, Imperium, John Carter, Traveller, White Bear & Red Moon.

7: After the Holocaust, Belter, Divine Right, Double Star, Freedom in the Galaxy, Ice War, Lords of the Middle Seas, Melee, OGRE, Runequest, Stellar Conquest, Time War, War of the Ring.

6: Alien Space, Asteroid Zero-Four, Black Hole, Bloodtree Rebellion, Chivalry & Sorcery, Deathmaze, Dune, Dungeons & Dragons, Invasion: America, Mayday, Outreach, Starforce, Swords & Sorcery, Villains & Vigilantes.

5: Chitin: I, Colony Delta, Demons, Godsfire, King Arthur's Knights, Lords & Wizards, Olympica, Snapshot, Sorcerer, Star Quest, Starship Troopers.

4: Beast Lord, Invasion of the air eaters, Magic Realm, War in the Ice.

3: Lankhmar, Metamorphosis Alpha.

2: Annihilator/OneWorld, Dixie, Holy War, Quazar, Rivets.

1: Atlantis: 12,500 BC.



Books: Our book reviews are going through one of those feminist phases where everything is looked through in terms of gender roles, messages sent by the story and whether they're culturally positive or not. They're certainly not a recent phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. And since sci-fi is probably the best genre for telling stories where normal gender roles don't apply, this is an entirely valid use of a column. Every little helps when you still have a long way to go.

Ruins of Isis by Marion Zimmer Bradley plonks the heroes in a female-dominated society, and forces them to adapt to the misandry as long as they're there. Hopefully they'll learn something about themselves that's useful even after they leave.

A World Between by Norman Spinrad does it the other way around, featuring an egalitarian society being invaded by radical feminists, and the resulting male backlash. A war for hearts and minds ensues. Thankfully, equality wins out in the end.

Electric Forest by Tanith Lee gets a load of praise while strictly avoiding spoilers. Sometimes it's tough being a reviewer and wanting the audience to have the same experience you did.

Jesus on Mars by Phillip Jose Farmer, on the other hand, gets a mediocre review that leaves no doubt it does exactly what it says on the tin, and is therefore a bit of a one joke book. That's what often happens when you think of the title first and then write a story to fit.

The Face by Jack Vance brings back the thoughts on gender politics, as he details a world where virtually all sex is paedophillic rape, and their almost as annoying neighbours. Somehow, the hero has to get in, kill the guy who killed his family, and then get out again the other side. Since it's Vance, there's little doubt it'll be an interesting ride.

Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen is a compiled trilogy set in a magical far-future earth, with some modern tech left over. Like many a post apocalyptic setting, that means they can combine & warp it in any cool way they choose.

Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delaney is also a collection of smaller stories plus worldbuilding, but in more of a slice of life vein than world saving epic. It still finds time for some humorous pretentiousness in it's framing device.

Another fine Myth by Robert Asprin is a more humorous and lighthearted bit of fantasy, putting an inexperienced apprentice wizard and a depowered demon against the hordes of evil. Sounds like there'll be more puns involved than just the title, some of which might be relevant to the actual plot.

Thieves World, which is an anthology series that'll get tons of follow-ups and RPG conversions, also gets a positive result here. The reviewer can look back on this without being embarrassed by hindsight.



Media: The final column isn't reviews, but instead previews of upcoming stuff. As with the reviews, many of these are very familiar indeed. The empire strikes back, Flash Gordon, Dune, Conan, Lord of the Rings, there's certainly some big hopes here. Of course, time will not be kind to most of these, but where there's a whip there's a way. Just got to keep working on improving those special effects. In the meantime it'll definitely be interesting to see how they get reviewed when they arrive here.



Feedback: Huh. They end the very first issue with a survey. That's a lot more on the ball than TSR were in that area. It's a very in-depth one as well, with a lot of specific questions about how you spend your money, and what games you've played, what magazines you read, and of course, what you want to see in the magazine in the future. This is very interesting indeed to note, and I wonder how they'll follow it up.


While pretty light on advertising, as they don't have any external bookings yet, they do take the time to advertise their sister magazines, Strategy & Tactics, and Moves. The first focusses exclusively on historical wargaming, while the second takes a more analytical approach to game design itself. By following connections, you can always find more interesting things to check out. I wonder if anyone's taken the time to properly archive these and make them available on the internet. Curiously enough, it seems like S&T is still going at a slower pace, having been moved between quite a few publishers over it's long lifespan. Wargaming may yet get the last laugh compared to RPG's, given Dragon's apparent demise.



Well, that wasn't as useful to a roleplayer as an average issue of Dragon, but it was interesting, did some things better and others worse than TSR, and let me learn some new things. Particularly interesting to me was the amount of the issue devoted to reviews, which was considerably more extensive and provided a new perspective on the media of the early 80's. And since there's only 19 issues to get through, I'm pretty sure I can do this in a few months without worrying about burnout. Let's follow this little tributary downstream until it connects up with the larger river.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 02 - The Wreck of the BSM Pandora: May 1980



43 pages. Once again, the centrepiece of the issue is put front and centre, with an appropriate cover (that's already higher quality than the first issue), while the rest of the contents get relatively small bits of promotion. A race against time to restart your damaged ship and survive alien attack? Will that be co-operative, competitive or a bit of both? Since this is more of a wargaming magazine, I'm going to have to get used to thinking of other players as the enemy again after many years of having don't split the party and no PvP drilled into me ad nauseum. Let's continue that adaption process.



Muse: The editorial topic this month is entirely familiar to me. Ironically, the aliens in most fiction are less alien than creatures you can find by exploring the ocean depths and looking back through the fossil record. Human imagination definitely has it's limits, especially if it doesn't get enough input in the first place, and this is one where we're routinely shown up by basic procedural generation computer programs. Doing research and getting external help when creating things isn't cheating, and you shouldn't feel ashamed for doing it. That was valid when I was being told to do it by Larry Niven, it was valid in Dragon Magazine, and it's still valid now. I hope I never forget it.



The Inn at World's End: Ahh, some good old Sword & Sorcery action. It's been a while since I had a new source of that. A morally dubious protagonist who wins through cunning rather than brute force, a sexy life consuming monster, a gaggle of quirky minor characters, and lots of implications of a big weird world out there beyond the boundaries of the story. This definitely has that authentic old school flavour to it, sex, blood and lots of quick and arbitrary deaths. It might not add much actual gaming material to my list, since I've seen all the tropes in it before, but it combines those elements well. After a break, you do often need a refresher course. I hope there'll be a few more of these before they go all sci-fi all the time.



Child of the Wandering Sea: In sharp contrast with the last piece, we now have a sci-fi story that's all about morality, in particular the morality of terraforming planets which already have life of their own. Should you transform an entire ecosystem to suit human needs, resulting in the extinction of anything that can't adapt, just to increase our own species chance of long term survival. Does morality even exist anyway, as most animals wouldn't even ask themselves that kind of question, simply eating and breeding until their population hits the limits of available space and food supply and then either stabilising or collapsing. What are we losing by not studying everything for utility before bulldozing it over? Yeah, this still seems very relevant today, as extinctions and climate change continue unchecked. On the other hand, we are making real strides in renewable energy, and birthrates have dropped below replacement rates in many developed countries, so we might yet reach some kind of new equilibrium with nature rather than destroying ourselves, but at what cost? It's tough sometimes, having the intelligence to analyse our animal nature, but not overcome it.



Alien Life Forms: And now for the detail heavy hard science piece by the same author as last issue's one. What are alien life forms likely to look like? As with last issue, he definitely inclines to the conservative side. Carbon based lifeforms with a water carried chemistry are likely to be most common simply as a matter of basic mathematics, as the 3rd and 4th most common elements in the universe, carbon & oxygen can't help but dominate a planet's makeup in normal situations. Size may vary, but the square-cube law means things can't go beyond a few orders of magnitude greater than earthly creatures. (although ironically, smaller, lighter gravity worlds could support larger animals than earth) But there are some things that are likely to be very different. Chemistry could be left or right-handed. Phyla are very unlikely to be like earthly ones, even if ecological niches are replicated by convergent evolution. (and there are a good few example creatures that blur the boundaries between earthly plants and animals) The information is of course, a little dated, as we now know rather more about the frequency of planets around other stars, and more about the other occupants of our own solar system. (It now seems likely that there are far more worlds that possess potentially life supporting oceans underneath miles of ice than earthlike worlds, and probably also many warmer ones that are entirely covered in miles of water with no exposed land. ) But this is another interesting and well thought out topic for them to cover. It still looks like it'll be a long time before we can settle other worlds, let alone stars, and in the meantime it's good to consider all eventualities carefully.



The Wreck of the B.S.M Pandora: Well, this is amusing. The premise for B. S. M. Pandora turns out to be very similar indeed to that of Metamorphosis Alpha. The ship is floating through space out of control, the original crew have lost their memories, and all the weird creatures are out of their stasis pods and wandering around making a terrible mess. Since they gave MA a critical review last time, this could easily be seem as SPI's riposte to TSR. This is how you do it with clearly worded, concise rules that let you get through the whole scenario in a single session. Or in other words:

The aliens buzz and it's all because
(this is how we do it)
Gamma rays mutate us like nobody does
(this is how we do it)
Scrambled brains, yeah the ships in danger
(this is how we do it)
So lets flip the polarity for some old school insanity
(this is how we do it)

Anyway, seriously, I do like this. It once again has not only a fair amount of depth as a game, but also actual effort put into it's fictional history as well. Reading things like this, it's easy to see how wargames could evolve into RPG's, while still being considered the same hobby by the old-timers, who are then surprised when new people come in and start playing them in a very different way, because the gap is bridged in lots of little steps rather than one big one. I definitely feel I am understanding a bit more of the history of gaming by reading this.



Conan - Illusion and Reality: Well, this IS a turnup for the books. L. Sprague de Camp gives us his version of the Robert Howard & Conan story. Not entirely positively either. I seem to recall history not being kind to his contributions to the Conan mythos in turn. Although it has to be said that for all his writing talents, it's pretty easy to portray Howard as a up in his personal life. Crippling shyness. Inability to hold down a regular job. Unhealthy mother fixation. Death by suicide. Seems a depressingly familiar story. It's interesting to ponder how he would have fared in the internet age, which would have enabled him to research his stories better and connect with people without face-to-face interaction. Oh well, really, we want our artists to be weird, precisely because it lets them create things normal people would never even consider. If they come to tragic ends because of it, that just proves we need a better mental health support system. Modern life is not something humans are adapted for, and I'm not going to hold it against anyone who dreams of cutting through their problems and living wild and free.



Books: The Enead by Jan Marks is another story of a strict and static civilisation that gets upended by a headstrong outsider. It richly deserves it, of course. The great thing about having societies as villains in a story is that you don't have to kill them to win so frequently.

Catacomb Years by Michael Bishop does much the same thing, but as a collection of short stories. Again, the storytelling gets a fair bit of praise. The main criticism is that the pathway from modern society to sci-fi future doesn't seem very plausible. Fiction, unlike reality, has an obligation to make sense.

The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith is set in an alternate universe where the Confederation not only won, but actually been wildly successful in sticking to it's (heavily right wing) political principles. Once again, the reviewer seems to find this more implausible than bug-eyed monsters. It is interesting how most arty types being left wing can result in unchallenged cultural assumptions even as we talk about pushing the boundaries in other ways.

Wheels within Wheels by F. Paul Wilson also has a strong libertarian streak to it, but gets a better review nonetheless, as at least it thinks a society run on pure pragmatism would be better at encouraging racial and sexual equality. It's definitely a shame that the current real world libertarian leaders don't fit that mold.

Schrodinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson is a story of three nearly identical novels in three different universes and the philosophical implications of this. This means that you may love it, or wind up baffled. Challenge accepted.

Eyes of Amber by Joan D. Vinge is another collection of short stories that gets a good result, even though the reviewer wasn't too keen on her full novels. Being better at one form than the other is a perfectly normal bit of variation.

The infinitive of go by John Brunner demonstrates how you can have both infinite parallel universes and free will via equations using transfinite numbers. It's nice to have some optimism when faced with a universe too enormous to comprehend.

The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price is unsurprisingly set in ancient fantasy china, and features the (actually not so evil) devil wives dealing with the fear of mundanes, and the machinations of an evil taoist (ie wizard). Some things never change, even when the names do. It's important not to judge things by appearance over actions.

Mooncrow by Jack Massa is another one dismissed quickly. Just another bit of generic fantasy. Yawn. We always have plenty of that trying to break through.

A shadow of all night falling is one of Glen Cook (of black company fame)'s early books. He's already managing stories that seem fantastical without resorting to archaic language or unrealistic expectations of human nature. Might as well get on the wagon now and keep up with him.

And we finish off with a collective review of Piers Anthony's Tarot trilogy. Unlike Glen, the reviewer thinks he's improved enormously since his early work. How long before the brain eater overtakes the increase in technical skills in overall significance?



Films & Television: The Black Hole gets a rather scathing review from a writer who thinks it's far too cutsey and disneyfied for literally the weightiest subject in the known universe. The dialog is wooden, the special effects are of dubious quality, and the whole thing is far too conservative in it's execution. The House of Mouse didn't have a great 80's in general, did they?

Saturn 3 gets an equally dismissive review. Star Wars has raised the bar enough that these B-movie efforts simply don't cut the mustard anymore, and anyone thinking sci-fi audiences will snap up any old drek with robots, explosions and girls in tin-foil bikinis in it is sorely mistaken. Such is the nature of being on the tail end of a fad.

Television is faring no better. Battlestar Galactica has found earth, and been retooled into the woeful Galactica 80, and both the original sci-fi series and novel adaptions thoroughly deserve to be forgotten. For now, books have the clear lead in this genre as imagination need not worry about special effects budget.



Media: On the other hand, this column is much more optimistic about future properties. I guess they have to keep hoping for better things to keep the genre going even when signs aren't great. Final Countdown? Galaxina? Scanners? Sinbad on Mars? A lot of unfamiliar names and far fewer I have actually seen. I guess every era has a lot of crap that deserves to be forgotten for very gem, and going through old periodicals like this lets me rediscover them and judge for myself.



Games: In sharp contrast to last issue, they only do one games review this issue. However, it's a long and in depth one. Magic Realm is Avalon Hill's big attempt at tapping the expanding fantasy market. Choose your hero, explore the randomly generated landscape, fight monsters, collect treasure, hire followers and try to become supreme champion by whatever means. It's an interesting bit of design, and the way it introduces the various elements of the game one at a time seems cool, but it falls down a bit due to poorly edited rules and an overambitious reach, trying to mix boardgame and rpg and not quite satisfying either goal. I suspect this may be a case where the reviewer is overly harsh due to lots of experience, and I could get a good few enjoyable plays out of this before moving on.



Feedback: Hmm. So they're not just doing feedback once per year or so, but every single issue. That is a HUGE difference from TSR. And it makes me wonder just how different the surveys will be each month, and if I'll be able to think of something interesting to say for each of them. Aside from the expected ones about how the previous issue was, and your opinion on their competition and review ratings, they also have a list of proposals for future games to include in the magazine, which definitely seems interesting. Jack the Ripper and The Stainless Steel Rat? I shall keep an eye out for these.


While there is an improvement in production values from the previous issue, it's certainly not as dramatic as the early days of Dragon. I suppose SPI have already been producing magazines for over a decade, so that's to be expected. It's also very worth noting that there haven't been any entertainingly bad articles yet. I'm not coming in near the beginning of the company this time, and they aren't dominated by one person in the same way. Of course, that may be part of what leads to their downfall. Sometimes you need that controversy to grow and avoid being stuck in your little niche. Oh well, if they can keep the articles conventionally good all the way through, I may finish this sad, but I certainly won't be unsatisfied. To number three!

 

[Jhaelen]

Ah, welcome back! I've already been following your thread on Dragon with great interest.

Only two months ago, I discovered that all issues of ARES magazine are freely available as pdfs and downloaded them right away. I stumbled over a link to the archive while sifting through BoardGameGeek looking for interesting coop or solo board games. So, this time around I can actually read the issues and compare my impressions of the articles with yours. This is really great

Sometimes I love the Internet

(Edit: I really had to laugh about your comment "Fiction, unlike reality, has an obligation to make sense." Apparently, this is a variation of a quote attributed to Tom Clancy: "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Funny, but definitely true.)

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 03 - Barbarian Kings: July 1980



42 pages. Oh dear, that hairstyle. He-Man was not the only rugged muscular character who tried to rock the pageboy haircut in the early 80's, and it all seems very risible indeed now. Once again, it looks like fantasy'll be taking a bigger share of the magazine than sci-fi, as it's time for some conquering and pillaging. Oh well, let's oil our muscles, paint on some woad and get down too it before the banality of civilisation crushes our spirits entirely.



Muse: The editorial doesn't talk about the magazine this time, instead devoting the space to praising The Empire Strikes Back. It doesn't just rehash the glories of the original, it builds on it, changing the tone but maintaining the overall spirit. That's why it'll make a long-running series, rather than just a highly successful single movie. (that and the merch possibilities, of course) A universe has to have room for more than one story, and ESB already manages that, given how the heroes are split up for the vast majority of the movie (and end it still separated and on a downer) So this is one instance when the mood and the time and hindsight are in perfect synch. Whatever the quality of later instalments, they've proved lightning can strike in the same place twice if you put up a big enough rod, and built up a big store of geek goodwill for the future.



The Whispering Mirror: Once again we kick off with some action packed Swords & Sorcery, with an emphasis on the sorcery this time around. A man is transformed into a rat to serve as a spy in wizardly machinations, and has to think fast to get out alive. This is a very familiar story indeed to me, so there's no real surprises here. They adapt to the new senses and capabilities of their body, deal with it's limitations, and face life-threatening perils that would be no problem if they were still human. Perfectly serviceable, but not thought-provoking at all to me. Doing this is starting to feel like a routine again.



Space Wars: Not too surprisingly, it's time for our hard sci-fi article. Just three issues in and we're already seeing definite patterns in the way they pace the magazine. Fighting in space is an awkward business, where travel times are long, stealth is exceedingly difficult, mass is limited, the high ground is important and offence trumps defence all too easily. Like nuclear war, space fighting is likely to be long periods of political maneuvering and trying to gradually build up tactical advantage, and short periods of devastating destruction which is hugely costly to all sides. As with most of the hard science articles, this one does show it's age, with the space shuttle being presented as this cool upcoming thing that'll hopefully revolutionise space travel, leading to bigger and better things. The future aint what it used to be, and human ambition has outstripped it's grasp in this case. Thankfully, our world powers show few signs of wanting all-out war either, and long may that be true. Let's hope we don't eventually get to look back on articles like this and compare them to real planetary wars.



Barbarian Kings: Once again the centrepiece comes with a whole load of background setting that makes it entirely suitable for conversion to a full roleplaying game. The map in particular seems perfect for an alternate Birthright, having a nice set of terrain variations and surrounding islands. Not that I should be surprised, since they have the same emphasis on ruling and conquering stuff, as well as magic large-scale enough to be useful in mass combat situations. You can make alliances, betray them, and hire all sorts of creatures to fight for you, including frog and whale people, pirate fleets, and airships. I think I'm going to enjoy conquering and pillaging this pace, even if it won't go down without a fight.



Final Notes: Despite the title, this bit of fiction isn't connected to the game we just had. Instead, it's one of those stories designed to teach a moral lesson about racism and underestimating things just because they're different. A tribe of savage humans descended from civilised space travellers meet a nasty end from the natives of the planet, which they'd been treating like animals and eating for centuries. Now it's their turn to be dinner, and deal with all the nasty tricks intelligence can create and steal. A lesson we shouldn't forget. Who's to say that crows, dolphins or even ants won't figure out how to band together worldwide and unseat human supremacy before we even expect it. And then we'll be glad we created all these stories of possible universes, giving us clues on how to fix the problem.



Games: Up to now, ARES has been all about the wargaming. But roleplaying is growing at an exponential rate, driven by satanic controversy, to the point where it's now surpassing it's parent commercially. And in the process, it's changing what people expect to see in fantasy, not just gaming. Yup. That's only going to get worse, as more people raised on roleplaying games like Brandon Sanderson & Charles Stross become successful novelists in their own right. Everything changes, even the categories that things are placed into. The only constant is change itself, and even that's pretty erratic in the rate it runs. But anyway, let's see what games they've picked to review, and their opinions of them.

In the Labyrinth is where Steve Jackson's Melee and Wizard become an actual RPG rather than just a fight simulator, introducing the world of Cidri and it's inhabitants for you to explore and fight. The rules get plenty of praise, being both solid and flexible, but they remain ambivalent about the setting itself. Fortunately, they'll have plenty of time and opportunity to create variations on this particular system, as history proves.

Runequest gets it the other way around, with the setting receiving high praise, but the system getting mixed results for being too granular and heavy on bookkeeping. Fair enough. When you're used to commanding armies, that much detail on every single character would bog things down to a glacial pace. It's all a matter of priorities, and that's why they'll cover the same setting using a very different system in the future.

Tunnels & Trolls is dismissed as an entertaining, but ultimately lightweight bit of parody for those who like their dungeon-crawling a little more self-aware and less melodramatic. It might be a fun way to spend your time, but don't ever expect it to be the biggest or the best.

And finally, they're forced to cover D&D and AD&D again in more detail. They aren't hugely complimentary. It might be the leader of the pack by a long way, and redefining gaming by introducing a whole new crowd to it, but the rules and editing could do with some serious refinement, and they haven't even bothered to add a proper setting yet. On the other hand, it is easy to pick up, create a character and get straight into it, and a rising tide lifts all boats. Might as well buy it and then use it as a stepping stone to recruit players into a game that better fits their tastes. Otherwise they'll spend decades trying badly to hack D&D's system to fit their natural playstyle and does that sound like fun?



Film & Television: The Empire Strikes Back also gets a full review in here, which is just as rapturously positive as the editorial. It's a lot darker, of course, but that's no bad thing, as any trilogy needs an arc. It escalates the role of the Force, which is a good thing so far, even if it will eventually get out of hand. And it introduces plenty of characters and musical themes that'll be remembered in their own right and referenced in all sorts of other media. Even if it'll turn out to be the least commercially successful of the original trilogy, it still leaves the vast majority of other films in the dust. Keep on rockin' that rebel spirit and see you in three years time.

The Watcher in the Woods sees them once again very unimpressed with Disney's attempts at darker filmmaking. Rush-releasing it with unfinished special effects is just the icing on top of a layer cake of many problems they go through. And looking up it's troubled history of re-edits and attempted directors cuts, it looks like the troubles are just starting here. Well, at least it's bad in an interesting way, which has kept it from being forgotten.

Being There is a study of how people project their own feelings onto a blank slate, as a mentally handicapped man stumbles into a position of political power largely through reflecting people's own words back at them. Self-absorption is one big way the smartest of nerds can fail at people, ironically, and while this is satire, it would explain a lot about politicians in general, and how they can win the votes of people they meet while having no actual ability to govern a country competently.



Media: Once again this column has an interesting mix of a few movies I remember, and considerably more that I don't. Superman 2 starts the annoying process of diminishing returns for that franchise. It can and will get worse. MUCH worse. On the other hand, it can also get better, as the 1982 version of The Thing is definitely better remembered than the 1951 one these days. And on the haven't heard of these, and might check them out side, we have Battle Beyond the Stars, Virus, The Tomorrow File, Alien Encounter and Outland. Any opinions on those?



Books: Engine Summer by John Crowley apparently got lots of positive reviews from other sources, and this magazine decides to follow the crowd in this case. It's more concerned with political ideas than hard science ones, which may explain the mainstream acclaim. It's always the human dramas that get the big bucks, not the genre trappings.

Unisave by Axel Madsen gets a fairly negative review in which the reviewer is baffled by his lack of self-awareness. Writing a complete dystopia without presenting it as such, and failing at both dramatic action and distinguishable characters? The publisher should have asked for another draft at least to develop the ideas better.

Still forms on Foxfield by Joan Slonczewski reverses this, with the reviewer liking it, but not sure exactly why they do. Who knows what goes on in the subconscious of humanity? It's impossible for a mind to completely monitor it's own actions, but if you know a person's levers, it can be all too easy to manipulate them, and that's what well crafted media does.

The Monitor, The Miners and the Shree by Lee Killough is a good old story of the prime directive being violated in the name of profit. (the shree obviously being the natives, and the other two the humans) Unfortunately, said monitor doesn't have the raw power to simply uproot and punish the illegal mining operation, so they have to use their brains to figure out a solution. Sounds very wild west, and that's not a bad thing.

Thrice Upon a Time by James P. Hogan gets a pretty backhanded compliment that he may have improved upon his previous works, but he's still got a long way to go. Once again, the cool ideas are not matched by the craft. It is easy to get overly critical as a reviewer, isn't it.

Sundiver by David Brin, on the other hand, gets praised as an excellent debut, with it's flaws far out weighed by the cool ideas and setting. Since this is the start of the Uplift series, I think we can safely say this is an opinion shared by quite a few others at the time. He can look forward to a long career.

Mayflies by Kevin O'Donnell also gets plenty of praise, and the promise to watch out for his future work. Since his last novel was published in 1990, but didn't die until 2012, I'm guessing he wasn't so commercially successful, and didn't get to give up the day job.

Michael and the Magic Man by Kathleen Sidney sounds like an amusing inversion of the scooby doo formula, with the heroes travelling the country in a van to root out all too real psychic threats that the authorities would never believe in. Actually, that sounds more mundane than all the monsters being fakes (but superhumanly convincing ones ), but it gets a good review anyway, so I presume there are some hidden depths here.

Ariosto by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a story within a story, with the star of one creating the second one in universe. Unlike a lot of fantasy stories, it uses renaissance trappings rather than medieval ones, which pleases the reviewer. After all, exploring a new continent and bringing back stuff that changes the existing order is perfect adventurer plot fodder.

Watchtower by Elizabeth Lynn sees our reviewer reveal his conservative side again. Fantasy aimed at feminists and humanists? I'd never have read that on my own time. But now I have I'm willing to accept it's a good story even if I still don't agree with it's politics. Fair enough. There's hope for him yet.



Directory: To go with their earlier big index of games, this month they have a slightly smaller index of Wargaming & RPG publishers. Anyone who's anyone (who's american at least, as non USA companies are completely absent) is here, and if you aren't you need a better publicity department. I definitely expect this one'll be a lot bigger next time they publish it, as more companies jump on the bandwagon, and existing ones determined to make themselves known and get reviews. Once again, it does seem that SPI cares a good deal more about proper cataloguing and editing than TSR did in the same era.



Feedback delves into the subgenres of fantasy this month, trying to figure out exactly what people are interested in reading and playing. High or low, medieval or strictly classical influences, humancentric or anthromorphic animals, they do have some very specific and slightly strange questions that wouldn't be asked in the same way today, if they were at all. I guess it all relates to the popular media of the day. As much as established designers may look down on new trends, they have to pay attention if they want to stay commercially successful.



The magazine is settling into a regular routine, and it's becoming pretty easy to see both it's strengths and weaknesses compared to TSR. While they are better organised and edited, and their reviews more rigorous, they're also considerably more conservative in outlook, and it's quite likely that this also means they're less adaptable. Such is life. Let's see what the next issue will remind us of.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 04 - Arena of Death: September 1980



44 pages. Time for a little one-on-one battle rather than the larger scale wargames we're used too from SPI. The growth of RPG's continues to affect them, as they have their own one coming out, and not only are the rules for the minigame derived from this, but they also have a second RPG article in here as well. I was expecting the magazine to have it's focus drift, but not this quickly. I guess what was just three issues for me was 6 months of real time for them, and they have been putting feedback forms in every single issue. And if they don't have the sales to go monthly anyway, why stick to your format that rigidly? What good is a labour of love when the love is gone? Let's see if I'm merciful to this one, or give it the thumbs down of death.



Muse: Our editorial continues the business of change in response to feedback. Less disconnected fiction, more setting stuff connected to their games and general plot hooks for you to use in yours. After all, there's plenty of other magazines offering general fantasy and sci-fi fiction, but not so many war & roleplaying game ones, and that's where their core audience lies. Pandering to the loudest voices? We've seen where that road leads before. Once again, I'm forced to draw parallels with Dragon's increasing specialisation over time, and how that wasn't particularly good for sales. I wonder how many other magazines have been born and died in similar fashions over the years, specialising themselves until their niche is too small to sustain them, and then being knocked out when the debt collectors come a-calling. Oh well, as above, so below. Evolution is all about survival, which means a certain amount of culling is a necessity. I knew this was a short trip when I started it. If it keeps changing several times during it's duration as well, that'll just make it more interesting for me.



Hillsong: Our first article is a very interesting bit of transhumanist sci-fi indeed. To survive in space long-term, we're going to need to make some pretty dramatic alterations to ourselves, to the point where we might not even be recognisable as human anymore. And with those changes will come a whole bunch of knock-on effects to our societies and morality, with both things that are currently permitted becoming banned, and ones that are currently considered disgusting or illegal becoming normalised. Lest we forget, nature has managed to evolve creatures which have cannibalism and incest as essential parts of their lifecycles. If they were intelligent, they simply couldn't have the same moral codes we do for practical reasons. Even relatively small changes to our biology are going to have unexpected secondary results, and create a new subgroup for the purposes of discrimination. Which means a key part of transhumanism will always be the struggle against reactionaries who call altering ourselves meddling with forbidden things, and the results abominations that should be destroyed. This story might be heavy on the talk, and low on action, but it's still interesting and full of things to debate. Just where does your line lie when it comes to doing strange or morally repulsive things for the sake of survival?



Science for Science Fiction: So here's the other big change, a pair of 2-page spreads jam-packed with strange facts for you to use. Many of them are historical science facts that have been known for centuries, but some are still under debate, such as the question of if Pluto is a planet or not, and the idea of using alcohol to fuel cars. And of course there's pseudoscientific hokum like flying saucers and negative ion generators that might not be true, but still make for good story ideas. Like Dragon's Class Acts series, which ones you'll consider good, bad and useful will vary widely, and it seems like a good way to make sure the amount of content precisely fits the page count, since it's easy to drop single ones in and out. While the big articles might be better remembered, stuff like this is just as essential to the smooth running of a magazine or newspaper. As with the reviews, I suspect it will gradually incline more towards recent news rather than just random tidbits as we go forward.



Facts for Fantasy: This column also draws upon a pretty wide set of sources, both historical and mythological, although it's definitely eurocentric in general. Sumerian, Eastern European, Norse AND Finnish, Greek, English, Welsh, French, Spanish, German. When you don't have easy transport or communication, even a hundred miles is more than enough for huge cultural differences to develop, and a whole different set of gods and stories. The world may not have become smaller since then, but it's certainly become more homogenous in terms of shared influences, even as our ability to use more impressive methods of representing what's in our heads has increased. As with the previous column, I already know a fair few of these bits of info, but not all of them, and it'll be interesting to see how they vary their sources as time goes on.



Eye of the Goblin: Their habit of putting in far more thought about the setting and backstory of their games than they need too continues here. To a lot of people, a goblin is just a goblin, they breed so fast, and die under adventurer's swords so easily that you don't get to think of them as individuals. But even they have their dreams and motivations, especially exceptional ones who leave their tribes and join the gladiatorial arenas in search of wealth and glory. And so we get to know the inner life of an aspiring goblin in quite a bit of detail, before they meet a quick and bloody end in battle before an audience that cares nothing for this detail, and just wants to see fighters and monsters kicking ass. It's almost enough to make you want to stop killing them as entertainment. Almost. Eventually, my bloodlust will rise again, and need sating one way or another, even if it takes several months.



Arena of Death: So here we are once again. DragonQuest got a fair number of articles in Dragon magazine, which seems kind of inevitable given their names. But I never read it myself, so I couldn't comment that much on the rules aspects of them. However, since this minigame is basically a quickstart for the DragonQuest combat system, I can finally correct that oversight. It doesn't seem dumbed down either, with a fairly complex action point economy as a base for the combat system, and lots of tables for modifiers, monsters and character advancement. You don't just approach the enemy and hack away until someone's dead, you have to choose between 16 different actions, and take into account details of facing, position, tracking a mix of fatigue and serious damage, critical hits, weapon breakages and popularity with the crowd. Once you add in lots of weapons, armour, learned skills, magic, and other widgets, I can easily see how this basic system would become even more crunch heavy than D&D. The Runequest influence to the system is also pretty obvious, which isn't surprising given it's name. It seems like a perfectly serviceable generic system for gritty games where advancement is one point at a time, and even at higher power levels you're still vulnerable to sudden death with a bad roll. If SPI had survived, they could have produced multiple games and settings using it. But then, when we already have Dungeons & Dragons and Runequest, anyone looking at this in the shop is going to ask themselves what this does that those two don't, and I can't help wonder if it's very generic name hindered it.

Also not helping the feel of genericness is an appendix describing all the weapons in the game, including a lengthy list of polearms that shows that Gary wasn't the only one obsessed with that stuff back then. I find it interesting how those have fallen out of fashion, quite possibly because they're more useful in formation fighting, and as RPG's developed way from their wargame roots, the weapons emphasised are naturally ones that work better for cool one-on-one fights.



Books: Our reviews continue to trend towards fewer, longer reviews, giving more depth to each one. Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg gets hailed as his best book yet, as he returns to fantasy with a fast-paced epic that fully deserves commercial success as well as critical acclaim. Can't say fairer than that, especially when they give lots of specific reasons why it's good.

Lost Dorsai by Gordon R. Dickson also gets plenty of praise for covering complex moral issues that compare different types of honor and badassery and what happens when they conflict with one-another. It might not always be possible to satisfy everyone, but you can give it a damn good try and tell very interesting stories in the process.



Film & Television: The Shining gets a fairly negative review that thinks it isn't nearly as good as the book. Jack Nicholson is so convincing as a complete psychopath that you never get any sense of internal conflict to his decline, while the other characters simply lack depth, and the humorous one-liners undercut the horror. I suspect a lot of their issues are a matter of expectations, since it's those very lines that'll go on to be pop culture references still used today.

There's no other reviews here, but Carl Sagan's Cosmos gets a lengthy and quite excited preview. Bringing hard science to the masses in an entertaining way is always a tricky road to follow, and they hope he's up to it, because one good show can make a big difference to the geeks of the next generation.



Media: The vast majority of the upcoming films mentioned here are familiar ones, interestingly. Star Wars' supposed 9 film master plan has been talked about. Best laid plans, eh? Similarly, they're planning an adaption of I, Robot, apparently. I suppose they do get there in the end. Maybe Star Wars will too in a decade or two. Not so delayed are Raiders of the Lost Ark, Scanners, and Day of the Dead, all of which have stood the test of time reasonably well. Don't remember Star Patrol, Dragon Slayer or Knights of Eden though. Are they worth checking out?



Games: Chivalry & Sorcery gets a review that makes it sound like a typical fantasy heartbreaker. More realistic!!! More Detailed!!! Historically Accurate!!! Multiple Complex Magic Systems!!! And as is far too frequent for these kind of homebrew efforts, the rules are too dense and cumbersome for anyone but the most obsessive to actually have an enjoyable campaign with. Ah, young enthusiasm. You've got to smile, even though you know just how much it's going to hurt them when their cool ideas hit the harsh light of the real world and turn out to be not so great after all.

Adventures in Fantasy gets a very mixed review indeed. In quite a few ways Arneson has improved over his original design in D&D. However, the editing and organisation is even worse, and that's really saying something. He badly needs an editor, and it looks like after leaving TSR he no longer has people willing to say no to him. Ahh, the traps of success. That's one we've seen plenty of times before. You can still have fun with this, but houseruling is essential, simply due to the unclearness of the writing. You can't get away with that kind of vagueness in competitive wargames, so they continue to hold RPG's to higher standards than their own designers do.

Mythology is yet another game that gets a "looks nice, but the rules don't quite work in actual play" result. Such a shame too, as all it would take is a little more proofreading to iron out the inconsistencies.



Feedback: The feedback form continues to evolve every time it appears. They seem more focussed on sci-fi this time around, both in the authors they want us to rate, and the potential games they're considering publishing. Still, more than half the questions are exactly the same as the previous issues, so it looks like they've got a formula for this as well. You need to maintain a fair number of constants to get analysable information in an experiment, after all. The sci-fi subgenres seem less weird than the fantasy ones last time, curiously enough. I suppose having to maintain some tenuous connection with real world science keeps it from changing quite so radically with the winds of fashion.



Dragonquest Tournament Combat: Having introduced the quite complex DragonQuest combat system earlier in the issue, they ironically finish up with a single page article encouraging you to just ignore the more precise details of positioning and timing and fudge it as a GM. After all, you were probably going to do it anyway, if AD&D was any indication. Might as well give their blessing to it. I guess this once again rubs in the difference between competitive wargaming where the rules need to be adhered too strictly to make the game fair, and roleplaying, where the GM is the real authority over what happens, and the rules are just there to help, because it's impossible for them to cover every option the players may try in an open-ended universe. It's a good thing they don't have a letters page, or we'd be going over that kind of argument in it ad nauseum, just as we did in Dragon.



After looking like they were getting into a routine last issue, they're already changing things up again, with roleplaying pushing it's way in and making itself impossible to ignore. Always amusing to see just how wrong my predictions can be on that front, given how I know this is going to end. How long before the RPG stuff becomes the primary focus? I suppose I'd better get back in gear and finish this off to see.

 

[Jhaelen]

Your summary and conclusion regarding DragonQuest reminds me of my thoughts vs. the Harnmaster RPG: Why bother with a system that is even more detailed and a lot less playable than Runequest? It still has its fans, though.

Of the movies you've been wondering about, I only recall 'Dragon Slayer'. At the time I thought this was an utterly amazing movie with a gorgeous dragon creature. I'm not sure how well it's aged, though.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 05 - Citadel of Blood: November 1980


Nearly monochromatic isometric 3D, huh? Someone's been taking their inspiration from the early computer games of the era. That's a good reminder that it's not just RPG's encroaching on the same free time and money as wargaming, it's the arcades and personal computers as well. Dragon had a computer games column for many years. Will ARES make their own attempt too? Guess I'd better push on and see if they've changed things around inside again.


44 pages


Muse: The editorial is very short indeed, with only 2 notable bits of information. First, that the editor actually prefers realistic games to fantasy ones. Well, SPI was primarily about the historical wargames, and Strategy & Tactics is still far bigger than ARES. Not surprised that many in the company would only be jumping on the bandwagon reluctantly in the wake of D&D's massive success. That's slightly worrying to know. Second, and far less surprising, is that the new game inside is a variant on the rules of one of their existing ones, which virtually all companies do. Another of those reminders that like any decently sized company, they are a production line, and that means giving people jobs they don't really want to do, at a rate determined by management rather than inspiration. Sigh. It can never be just fun and games, can it? On with the show.



The Dark Tower of Loki Hellsson: Wut. Loki Hellson?! Now there's a name that's chosen to sound cool and completely inaccurate from an etymological point of view. But then, when you're talking about a generic fantasy dungeon, what can you expect. His enemies, Thorin Evilsbane and Vasili the Blessed are similarly cheesy. This is the first time their habit of providing setting material for every game seems a bit forced and perfunctory, barely longer than a page, and with terrible names in general. It's a magical dungeoncrawl which shifts layout every time you visit it. It doesn't have to make sense. Just let us play the game and enjoy it. After all, unlike D&D, it's not as if you have to place it in a specific location in the world, worry about it's effects on the neighbours, and what'll happen once it's cleared out and left abandoned for a while if the campaign continues. Not impressed at all by this one. Let's hope they put more effort into the actual game.



Dark Stars & Dim Hopes: The miserabilist pieces on the limits of human advancement continue, once again going into the mathematics of interstellar space and the difficulty of traversing it within a practical timespan. Even if we solve the mechanical challenges of building something that can accelerate to a decent fraction of lightspeed, get to another solar system, brake and transmit useful information back, getting humans there alive, well and sane within a single lifespan seems impossible with us as we are. Cryogenic suspension still isn't an option even now, and generation ships seem doomed to revolt due to human nature. The only course I can see that might have potential is genetic engineering, and that seems unlikely to be tried properly given the current suspicion of human experimentation by the general public. It's all pretty depressing. I do wonder why they keep publishing these. One is fair enough, but what do they expect to achieve by continuing to go on about it? Are you really THAT devoted to gritty realism over fun? What's the motivation here? And how do I keep my motivation up in spite of it? It's all a little baffling.



Miniature Spaceships: Adding minis reviews to their already pretty full roster? I'm not surprised at all, actually, as it's more relevant to their core goals than movies or books. Not that they have a huge amount to say about them, as they cram 7 into 2 pages with a fair bit of whitespace to spare. Really, it's not much more than telling us that they exist, and there are games you can play using them. The photos aren't particularly impressive either, being very much limited by the printing technology of the day, especially in black and white. This definitely needs some retooling before it could become a regular column.



Books: The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein sees him well into his brain-eater phase, producing material that's rambling, overlong, full of subplots that go nowhere and weird sex stuff. It's not that it isn't interesting, in part because of it's strangeness, but it's still very disappointing compared to his older works. Time does cruel things to us all, and the higher you rise, the farther you have to fall.

Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny also comes up short compared to his previous works, this time for being too short to properly explore all the ideas he comes up with. This is why you need an editor who can be completely blunt with you no matter how big you get.

The Magic Labyrinth by Philip Jose Farmer completes a hat-trick of let-downs, bringing Riverworld to an anticlimactic conclusion where the big secrets are largely irrelevant. It's always so much easier when you don't have to explain your tricks, and can let people's imaginations do the heavy lifting.

The man who Corrupted Earth by G. C. Edmonson does please our reviewer's strict standards, on the other hand. It's dark, dramatic, and tackles some genuine real world issues. Shame that space travel has died down so much in real life, where the good guys don't get to win in the end by author fiat. There's always the future.

The steel, the mist and the blazing sun by Christopher Anvil gets a resounding meh. Just another way to fill a few hours with no lasting impact. It's so easy for reviewers to get jaded when they consume a lot, isn't it.

Lifekeeper by Mike McQuay suffers from the classic first book problem of feeling like the author just started writing without a plan and rambled until they had enough material for a novel. This is where physically writing multiple drafts instead of a word processor helps. A good editor is just as important for beginners as it is for big stars.

The Light Bearer by Sam Nicholson is one of the lucky books that makes the grade. Essentially an Arabian Nights story in space, it manages to be both entertaining and well-written enough for Greg's standards.

Ironbrand by John Morressy is another decent, but not exceptional fantasy one. Three brothers get magical swords, and have to liberate the kingdom from evil. Same old story.

The Dancers of Arun by Elizabeth Lynn sees Greg once again complain about all this tedious feminism that's getting in his fantasy lately. Less talky, more fighty! If he posted this today, the comments sections would be packed full of flames.

And finally, Glen Cook's Dread Empire series gets a pretty positive collective review. The ending might be a bit rushed, but it's still a solid series that has potential for more expansion in the future. Well, he's not wrong here, at least.



Bypass: Along with the scientific articles about how the future can go wrong, we have some fiction about how the future can go wrong. Uploading human minds to a computer? It's quite possible that they'd go insane and become self-destructive trying to deal with their new condition. Which would be a great pain in the ass for everyone else involved, especially if they're running a spaceship or other place where they control the life support. Fortunately, this is only fiction, so they can come up with a happy solution with no loss of life at the end. Nothing too surprising on the speculative fiction front, really as this is the same kind of problem we've seen many many times before, and hopefully will be equipped to deal with if we ever face it in reality. I can't give it particularly high or low marks.



Citadel of Blood: Time for a fantasy dungeoncrawl in here, which isn't too surprising, even if the way they're going about it is a little different, as this is more an elaborate board game like Advanced Heroquest than a full RPG. The layout of the dungeon is generated randomly each time you enter, and the whole thing is designed to work without a GM. There's a decent selection of monsters, and they have various quirks to make them more interesting than just hitting back and forth until someone dies, plus you can roll to negotiate with them or magically charm them if you want too. The Spell selection is a little limited though, and could do with some expansion, especially on the Special table to give more room for advancement. So this is good if you don't have a GM, and want a fantasy adventure with a little more room for player choice and character advancement than Heroquest, but not so much it becomes unwieldy to keep track of. If your DM is flaky, keep it around as a standby.



Facts for Fantasy: This section is shrunk to a page and a half to fit around the adverts. As before, it's completely eurocentric, with a little bit of egypt squeezing it's way in, with a combination of fantastical and historical stuff, including some surprisingly detailed talk about various types of cannonballs and the excesses of 12th century feasts. The various monsters and myths are all completely familiar (and statted out), of course, but some of the historical bits are new to me, which again shows the difference in focus between ARES and Dragon. When you play mass combat games regularly, you care as much about different gauges of cannon as you do polearms.



Science for Science Fiction: Just like the previous column, this gets a 25% cut in size for the sake of equality. It's tidbits of information are slightly more detailed, but also much more dated, since we have a lot more information on what stars nearby have planets, and even how big and far from their primary they are. Continental drift has long since ceased to be controversial, but global warming has if anything become more so. You never know what's going to change, and what's going to be all too similar until you get to the future, and there's still a lot to find out in this field. I do wish we could afford to send a few more probes off into interstellar space with powerful cameras to get more accurate information from multiple viewpoints.



Monsterquest: Just like TSR, SPI needs their fans to produce supplementary material for their games. DragonQuest is brand new, and they need to do some serious catching up on the monster front if they want to compete with D&D's multiple monster books. So here they encourage you to send in your own monsters, and lots of them, so they can publish a big book full a mere 6 months later. As usual for these things, the monetary rewards and legal terms are not great, making it very clear that this is work for hire where they get all the rights and control and you get little but the bragging rights of seeing your name in print. It's very much one of those moments where seeing how the sausage is made removes your desire to actually eat it. I know all that legal crap is necessary to cover their ass, but it's still depressing. There's very little money in creativity unless you're at the top of the pyramid, at which point you have all the power.



Film & Television: Close Encounters - Special edition is actually slightly shorter than the theatrical version of the film, but the reviewer still considers it a substantial improvement in pacing and special effects. It may lack the worldbuilding of harder sci-fi, but in terms of sheer wonder, it's still up there with Spielberg's best.

The Final Countdown gets a negative review because the film makes very little sense as it is, skipping huge sections of the book to keep it the right length for the theatre, at the expense of pacing and coherence. You know, that was what intermissions were for in the old days. That way you don't have to test your bladder every time you want a little room to develop in your films. Let's hope they filmed more than they used so a better cut could be releasable later.

Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars gets a pretty positive review, punching well above it's budget in terms of special effects, and while it has some humour, the actors still take their characters seriously. It might not match up to Star Wars in impact, but it's still more than entertaining enough for a rewatch.



Games: The games section is thoroughly taken over by roleplaying at this point, and begins with a lengthy rant on how fantasy and sci-fi vastly outsell more realistic historical or modern day scenarios. This does not please the editor at all, as we found out earlier, and if he had his way, he'd change the tastes of the public too. (preferably by releasing a megaselling game that puts SPI at the top of the roleplaying pile) Yeah, that's not going to happen, and at least they're realistic about the odds against it and the reasons why. The closer you are to reality, the more constrained you are as both a writer and a player. It's harder to make fun, and you have to deal with more nitpickers telling you you're doing it wrong. That issue hasn't changed with the passage of time, and I feel like I could jump in at any point of history in any gaming related media and deal with complaints of much the same nature.

Traveller actually gets a pretty positive review, as the glacially slow experience combined with gradually escalating chances of death in character generation is actually fairly realistic, and makes for a fun minigame in itself even if you don't get around to playing. The worldbuilding systems are good, the action resolution works as intended, and there's tons of things to do out there in space. Of course, there's one area that's a little too realistic, and that's the lack of technological advancement in other areas. (which of course is all the more glaring 30+ years later) They're also not so positive about the supplements, which show the usual problems of being written on a lower budget and with less playtesting than the corebooks. Oh well, that's why you read the reviews and choose carefully where to spend your money in the first place.

Space Opera also gets some praise, but slightly more criticism, as it is pretty comprehensive, but that also makes it too slow in actual play for their tastes. Like many RPG's, you really have to figure out which rules to ignore for maximum fun, which is not a pleasing concept to those raised on competitive wargames. A perfectly accurate map is actually useless, and so it goes with games that are as slow or moreso than reality. It's a hard lesson for designers to learn.



Feedback: The feedback remains mostly the same, but this time, starts to slip ideas for DragonQuest supplements in amongst the standalone games to see what people might be looking for in their roleplaying. Like the advert for monster submissions earlier, they need your help to grow their game in the right way. Will you focus on dungeons, wilderness or cities, adventuring or domain management? As ever, let's hope we find out before all their plans come to naught anyway.



Having had the novelty wear off of doing this again, this is where the conservative and parochial attitudes of the writers is going from amusing to grating for me. I never thought that early 80's Dragon was a bastion of equality, but compared to ARES of the same era, it certainly was. The pessimistic take on realism and scientific accuracy is also weirdly discouraging in a magazine that's supposed to be about gaming, and makes it seem like they have very specific tastes in fun and will complain at you if your playstyle doesn't match up. Is the emphasis on stamping out badwrongfun one of the things that hurts their sales and kills them of in the end? It certainly isn't making it easier to get through this. Let's see if the next issue is any more entertaining.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 06 - Voyage of the BSM Pandora: January 1981



43 pages. What Flame the dragon was to Dungeon Magazine, the BSM pandora is to ARES, an iconic character/setting that they can return too again in a different form to give continuity to their games. If the magazine had lasted longer, we would probably have seen it show up again on big anniversaries and the like, and got nostalgic posts about playing the games involving it and weaving the bits of setting they gave us into a larger canon. Oh, for what could have been. Time to confront the reality of what actually is again.



Muse: Nothing much to see here, just an affirmation of the fact that as time goes on, they are indeed increasing the proportion of game material here, and also trying to create more ambitious games. Fair enough, if difficult to comment on. After you've been doing things for a while, and gained new skills, you do naturally want to push your limits, and nothing wrong with that. Dragon didn't start to level off in production values until about 10 years in, and 10,000 hours is cited as the amount of time needed to get really god at something. You can't manage that kind of mastery in just one year.



2 adventures and a GM screen are already out for DragonQuest. A timely reminder that even many less popular games back then had supplement treadmills that put 5e to shame.



Pandora Tech: Our setting detail this time isn't a story. It's a bunch of tech specs for things in the B.S.M Pandora. This serves to make them all the more stealable for other games, as it gives you solid numbers that you can use to build your game stats. It also gives you an idea of the feel of the place, which is less formal than you would expect. When you're trapped together on long-range space voyages for years at a time, getting sloppy about protocol is eventually inevitable, which of course gets them into the mess we saw last time. This is only short, but it's both entertaining and consistent with what we've already seen, so I like it quite a bit and wish it was longer. Their worldbuilding continues to be far above what it needs to be to create their games, and all the better for it.



Facts for Fantasy: Back up to 2+1/3 pages for this column, and they put indian and incan tidbits in alongside the usual european and egyptian smorgasboard. They seem particularly keen on Herodotus, as he turns up twice. Even before modern technology was developed, people came up with some pretty impressive infrastructure, and human imagination has always exceeded it's achievements. As ever, the shallow dipping means It's telling me little I didn't know before, and I find it hard to sustain interest. It takes a long time to put together a big picture from a collection of tiny little scraps, and I've already done it before. Ed Greenwood could spin this kind of stuff out forever and stay interesting. This can't.



Science for Science Fiction: Inequality in these columns for the first time, as this is only 1+2/3 pages long. |t also overlaps with the previous column a little when it talks about icelandic history, as the gap between history and mythology gets fuzzy after a certain distance. As ever, the ruminations on both astronomy and genetics are long since superceded, as we've improved our information gathering equipment a lot since then. The info on endangered animals has also changed a fair bit since then, and I have no doubt it will continue to do so given the way we treat the environment. So this continues to be slightly more interesting than the fantasy column because it shows just how much our understanding of the world has changed over the years, and how it might continue to do so within our lifespan. That's worth more than another flight of pure imagination.



Film & Television: Flash Gordon gets a thoroughly mixed review where the reviewer feels the good bits just throw the awful cheesy parts into even sharper relief. The supporting cast and effects are good, but the lead actor is terrible, the story is weak, and the whole thing is thoroughly unfaithful to the source material. Just another example of how hollywood doesn't take sci-fi seriously despite the enormous commercial successes Star Wars & Trek have had. That crap could really do with a cull. A good example of how things have actually got better for geeks in recent decades.

Altered States also gets a mixed, but slightly more positive review. It's basically a riff on Jekyll & Hyde/The incredible Hulk with lots of 60's psychedelia thrown in, and whether you'll find it deep and meaningful, or merely incoherent nonsense will very much be a matter of taste. Not everyone has the same inner demons, so playing with symbolism is very much hit and miss.



Media: This column delves into the murky world of hollywood accounting, and the ways they try and ensure a profit, while making it look like they never actually make one for tax purposes. The studio system has become bloated and corrupt with price gouging and forcing cinemas to do several month guaranteed runs even if the film flops. They're even asking for percentages of the food sold at the cinema, which just forces them to jack the prices up even further, and makes sneaking your own in make far more sense. It's a system rife with abuse, and means the profitability of a film is heavily based on the deal negotiated rather than actual audience response. All together now. THAT'S SHOWBIZ!!! As with the previous article, It's funny to see how things have changed. The internet may mean there's less money in media as a whole due to the ease of pirating, but people are more able to find and buy precisely what they want, rather than what's advertised, and there's fewer limitations due to manufacturing and distribution logistics. But there's still plenty of scummy backroom stuff and legal shenanigans big companies can pull to stack the deck in their favour, and nepotism is just as strong a force as ever. So this article is very interesting indeed, even if it's not particularly game related. Nice to see them applying their analytical cynicism to other areas.



Voyage of the B.S.M Pandora: In contrast with all their previous games, this is a solitaire one, where the challenges you face are heavily determined by the dice, but there's also a strong element of player choice and resource management as you choose how long your voyage is and how you deal with the things you encounter. Like the old choose your own adventure books, which this strongly resembles, you can get different results even if you choose the same route. (presuming you don't cheat on the dice, which is always a particular temptation in a solitaire game) It has more depth to it than most CYOA books though, despite being dramatically compressed, due to the larger scope of play than simply controlling a single character on an adventure. So once again, while something like this doesn't give you the full flexibility of an actual roleplaying game, it has a lot more depth than most boardgames while still giving you a clear objective and path of play, (which is where RPG's can often fall down) and shows off their ambitions in quite an interesting way. I definitely want to see what else they have planned before they go down.



Dragon deigns to advertise in it's competitor's pages. Guess that shows TSR are taking SPI seriously as challengers.



Books: The Devil's Game by Poul Anderson is unusually light on the supernatural elements for him, which allows the reviewer to praise him for being versatile and trying different things. There's things you can do with ambiguity that you simply can't if everyone knows for certain all the weirdness is real.

Malafrena by Ursula Le Guin is set in a fantasy world, but is also devoid of any other supernatural phenomena. This means she can do a historical drama without feeling beholden to the details of real world history. Your own fanbase can become your worst enemy if they don't buy into the details.

The Mind Game by Norman Spinrad continues this theme, making the point yet again that fantasy and sci-fi still aren't as credible as other genres, and it's quite possible they're doing it to get more mainstream success and literary plaudits. It's a tiresome business chasing money and respect, but I guess that's what you've got to do when you aren't a megastar and have a family to feed. And why should a writer feel compelled to stick to one genre just because it makes life easier for the marketers anyway? More stuff that definitely gets better in the intervening decades.

Leviathan's Deep by Jayge Carr sees the grumbles about feminism show up again, which also feels increasingly irritating, especially as he only does so to say that this particular novel avoids those problems despite being written by a woman and featuring interspecies gender politics as an integral plot point. I grow increasingly grateful that I won't have to put up with this for too long.

Antinomy by Spider Robinson is a collection of his short stories. It gets a positive result because it's interesting without being depressing or particularly challenging, which once again highlights the conservative tendencies of the reviewer. Once again, I grow distinctly more unimpressed.

Star Driver by Lee Correy gets a positive review for more agreeable reasons. Combining solid sci-fi speculations with properly written characters? That ought to work in any era, regardless of the political trends.

Beyond Rejection by Justin Leiber gets even higher praise, made all the moreso because it's a debut novel. If he can keep it up, he has a bright future ahead of him. Since he publishes 5 novels, then leaves fiction behind for academia, the commercial realities at least don't agree with the reviewer in hindsight. Trying to predict the future rarely works too well, unfortunately.

And finally, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy gets a brief, but very positive recommendation. Given it's longevity, I think this doesn't really need any analysis. Just another voice in the choir.



Quick Combat II: A second, different way of speeding up DragonQuest in this magazine? That really does rub in the fact that most people don't want a combat system that heavy and detail obsessed. Still, this one is crunchier than the previous one, which was basically just GM fiat. It seems to be aimed at boiling down larger group combat into a few rolls, and there's still a fair bit of math involved. It also assumes fighting to the death without surrender as the default, which means total death for the loser, and high casualties for the winning side, which will please neither fans of realism, or players who have to argue about which PC's in the group die after a single die exchange even if they win. For that reason, I really can't see this system working in an actual campaign, as it'd be far too lethal and divisive to maintain a functional group dynamic unless every player had multiple characters and was ok with them being replaced regularly. But it's still interesting to see them trying to make things work better. Will one of them stick?



DragonNotes: Completely unsurprisingly, they institute a regular column for DragonQuest material as part of their increased focus on gaming. This first one isn't that interesting though, being entirely self-promotion, much of which is repeated from the advert earlier in the issue. Lots of stuff coming out in the near future, both adventures and game aids. You might want to hold off on buying the core for a few months if you haven't already though, as they plan on incorporating all the errata people have found in the next print run. Is it really a good idea to say something like that? Oh well, at least it's admitting your flaws. And this shows again how serious they are about building this up into an extensive gameline to rival D&D. Hopefully they'll give us some useful material in here while it lasts.



Games: Shooting Stars gets a long and very sardonically negative review that leaves you in absolutely no doubt why they don't like it. Shovelware that's a poor copy of a previous game they liked? Why even bother? Save your money and time, and leave the suffering to the professionals.

Azhanti High Lightning, on the other hand, they rather like. It works as both a game, and worldbuilding, and the ship plans are a thing of beauty. They're useful for anyone who wants to play in a large-scale sci-fi spaceship, whether active or crashed dungeon crawl. Well worth checking out.

Asteroid is by the same team as Azhanti, but has simpler rules, and a far more humorous tone, as a band of oddballs (and their dog mascot) have to save the world from an asteroid headed towards it, while dealing with some ridiculous subplots. Again, the ideas in here are eminently stealable to use in another format. GDW are really on a roll at the moment creatively.



Feedback: The feedback form becomes concerned with the competition, asking which other gaming magazines you read/subscribe too, and what they could change to get your sweet reliable subscription money. The number of very specific DragonQuest questions increases, as they try to pinpoint what supplements will sell best, and we get an interesting hint that they're considering adding computer gaming to the mix, as they ask what computers you own as well. They're still planning a fair number of standalone wargames though, even if a greater proportion of them are sci-fi. So we can definitely see the transitions in focus over the year just from looking at these forms. Let's hope that continues to be the case.



Once again, some quite high contrasts in here between the bits that I like and the ones I don't, with the ambition of the game material feeling like it comes from a different world to the very critical and weirdly conservative review sections and somewhat dull columns. It does make for quite a strange mix, and not one I would have kept on buying myself back in the day. But as we're already a third of the way through this, doing the rest doesn't seem too onerous. Lets see what strangeness the next issue brings.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 07 - Rescue from the Hive: March 1981



43 pages. Time for a little lurid pulp action, as we get a female character in a ridiculously skintight spacesuit, in need of rescuing by the rugged hero, who's spacesuit is bulked up on the body and not remotely skintight. It may be the far future in space, and we may be facing giant insects instead of a dragon, but some things never change. And one of those is trying to sell via sex, which people will inevitably try eventually regardless of the product or subject matter. Let's see if this issue'll live up to the hype, and if it'll attract any new buyers on the newsstands.



Muse: The editorial does nothing to dissuade me from the idea that they're trying to sex up the magazine a little. There's some more high quality, full-color cheesecake on the next page, and if you like it, you can buy a proper print of it from the artist. Yeah, that's some fairly blatant commercialism of a kind I'm not too keen on. Similarly, making their game boards bigger and with more pieces so they can charge more for it seems like a somewhat backwards way of looking at the creative process, and not the way I'd phrase it at all if I was trying to sell that change to people. Are they feeling the bite financially and starting to flail before they go down? The plot thickens. I'm very interested to see how this develops now.



The House of Kurin: The DragonQuest material this month is an adventure that's almost as large as the centrepiece, and the combined size of these has forced them to cut some of their regular columns. While at it's core it's still basically "party gets hired in a tavern by mysterious old man to kill bad guys and rescue people", it's more character driven and less map focussed than D&D adventures of the same era, with a long list of named characters who move around rather than sitting in their rooms waiting for the PC's to barge in and kill them. There's still plenty of random harlots though, for that authentic 1e DMG feel, and the monsters are all too familiar to any D&D player. This definitely shows it's age in terms of writing style and sexist attitudes (again, even more than the D&D adventures of the same era), and is a little bit funny because of it, but is still pretty usable, and the clear writing makes it easily converted to other systems. This still has some value to me then.



Facts for Fantasy: These columns have both stabilised at 2 pages again. Herodotus appears again twice, his popularity shows no signs of waning. Two mythological creatures that have been statted up in RPG's repeatedly also appear: The Phoenix and the Zaratan. On the historical side, we have to deal with sexism past, and examples of women who managed to accomplish great things in spite of this, the hassles of trading silk, and how mistletoe was appropriated from a pagan tradition to a christian one. Same as ever then. The problem with having the same writer every month is being limited by their sources of knowledge and personal preferences. I think they need to juggle this around a bit more.



Science for Science Fiction: While the fantasy column deals with sexism, this one decides to talk about racism, and the way people justify it to themselves. Science is merely a tool, and it can be turned to vile ideas as easily as virtuous, especially when people cherry pick the data to support their theories. They remind us that anything scientists can do can also happen naturally, such as nuclear fission if enough radioactive material is brought together, and that evolution is a provably real thing that happens, but a lot of the links are still missing. While there is some dated space info too, this month seems slightly more interesting than average to me, partly because it's not afraid to call superstitions and prejudice . Considering the fight with ingrained sexism other writers on the team are still dealing with, that seems pretty relevant.



Rescue from the Hive: After the solo experimentation of last issue, it's back to good old-fashioned adversarial 2 player fun. Humans vs Aliens in a battle to rescue the princess ambassador's daughter before it's too late. The humans have slightly better forces, but time is against them, because if the aliens go into warp, you lose. Plus the alien queens have mind control, which always makes for unpredictable and swingy battles as you never know if you're going to be able to resist it. So as usual from SPI, this requires a combination of skill and luck, and has lots of little details packed in to reward tweaking, repeated play and system mastery. The play board isn't as impressive as some of the ones they've produced, but it does the job, and looping the edges to represent a cylindrical layout with artificial gravity adds some more interesting tactical choices. Once again, I can definitely see myself playing this at least once.



DragonNotes: Since we've already had a full DragonQuest adventure this issue, this column is only a single page, and not that interesting. Half promotion of their upcoming products, and half Sage Advice. We're getting an expansion for the magic system, the monster book they sourced contributions for a few months ago, an expansion for random dungeon generation, and a regional sourcebook full of adventurable locations, with plans for more adjacent to it that'll eventually make a whole campaign world if successful. Once again, they're showing the results of better customer service than TSR, which focussed on adventures for ages, and didn't do a dedicated magic sourcebook until 2e. How many of these actually got released? The rules quibbles seem all too wearily familiar. Caster vs non caster balance, and adjudicating the effects of shapechanging powers. Those always seem to cause problems no matter the system. So they're making some of the same mistakes most designers make with their first RPG system. This is the problem with going back and playing old school games without updating them. You have to deal with problems you thought you'd left behind all over again. This makes me feel very very tired.



Media: This column is once again in a cynical mood about the details of the movie-making industry. This time, it's about the ephemeral nature of movies. Celluloid is not only highly flammable, but also prone to cracking and fading, so even movies that are only 10 years old already show noticeable deterioration. Copies are always at least a little worse than the master, and this only becomes more obvious the longer the chain gets. How are we supposed to take movies as a medium seriously when they literally won't last? Another of those problems we've gone a long way towards solving these days, as digital allows for perfect copying once something has been captured, and our array of clean-up and editing tools is vastly greater than it was a couple of decades ago. While it's still possible for things to fall through the cracks and be lost forever, it's much much harder when everyone can have thousands of full HD movies in a single hard drive, and all it takes is one person to care enough to preserve something and redistribute it to thousands for free. So while their doom and gloom may have been justified then, it definitely isn't relevant anymore. It's nice to be able to point out how things have got better over time.



Designers Notes: This column is a big promotional piece for Universe, their new Sci-fi RPG. And it has to be said that it looks quite a bit like a bigger, more open-ended version of last issue's BSM Pandora voyages, with a lot of emphasis on providing systems to generate your worlds and the weird and wonderful creatures that live there, so the DM doesn't have to think too hard to create adventures. And with tons of classes and even more skills to choose from for your characters, and lots of spaceships to buy and customise, you aren't going to run out of room to advance anytime soon either. This looks interesting, and also means they can increase the amount of game material each issue while still sticking to one article per line. And so they move a little further from wargaming and towards RPG's.



Games: The other review columns take a break this month, leaving us with only this one. It decides to do the oriental adventures thing, reminding us that TSR was actually pretty late to that party, and several other systems got books out years in advance. There's a huge amount of material to draw on, both mythological and modern, that's very gameable indeed, and not too hard to buy if you know where to look. It's not surprising at all that it would prove to be popular not just once, but repeatedly. Lets see how good these implementations of the idea are.

Bushido gets a quite complexly mixed review, as they liked some elements, but disliked others, and are willing to go into quite a bit of detail on which should be kept and which should be changed. They think they could do better, and since they do have quite decent editors, it's quite possible they could. I have no doubt they would have done an oriental supplement for DragonQuest if they'd lasted a bit longer.

Land of the Rising Sun is the oriental version of Chivalry & Sorcery. It's still far too slow and crunchy for the reviewers tastes, but he's willing to admit that the rules have been tightened up a fair bit in the rewriting, and the new setting information is pretty well researched too. If you liked it before, you should like it even more now, and even if you didn't, you might at least be able to understand the system clearly this time around. Can't say fairer than that.

The Compleat Fantasist gets an exceedingly vicious slating indeed. A shoddy unofficial conversion guide between a whole bunch of roleplaying systems that doesn't really do any of them justice, and wastes a load of page count on wishy washy waffle? Yeah, I'd warn people away from that too. There's always been cheap cash-in crap, and thankfully most of it gets washed away by the tides of history. Don't let false nostalgia fool you into thinking things were better back then.



Feedback: Since they now have a full year to look back on, the questionaire sorts through the different kinds of articles, and asks which was your favourite in each category, as well as which issue was overall best. The games they're asking to you to consider for production have also cycled to a completely new set, most of which will unfortunately never come out, despite sounding pretty interesting. I once again feel a little frustration on how much work they put into this area, and how little they'll get out of it. Good customer feedback should be encouraged, and reality doesn't seem to reflect that.



The dramatic uptick in game material in this issue made it much easier to to write about than the last few, as I had things I could actually analyse rather than just making purely subjective judgements. It actually feels like a gaming magazine, rather than just a magazine that happens to include a game in it. And since that trend will probably continue, hopefully I will be able to move a little faster. Seems like a promising development. Let's see what next issue brings in turn.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 08 - Ragnarok: May 1981



43 pages. After the schlock fantasy of Loki Hellson 3 issues ago, now it's time for the genuine article to make an appearance, along with the rest of the norse gods. Not that they look particularly godly on the cover, being both too skinny and underdressed for the climate, but oh well, it's what's inside that counts. And since the whole point of Ragnarok is that most of them die in the process, you don't want them too overpowered and infallible. Let's see how this saga follows along with the predictions …… or not, and how much influence you'll have over the outcome as players.



Muse: I've certainly noticed how much effort they put into their customer feedback compared to any other magazine I've read. The editorial is all about that, and reinforces that it does make a difference to them what you say, as many of their game ideas are derived from customer suggestions, and their own ideas still get run through the feedback process to see which are most popular. As usual, emphasising this this makes their ultimate fate seem all the sadder, as putting in the effort to understand your audience should be rewarded. (it certainly was in the 2e > 3e transfer by WotC, after all) I guess no matter how well you market to your existing audience, if you don't bring new people in, attrition and saturation will eventually take their toll. Plus if they market heavily to the people who fill in feedback forms, they will inevitably skew towards the hardcore gamer market, and that in itself can drive some people away. I guess there are no guarantees in life, no matter how hard you try to push the odds in your favor.



Ragnarok - The Mythic Story: Completely unsurprisingly, our setting detail this month is a condensed retelling of norse myth for those philistines who don't already know it. (TLR, Loki is a dick, and both the source of and solution to everyone's problems until everyone else gets sick of his and locks him up. He escapes, Giants attack, monsters get loose, everything goes to , but a few survive and maybe the next generation will do better.) It's written by the same person who does the Facts for Fantasy column, and like that, makes these exciting stories far less so in the translation, stripped of their poetry and narrative style. So weirdly enough, this is actually a less entertaining read than most of the original settings for their games, because it's not new enough to be novel to me, or creative enough in it's retelling to put an interesting twist on things. Let's hope the game itself is a little more exciting.



Pandora's Link: An article tying the two BSM Pandora games into a larger whole? Just what I hoped they'd do when I saw the second one.
This means that you can play Wreck with different starting conditions based on what your characters got in Voyage, giving both more replay value. It also gives them an opportunity to make a whole bunch of little tweaks, some of which are to make them fit together better, and some are simply errata to the individual games that they would have put in the magazine at some point anyway. (but like this, they're more likely to be noticed and implemented) They even include tournament play options for a more multiplayer experience, which again gives you another round of replays before things start to get repetitive. This is indeed pretty nifty, multiplying the usability of their previous articles in only a single page. It's always nice when you can get the benefits of quadratic scaling when combining existing material. I hope we'll see some more of these in the future, but it's hard to see where they'll get the opportunity.



Facts for Fantasy: These columns are still 2 pages each, but split into 4 half pages, with fantasy on top, and sci-fi underneath. They finally get through a whole column without mentioning Herodotus once, which is a relief, and they have material from Russia, India and Japan to broaden our horizons further. Only the one from Ainu myth is unfamiliar to me though, which means I'm still finding this pretty dull going. These ultra compact bits of info just don't have enough meat for me to get my teeth into.



Science for Science Fiction: This column has far fewer, longer topics than it's fantasy counterpart, and is slightly more interesting as a result. The most detailed of all is one on ecological niches, and how creatures evolve convergently to fill them and get displaced and driven to extinction when something better appears elsewhere and spreads. This definitely applies to humanity, which increasingly rolls over the rest of the ecosystem unopposed the further away we get from Africa. The recent occupiers of that niche, Baboons and Gigantopithicus, have lost out pretty badly, illustrating just how dangerous we are even against creatures considerably larger and stronger than us. There's also a greater than usual amount of fantasy crossover, with talk about judaic astronomy, lost continents, and the origins of the unicorn myth. The best stories have enough basis in fact to be plausible, even if the details have been twisted around over time. I think that this once again shows how doing your own primary research can help you make better stories.



DragonNotes is fairly dull this month, as it's comprised entirely of errata. Lots of little rules corrections and clarifications, and an adjustment of the XP system to make advancement a bit quicker, as player feedback has not been favourable on that front. I guess power creep is inevitable, especially when you're planning on releasing supplements as fast as you can write them. Better to start conservative and gradually revise upwards than the other way around, which gets a far more negative reception from the audience. Whatever the system, we see this struggle play out again and again in slightly different forms. The designers try to make the rules work clearly, without ambiguities and loopholes, and the players find new and interesting ways to break them. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme and all that. Next!



Designer's Notes: Universe moves a little closer to release, and they give us a little playtest info to whet our appetites. The random generation for both characters and star systems is shaping up nicely, and the sample adventures are proving interestingly lethal in the classic Star Trek fashion. Make sure you generate more characters than you need, so the redshirts can take the brunt of the hazards and the others have a chance at advancement. So they're making it quite clear that they're still designing in an old school competitive way, and you need to be both skilled and lucky if you want to live long and prosper through an extended campaign. Fair enough. As long as that's their intention, and they're not trying to sell the game as something it's not, that's not a bad goal to aim for. Just as with DragonQuest, it's better to start conservatively and then maybe increase the power level in the supplements than the other way around. Just have to hope that's still what the audience wants after several years of brutal dungeon crawling.



Ragnarok - Twilight of the Gods: Like the description earlier on, the game of Ragnarok manages to take an interesting topic, and make it bizarrely dull. This is the reason this issue was delayed for months. I'd done all the other articles, but kept looking at this, putting it away, and looking at it again, finding nothing to say, and repeating the process. It's not actively terrible, but the writing is dull and repetitive to the point where I found it indigestible, breaking the rules into subclauses even where they don't really need to be, just to make it clear that the same rules apply to various units. I have no idea if it could be fun in actual play, and particularly doubt I'll get to test this one as I don't think I could explain the rules quickly to a group to get it going. Definitely disappointing, given the idea's epic potential.



An SF Game Sampler: Over the past year, they've gradually tended towards fewer, more detailed reviews. But games are being released far faster than they can review them, so it's time to roll up our sleeves and play catch-up with a burst of capsule critiques. Who will be the winners and losers this time?

Starfall is challenging, with plenty of depth and strategy to reward experienced players, but exploration still has a fair bit of randomness. Since the exploration part is as important as the competition, it works as both a solitaire and multiplayer experience.

Dark Stars gets a fairly negative review, mainly for being unrealistic, too simple, and too small in scope for a game of interstellar exploration. It also casts the humans as the clear villains, with no goal other than killing all the aliens, which is a curious design choice considering the target audience. The ideas might not be terrible, but they need serious developing on to make a more satisfying product.

Timelag also gets a negative review, for it's unsatisfying portrayal of relativistic travel. It's once again too simple, and the graphics suck. You know, I don't think I've ever seen a good game treatment of relativity, so don't be too hard on yourselves. The human brain just isn't designed to handle it.

Warp War gets good review despite probably actually being simpler, because it's a microgame, and so different standards apply. It's all about information density and making the best use of your medium. Their only real complaint is that it doesn't work at all played solitaire, which can be said of many still good games.

Starfire is a versatile large scale ship combat game, with s built in sample campaign, but plenty of scope for creating your own, which pleases both their wargaming and roleplaying sides. The main complaint is that the scale is completely off in terms of realistic space distances, which like relativity, is always a headache if you want simple enough rules to be fun. Tracking the realistic orbits of everything in a solar system is a headache even for a computer, let alone pen and paper. They badly need to accept that abstraction is necessary in gaming.

Starfire II builds on the original, but is still a stand-alone game in itself with lots of new bits and pieces. It's improved on many details, but the fundamental complaint about unrealistic scale remains. There's always limitations to what you can do with edition changes, as you have to deal with established expectations.

Star Fleet Battles is not actually an official licenced star trek game, but the names and scenarios are so obvious that it would be unlikely to stand up in court if challenged. As befits it's source material, it's pretty fun as one-on-one tactical ship combat, but gets unwieldy if you try to control entire fleets. That's what the Star Wars ripoffs are for.

Star Fleet Battles Expansion I incorporates a load of errata, and adds new equipment and scenarios, including ones that aren't complete ripoffs. And given the nature of the system, there's room for plenty more if this one sells well. Being prepared for success as well as failure is important from a commercial point of view.



Games: Quirks is a lighthearted game of evolution and mutation, in which players compete to evolve creatures that fill as many ecological niches as possible. It has a fair bit of randomness, as you'd expect from the theme, and the possibility of last minute reversals even when it looks like one player is about to win, but those just add to the fun, as creature traits pile up in increasingly weird combinations. The biggest complaint is that it doesn't support too many replays before getting repetitive, but thankfully, there are several expansions adding new cards to make up for that. Still probably can't quite catch up to the strangeness if reality though.

Dark Stars gets a second, slightly longer review here too. It's slightly more positive, and recommends it in particular for PbP gaming, but still points out much the same flaws. As ever, peoples desire for simple or complex games varies widely, and what's suitable for a group of regular gamers would put off a more casual pickup audience, so you can't take one reviewer's word as god.



Film & Television: Scanners gets a very positive review indeed, for being both an excellent horror story, and relatively hard science fiction as well. It's atmospheric, the effects are interestingly gruesome, and the plot doesn't dumb itself down for the audience. I think this one has sufficiently passed the test of time, even if it would look very different if remade today. (the thalidomide baby part of the metaphor in particular is thankfully no longer topical) Well worth a rewatch.

Hanger 18, on the other hand, gets a very mixed one, giving with one hand, and then taking with the other several times over the course of the review, leaving me more than a little nonplussed. Sometimes a writers attempts at being witty winds up obscuring their overall judgement rather than illuminating, and that seems to be the case here.

Starblazers gets one of their context heavy reviews, talking about the general differences between western and japanese animation, and giving anime a good deal of praise for containing adult storylines, continuity between episodes, character development, and all those things we take for granted today, but were practically nonexistent in cartoons back then. Another of those cases where nostalgia definitely isn't what it used to be, as we have so much more choice in media from around the world to enjoy, and no longer have to watch it at a set broadcast time. Most households back then didn't even have VHS yet. It's nice to not be so dependent on the whims of the network, dictating to us and underestimating the intelligence of it's viewers.



Media: This column is also as intelligent and analytical as ever, talking about the details of the trailer system used to promote upcoming films. This once again makes it clear how things have both changed and stayed the same since then. Cleverly edited good trailers for bad films, trailers that spoil the entire plot and make seeing the movie virtually redundant, trailers that contain material that's not even in the final cut of the film, these still seem all too familiar complaints today. The details about the costs of making and printing trailers, and the weird secondary market for those prints after films are actually released and the trailers are no longer needed seems like another world though, since these days you'd just download them off youtube if you did for some reason want to keep a copy for yourself. (also illustrating just how much easier and more taken for granted piracy is these days. ) It's all very interesting, and pretty informative too, despite not being a particularly large article. When you're learning from materials written in the time you're studying, it's a very different experience to history books.



Books: Myth Conceptions by Robert Asprin is fantasy with a fair bit of humour in it. (as you could probably guess from the pun title) It puts it's heroes in a no-win situation, which of course they find their way out of in an entertaining way. Since there's not enough people around filling the lighthearted fantasy niche, the reviewer is glad someone's doing it, as ploughing through epic darkness all the time gets very tedious.

Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn is a set of short stories in the same universe, edited by Robert Asprin. It shows a fairly tight editorial hand, sequencing the stories to build upon one another despite having different authors and maintaining the humorous tone throughout. it's good to be able to share the load, even discounting all the cross-promotion benefits in doing so.

Expanded Universe by Robert Heinlein is a collection of short stories and essays intended to give you more insight into both his fictional multiverse, and his real-life political views. Since this is Heinlein we're talking about, they're interesting, but more than a little problematic by modern standards. Wether they're still worth learning from is very much a matter of opinion, and this reviewer doesn't think they are at book prices back then. I'm inclined to agree.

Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward is one of those odd novels that's more interesting for it's theoretical ideas than the actual story, like A Space Odyssey or the Long Earth series. That said, the work on creating a plausible way life could exist on a neutron star, made from degenerate matter, and operating at a timescale a million times faster than human perception is pretty damn cool, and it would be interesting if this is one sci-fi prediction that would be borne out by reality. But I guess it'll be a very long time indeed before we can get anywhere near a neutron star and get a better idea of what goes on down there. Like the martian canals, the truth probably won't be what we expect.

Transfigurations by Michael Bishop gets a mixed review for demonstrating that what works in a short story may not be so effective when stretched out to novel length. That said, it's not exactly negative, just disappointed. Building a sustainable career on creativity is hard work, and even most big authors fall into formulas over time.

Songs from the Stars by Norman Spinrad gets a mixed review in a different way. There's a lot to like, but also some little things that bug them persistently, and by focusing on those, they may wind up seeming more negative than they actually are. Nitpicking the things you're a fan of because you care of is a classic geek issue, and it's amusing to see that hasn't changed with time either.

The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones, on the other hand, gets an unreserved two thumbs up, working as both story and worldbuilding of magical physics. Not arguing with that one. She fully deserves both critical and commercial success.



Feedback introduces several strange new questions amongst the now familiar selection. The first is an incredibly specific counting of exactly how much you play boardgames and RPG's, in both hours and percentages of your time. The second asks which of their existing games would be most easily converted to solitaire play, which indicates that there might well be more follow-up articles on the way. The pitches for new games bit also starts including deluxe editions of their existing ones, as well as introducing quite a few more supplement ideas for DragonQuest, and also pitches a boardgame idea for Dragon's Egg, which I very much wish they'd got around to doing. So continuity is very definitely on the up here, and they'd like to build upon their existing works to create something with a little more depth. As usual when I see these hints of what could have been if they had more time and money, it makes me sad. Still, I suppose it's better to have an ambition that outreaches your resources than the other way around, which we're seeing with 5e these days.



Well, that wasn't a bad issue overall, but the seriously boring centrepiece bogged the rest of it down, making the historical information on media far more interesting than the gaming material. It's a testament to how presentation is important, as if you're too boring, you wind up driving people away no matter how good your intentions are. Oh well. Let's see what direction the next issue goes in, and if it'll be any easier to digest.