[Let's Read] ARES Magazine

[Jhaelen]

Good to see you've not abandoned your Let's Read of the Ares issues!

It's not been that long since I watched Scanners for the first(!) time. The movie had been banned in Germany for a long time but was reduced to FSK16 after a recent re-evaluation. I thought it was still pretty good and 'watchable' given it's age. (I don't think the same can be said of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' which went through a similar process.)

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 09 - DeltaVee: July 1981



55 pages. The balancing of sci-fi and fantasy continues with a split cover, advertising both this month's game, and a big feature on an upcoming movie. Guess that's another sign that they've got media awareness beyond just wargaming geeks. Let's see how they juggle their various responsibilities this time, and if they'll drop the ball and wind up looking like fools.



Muse: Once again they acknowledge that they're gradually pushing up the amount of gaming material, and accept that some people will like that, and others won't. When you have detailed survey material like they do, you can crunch the odds, but it's still a gamble in the end. If they focus on the people who like gaming correctly, chances are they'll also buy more of their other games as well as sticking with the magazine. As with most of their statements here, this seems sensible with the information they had, and makes their demise seem all the more undeserved. That doesn't seem to be changing as the magazine progresses.



Dragonslayer also advertises a tie-in boardgame (by SPI themselves, which explains a lot) before the big feature, showing that even back then, Disney really didn't mess around when it comes to their cross-marketing and self-promotion. Get your fingers in as many pies as possible, as it makes the company as a whole harder to kill even when one product doesn't do so well.



Dragonslayer: So yeah, they're doing some serious promotion on the movie Dragonslayer this issue. Now there's a film I haven't thought about in many years. They take a fairly interesting tack, too, as it stars an apprentice wizard, while simultaneously taking steps to make magic mysterious and unreliable, and the overall setting gritty (and the color palette oversaturated by brown, showing that this isn't just a thing in modern computer games) and focussed on the human characters rather than the monster. It's an offbeat combo, but as there's a whole load of other fantasy movies coming out around the same time, they're hoping this'll work out in their favor and help them stand out. They talk a fair amount about the special effects, which were by ILM, and haven't actually dated too badly, apart from some of the stop motion, which is a bit obvious to my modern eye. They also talk a fair bit about wargaming and roleplaying, largely in the sense that they're pleased that exists, but had never heard of it before the interview, (as they'd spent the last couple of years working hard on the movie and not keeping up with current events) and view it as just another manifestation of the same trends. Sometimes, a whole bunch of people seem to independently come up with the same ideas, and you'd need a lot of info and understanding of the butterfly effect to figure out what the cause was. So like a lot of the media articles in here, this is a very interesting bit of historical perspective, reminding us what people thought of the changes in fashion at the time, and also the ways technology was advancing that we've now superceded or take for granted. I wouldn't mind a few more of these.



The sword and the stars: On top of our regular boardgame and roleplaying material, we also have this bit of promotion and errata for another of their new games by the designer and playtesters. The Sword and the Stars takes the system they used for Empires of the Middle Ages, and updates it for a Sci-fi setting. The primary means of FTL travel is stargates, which means who is adjacent to each other is far less important, and they can keep the map two dimensional and compact and not have to worry about the complex trigonometry of 3D travel times. You aren't limited by historical accuracy, so you can make sure all the factions are approximately balanced and equally interesting. You can create a greater variety of scenarios, and use your imagination more as a designer. Once again demonstrating why sci-fi and fantasy are more popular with writers than strict historical games and stories. Still, this article manages to make the game seem interesting without being blatant shilling, and the extra rules bits means it's useful once you buy the game, so it falls on the positive side of the spectrum. Just another way the proportion of mechanical stuff in the magazine can gradually increase.



Lasers in Space: John Boardman gives us another of his pessimistic hard science essays, talking about exactly what lasers are, how they're created, and why they can't be used to easily disintegrate things from huge distances like sci-fi rayguns. That's not to say they can't do some pretty awesome things, including nonviolent uses such as eye surgery and holograms when used precisely, but they aren't some kind of miracle device, and are an exceedingly inefficient way of expending energy. Unlike the movie effects stuff, this all feels quite familiar, as laser technology hasn't advanced vast orders of magnitude like computers. (although they're a lot more common, as they're a part of every CD and DVD drive. ) Which makes it a good contrast, as what stays the same is just as important as what changes. It's good to know that the laws of physics remain constant (rather than being shaped by belief like certain RPG's) and it's merely our understanding of them that improves, because the other option would be a lot scarier to live in.



Facts for Fantasy: Apparently the last two thousand years of domestication has made cats slightly less assholish after all. Or maybe it's the neutering. Either way, while domestic tomcats do still sometimes kill kittens from other males, research shows it's no longer the default, and they can be devoted father figures as well. Their ability to inspire love out of all proportion to what we actually get from the little monsters hasn't changed though. This column is almost entirely historical rather than mythological this month, and the only definitely fantastical part is another pet related one, that of Sir Tristan's many-coloured dog, which is a cute little story I'd somehow missed from my readings of arthurian mythos. This column continues to be far drier than I'd prefer, and a real pain to think of anything to say about. It's really slowing me down.



Science for Science Fiction: Three decades ago we were still wondering if there was a 10th planet out there. Now we know there's a whole load of them, many larger than Pluto, with eccentric orbits that take them many orders of magnitude further away from the sun, and make numbering them in order of distance futile because the order would change on a regular basis. Do we call them full planets, or merely dwarf ones? Does the universe care about our attempts to categorise it's contents? Things aren't as neat as we'd like them to be. Similarly, the truism that plants can't move quickly is upended by venus fly traps, which can be pretty scary if you're the right size to become their dinner. And one thing that has become even more nebulous today is when you can actually call yourself an adult, with not only the destruction of traditional coming of age rituals, but the increasing difficulty of earning enough to own your own house and support a family. So the usual mix of things I already know, things that have changed, and things that have stayed the same here.


The Embracing: The fiction this issue is a shockingly dark piece about what living in a dystopia can do to a person. Crippled and thrown into a prison where only the strongest survive to rot, the things you do to survive can turn you into a monster that can never go back to a normal life, and destroys those that you loved because you can't face living with them as you are. No happy ending here, only living another day, and hopefully doing some damage to the system in the process. Well, that's definitely a downer, even by my standards, making this interesting, but not particularly enjoyable.



Film & Television: Raiders of the Lost Ark gets a review that's superficially positive, but also points out that while well done for what it is, it's purely a fun popcorn movie, with no deeper message or artistic subtlety. Don't go into it expecting it to change your life, just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Superman II gets a review that makes it very clear that while it's not terrible, diminishing returns and stupid comedy are already creeping in compared to the first movie. Fair enough. After all, we know with hindsight what happens next, and it does indeed get much much worse before they decide to reboot the series. Sometimes when you get it right first time, the only way to go is down.

Excalibur, on the other hand, gets a very positive review filled with lots of highly specific superlatives. The cast is excellent, the plot is intricate, the fights are gritty, and the sets are well-designed. There's plenty of social allegory and depth to the design too. If you see just one of these films, it's obvious which they'd prefer.

Knightriders (not to be confused with Knight Rider, which won't be out until next year) is a movie about internal conflict in a travelling SCA jousting group. The somewhat ludicrous concept is turned into a genuinely intelligent examination of the stresses and backstage politics of showbiz and organised sport by none other than zombie guru George Romero. That's incredibly interesting to find out about, and leaves me very interested in checking this out for myself.

Clash of the Titans is another big blockbuster that they're somewhat disparaging about. The lead actor is absolutely wooden, and a complete pawn in the hands of the gods, who are far more interesting. The mechanical owl obviously wants to cash in on R2D2. The stop-frame work doesn't look convincing and blend well with the real action. Special effects technology has a long way to go to make truly fantastical fantasy convincing.



Media: We tackle another interesting topic that thankfully has got better over the decades, that of the hassles of back catalogues. A retailer has to carefully manage their shelf inventory for maximum sales, as most products sell a lot when first released and then slow to a trickle, and it's hard to tell what will become a perennial seller that needs regular reprints. If you get it wrong and don't purge occasionally, you end up with a load of crap that just sits there forever. This is further compounded by the issues of warehouse stock. You don't want to just destroy it, but keeping stuff for years costs money, and it's tricky to get it to the right place at the right time to sell the remainder of it. The joys of ordering off the internet have gone a long way towards letting us find old, rare, and obscure things, and the combination of preorders to accurately judge demand, and electronic products with optional print on demand that don't require any physical space also helps keep companies from losing money by making too many copies of their products. Once again, this makes it very clear that the past might be an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, as there's just so many more conveniences now. It's good to get perspective.



Books: Savage Empire by Jean Lorrah is correctly predicted as the kind of novel that wants to be the start of a series, as it creates two mutually antagonistic kinds of supernatural powers, and then does it's worldbuilding around the interplay of those abilities and the human drama that results. The reviewer isn't entirely convinced by the worldbuilding, and is distinctly unimpressed by the political stance of the book, but still finds it an interesting read anyway. If you like the romantic fantasy subgenre, this'll make for a good way to pass a few days.

Sword of the Lamb by M. K. Wren also looks like it could run and run, as it's basically a historical family drama, only set in the future. (which is only mildly more technologically advanced than their present, and almost definitely less advanced than the real changes that have happened in computing over the past 30 years) Once again, they find it addictive in a junk food kinda way, but don't think the worldbuilding holds up to serious scrutiny. Very few books do, because you'd need to be familiar with virtually every technical discipline in existence to make it completely accurate, and that would get in the way of telling a compelling story.

A Planet in Arms by Donald Barr gets a much more positive review than the last two, with only one little nitpick about philosophy to even things up. Wouldn't we all like to tell the banks where to stick it with their manipulative debt traps and make a society that doesn't depend on them. That's a theme that hasn't changed at all in the intervening decades, even if inflation is somewhat lower than it was then.

Valis by Philip K. Dick gets an ambivalent review. Is he really a genius, or just a purveyor of drug-fuelled gibberish who gets critically acclaimed because people don't understand it, so it must be deep. Now that's a can of worms if you want a debate. That kind of psychedelic thing has fallen out of fashion since then, and there's probably a good reason for that. If you're going to be experimental, they should be different experiments each time, not repeating the same experiment without learning from it.

Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson also has some profoundly silly drug-fueled bits in it, but is a more coherent story, and so gets higher marks. As is often the case, what you juxtapose something with can have a big impact on if it seems good or not.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe gets unstinting praise as an epic fantasy series done the way it should be, taking the protagonist from lowly torturer to world-conquering hero through all sorts of fantastical adventures. Another case where the books that'll be remembered decades later actually got spotted successfully by the critics.

Too Long a Sacrifice by Mildred Downey Broxon is the story of what happens to a couple who've spent centuries in faerie lands, and then get out, only to find themselves in the middle of the irish Troubles. The juxtaposition of ancient myths and modern explosives provides plenty of opportunity for drama and plot twists, and this time the one minor criticism is about stilted dialogue. Still worth revisiting to remind us how close violence has always been even in "civilised" countries, and how easily it could break out again.

Dragonslayer also gets a review here, placing the book in context with the film version. It's obviously a straight conversion of the script, and suffers a little for this, but still makes an entertaining story. If you only choose one though, go for the movie.



Games: Amoeba Wars gets a slightly disappointed review, as it's not about wars between amoebas, but humans vs giant space amoeba. It's not entirely negative, but they're as nitpicky as ever about little details and how they could be different. This is what happens when you let professional designers become reviewers. They overthink stuff normal players wouldn't even notice.

War of the Worlds completely changes things from the book so we can have a viable game in which the human and martian players have approximately equal chances of winning, and the reviewer is somewhat scathing about using a property if you're going to miss the point of it. They're also not particularly impressed with the system, which is mathematically simple enough that they'd worked out the optimal tactics for both players within a couple of plays. Not one worth keeping and remembering.

High Fantasy and it's adventure book also gets a review that carefully lists out good and bad points of the rules, but ultimately comes down on the negative. It might have a universal resolution mechanic and be better organised than D&D, but it's still no Runequest in terms of design stylishness and setting depth. Really, it feels like bandwagon jumping from the publisher, as they've spotted a new market, and want some of that money. Yeah, there's going to be a lot more fantasy heartbreakers like this along in the next few years. If you want a game that survives, it has to establish it's own identity, not just be generic fantasy RPG no 1653.



Designer's Notes: This article is heavily spoileriffic, talking about the development of the games in the next three issues, and how their rules work. As such, there's some interesting stuff here, but I think I'll pass lightly, and save detailed talk for when I actually get to them. They also warn about a postal strike, which is also vaguely amusing. That's another thing that hasn't changed much.



Feedback: This is much the same as usual, but with lots of new game ideas submitted for consideration. The most notable is a wargame based on the Thomas Covenant series, which seems to me like COMPLETELY missing the point of the books to the point where it's funny. (which is extra ironic in light of the earlier War of the Worlds review.) They also want to play in Robert Adam's War of the Horseclans setting, Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series, and have two different ideas for Invasion America, along with the plentiful ideas for Dragonquest and Universe. Are they doing this before or after they get the licenses to do so? Where does getting the permission of the authors come in, and what happens if the public is vocally negative about the idea of the game after they've already committed to doing it? These things can be such a headache. After all, look what happened to Eden Studios after Buffy left. Was that also a factor in SPI's mounting debts? Another case where I'd really like to know more about the behind the scenes mechanics of things to form a better opinion.



DragonNotes: Another single page article here that's half upcoming products, half Sage Advice. One setting book, one adventure, and one more general GM advice supplement, they're still covering their bases sensibly in this area, even if they really could do with some more player focussed material. The new rules are probabilities for weapon breakage, which is one of those gritty things that shows up over and over, yet most players ignore, so I can't see this one becoming essential. Just another day at the office, I'm afraid. Wake me when they do something bigger.



DeltaVee: The game is moved to it's own separate insert, which results in it's being moved to the back of the .pdf (Which ironically, is the opposite of what happened over the course of the Dragon Magazine scans.) As you can guess from the name, it's an attempt at realistic space combat where momentum is conserved from turn to turn unless you actively change it, fuel is limited, and controlling them crucial to your tactics. This requires keeping a log book each turn, so while it can work for more than two players fighting, it does rack up in complexity of interactions fairly quickly, as actions are interleaved to simulate the slow reaction times of spaceships and force you to anticipate your opponent's moves to succeed. Spaceships are statted up in terms of pods, which each add a certain amount of capabilities onto the overall ship, and are destroyed individually, which gives ships a very definite death spiral in combat. The whole thing is designed to be slotted into the Universe RPG as their tactical space combat system, so it's quite open to new things being added in terms of ships and equipment. It's all pretty easy to understand, and is one I could see myself, not only using, but kitbashing to expand the scope. It's a good bit of joined-up thinking, and shows they're thinking about their games as an ecosystem rather than just a bunch of games. Two thumbs up.



Once again the amount of gaming material gradually sneaks upwards, and diversifies in form, making this a very different magazine from when it first started, and somewhat less accessible to newcomers. It still has some interesting bits, but then again, it also has some very dull ones too. It still feels like much harder work doing this than Dragon, as it's so much less familiar to me, but it's starting to cohere into it's own picture. Time to get to double figures, and see where that takes us.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 10 - The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat: September 1981



55 pages. Well, this is a very interesting tie-in to see indeed. Harry Harrison's roguish adventurer gets the big tie-in game this month. Given his adventures are as much puzzles as they involve personal danger, that definitely has potential for a different kind of game in here. Will it accurately simulate the books? Definitely hoping this one does it's source material justice.



Muse: Yet again, they make it clear that the amount of gaming material is only going to increase, but their magazines' material is going to stay segregated, with Ares taking the fantastical stuff, and Moves handling all the historical and modern day topics. They also solicit for articles, as like any magazine, they can't do it all alone, and freelancers are cheaper than full time staff. An involved readership putting their own twists on the companies ideas makes for much more interesting games than everything being written in house, as we also saw all too well in Dragon as it changed over the years. I wonder if they'll actually get any in the time they have remaining, or if it'll be mostly the TSR incarnation that deals with that.



Designer's Notes: One adventure and two new games promoted in here. An RPG is nothing without a few modules, so Universe has it's own ones in the pipeline, to come out very soon after the core set. Meanwhile, the standalone stuff they want us to know about are Ghostship and Star Trader, both space based sci-fi games, but very different in scope and playstyle. Horror exploration, or economics, which sounds more fun to you? I'll wager horror is the more immediate sell, but economics has more long-term complexities that make for greater replayability. If only there were some way to combine the two.



The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat: Unsurprisingly, the fiction this month is pure tie-in written by Harry Harrison himself, showing us how the adventure could go. (spoilers, but not really, as in the actual adventure a big chunk of the challenges are randomly generated, so this is only one of many options) He's called upon to rescue a space station who's computer has gone haywire. Hijinks and double-crosses ensue, as he has to not only figure out how to get too and fix the computer, but find out who sabotaged it in the first place. While short and obviously written to formula compared to the actual books, you'd expect that, as what's the point of getting the licence if you're not going to make a representative example of them. It's still a fun bit of sci-fi heist adventure that doesn't take itself seriously. You could well use his adventures as inspiration in a more modern system like Leverage as well.



Science for Science Fiction: These two columns go back on individual pages instead of being interleaved. Along with the usual stuff about the cosmos, we also have a rather more down to earth piece about the horrors of modern grain growing, and how creating hybrid crops that don't breed true and need recreating each year can leave farmers dependent upon a big company, and a weird bit of advertising for maps of the other planets in the solar system that feels like cross-promotion, and leaves me interested, but also dubious. They'll definitely have been well and truly supplanted by the modern day.



Facts for Fantasy: The information this month shows how things can have interestingly contradictory elements. Charlemagne was tough on his sons, but completely spoiled his daughters. African kings might be supreme rulers, but several countries had strong superstitions against them crossing rivers, or even seeing the sea, which means for all their authority, they were limited in strange ways. Siva is both the god of destruction and creation, aeseticism and fertility, because they see these things as part of a cycle rather than opposed. Some more reminders that reality is complex and messy, and you need some of that if you want your fantasy world to feel real.



Film & Television: Outland is grimy, claustrophobic sci-fi about drug abuse and corporate corruption in a mining colony on Io. As is frequent with sci-fi this allows them to engage in social commentary by filing off the serial numbers and giving the issues a more interesting backdrop. Low on special effects, and high on cynicism, it's interesting, but hardly light entertainment. These guys love it, unsurprisingly, as it fits their worldview to a tee.

Escape from New York is somewhat less intellectual, but there's still a fair amount of craft to the action-packed tale of future dystopia where only Snake Plissken is a bad enough hombre to save the president. Despite being set in a future that's well into the past by now, and not an accurate prediction at all, it still holds up as entertainment. (although definitions of fast-paced have also changed since then with digital editing making more and faster cuts easy.) Definitely one I'm pleased to have been reminded of and rewatched.

Dragonslayer gets slightly late coverage by this column as well. As you'd expect, it gets a strongly positive review, pointing out all it's strong points, and carefully avoiding any weaknesses. They've got a stake in this being a success, and if the film flops, then their tie-ins don't stand much chance, so the usual cynicism of their reviewers is duly suspended.



Media: The massive cynicism about the workings of the entertainment industry resumes with this piece on cable TV. On the plus side, you get to enjoy movies uncut and uncensored, which is a powerful draw to those who crave nudity in a pre-internet world, or dislike intrusive adverts every 15 minutes. On the negative side, they still lose a fair bit in the translation from a massive wide screen in a custom built room with surround sound to a little 4:3 aspect ratio box. And then there's the political aspect, where particular channels snap up exclusive rights, and movies appear on the small screen faster than they used too, making you question if it's worth spending the money on going out to the cinema in the first place. As usual, much of this has got better in the intervening years, as TV's are far higher resolution than they used to be, the internet has made network censorship laughable, and intelligence demanding long-form serialised storytelling has become far more common since it's easy to buy entire series and watch them on your own schedule. And somehow, there's still demand for cinema as well, despite all the naysaying that it's going to be replaced, it still has a profitable niche in society. So as usual, this manages to make me feel a little better by showing how things have improved over the past generation in quite specific quantifiable ways. And barring the outright collapse of civilisation, they aren't the kind of things that go backwards either, which is extra positive.



Books: Star Drifter by Dale Aycock gets one of those reviews where the reviewer gets distracted and goes off on a rant about the overall state of the industry and changing of fashion. Space Opera may be out of fashion at the moment, but this book is still a good example of it, and makes for fun reading unless you're going to be a snob about stuff like that.

War Games by Karl Hansen continues the space opera theme, although it contains more explicit sex and violence than they could get away with in the 30's. There are certain advantages to revisiting a genre once hindsight and technology lets you do things that were previously impossible and putting new twists on them. Makes me wonder if we'll ever see a revival of Westerns.

Homeworld, Wheelworld, Starworld by Harry Harrison gets a surprisingly mixed review given that he's being featured in this issue, mainly because he's trying to be serious here, which doesn't quite suit his writing style. A spoonful of sarcasm helps the moralising go down in a more memorable way. Trying to be a "proper artiste" is a trap that has ruined the career of many an entertainer. Don't fall for it.

Space Doctor by Lee Correy takes us back to hard sci-fi, examining the challenges of medicine in orbit, including microgravity, radiation, and highly limited resources. The kind of thing that would be quite different if it was written today, as we have a lot more information about what happens to people spending extended amounts of time in low orbit. (and the effects aren't good for potential interplanetary explorers, including bone degeneration, muscle wastage and longsightedness.) As with a lot of big idea sci-fi, the actual plot comes second to the science, so this probably hasn't aged well as a story.

Vampires of Nightworld by David Bischoff keeps the sci-fi theme, and does vampires as genetically engineered disease, which allows them to play up the uncontrollable urges from infection while retaining some humanity element. Once again, it gets a mostly positive review, which means this column is being a lot more lenient than usual. I suppose vampires are perennially popular in their many forms, so it's not too surprising.

Schrodinger's Cat II by Robert Anton Wilson is an examination of quantum theory and parallel universes that in practice, takes the form of a whole load of semi-interconnected short stories that thoroughly stretch the concept of narrative and continuity in all sorts of weird ways. Like Philip K Dick, this will divide the readership, with some loving it, and others being baffled. Sounds like a worthy challenge to me.



The Camp of Alla-Akabar: Our second DragonQuest adventure moves away from the dungeon crawl formula a little more, with an adventure that they intend you to solve through roleplaying or stealth. It still follows the formula of being hired by a mysterious person to rescue their kidnapped daughter, but this time the kidnappers are a nomadic bunch of Bedouin, with the only supernatural monsters a hobgoblin (who is still one of the most complex and well developed characters) and a few sand golems. So while this might not pass the political correctness test today, it has a fair bit of depth to it, and has lots of opportunity for plot and roleplaying without being at all railroady. It also has some designers notes that detail how it turned out for him in actual play, which is very promising indeed, as that shows it's actually been tested, not just shovelled out there. And it's pretty easy to convert to D&D if that's what you'd prefer, which makes it even more likely I'll get some use out of it at some point. Two thumbs up.



DragonNotes: Gerry Klug, the writer of the DragonQuest adventure, also takes over this column, which means the first half is just getting to know him (and presenting his credentials, which seems kinda pointless in a hobby less than a decade old. You're all just starting, you don't have anything to prove apart from how well you can write and how good your ideas are. And since you managed to come up with a pretty good adventure last article, I'll forgive the rest of this one being realism heavy new rules about riding various types of animals, which might be handy, but are also quite dull to read. Looks like things'll be staying on the gritty side for his tenure, however long that'll be.



DeltaVee Enhanced: Another revisiting of their existing games to give them more longevity. Five new scenarios for DeltaVee, which instantly doubles your options, along with a few new ship types. (including a ghost ship that's indestructible and only there to troll players) There's a pretty decent variety of scenarios here, and they introduce the idea of alien threats that were absent in the original. So I can see why they didn't lead with these, as it's easier to start conservative and then become more gonzo with time. And thankfully a boardgame will never get the kind of accumulated continuity that strangles comics and RPG settings, no matter how popular it becomes, because you'll rarely be using more than one add-on at a time, and you can always turn the options off again. This is the kind of thing I can see myself using, so I approve of this article as well.



There's only one Universe: Gerry Klug gets a third article in quick succession, which shows how much he's doing for the company at the moment. This is another of those promotional ones trying to sell their upcoming Universe system, which I must admit is dragging on a bit. Hurry up and release it, so you can start selling supplements instead of going over what's in the core set again in greater detail. I know it's a big involved process, especially when trying to simulate entire star systems in an accessible way, but you can't keep on going on about it without giving me advertising fatigue. Let's skip onwards and see if they manage to get any further with this next issue.



Games: Griffin Mountain gets a fairly positive review that shows once again they think Runequest is the RPG that does things mostly right, even if they still put some D&Disms in there out of reflex or the desire to sell. As a mostly self-contained area in a bigger world, it has plenty of opportunities for adventure without making you reliant on a plethora of other sourcebooks (which don't exist yet anyway.) and the formatting makes it easy to read and reference, which is important when working on the fly. Hopefully other companies will learn from it in their own worldbuilding efforts.

The Lords of Underearth also gets a positive review, although in the process they take shots at a whole bunch of other minigames that they think suck. It takes advantage of the underground theme by creating tunnels and creatures of varying sizes, so there's places the big ones can't fit, while the smaller ones still have to struggle with co-ordinating their forces. If you think you could have done better than the dwarves in the hobbit against a marauding dragon, this is the system to play it out in.



Feedback: The exceedingly specific questions this month turn to your electronic equipment, asking if you own various things like a video player, camera, stereo, video games, and even a digital watch. They also ask if you belong to clubs involving the analysis and sharing of these various types of media. It reminds us that many things we take for granted were just being introduced then, and were an indicator of your socioeconomic status, and the lack of an internet forced you to actually physically go and see people if you wanted to discuss and develop a consensus on the latest releases. With a more efficient system developed, those kind of things gradually wither away like vestigial organs. On the gaming side, they have ideas for games based on James Bond and the Amber chronicles, and float the idea of spinning off a magazine dedicated to roleplaying, so ARES can concentrate on the fantastical war and boardgaming. Once again overestimating their long-term survival prospects, but you've got to keep on trying, especially since RPG's are a growth industry while wargaming is now in decline.



The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat: It's finally time for the stainless steel rat (and his mechanically superior wife) to save the day. For a second time, they do their best to squeeze an entire choose your own adventure book into 16 pages at the back of the magazine. It's a tall order, but they can pull it off, which just goes to show how inefficient most books are when they put pleasing layout over maximum density of information. On the other hand, the sheer density of information, and the very heavy reliance on random rolls to generate the challenges means I have no idea what this will turn out like in actual play, and suspect replays will look quite different each time. Make your way through the space station, facing both out of control robots and treacherous employees. When things don't go your way, decide whether you take actual damage, or raise the suspension of disbelief meter to represent his talent for getting out of scrapes in ridiculously improbable ways. So this is not only quite cool as a game, but also a precursor of RPG's with dramatic editing, fate points, and similar systems that allow the players control of the narrative. Anyone know of any even older games that did this, as I know it wasn't common then, but I don't know who did it first?



A noticeably more positive issue than most of them, with most of their coverage actively enthusiastic about whatever they're tackling. (with the continued exception of the media column. ) Not sure if that would be a good thing if taken even further, but along with the continued increase in gaming material, it's definitely worth noting. Too far that way lies becoming a pure promotional house organ, although I don't think they'll get that far in the time remaining. I could be wrong though. Let's find out if the next issue continues the same trends.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 11 - Albion: Land of Faerie: November 1981



55 pages. Just from looking at the cover, we can once again tell that they've put way more work into designing a setting and backstory for this issue's game than they needed too. A History of the Troll/Elf war? This definitely sound like it might be mineable for RPG use as well as wargaming. Let's see how the supernatural element here makes this different from straight historical reenactment and what interesting things they do with the material.



Muse: Steaming enthusiastically ahead in the editorial. DragonQuest won best roleplaying game at Origins this year, and has already sold out it's original printing, so they're planning a new edition. Whatever it was that killed the company, that certainly wasn't it. Maybe it was dabbling in computer games, which are an order of magnitude more expensive to develop and do well than pen & paper based games, as you don't have the same leeway with loose rules when it's a machine rather than a human interpreting and implementing them. Far bigger companies have been killed by a single heavily hyped game flopping or getting stuck in development hell. Seeing them try to get into that field when I know there's going to be a big crash in a couple of years definitely gets my attention, and not in a good way. What will come of this?



A History of the Third Formorian War: Unsurprisingly, when it comes to detailing the fae, they go straight to Celtic myth and try to assemble a timeline from a bunch of the stories within. Since they're approaching this from a wargame perspective, they're considerably drier about it than say, Changeling: the Dreaming's mythic age, but a lot of the names and broad details are the same. (particularly the ending, where all the conflict is ultimately rendered irrelevant by humanity and the fading of magic, whoever wins.) It covers 7 months of conflict, which doesn't seem like a huge amount of time compared to modern wars, but I guess even the fae have to time their wars around the weather back then. I guess that indicates the game will be on the gritty side of things with the supernatural elements just a replacement for modern technology rather than massively warping space and time at their whim. Well, at least I know what to expect. We'll see if they come up with some big twist when we get that far through the issue.



Chichevache: We stay in the same place but skip forward a few centuries for some amusing Arthurian fiction featuring a young Mordred as the protagonist. While still a fair way away from overthrowing the kingdom, he's already sneaky, dishonorable, disrespectful, lecherous, and generally an all-round cad. This of course makes him perfect for solving problems by using his brain that would get any ordinary knight killed, as he faces a massive ogre with some very distinct fairytale style quirks that he can exploit to it's downfall. a highly entertaining read that also fits the theme of the issue. I strongly approve.



The Power Points of Albion: Continuing the theme, an article on ancient stone circles, chalk figures carved into hills, and similar cool landmarks of the UK. There's a rich history of them, and the legends associated with them, that can and has had massive books written about it. So this is one of those articles that's not exactly bad, but feels a bit shallow to me, as it's tackling a topic that I've already read about in orders of magnitude more detail. Thankfully, it includes a bibliography at the end, so check those books out if you want to know about the real meat of British mythological geography. Your campaign settings will thank you for it.



You Against the System: A rather interesting article on solitaire gaming here, showing us the current state of both procedurally controlled solo wargames, and choose your own adventure style games where you reference a paragraph, make a choice and possibly roll the dice, and see where the story takes you from there. Includes plenty of notes on SPI's recent games in this style, and why they designed them in the way they did. A very cool historical snapshot that's well worth referencing if you're investigating the history of solo adventure books, and want a contemporary perspective on them. They would have been much bigger if computer games hadn't come along and competed for the same leisure time and money with better graphics and a faster pace.



Science for Science Fiction: Two large ideas and one amusing little one in here this month. The brightness of stars varies a lot by wavelength, and wide range spectrographic analysis can reveal a lot about their composition and even the things surrounding them. Tectonic plates are messy complicated things, and only the slowness with which they move compared to our lifespan
lets us have any illusion of stability. There's even places where whole chunks get turned on their side, completely messing up the usual rock strata. And preservation of fossils is an even more unpredictable thing. The tiniest amount of exposure to the outside world will increase the rate of deterioration by orders of magnitude. Which is why finding complete dinosaur fossils is so rare and celebrated when it does happen.


Facts for Fantasy: This column is in theme this month, with all it's sections focussed on celtic lore. Although it can't resist being pedantic and pointing out that although that's what we call them, it's not what they called themselves, and there were previous ethnic groups that they conquered and displaced in turn when they arrived in the British isles. There's also some speculation on how they built those massive stone circles, and the expected stuff on their gods. Nothing too surprising then, apart from being more connected to the wider picture in the magazine this month.



Film & Television: Heavy Metal is our only review here, the anthology film based on the magazine. It gets a very critical review, pointing out that while it may look cool in places, as an overall product it's a complete mess, with a nonsensical framing device, stories that go nowhere, egregious sexism, gratuitous gore and nudity, and inconsistent animation. Not going to argue with that analysis, as even the people who like it do so because of those things. Sometimes you're in the mood to get a bit gratuitous, and at least it's an interesting failure rather than a boring one.



Media: This column's grumbles are unusually incoherent this month. Film is becoming more like TV, and TV is becoming more like film? I fail to see the problem. Remakes, sequels and adaptions are more common than original material? Same as it ever was. Stories get watered down either due to censorship, or a desire to preserve the status quo and string out the series longer to maximise profits? Yeah, those are genuine problems, but it's not as if they're new in any way, even back then. It all seems a bit unfocussed, and like they're just grumbling because that's what this column has got into the habit of doing rather than because they have any good ideas about what to complain about. Neither as informative or as entertaining as usual.



Books: Dream Park by Larry Niven & Steven Barnes gets a quite positive review. The whole virtual reality thing was big then, and technology has only made it more relevant, so it's not surprising this has stood the test of time and been adapted and sequelised repeatedly. Well worth revisiting.

Octagon by Fred Saberhagen is a murder mystery built around intrigue in a play-by-mail game. Since it relies on what was once cutting edge technology, it'll definitely seem a bit weird today, but the fundamentals of the story could still work, especially the stuff involving manipulation of computer records, which would be even more terrifying in the internet age.

The House Between Worlds by Marion Zimmer Bradley is a fantasy novel which also features the characters within roleplaying, and speculating that it was introduced by planehoppers to make people more receptive to their existence. The main plot is pretty good too, making the reviewer happy to give this one good marks. Always interesting to see writers deconstruct their own conventions.

Their Majesties' Bucketeers by L. Neil Smith takes a potentially very alien tripedal and tri-gendered alien race and makes their adventures and society entirely relatable and entertaining. There's a little bit of using the sci-fi elements for real world social commentary, but it's not as obtrusive as the author's previous works. Another one they recommend.

Systemic Shock by Dean Ing gets a somewhat more mixed review, as while his tale of WWIV is entertaining, the course of future history it takes strains their credulity. At this point, I'm not going to worry about that, given how inaccurate most serious predictions of the future have turned out.

Schrodinger's Cat III by Robert Anton Wilson continues the semiconnected stories about the nature of quantum mechanics, consciousness, alternate universes, and reality in general. This time, the concept of value gets particularly focussed upon. What exactly is value, and why do we value things? As before, the humour helps the big philosophical ideas go down in the most delightful way.

Starspinner by Dale Aycock gets a review that's mostly complementary of the writing, but very critical of the cover and font it's printed in. The publisher needs to step up their formatting game, or they'll drive people away through rookie errors, because people do judge a book by it's cover.

Shadow of the Swan by M. K. Wren continues from the book reviewed in issue 9. As with that, it's entertaining reading, but don't expect the philosophical depth some of the other reviews here offer. Sometimes you're in the mood for popcorn, and there's nothing wrong with that.



Games: Star Patrol gets the lion's share of this column, a full 1+1/2 pages in which they detail plenty of both positive and negative points, before ultimately coming down on the negative side. It has some cool ideas, but it's nowhere near comprehensive enough for the reviewer, and the art direction & writing are at odds with one-another. They're hard to satisfy in here.

Arms Law & Spell Law for Rolemaster (well, they will be, even though they're currently being sold as a generic system, and they were blatantly intended as unofficial D&D add-ons at first) get a collective review. They epitomised ridiculously complicated "realistic" gaming back then with vast spell lists and brutal critical hit tables, and it's a reputation they've kept over the years. These reviewers are no exception, being fairly scathing about both the minor errors in historical accuracy, and how slowly the whole thing goes in actual play due to all the looking stuff up and cross-referencing for every roll. Yeah, I think I'll continue to pass on this one. Hindsight has changed nothing.

The Wizard & the Princess is our first computer game review. It's a text controlled RPG adventure, but includes full color images that the reviewer finds quite impressive. As with many games of the time, it's pretty brutal, and it'll take a lot of trial and error just to get out of the starting village, let alone explore everywhere and finish the game. Good luck getting through it without using a guide.

Bill Budge's Space Album is one of those compilations of minigames that were common in those days, all with a sci-fi theme, unsurprisingly. This gets a positive review, as all the games are short but fun, and the graphics are quite good by the standards of the day. These day's, there's no way one person could produce and release that many games on their own in one go.

Planetoids is an obvious rip-off of Asteroids. It still gets a good review as the controls might be a little fiddly, but it's a good version with plenty of adjustable difficulty options to keep you from mastering it and getting bored too quickly. The gaming industry is still young, they aren't going to be sueing each other for making games that are too similar just yet. OR ARE THEY?! (spoiler, they totally were)



DragonNotes: In fitting with their love for random generation, here they have a system for creating random NPC's, for when you find yourself completely devoid of inspiration, but need to keep the game going anyway. This is of course interesting because it lets us get a look at what the designer considers good demographics in DragonQuest's default setting. More helpful than hostile, more spellcasters than nonspellcasters, the obvious races are by far the most common. It's not so much intended as a wandering monster generation method, as it is a means of regulating what the PC's can learn, by controlling how hard they'll have to work to find someone who can teach them a particular skill. Which is definitely not the set of priorities I would have chosen. (I'm not fond of requiring a teacher rules in games in the first place, as it downplays the ability of people to innovate and come up with the same ideas independently from first principles reality demonstrates. ) It shows his desires to make a good game, and to simulate a world are somewhat at odds. So I don't see myself ever using this, even if I did play DragonQuest, but it's still interesting to read and reveal more about their design philosophy.



Feedback: Having been around for a while now, their new questions include if you've subscribed to the magazine, and if so, for how long. The new ideas they're floating include a Universe supplement covering Larry Niven's Known Space, a mass combat system for DragonQuest, (cannibalised from one of their other systems, of course.) Along with the usual fantasy and sci-fi standalones, they also float an idea for a game of pulp serial cliffhangers, and what looks suspiciously like proto-cyberpunk in the judge dredd mould. Even if they haven't invented some of the terms we use today, the underlying conditions that produce those lines of thinking are already there. That's quite interesting to see.



Designer's Notes: This column is quite honest about the struggles facing a line developer trying to create good game material. Sometimes you've got to be prepared to tell your writers that what they've done sucks, and they'll need to redo it, or else you'll have to heavily edit it anyway. Sometimes you realise your rules design has led to a dead end, and need to throw big chunks of it out and start again if you want to improve. This is particularly the case when dealing with freelancers, who may be writing hundreds of miles away where every bit of communication costs. (or at least, did back then) So yeah, there's going to be a book full of new magic types for DragonQuest, which hopefully will not be horribly broken after editing is through with them. The second edition is going to be substantially streamlined. (which might break those magic systems anyway if they weren't edited with the new edition in mind) Their standalone games have similarly convoluted developments. Once again, this is all the more interesting because of it's cynicism and honesty, not trying to sanitise the complexities of the creative process. Everyone goes through it, some just try to pretend they don't. This is why you don't try to set a strict schedule for creative work. It only leads to disappointment or burnout unless you have plenty of people and budget to spread the load.



Albion: Land of Faerie: So it's time for the Elves and Formorians to go to war over the fate of albion. They certainly manage an impressive scale, squeezing the UK into an 8 page fold out hex map that'll fill a lot of tables when spread out all the way. (and printing out in it's original size will be an obstacle if you want to play this from the .pdf) With a scale like this, the size of the armies is fairly abstracted, the length of turns is quite long (each one represents 2 weeks, so long games could easily last over a year if they didn't implement a time limit in the default scenarios) and given the theme, the power of individual heroes is pretty important. The stats are fairly standard for a game of this type, speed, combat strength for all units, plus magic rating & command strength for the named characters. The places of power detailed earlier in the issue are significant because once taken you can teleport between the ones you hold. There are 13 spells and 23 magic items you can get hold of, and some are quite powerful, particularly the weather ones which can affect the entire board. It's better than I though it was going to be from the conservativeness of the earlier setting material, and looks like there's a lot of tactical depth to the positioning and control of your units, although luck still plays a part in individual engagements. Definitely one I wouldn't mind playing.


With an unusually high proportion of material connected to the theme, this is quite a strong issue, even if their approach is slower and more pedantic than I'd prefer. I guess that's another demonstration of how the improved tools we have for researching, writing, editing and transmitting have speeded up media in general, and it's easy to take that for granted and get impatient with older material. Still, it continues the overall trend of having things more connected up and game focussed. If it continues, they'll soon run out of space for other stuff. Oh well, let's see if the trend accelerates or decelerates in the next issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 12 - Star Trader: January 1982



59 pages. So they've managed to get this game out after a fair bit of development time. Economics IIIIINNNN SPAAACE! How will they abstract that so as to make it interesting to play? They've been dropping little bits of information on this for quite some time. Let's see what the results are.



Muse: The editorial is longer than usual, and tackles a topic I've noted several times in my reviewing. Their hard science pieces are intentionally conservative and pessimistic as a way of presenting contrast to the more fantastical settings of their games. They've got a number of critical letters about those pieces, and this is basically just to confirm that this is entirely intentional, and they intend to keep on doing it, so nyah. You've got to have your fibre or you won't appreciate the sweets as much, and your health will suffer. Yeah, I approve this message, since I've seen what happens when they try to please everyone in every single article and the blandness that results. It's not the way to keep your publication healthy in the long run. On with the show.



New Minds: Appropriately, following straight on from the editorial, we have one of their hard science pieces that seems incredibly dated today, on the problems facing artificial intelligence. Getting computers to understand sensory input, and respond to it in a coherent and useful way is a monumental task, but it gets a lot easier as you increase both the quality of the input, and the quantity of processing power and memory your computer has. And since they were measuring memory in kilobytes back them, while we can comfortably work in terabytes, it's no surprise we've surpassed a lot of the old constraints in things like voice and facial recognition. We still might be some distance away from a machine being truly sentient, and even if we succeeded, it's mind probably wouldn't think like ours, but it's safe to say this is a goal we've made genuine progress towards. (unlike cold fusion, which still seems like just a pipe dream) So this is another of their articles that's interesting precisely because of the pessimism, as it shows what things were like then, and how they've improved in concrete measurable ways. We can and are making progress, although it's often in spite of the government rather than aided by it. It'll be interesting to look back at today's articles decades in the future and see which ones hindsight vindicates as well.



Adventures in Albion: Completely unsurprisingly, they follow up last issue's game with DragonQuest conversions for the stuff described in it. 44 characters, 23 magical items, 13 spells, and some statistical information about how common various things are there. The kind of dense, table based information that TSR used sometimes in the same era, and then increasingly forgot in the interests of padding articles out with waffle to fill space. They aren't particularly nerfed to fit into an RPG either, with the spells still covering vast areas, and the items having sweeping effects with no saving throws. Use with caution, especially in the relatively grounded default DragonQuest setting. Amusing that the stuff based on real world myths would be less balanced than stuff invented just for the game. I guess that's also a pattern I've seen before in D&D as well. Writers of fiction aren't bound by the same standards of fairness, so you need an intelligent GM to keep the game fun despite the unfairness.



The 11 Billion dollar bottle of wine: Our first bit of themed material is another serious hard sci-fi piece about just how big space is, how much fuel it takes to travel at any kind of speed, and how much of a pain in the ass it would be to transport any kind of perishables across that distance. The numbers are quite horrendous, and even if we overcame the mechanical challenges, barring the invention of some kind of faster than light travel, we'd still find it a struggle to make it profitable due to our own lifespans and the short-term thinking inherent to that. Who's willing to spend billions to send a spaceship off in the hope that their descendants will get a multi-trillion windfall a few thousand years later? How do you deal with the prisoner's dilemma when it comes to profiting by mutual sharing of information. How do you even begin to handle sanctions or actual war if you fall out when your reaction time is measured in decades? It's not completely pessimistic, but yeah, it's not an easy task, and unlike AI, this is something we're no closer to accomplishing than we were 30 years ago. If we ever crack it, that'll be a story worth telling.



Designer's Notes: This column continues to be interestingly candid about their struggles to get things done. Too many standalone game ideas, too much demand for Dragonquest supplements, and not enough time or people to get everything they'd like to do done, especially when they go down dead ends, and wind up having to scrap a load of design work and start again. Ever the way with creative endeavours. You either don't have enough time and money to do your dream perfectly, or you're juggling a big bureaucracy and getting everything organised and moving in the right direction is like herding cats. It's no wonder that even big, successful seeming companies can suddenly go under, and you only find out in hindsight how much of a mess they were in.



Startrader!: Our second tie-in is a comic showing a seedy deal going down. (IN SPAAAACE!) Unsurprisingly, the Johnson tries to betray our protagonist, and equally unsurprisingly, the protagonist has taken inventively horrible precautions against betrayal, and comes out on top. Pretty standard narrative arc, made more entertaining by the exceedingly dated fashions of the characters, which manage to be terribly 80's despite being set in the future. This kind of story never gets old as long as the writer can come up with different twists each time, as people love ironically appropriate comeuppances.



Science for Science Fiction: A mix of universal and very specific questions here. Attempts to resolve the paradoxes inherent in infinity and space travel. The mathematics that look elegant on paper are not borne out by the messy reality of how things actually are. The mechanics of creating a fake unicorn to bilk money from rubes. It's not pleasant, but it's not that complicated a procedure. And combining the two, a lecture on the need for absolute lack of ambiguity when communicating with computers. They may not actively try to pervert your instructions like literary demons and genies, but bugs can still cause all kinds of unexpected results that are a real pain to track down and fix. Choosing the right programming language for the right task can make things a lot easier to accomplish.



Facts for Fantasy: As usual, this column tackles more topics in less detail than the science one. Two slightly disjointed bits of information on the runic alphabet, the phonemes it contains, and how it's organised. The creation myth of the Gilbert Islands in the south pacific, which unsurprisingly is heavily shaped by the native creatures and environment. Human imagination can only extrapolate so far beyond it's inputs. The cosmology of the inuits, which seems like pretty standard animism. And the economic classes in 500BC athens. Still true how much more specific the details get the closer we stay to there. They have got to get themselves some new primary sources.



Film & Television: Time Bandits gets a mixed but ultimately positive review. The production problems are pretty obvious in the final product, but it's still a tremendously entertaining film that completely defies categorisation. While working to formulas helps a lot of the time if you want to make something good, sometimes you should just throw them out and see what happens, as novelty is a good thing in itself in the entertainment industry. If it works, you might spawn a whole legion of imitators.



Books: Starship & Haiku by Somtow Sucharitkul gets a mixed review because it's well written, but has a very bleak and depressing worldview indeed. Yeah, preaching ecological doom will do that for you. We might still get there, but it's clear by now that it'll be a long process of things gradually getting more unpleasant, not some big end of the world. Trying to panic people with exaggeration will solve nothing.

Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker mixes extremely high concept mathematics and metaphysical speculation with rather more lowbrow sex, drugs & rock n' roll. The reviewer finds the results interesting, but also rather absurd. Things on a quantum level often do, as they're not intuitive to the physics we see at macro size. You just have to deal with it.

Long shot for Rosinante by Alexis Gilliand isn't bad, but shows the effects of sequelitus and diminishing returns. If you tell basically the same story twice, what's the point of writing it anyway?

Last Communion by Nicholas Yermakov also gets a good result, but not as good as his last novel, which is still a compliment, but doesn't feel like it. The higher you climb, the higher the standards you get held too.

The Janus Syndrome by Steven McDonald gets a short, but unmitigated slating. Shallow, badly written action movie fodder. Not even worth picking apart and mocking.

Lilith: A snake in the Grass by Jack Chalker showcases another of his really weird and interesting worlds, and unconvincing human characterisations.
Goes to show, you need a strange mind to come up with this stuff, and that's it's own benefit and drawback.

Tomorrow's Heritage by Juanita Coulson is a family drama with sci-fi trappings, as a ludicrously megarich family engage in political squabbles, while a potential alien invasion lurks in the background. Seems like good fodder for an HBO adaption.

Reefs by Kevin O'Donnell Jr has an interesting plot, but it struggles to challenge it's protagonist, as he has powerful teleportation and the brains to exploit it logically in devastating ways. He needs an antagonist with similarly flexible capabilities to keep the series from turning into a mary-sue fest.

The Great Rock n Roll Swindle by Michael Moorcock sees him tackling the punk rock phenomenon in his idiosyncratic style. His very british references leave the american reviewer amused but frequently baffled. I suspect it'd be a lot easier to unpick in hindsight with the help of google.

Shadows of Sanctuary by Robert Asprin sees the Thieves world anthologies maintain their high standards, once again showing why they've had lots of longevity and make good inspiration for RPGs. A world built by multiple people can gain a level of complexity no one person could ever manage alone, but not without an editor to keep things consistent.

The Seven Altars of Dusarra by Lawrence Watt-Evans sees a RPGer becoming an author, and incorporating stuff from his campaign into his novels. Now there's something that'll become increasingly common as decades go by.

Lord Darcy Investigates by Randal Garrett is a fantasy detective story where the protagonist uses magic to solve the crimes. Our reviewer doesn't enjoy it much, but can see why other people would. Mysteries in magical worlds have to tread an extra fine line to maintain internal consistency, without which the puzzles are just asspulls, and where's the fun in that for the readers?

The Elves and the Otterskin by Elizabeth Boyer, and The Ring of Allaire by Susan Dexter both get resounding mehs and virtually no descriptive detail. This is not the way to write a satisfying review. If it isn't good or interestingly bad, leave it out. You only have so much space and it would be better spent that way than trying to cover all the shovelware the book companies produce. No sense in spreading yourself too thin.



Media: This column has a complaint that seems particularly bizarrely dated this month. The rise of multiplex cinemas, multiple smaller screens under one roof rather than just one? (and usually part of an even larger mall complex in turn. ) That's been standard for as long as I can remember. Which I guess shows my age, and also that commercialisation is like urbanisation or entropy. You see the state of things when you were young as normal, but there are already many generations of gradual development that they were built on in turn, and there was never a true status quo in nature for more than a few million years at a time. I can't get worked up about this at all, as more choice is a good thing, especially in movies, which are considerably fewer in numbers than songs or books due to the more complex and expensive creation process. Lighten up, Francis.



Games: This column tries to expand by soliciting for freelance reviews, as they simply don't have the time to cover everything that's being released. And you never will, because complete comprehensiveness is impossible in one little bimonthly magazine, especially when you're talking about an industry with lots of small press publishers that can easily slip under the radar. Since I definitely prefer longer, more comprehensive reviews that give the reviewer more opportunity to express their opinions and preferences, I'm not optimistic about this change. But on with the show.

Barbarian Prince gets a mildly negative review, simply because the reviewer has played it several times and hasn't managed to beat it yet. With solitaire games, it's so easy to cheat. You have to include lots of options, many of them wrong, otherwise people will beat them first try and then forget about the game entirely.

Star Viking gets a fairly positive review, as it's rules are detailed, but concisely explained. The Star Vikings vs the Federation seems like a david & goliath battle at first, but they have different win conditions that make the game fairly evenly matched, and the ability to pick different units for your forces each time gives it plenty of tactical elements and replayability. Nothing wrong with a little marauding if it's done in good taste.

Outpost Gamma is a game of natives revolting against their colonial oppressors IIINNN SPAAACE!!! (that never gets old, does it) Unsurprisingly, the humans are outnumbered, but have considerably better equipment. While it looks nice, the rules don't get particularly high marks, as they aren't particularly well balanced or tuned. This can stay in the past along with it's source material.

Demonlord is a game of a human empire trying to avoid being taken over by demonic invaders. It gets a moderately positive review, as it has several different sets of tactics you can use, and none of them is blatantly most powerful. A bit of depth does wonders for replayability.

Champions gets a fairly positive review too, although they wind up giving the edge to Villains & Vigilantes. (the name is certainly more trademarkable.) Given the wild diversity of superhero powers, the systems are always going to have to be widely applicable, and evolve towards genericness, and that's very much the case here, with powers and disadvantages aplenty. It still needs a fair few supplements to make it comprehensive and capable of sustaining extended campaigns though.



RPGaming: Dwellers of the Forbidden City gets a viciously negative review that makes it clear that they think TSR's rapid expansion is already resulting in lowered standards of writing and editing. The plot is paper thin, the cartography is hard to make out, the monsters' positioning and relationships make no sense ecologically, and they no longer have separate descriptions of the rooms to read to players. It's amazing how quickly these kinds of complaints crop up after a company gets going. Same as it ever was.

The Secret of Bone Hill gets a somewhat more positive, but still ultimately ambivalent result. The town is interesting and decently fleshed out, but the dungeon feels perfunctory and there's no actual secret at the end of it, which makes the name seem stupid. It's as if TSR would have liked to do a setting sourcebook, but didn't think it would sell without the dungeon crawl. It's still a long time before they'll really embrace worldbuilding. In the meantime, we had to live with these half-measures, make our own, or move to a game like Runequest that has already massively outpaced TSR in this area. Good thing those days are over, and we have vast amounts of choice in well developed settings to draw inspiration from.



Software: Robot Attack manages to grab the reviewers attention by including actual spoken words in it's sounds. it has several other features that make it cutting edge for it's time too, although it would still be pretty clunky by modern standards. It's amazing just how much data can be compressed if you have good programmers, but some things can only be accomplished with more raw power.

Master Trader is one of those games that tries to do economics IIINNN SPAAACE!!! It gets a so-so review, as it's decently designed, and has some nicely humorous moments, but it's also long and a little too boring for people who prefer their games with lots of action. it's always going to be a niche genre.

Cosmic Trader has exactly the same premise, but isn't implemented as well, being both simpler and more boring in design. It can stay buried in the scrapheap of history with many other mediocre games.



Feedback: The mooted games reach the point where none of them are actually going to be published in the magazine in the future, which is a shame, because the pitches are still pretty cool. Several very different types of interstellar war, some extradimensional exploration, wizardly intrigue and battle, and three potential novel licences, including a second Stainless Steel Rat one. They certainly don't lack for variation or nuance in their game designs. The RPG stuff seems somewhat more generic. DragonQuest rules for priests & religion, and books filled with more treasure and monsters. The only quirky one here is a system for generating adventures using tarot cards, which should stand up to a fair few replays. Well, Ravenloft did something similar, and look how successful that was, so it could well have been a hit for them if they'd got round to it. Once again we wonder about the path not taken with a fair amount of melancholy.



Questing: Lots of new rules material here, compressed into a small space. The push for more informed choice and less randomness in character generation continues to creep through the system, as it will for decades to come. And PC rules for Half-elves, Lizard Men and Giants, which is slightly more adventurous than AD&D had reached in it's official publications at the same point. Each has some quite specific quirks, half-elves getting to choose between mortality & immortality a la Tolkien, lizard-men having some very specific skill benefits & penalties, and giants getting the obvious high physical stats. Seems like pretty decent material if you ever get round to playing the game.



Universe Commlink: As with their DragonQuest setting, they're scrambling to build up the Universe setting, and here's where they elaborate on that. Unsurprisingly, more gear and spaceships are first on the agenda, with more adventures, monsters and alien races following after that. A separate magazine isn't on the agenda yet, but it will be if they can justify it financially. The thing that the public conspicuously didn't want though was underwater & underground expansions, which goes to show, it may be sci-fi, but we still don't want the realistic hassle of dealing with hostile environments in great detail in our gaming. Waterworlds, and ice worlds with underground oceans may look increasingly common in the cosmos as our instruments increase in precision, but we won't be seeing an RPG based entirely in one where no human could venture unprotected anytime soon. Once again shows the limitations to our own imaginations. So many more environments we can't survive in compared to the few we can, but since we live in them, we think they're disproportionately more common than they are. So even the strangest and toughest worlds we create will still be more forgiving than the real ones out there. All the design rigour in the world can't entirely prevent that.



StarTrader: So after an issue in which they've faced their own economic limitations a fair bit, it's time to make a game of it. It's designed to be integrated into the Universe system as a minigame, but can also be played standalone. A lot of effort is put into not only trading physical items, but also information, with a fair bit of blind bidding and different people being told different things, then deciding if they want to keep it to themselves or sell that to other players. It's considerably more complex than monopoly, but like that, once someone gets ahead, they'll tend to pull further ahead until they eventually win unless they get very unlucky with the dice and random events. Reputation and political influence is formalised based on your actions, and has a considerable effect on how the game plays, but you can also make big profits from illegal double-dealing, so whether you play fair or backstab the other players is a genuine choice. As with most of these, they have several variants to increase the replay value, so you can get plenty of use out of it even if you aren't mixing it with your RPGing. The trickiest thing, as ever, is finding enough people to play it with to exhaust all those possibilities.



By integrating the boardgaming and rpging sides of their writing, this issue once again continues the trend of having an increasing amount of material connected to the theme, with only the media reviews really staying out of it. Shows just how quickly a magazine can transform as the writers go from tentatively feeling around, to hitting their stride and finding they have more to say on subjects than they can fit in the periodical format. If only the budget had matched their ambitions. If they were around today, they could manage considerably higher production values with the same resources. Let's see how quickly they carry on progressing next issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 13 - First Contact: Winter 1983



60 pages. So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. In the time between the last issue and this, SPI went bankrupt and TSR nabbed all their intellectual property. Ares laid fallow for a year before they decided to revive it. Although it looks like this issue was pretty much ready to go before the hiatus, as while the backstage staff have changed on the mast, the writers and contents remain exactly the same, at least for this issue. Just as with the TSR-WotC takeover and issue 237 of Dragon, it'll take a few issues for the new masters to decide what they want to change and implement it fully. Let's see how fast and smooth the transition is.



Muse: The editorial, unsurprisingly, is talking about the changeover. And also not too surprisingly, it's talking complete and utter . They're cutting the number of games we get from one every issue to 4 out of 6 per year, yet somehow trying to sell it as an increase. ( I suspect their initial plan was to cut it to every other, then they changed their mind, and forgot they never announced that in the first place, so their attempt to sell this version as an improvement seems very stupid. ) They're going to make the games shorter and less well playtested, as they need to cut costs (the fact that the magazines were being sold by SPI at a loss seems utterly ridiculous, yet unsurprising in hindsight given what I know of other companies that got into the same predicament.) which they also brazenly try to say is a good thing. They plan to make Ares all sci-fi as soon as they burn through their currently contracted articles, and all future Dragonquest articles will be in Dragon. (which makes sense, I guess) Basically, this rubs in that while Ares was an important part of SPI, it's now just a tiny part of TSR, so it gets lower priority than their homegrown properties and will be jerked around as they see fit before eventually being cancelled over the next few years. (all the while gaslighting us that this is a GOOD thing to happen, and anyone who disagrees can go to the cornfield. ) This is all a lot more unpleasant than it seemed when I was reading the same era in Dragon. Goes to show, the nearer the top you are, the smoother life goes, and you can easily not even notice the suffering of those beneath you.



Damocles Mission: In a fairly interesting turnup for the books, the tie-in fiction this month is by Timothy Zahn, best known for doing many Star Wars EU novels, but he's also had a long career writing both original books and other licensed IP. It's presented as in-universe mission logs as a group of astronauts arrive at an unidentified alien artifact, to be presented with a series of increasingly strange and complex puzzles, and then gradually go insane from paranoia (and possibly subliminal messaging of some sort) and kill each other, leaving the big questions unspoiled so you still want to play the game. It's short, and padded out to made to look longer than it is by lots of large illustrations, but the terse tone works to establish the atmosphere and keep the horror slowly mounting more effectively than jump scares, which don't really work in the written medium. So this is pretty good, and if he can turn out stuff like this to spec, I'm not surprised he has a long career in the same vein ahead of him.



Facts for Fantasy: This column has been served notice that it's on the chopping block, so it's not surprising that it's pretty small and unenthusiastic. The reason snakes are associated with evil in egyptian mythology. Surprise surprise, it's due to their fear of death and ritualistic burial practices. The tricks pacific islanders used to navigate by the stars across vast distances. It requires a lot of star chart memorisation, which goes to show how much understanding underlying principles reduces the need to do things by rote. And finally some very basic info indeed on historical bards. As usual, the sheer basicness of this stuff leaves me very unsatisfied. I shall not mourn it.


Science for Science Fiction: This column once again gives us info that has since been proven wrong. DNA testing has shown that neanderthals didn't just die out, they DID interbreed with various other proto-human subspecies, there's a fair amount of it still in modern people, and we can track our ancestor's movements to a surprisingly high degree simply via various genetic markers. It's nice to see progress being made, and for that reason, I shall probably miss this column a little more.



The Space Shuttle: These fact heavy, pessimistic articles are unlikely to survive long either under the new management, but as with FfF, why not use up the ones they had already. So here we have a math heavy piece on the capabilities, and more importantly the limitations of the space shuttle. It's definitely not like in the movies, where getting too and surviving in space is a relatively minor speedbump on the way to more spectacular adventures. Getting out of earth's gravity well requires massive amounts of power, and keeping everything sealed enough for astronauts to survive for any length of time is a serious engineering and ecological challenge. (and space is big, so it takes a long time to get places. ) This demonstrates precisely why we haven't travelled to other planets or set up long-term space colonies, as the energy costs and engineering challenges may not be insurmountable, but they'd require a far larger budget to get anything serious done, and it'd still take years to design and build new improved spacecraft. If an alien spaceship showed up in our solar system right now, we'd be woefully unprepared to scramble out anything to investigate or counter it. Really, our whole method of using tons of non-renewable petrochemical fuel to launch is hugely wasteful, and we'd be better served by a solar powered maglev based method of acceleration, preferably built on the moon, where there's reliable sunlight and no weather or atmospheric drag to disrupt launches. (but we'd still have to get there and set up a self-sustaining colony somehow) It is indeed pretty depressing, as despite all the advancements in technology in 35 years, we're still no closer to making this work, and using the existing things we have well past when they should have been retired instead of replacing them with better due to budget cuts. Absolutely no Wahoo to be had here at all.



StarTrader Game Enhanced: As they often do, they follow up last issue's game with some optional rules to fill in gaps and encourage replays. Boarding ships, insuring your cargo, bribery and corruption. The kind of stuff that depends heavily on individual interaction rather than macroeconomics, and so pushes this in the direction of being a full rpg rather than just a boardgame. Which since it's already integratable with the Universe system, seems mildly redundant if you want to go full sandbox, but sometimes you want that crunchy middle ground to keep the game from getting sidetracked. Seems decent enough, as usual. Hopefully reducing playtesting won't make them introduce obvious errors to these expansions.



Games: Fifth Frontier War gets a lengthy and overall positive review. Marc Miller creates a wargame steeped in lore from the Traveller RPG yet still functional standalone, that models the logistics of large scale space travel somewhat realistically. There's FTL, but it does consume vast amounts of fuel, so finding places to refuel is a big deal. You can't send messages FTL except by carrying them in a ship, so you have to give orders well in advance and hope they still make sense in the everchanging battle situation. if you can deal with the system heaviness it sounds pretty good. Another interesting spinoff from a game that still has plenty of fans today.

Ultra-Warrior doesn't impress them so much, being a basic game of one-on-one combat between super soldiers. Serviceable, but nothing particularly ambitious or innovative. There's a ton of other games that could do the same job.

Helltank sees the creators of OGRE return to the same well, with another game about ridiculously powerful future vehicles fighting large numbers of other ones. This one seems faster and simpler than that, but there's still plenty of tactical fun to be had here. Diminishing returns may be an issue, but that doesn't mean this is worse than it's precursor. Wargaming has shrunk in the intervening years as well, so it's not surprising this is less remembered in hindsight.

Starfire III:Empires builds on Starfire I & II to the point where the rules get a bit unwieldy, as interstellar empires are always going to be huge and difficult to model in a game. This is not helped by the fact that the writing and editing is not the greatest, so the reviewer is left unclear on a few points. Some systems just weren't built to be scaled up effectively.



Software: Space Ace 21 (not to be confused with the many other Space Aces, as it's a very common title) is a game of ship to ship combat. Assemble your craft, fight a bunch of different scenarios, and when you get bored, hack the system to increase the variety of opponents. Ah, the days when BASIC was a simple enough programming language any kid could deconstruct and mess around with their own games, changing variables and seeing how the game got easier or harder in response. I definitely miss that.

Meteor Mission II, on the other hand, gets a competent but dull verdict. There's nothing obviously wrong with it, but it's pretty easy and repetitive. Might be worth playing in an arcade once, but not buying.

Oo-Topos is a good old fashioned text adventure, boasting that it understands over 70 different verb classes. As usual with these things, the puzzles involve not only figuring out what to do, but how to communicate it in the computer's vocabulary. It'd be a lot easier to complete these days, but since I never particularly enjoyed this genre, I have no desire to do so.



Damocles Mission: Our game this time is another solitaire one with plenty of random elements to keep it challenging in replays. As set up in the fiction, you explore the innards of an alien spaceship that recently appeared above earth and try to figure out how to work it. Pick your team and the gear they bring with them wisely, because having a well-rounded skillset will definitely improve your odds. They encourage replay by a system that gives you more time in your next game if you did badly, or less if you won particularly well, so the difficulty will naturally scale to your competence level over repeated replays, and you can work to increase your rating. Since it's a fairly complicated game, you'll probably need those extra goes to really get the hang of it. So another interesting variant on the choose your own adventure idea that's growing in popularity in that era.



Universe Commlink: As is usual with a new system, it looks like the developers are in a constant state of tweaking even after the game has been released. They decide that what the game really needs is a Perception stat. Yeah, we've definitely been here before. In a combat light game, that's THE thing you can wind up rolling most of all, and it's surprising how many games miss it out. It's like their expectations of what's needed to play the game, and what happens in actual sessions are out of sync. Also an indicator of real world stress testing getting back to them is the creation of abbreviated cards for NPC stats, giving the essential information in as compact a form as possible. You can be finicky with PC design, but there's just no point doing it for NPC's that are unlikely to survive more than a few rounds of combat. Just bash out what you really need and get to playing.



Questing: This month's DragonQuest column is all about clearing up the rules on summoning. Now there's something we've seen complained about quite a few times in D&D as well. But interestingly, the issues are completely different, because DragonQuest summoning is a long and involved process, and so doesn't break the combat action economy in the first place. Instead it's about the minutia of demon binding and banishment, with a particular focus on the dark desires of succubi. Goes to show that DragonQuest is a considerably lower magic game than D&D, and also considerably less concerned with bowdlerising real world occult practices to avoid annoying the moral majority. (although that may well change now TSR is in charge) Every system has it's problems, and it's interesting to see just how widely they vary. Nice to know they're in no danger of an uncontrolled spawn cascade taking over the world there.



RPGaming: Thieves World is our only review in here. Like the fiction anthologies themselves, they've got a whole bunch of writers in to convert it to as many games as they possibly can. In trying to provide stats for nine different systems, it shows just how widely different writers interpret the same books, (as the same characters differ surprisingly widely from system to system) and how much easier it is to emulate books in general in some systems. However, in trying to cater to everyone, it's probably spreading itself too thin and not doing anything brilliantly. Just pick one good system and stick to it, it'll be much less hassle. An interesting curiosity that shows just how much looser people were about licensing and copyright restrictions in the early days of roleplaying.



Film & Television: Since the magazine has skipped a full year, this column tries to play catch-up in a rush by doing lots of little reviews of 1982's biggest movies. Bottom of his rankings is the new remake of The Thing, where he likes the special effects, but is extremely scathing of the acting and characterisation. ET also faces his ire, as it may be heart-warming family entertainment, but has no real scientific rigour or big ideas behind the visual spectacle. Wrath of Khan gets the same marks, but the writeup seems more positive. It's a substantial improvement on both the series and first movie, even if it still feels like a big budget TV show at times. More positively treated are the delightfully creepy Cat People, Mad Max: The Road Warrior, and Bladerunner, all of which have the storytelling chops to back up their premises. Definitely shows that his tastes aren't following the herd, and very interesting how differently hindsight has treated these films. Time has definitely been kinder to The Thing than Cat People, while Mad Max and Bladerunner have had huge ups and downs in critical reappraisal despite relatively few follow-ups in the series. It's so hard to predict what will last and be referenced in the future.



Media: This column is once again railing against the corruption of the big studio system. This time it's the blind bidding system, where studios force cinemas to buy blocs of their films and keep them on their screens for weeks without having the slightest idea if they're any good, making success more a matter of promotion than critical acclaim. The usual petty nepotism that ensures once companies get big, they tend to stay big even if what they're producing goes downhill, because they have the money and connections to bend the right ears. Yeah, that stuff pisses me off too, and people are quite right to try and pass regulations curbing the worst excesses of it. They also talk about the rules lawyering and shenanigans involved in the age rating system, which also involves a fair bit of as companies cut films to a lower rating than they should for commercial reasons, or occasionally do the opposite because they think being edgy will sell, and either way it hurts the artistic integrity of the story. Yeah, that's still very much a problem in the modern day too. The internet may have made bypassing censors easier, but they're still here and pushing their way into the new power structures. As long as people are uncomfortable with sex and violence, that's not going to change.



Books: Madwand by Roger Zelazny gets a result of entertaining, but not as good as his previous books, mostly because the protagonist is an undeveloped cypher who's past and motivations don't quite add up. Complacency is a terrible thing, and even the best of us can fall prey to it.

Esbae: A Winter's Tale by Linda Haldeman sees a student summon a demon to help him with his essays, and then spends the rest of the novel dealing with the fallout. This could be a lot darker, but in practice turns out to be on the quaint and comedic side of school fantasy stories. No problem reading it to kids who enjoyed Harry Potter.

The Anarch Lords by A. Bertram Chandler sees his long-running space adventurer character temporarily stuck with a desk job, much to his displeasure. Fortunately for us, it's governorship of an extremely unruly planet, so there's plenty of adventure to be had surviving the political maze and making it a better place. So more entertaining pulpy fun here.

The Morphodite by M. A. Foster is about a shapeshifting assassin trying to destabilise a society from within by identifying and killing key people. A cool premise, but it fails to go into enough depth about the society and people to make this kind of drastic measure to overthrow it seem justified. Some stories would be better if made longer and more convoluted.

Tintagel by Paul H. Cook intrigues but also frustrates the reviewer, mixing philosophy and action in ways that are interesting, but don't quite cohere properly, leaving some obvious plot holes. Some sci-fi futures are more implausible than others, and this one is way into the fantastical spectrum, not any kind of realistic allegory.

The Soul Eater by Mike Resnick turns out to be a sci-fi reskin of Moby Dick, a tale of how a man's obsession with pursuing a mystical creature takes over and ruins his life. It's not as deep as it would like to be, so our reviewer does not give it high marks. Failed pretentiousness is worse than just being unashamed popcorn entertainment.

The Restaurant at the end of the Universe by Douglas Adams gets a result of good, but not as good as the original, and says he seems to be struggling for ideas. Since I've read interviews where Adams admits he procrastinated in his writing for ages and then usually dashed his books off just before the deadline, this is an entirely accurate criticism. He always struggled with both productivity and depression, and that's part of the charm of what he created.



The Treasure of Socantri: Our features finish off with an 8 page DragonQuest module. It's very much a site based D&D tournament module with different stats, right down to putting an emphasis on new monsters with screwage powers to catch players who think they know it all off guard and force them to use their brains if they want to survive. The writer notes in the postscript that this pissed off some of the groups that ran through it, as they specifically switched systems to get away from the D&D meatgrinder, which amuses me in a sadistic way. If you don't want to be challenged, stick to systemless roleplay. So this module is very much of it's time, and would be easily converted to D&D if you were so inclined. We can always do with another session filler for when we're short on ideas.



Feedback: The short time the magazine'll survive under TSR is already evident in the feedback page, as not only will none of the pitched games here be published, most are completely unfamiliar. Particularly jarring is the idea of one based on A. E. van Vogt's anti gun control parable The Weapon Shops of Isher. That would cause a fair few flamewars if revived today. Less interesting are the DragonQuest supplement ideas. A calendar, and an expanded book on their horoscope system. Shows how much less commercially focussed their ideas were, and also how much shorter the average book was back then, as both of those put together wouldn't fill a regular sized splatbook now. Once again, the things they're pitching showed why they failed in the first place, as I can't see myself buying the vast majority of them.



As is often the case after a change of management, inertia means this issue is mostly the same as the one preceding it, if a little less joined up themeswise. But even if I didn't know exactly how short the rest of the magazine's run was, the signs here aren't positive ones. A combination of and openly admitting they're a much smaller priority to TSR than they were to SPI? No good way to spin that. Let's see just how much and how fast they change over the last few issues.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 14 - The Omega Wars: Spring 1983



55 pages: Just one issue later and both the cover and contents have indeed been purged of any fantasy content. From here on out, it's all sci-fi, all the time. That was quicker than I expected. Oh well, at least that shows they're trying to put their own stamp on things, not just coasting on a backlog of submissions. Let's see if tightening the focus actually increases the average quality, or if it's just niche protection to keep them out of the way of Dragon magazine.



Muse: Not only is the content being refocused, they're also going to put their own stamp on the formatting, and this editorial is where they boast about that. I'm not surprised, since the ARES section in Dragon had very different formatting to what I've seen so far. It'd make sense that it would appear here for at least a few issues before being transferred over there. TSR has more money, and that means better computer technology than SPI had. If they can use that to make things look better, while also taking less effort, that's just sensible.



Science for Science Fiction: This column consumes it's counterpart's wordcount and doubles in size, letting it go into a little more depth, although it's still never going to give comprehensive scientific explanations. Egypt's water problems are still an issue all these years later, if anything getting worse as they gradually tap deeper into the water table to sustain their population. Eventually, the is going to hit the fan there, and it's not going to be pretty. On the other hand, the depletion of the ozone layer no longer seems like a big threat, as banning CFC's has led it to recover nicely. And the birth rate is slowing down. We might be able to deal with overpopulation without mass migration or starvation as well. We'll also easily be able to deal with the gradual reduction in tooth size over the centuries if it becomes an issue, given the state of modern dentistry and culinary arts. Making planets explode in real life, not just the movies is still probably beyond our technology for a very long time though.



The Troubled Sun: Our big hard science piece this month is slightly less pessimistic than usual, but still paints a grim picture of our long-term prospects as a species. A detailed look at our sun, it's place in the universe, and various quirks compared to other stars. It might be near the middle in terms of types of star, but in terms of size, it's easily in the top 5%. Smaller ones are more prone to fluctuations that would make habitable planets unstable, while really large ones probably wouldn't last long enough for life to evolve around them. Our existence is horrifyingly fragile, and both increases or decreases in worldwide temperature would cause dramatic, quite possibly civilisation-destroying events. As is often the case, the degree of grimness seems a little excessive in hindsight. Increases in telescopy have shown that even very large and small stars have planets, and since gravity and stable orbital spacing is quadratic, not linear, even very small ones can have multiple planets orbiting in their habitable zones. Similarly, we've discovered single celled organisms that can hibernate to survive in space for extended periods, so life doesn't have to develop completely from scratch every time on new planets. Life finds a way, even if more than 99% of individuals are wiped out, and that's small comfort to the ones that die. And humans are far more adaptable than most species. We can figure this out.



Film: High Road to China gets a fairly negative review. It's sold as a pulp action film when it's really more of a romance, and the whole thing is just too slow and silly to hit the right spots for them. It's definitely not going to replace Indiana Jones in the public consciousness anytime soon.

Videodrome, on the other hand, is still fairly well remembered today. David Cronenberg's creepy and offbeat style is far less imitated than generic action/romance films, and for that reason it actually remains fresher on rewatching, even if the ease of finding porn on the internet has blunted the idea of secret unregulated broadcasts a fair bit. Let your depravity free in a controlled manner, and we'll all be much healthier in the long run.

Blue Thunder also gets a good review. The idea of the government creating a special division of attack helicopters to keep the population in line seems all too relevant today, and the action & special effects impress them as well. Get the right blend of action and story, and hopefully it'll still hold up decades to come.



Feedback Questions: The feedback is one of the first things to get a rejigged layout with a clearer font, and switches from prioritising SPI properties to TSR ones. While they're still interested in the competition, they're now putting their detailed rankings of various properties to things like Gamma World and Boot Hill as well. All the pitched games are now sci-fi ones, unsurprisingly, although a few feel like rewritten fantasy ideas that they had before and still want to use, so they merely changed the fluff around a bit. One of the pitches is Space 1889, which would eventually be published by GDW in 1988, but the others are once again unfamiliar to me. At least that indicates they aren't forcing the pitchers to sign contracts that give the company their copyright indefinitely even if they don't make the game. Even the evil empire of roleplaying isn't that bad compared to the REALLY big media companies.



Braskan Gambit: The tie-in fiction for our game this issue is another comic, taking us down and dirty in a postapocalyptic warzone. All's fair in love and war, and when civilisation's collapsed and you're facing a mishmash of high and low technology, you've definitely got to play it smart, because you never know what you'll be facing from one fight to the next. So this serves to set the aesthetic for the game, which is very Mad Max/Tank Girl, and get you in the mood as usual, for which it does a decent job. That doesn't look like changing despite the management turmoil.



The Omega War: Straight from the fiction into the action. It's basically the same kind of setup as the Command & Conquer games. Far future with weird tech, decaying government vs populist rebel movement. Who will win? Obviously for game purposes they're fairly balanced despite the different logistic setups, unlike most real word resistance movements. The map covers the mainland USA in 130km hexes. (which seems an odd number, but I guess they needed them that size to fit in the magazine and accommodate the counters. ) The writing format has indeed been cleaned up, making this far easier to play than previous games in the magazine just by reading linearly, rather than having to have read everything before you even begin to understand how it works. As usual, the fact that I don't have much wargaming experience means I can't be certain, but it seems decent enough, and shares a fair bit of DNA with their previous games. I guess that like RPG's there's only so many ways you can do mechanics, so the same ones tend to crop up over and over again.



The Alpha of Omega: Another behind the scenes showing us the designer's thought processes follows. The references I made were completely not the ones he had in mind making it, instead being mostly influenced by Buck Rogers' tales of derring-do in the 25th century, and the events of recent real world wars. While realism wasn't a huge concern, making the setting compelling, the action dynamic and the two sides distinct was. It definitely helps give me some more appreciation for the effort that went into it's making. When you're a designer, you can go for generic rules, or ones highly specific to the scenario, and this one definitely thought about the customisation side. I approve.



Software: Crush, Crumble & Chomp is an awesomely named game of Kaiju vs the military. Build your monster, set your objectives, and get to smashing those cities. Sounds pretty fun to me. As with the last issue, they tell you how to hack it to tweak the difficulty so you can increase the replayability, which continues to please me. These reviews do seem to have been improved by the change in companies.

Sword Thrust is a core disk and series of expansion adventures. Build your characters, level them up through the adventures, see them die horribly, do it again. Seems a fairly standard representation of the D&D experience in computer form, albeit with permadeath that would never fly in modern computer games. Given how much more flexibility you can have in both RPG's and computer games nowadays, I don't think this series is worth digging up and emulating, even if it was good at the time.



Books: The Guardians by Lynn Abbey gets a very good review indeed, reminding us she has a long and productive future with fantasy roleplaying tie-in books ahead of her. In the meantime you can enjoy this tale of the fantastical intruding on the real world to gradually mounting horror.

A Rose for Armageddon by Hilbert Schenck also gets plenty of praise. An earthbound relative of the Foundation series, it shows people trying to stave off societal collapse by the analysis of geographical history. Only with a better focus on the human element than the grand sweep of things than Asimov, which is fair enough.

A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison sees a black guy sent back in time to the civil war to prevent another set of time travellers from helping the south to win. Unsurprisingly, hijinks ensue, and the racism he faces makes them all the more interesting for us as readers. Since I like his work in general, I should definitely find out if this one holds up today.

Mike Resnick's Tales of the Galactic Midway series chronicles the adventures of a travelling carnival …… IIIIINNN SPAAAACE!!!!! The performers might be freaks, but the aliens and their cultures they pass through are even weirder. It's another positive review, but by a narrower margin, as the reviewer thinks this schtick could easily get tedious if dragged out too long.

Janissaries: Clan & Crown by Jerry Pournelle & Roland Green and Lady of Light by Diana L. Paxton have their reviews missing from the scan, so unfortunately I can't comment on them.



Games: Invasion:Earth shows what happened to Earth in the Traveller universe in 5511AD. A brutal guerilla war for freedom against the conquering imperium, the earth players seem outmatched initially, but as we know from real wars like vietnam and afganistan, you might be able to smash 'em from above, but holding the territory is a whole other matter, and the odds of winning are fairly balanced overall. Both the mechanics and setting detail are well thought out, and it also includes some adventures for the Traveller RPG using it as a background. Sounds like a pretty full package you could get a lot of use out of.

Dragon Pass is an updated version of Greg Stafford's original Gloranthan wargame White Bear & Red Moon. As is often the case in revisions, it might lose a little bit in charm, but makes up for it in improved production values and clarity of rules writing. It continues to include a ton of setting detail that crosses over with the RPG, and is generally full of the flavour and unique interactions that you only get in a well developed alternate world. Long may it continue to inspire further games.



Curiously enough, it does seem like TSR's changes are improvements so far, as they leverage their greater budget and better equipment to change the format for the better. But they are still using the same backlog of articles, so I guess the real litmus test will be when that stuff is all new. And also what they'll do differently in the issues without a game for the centrepiece, which uncoincidentally is what's coming up next. How will they fill the page count, and will it be thematically connected in other ways like many Dragon issues, or just a greater number of little articles and reviews? I don't like hanging around, so let's move it move it to the next one.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares Special Edition 1: Summer 1983



64 pages. So here we are, breaking up the chronology of the magazine into two different paths. From looking at the contents page, it seems like they're going to be using the freed up page count to burn through the remainder of their fantasy submissions faster, as the issue is packed with them. But there's also a fair bit of sci-fi too, including a longer bit of RPG material than they've ever done before. Let's see if the contents of this extinction burst are any good.



Ares Log: The editorial gets renamed to be a bit more sci-fi appropriate, with the name it'd keep all through it's time in Dragon. Unsurprisingly, the rest of it is a mix of the usual self-promotion, and trying to make the magazine more like Dragon, since they're trying to turn it into it's sci-fi counterpart. Letters, classifieds, and more little articles with crunchy bits in. But of course, to do those things, they need reader submissions. Yeah, that's probably going to be the sticking point, isn't it, since not only do they have far fewer readers than Dragon, but they also alienated some of the long-term hardcore fans by not honoring SPI's subscriptions, which is the kind of petty douchery that backfires by turning your previous strongest supporters into vocally complaining ex-fans. That probably had a fair bit of influence on Ares failing to thrive as it's own thing and being folded into Dragon in the end. I guess we all sow the seeds of our own downfall.



White Hole Bomb: Our hard physics piece this month is on the mechanics of black (and white) holes. Since black holes do actually radiate away mass inversely proportional to their size via hawking radiation, (at least, according to the most popular current theory) they do have a limited llfespan, even if it's many orders of magnitude longer than anything else in the universe, and a white hole is simply a black hole that's become small enough that it's radiating significantly more energy than it's taking in. (which won't be for long, as that's only when it's very small indeed) So while it is possible to use one as a power source by stealing rotational energy, transporting one and using it as a bomb is completely ridiculous on a logistical level unless you have teleportation, in which case physics already works so differently from reality as we know it that there's no point worrying about it. Creating and storing enough antimatter to use as a weapon is even more implausible still. So this is one article where our understanding of physics hasn't improved much in 30-odd years simply because we still don't have access to any black holes to get more practical data, so it's still mostly fancy theoretical models. A little less depressing than some of these, but still very much about what we can't do rather than what we can. Oh well, at least that's several fewer ways the world could be destroyed. We should be grateful for that at least.



Conan the Barbarian: Ah yes, L. Sprague de Camp's attempts to turn the adventures of Conan into a consistent chronology. Now there's a topic that still proves divisive today, both because the quality of other authors playing in the universe is variable to say the least, and because trying to say they're all canon results in him having an improbable quantity of adventures packed into every moment of his life, especially given travel times in a low tech world. This is the problem with trying to turn something that wasn't originally designed as a cohesive world suitable for a franchise into one post hoc, and is why comics universes wind up repeatedly rebooting and retconning stuff to keep popular characters around and not aged out of the points where their stories make sense. So this is a somewhat irritating promotional article that reminds me that Conan remaining a famous character after his original author died was not entirely for nice reasons. Like a lot of things, showbiz is a lot more pleasant when you don't know how the sausage is made.



The Oaken Sword: Ian McDowell returns for a second piece of fiction about the younger escapades of Mordred before he went full-on villain. Once again, he gets into trouble due to his personality flaws, which ironically, are also the things that get him out of the trouble again where a stalwart and true knight would face it head-on and die. This time, he trespasses on faerie ground, and gets geased to retrieve a magic sword, which obviously he'd like to keep, but fate wouldn't be so kind to him, and he ends the story no better off, but no worse either for future instalments. He continues to be a selfish dick, but not so awful it's impossible to root for him, so while this isn't original, it's still pretty entertaining. This seems like a fairly rich vein of inspiration ready for the tapping.



Mordred Mac Lot: A short behind the scenes piece following up on the fiction about the adventures of young Mordred. Unsurprisingly, the author has decided to spin out the idea to a whole novel, where our hapless antihero goes from one scrape to another trying to have a good time, earn his dad's approval and stay out of any epic heroic quests. (and definitely failing miserably at that last one) Yup, that definitely sounds like a premise capable of supporting a good few books, as series like the adventures of Flashman prove. Rogues make more interesting protagonists than paladins precisely because of the troubles they cause for themselves and those around them. So this is well written and interesting at first, but look behind the curtain and it's also a fairly formulaic bit of promotion. We've seen many stories in this vein before, and we will see many like it in the future, because most authors will stick with what works.



Nitimandrey & the cabinet maker's vision: Our second bit of fiction this month is far less formulaic, a poetically written fantasy fable that seems heavily influenced by the stylings of Lord Dunsany, which is definitely something that has fallen out of fashion with the rise of Tolkien knockoff worldbuilding heavy doorstoppers. A battle between gods from the perspective of an ordinary cabinet-maker swept up into events way above his reckoning, the rules of what's going on remain ambiguous right up to the end, at which point you're definitely rewarded by reading it a second time with a better idea of what's going on. There's a lot of buildup, and then when the action does come, it's sudden and unexpected, with a dark twist of an ending. It might not be so easy to make a game out of as a story where the rules are consistent and explained, but as a story, it's a nice breath of fresh air. I definitely approve of this.



Dawn of the Dead: They might not be giving us a new game in here for the first time, but they're still posting an expansion for one of their existing ones. A tie-in game to George Romero's movie? Not the most obvious choice for toyetic cross-marketing, but fair enough. They tweak the rules for the humans so they're more likely to do stupid impulsive in the heat of the moment, and thus cause their own downfall, making the game play more like the movie while also pushing things closer towards balance between the two sides. Curiously, the rules use the old SPI method of numbered clauses and subclauses rather than the more natural language introduced last issue, showing this was probably in the queue for a while and they're still not fully up to date with their reorganisation. So this isn't that interesting to me as an article, since I don't have the game it's expanding upon, but that bit of behind the scenes knowledge is interesting. They probably could have rewritten it if they really wanted, but it wasn't high enough priority to do so. Another reminder that the people at the top don't really care that much about their new acquisition.



First Contacts: Our final article also shows definite signs of having been written and formatted before the changeover. It also feels less like a magazine supplement, and more like a full module that they didn't think would sell enough standalone, as it's a full 28 pages long. (which would become the standard for the era 32 once the cover was added) So this introduces the Sh'k'tlp to the Universe RPG, giving us an extensive lowdown on rules to play them, along with plenty of detail on their psychology, history, how they meet humanity, and a bunch of new equipment and psionic powers connected to them. (plus the odd bit of more general setting material and errata they just happened to be thinking of at the time. ) It's all interestingly crunchy and old school, as the Sh'k'tlp are indeed pretty alien, and so need a fair bit of rules work to incorporate. Natural shapeshifters on a planet dominated by various species of natural shapeshifters, they have to deal with the fact that anyone could change their appearance to look like anyone else, and any object could be a shapeshifted predator waiting to strike. They deal with this via an eidetic memory and a truly epic degree of obsessive compulsive orderliness, (which contrasts sharply with the freewheeling nature of most D&D shapeshifters) allowing them to spot anything that's even slightly out of place, and making them a real pain in the butt when living in close quarters with the generally more slobby humanity. So they're challengingly alien to play, but in a way that's derived logically from their physiology and powers rather than being incomprehensibly weird for the sake of it. It's pleasingly ambitious work packed into a compact package instead of rubber forehead aliens and demihumans that don't even vary a size class. Even if I'll probably never use it, I still respect the quality of their worldbuilding.



Despite the lack of a centrepiece game, this issue actually felt more SPI and less TSR than the last one, in terms of aesthetics and topics chosen. I guess that's a reminder that the assembly of magazines is a very nonlinear process, with some things scheduled way in advance, and some only finalised just before they go to the presses. So this was probably the equivalent of two issues of old material burnt through. Which will probably make the changes next issue feel even bigger. Oh well. I'm definitely finding this stuff more interesting and easier to get through than the early issues, so let's see what the next one brings.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 15 - Nightmare House: Fall 1983



68 pages. Huh. So even Ares gets a Halloween themed issue, such is it's popularity. Does horror count as sci-fi or fantasy, or as in novels, it's own genre due to the different audience? Oh well, at least it keeps the variety up for me. And I do remember enjoying the October issues of Dragon more than average. Let's see if that's true here as well, or it'll scare me in the bad way.



Ares Log: This isn't saying anything new, just reiterating that this is now the Sci-fi counterpart to Dragon. If you like both, buy both! Gotta collect 'em all! And since TSR is primarily an RPG company by this point, with plenty of sci-fi games, they're going to be appearing a lot more in here in the future. Yeah, nothing surprising about that at all. Not worth commenting on more.



Matters of Fact: Science for Science Fiction is rebranded and expanded now it's counterpart is gone, with a new writer, and a very cramped four column per page formatting. The individual topics are just as shallowly covered as before though, apart from the last one about 2010, the sequel to 2001, which gets an extensive sidebar about the gaming implications of von neuman machines, (do spawn cascading undead count?) and stats for several of them in the Star Frontiers system. Also pretty interesting is a study on the vast variety of micro ecosystems created by human gardens, where each one in a road can differ dramatically, and thus there's far more ecological niches than would occur naturally in a space that size. This relates closely to another piece on fractal geometry, and how area to volume ratios of a place can change dramatically depending on the precision of your measuring tool. Some utopians think the world would be better with no borders, but in reality, borders are where most of the interesting stuff happens in the world. The more of them there are, the greater the quantity and variety of life becomes. We should be trying to increase the number of them in the world, not tear them down.



Film: Return of the Jedi gets a long and very scathing review indeed. It's poorly directed, kiddified, toyetic, pandering to the international market, inconsistent with the previous films, and the special effects look cheap and unfinished. And yet by the time the phantom menace comes out even this'll be held up as a masterpiece by comparison. Just goes to show, Star Wars has never been a critical darling despite it's massive commercial success, and people claiming otherwise have had their perspective skewed by nostalgia. What looks awesome when you're a little kid often doesn't hold up to closer examination, and so it has ever been.

War Games is a story of a teenager hacking into the government's computers with embarrassing ease, and then having to deal with the consequences. The reviewer thinks that's implausible, which now seems very dated indeed with the rise of the internet, and multiple high profile IT ups by big companies and governments. They're funded by people who know nothing about computers, and the people running they day-to-day side are frequently overworked, underresourced and trying to juggle contradictory bureaucratic imperatives on equipment of various ages that requires jury-rigs to keep running and communicating with each other. It's more surprising that we don't see more of these stories, and I suspect that's because they happen, but the people responsible are never discovered or caught.

Psycho 2 gets a surprisingly strong review. It deliberately subverts our expectations from the first one, and the set, soundtrack and cinematographic work is easily up to the standard of the original. Now there's an opinion many reviews in hindsight don't share. Funny how that happens.

The Hunger gets a short and negative review, good looking but dull. Without a substantial story, cool visuals are ultimately an empty experience. Yup, heard that one before. Trying to make a full length theatrical movie out of a fairytale takes a lot of padding, and many adaptors aren't up to it.

Something Wicked This Way Comes also goes against the tide, giving it a positive reception while bemoaning it's poor commercial performance. It might not be the fastest or flashiest, but it sets a good creeping horror atmosphere, and the special effects and soundtrack work well to support that. Worth digging up and revisiting.



Lexicon: The media column is axed and replaced by this piece of meta analysis, talking about the new jargon and subgenres of sci-fi. It's one of their more conservative ones, mostly mocking things like turning verbs into nouns, dressing up menial job descriptions with fancy titles, and the general dearth of originality or artistic integrity in the movie industry in general. So not that different to before, but without any real education to go with the snark. That's a bit of a step down overall. We already know creative industries are cesspits filled with backstabbing sharks, but we don't know all the complex technical ways they accomplish their goals. Snark may be entertaining, but if you can educate and entertain at the same time, that's even better. I mildly disapprove of this change.



Games: Star Fleet Battles Expansion Module 2 gets a purely descriptive review that gives me no idea what he actually thinks about it. A ton of new crunch, and a fairly extensive amount of errata for the previous instalments. The kind of thing that's incredibly common in games of all kinds, and subject to definite diminishing returns. I guess that is pretty common, to the point where you might get bored and skim over it instead of developing a proper opinion. It would be oh so easy.

Striker is another spinoff game from the Traveller RPG setting. Where Invasion: Earth was large scale and highly specific in it's scenario, this is a more flexible squad level tactical wargame. It gets plenty of praise, as it's rules are clear and concise, yet not so simple as to lack tactical options, and it has plenty of room for expansion in new infantry and unit types, and so you can create new scenarios easily as well. Their willingness to branch out shows why Traveller became the biggest sci-fi RPG out there for quite a few years.

Moon Base Clavius, on the other hand, gets a sardonically vicious negative review. It's mostly a poor ripoff off a better game, the bits that are original are stupid, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a poorly edited, typo filled package. Why even bother if you're going to make a job this sloppy?



Visitation: We warm up for this issue's theme with a bit of creepy fiction to set the mood. It's an interestingly meta one, positing a universe where the supernatural is shaped by human belief, so all the monsters and their strengths and weaknesses aren't truly real, but they're tailored to your fears and more than real enough to thoroughly mess you up if your subconscious wavers. We've seen that quite a few times, and will again in many RPG's in various permutations, showing it's a common idea. It's probably not quite what they really need to set the scene as it undercuts the whole idea of the supernatural, but it's still pretty well written, and I guess adaptive fears can remain scary in a way concrete ones can't once solved. All a matter of taste, really.



Nightmare House: The actual boardgame doesn't follow the metaphysics of the fiction, instead being a more traditional take on the gothic haunted house subgenre. Darkholm Manor was built on cursed ground, and each generation since then has added their own unpleasant touch to proceedings, racking up an increasing number of melodramatic ghosts trapped within it's walls until it became impossible for even the most hardened skeptic to live in and left abandoned and mouldering for decades. Choose from 12 investigators, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and reasons for coming to the house, and figure out how to break the curse. It's more psychological horror than slasher movie, as the house has limited energy to manifest supernatural occurrences, and needs to psychologically wear it's victims down before possessing them instead of going straight for a bloodbath. Similarly, the other players need to systematically exorcise the rooms in the house to weaken the entity before they can get rid of it for good, giving plenty of room for dramatic back and forth progression. The odds of success definitely increase if there are multiple players, and they pick characters with contrasting abilities to make a well rounded team. As usual with this magazine's games, the rules are fairly complex, with a lot of phases in each turn, some only relevant to certain characters, and require a mix of skill and luck that'll take a few tries to figure out good tactics. If you only play it once a year on halloween you'll probably never master it. Oh well, at least that keeps it open to new players.



Books: Millennium by John Varley gets a review that's overall positive, but also pours water on previous, even more rapturous reviews in other publications. Yes, it's both competently written and has a good story, but it's hardly original. That's the thing when you manage to appeal to a younger or wider readerbase than normal. They're not as cynical as hardcore consumers, so they're more impressed by clever tricks. Plus in a pre-internet age, it was harder to check if someone else has already had the same idea. Things wouldn't play out in the same way today.

Lyonesse by Jack Vance gets a review that's positive overall, but also points out that his writing style isn't for everyone. it's not quite style over substance, but the floridity does make for challenging reading. Stick with it, expand your vocabulary, it'll be worth it.

The Prisoner of Zhamanak by L. Sprague de Camp also gets plenty of praise. His tales of weird and wonderful alien worlds consistently manage to come up with new twists to entertain readers. No argument with that.



Haunted Places: The second tie-in to our big game this time isn't a behind the scenes debriefing, but a short introduction to the tropes of the horror genre. It's written from the perspective of introducing sci-fi fans who are completely ignorant of the other genre, which means it definitely feels pretty shallow and redundant to me, especially after the very self-aware fiction, saying nothing I didn't know already. Really, how many people are that blinkered and specific in their reading and tv watching choices? Who doesn't know what haunted houses, ghosts, serial killers or vampires are? I really don't see much point in this article for any but their youngest readers.



Into the Void pt 1: Our second bit of fiction this month eschews the horror and philosophy for some fast paced sci-fi action. A racially diverse and snarky space crew have to fend off an alien attack. Their ship gets damaged, and they survive through ingenuity rather than raw power, using their remaining options in a way the enemy wouldn't expect. It feels very much like a group of PC's, as they mostly treat each other as equals despite the theoretical chain of command, and the banter is pretty engaging. So this works pretty well as an example of actual play, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was based off one. I suppose if they're going to be a gaming magazine, they want to lead by example.



Into the Void pt 2: Following directly on from the fiction is a 6 page module for Star Frontiers, using the characters there as pregens. Unlike most modules of this era, this is a complete railroad rather than a sandbox, with the encounters presented in exactly the order they appeared in the fiction, and the players expected to choose the same solutions if they want to progress. That's not the kind of writing I'm very pleased to see. Looking at the writer's resume, it looks like he was one of the guys responsible for the first wave of Dragonlance modules, which also pushed linear stories rather than letting players loose on the setting to make their own. So it looks like this is one of the first signs of the second wave of adventure design, where frustrated novelists replace wargamers, and as sole writer on both fiction and module, it was his own idea. He definitely deserves some of the blame for the next few years then. I have no interest in playing or running that kind of railroading crap, and I doubt I ever will, so I definitely disapprove of this one. Let players create their own solutions, don't expect them to read the designer's mind to do things the One True Way.



Ringshipper: Another sign of TSR's style taking over is the start of a regular comic series, a bit of sci-fi action which looks like it's about space traders and raiders fighting over the artefacts of a lost civilisation. It's only a single page, so not a lot has time to happen, and since we've only got a few issues to go, I suspect this won't be resolved, just like Jasmine, Pinsom, Wormy, and most of their other comics with continuity from this era. Serialised fiction in monthly publications is hard to sustain, especially in comic format, where a single busy day can take over a year to write and draw, and so it's saddening but not surprising it's filled with false starts that wind up going nowhere.



Feedback Questions: The feedback section loses it's most interesting part, the pitches for new games. That's definitely not a good sign, and reminds us TSR's lack of interest in audience feedback was one of the reasons for their downfall a decade later. Have they already decided the magazine's days are numbered, or is that still up in the air for a few months yet? In either case, this is a pretty unwelcome change. All those cool game ideas, shelved and sat on indefinitely because someone at TSR thought they probably wouldn't be profitable without asking their audience if they wanted them. I suppose this is the great thing about Kickstarter and it's ilk. Anyone can get an idea out to the public, and if it's good enough, they can make it in the right quantities, no worry about over or under production and dealing with storing lots of unsold stock for years. That's a definite improvement over the old days.



In sharp contrast with last issue, this one brings the negative aspects of TSR's management compared to SPI's into focus. Dumbing down for a wider audience, railroading, and lack of interest in listening to feedback are all things I've been annoyed about in the past, and getting all three in quick succession does not amuse, even if there are still plenty of good articles in here as well. Such is the nature of change, giving with one hand but taking with the other. Let's see where next issue falls in the overall balance of things.

 

[(un)reason]

Ares 16 - The High Crusade: Winter 1984



67 pages. Another big name writer licences out their work so the magazine can make a game of it. This time, it's Poul Anderson who's dipping his toes into multimedia with his tale of english knights on other planets. Will you manage to be the conquerers or the conquered. Or maybe you'd prefer to avoid that whole nasty business of imperialist colonialism and the horrors that are committed in it's name. I guess even with the sci-fi rebranding, they're still wargamers at heart. We're still a long way from outgrowing the need for violence and other conflict in our escapist media. So I guess it's time to strap on our shiny armor, kill things and take their shiny stuff again. To Action! Are we men or are we magpies?! Who Cares?!



Ares Log: The editorial is basically the same as the contents page, telling us what's in the magazine, only with slightly more words. Nothing particularly interesting to read here, so I have nothing in particular to say in response either.




Letters: The TSRification of the magazine takes another step here, with a letters page that is basically identical in format to the Dragon ones of the same era. Let's see if the individual letters are just as predictable in content.

First up is a request for help converting between 1st and 2nd edition DragonQuest. They tell him to do it himself, as it's hardly rocket science. Some gamers, no ability to think independently.

Secondly, a long criticism of one of their recent reviews, pointing out how factually inaccurate and contextually ignorant the reviewer was. It's a fair cop guv. We'll try and do better next time.

Thirdly, someone wondering when DragonQuest material will start appearing in Dragon Magazine. It already has, buddy, it already has.

Finally, an ever predictable request for submission guidelines. Avoid becoming a meal for the no SASE ogre and you're in with a good shot, as the competition is small enough that they can't afford to be that strict with their standards yet.



Galactic Empires: Our hard science piece this issue is very much a rehash of issue 12, looking at the logistics of interstellar travel and communication, only from the perspective of a conquerer rather than a trader. The problems are still the same though, vast distances, communication lag, perishability of things being transported, making the whole enterprise profitable, prisoner's dilemma when it comes to exchange of information, and huge amounts of bureaucracy trying to keep everything organised, so there's a fair bit of repeated material. But there are some new mathematical tidbits, such as a breakdown of organisational complexity and ways to improve efficiency via multiple semi-independent chains of command. On breaking it down, without faster than light travel, any interstellar empire will have to allow a lot of freedom on any short term decisions by individual star systems, and some form of lifespan extension to create the continuity needed to implement broader policy decisions over thousands of years. And as ever, I wish people would spend more time and energy working on making this stuff a reality rather than writing thousands of novels about it. It continues to annoy me that if anything, we've regressed in terms of space travel over the past 30 years. I guess that once again, that shows how hard bureaucracy is, as novel writing is a solitary process, but getting thousands of smart people to work together in pursuit of a bigger goal requires complex social communication. They're always going to be rarer than the sum of their parts.




Crimes, Crazies and Creole Cookery: As a postscript to the last article, we have a little piece on the odds that an interstellar civilisation would steamroller us, destroying or co-opting casually not out of any malice, but simply because we were in the way. Now that's an all too plausible fear, given how colonialism on earth has gone. All it takes is a disease we've got no defence against or a fast breeding invasive species, and even benevolent explorers have wound up wrecking an ecosystem. It's a good thing that we'll probably see them coming years in advance if there's no FTL, no matter how technologically advanced they are. If only there was some way of preparing when we have no way of predicting what might be out there. Oh well, better keep on improving those telescopes.



Quest: As mentioned earlier, Poul Anderson created a novel where knights were transplanted to another planet by slaving aliens, and managed to win their freedom by adapting to their new situation and technology, but retaining the emphasis on chivalry, heraldry and feudal hierarchy. Now we get to see what happens when they get a sniff of the holy grail out there. (God works in mysterious ways.) Piety and crass opportunism intermingle as a whole host of knights decide to seek it for various reasons. They fight a dragon, find a church containing a holy man and beautiful maidens that seems to fit the bill, then get suspicious, and look for the catch. Turns out it was all an alien plot to exploit their superstitions and the fake grail is a nuclear bomb that would have gone off when they got it home, destroying their leadership in one fell swoop. But they manage to foil the plot, and return home with the spoils of their labour. Huzzah! So this is reasonably entertaining, but feels altogether too easy as a challenge. It takes what could have been a whole novel's adventure, and condenses it down to a single small chapter. I guess leaving me wanting more is a good thing overall, especially when it's leading into a game. You want to get people fired up and ready to go, not satisfy them so much they're content with just being passive consumers.




The High Crusade: While the formats of the past two games got a mild rejigging by their new editor, this is the first game that feels TSR all the way through, with writing by Zeb Cook, Larry Elmore on the cover art, and playtesting by a whole bunch of big TSR names. The parts are still fairly familiar though. Little square chits with a couple of stats representing the units, and a big hex map representing the star systems our knights and aliens are fighting over. i'm not sure if the knights are more powerful than the aliens overall, but they have named characters with individualised abilities while the aliens are just faceless hordes, so they probably hold the edge in flexibility. Both sides have ways to convert enemy units, causing them to switch sides, giving you an incentive to capture them instead of just killing everything in your path. While there are dice rolls, they feel like a smaller part of the game than many of these, putting more of an emphasis on your tactical choices, so you'd better work at keeping your enemy off balance and wearing them down. To battle! To the victor goes the spoils!




Miniatures: TSR's really taking this sci-fi/fantasy divide thing seriously, as they divide up their minis reviews between the magazines. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work, as they only have enough material for a single page and three different packs of stuff, which means both poor quality photos and very little critical analysis. They say if you build it they will come, but that's not always true, it's just that confirmation bias means we only notice the times we did notice the thing and went to it. This looks like another of those experiments that's going to disappear unmourned when they merge this into Dragon.




Return of the Stainless Steel Computer: Another expansion for a game in a previous issue, this one reaches all the way back to issue 10 to make things a little more challenging for slippery Jim. It basically turns reaching the computer at the end from your win point to a boss fight, with randomly determined defences to keep you on your toes through multiple plays. So it's a mild increase to both the length and difficulty of the game overall, which is something I have no objection too. A climactic ending is definitely better than a blank screen saying "A WINNER IS YOU".




Creating Alien Races: The RPG stuff feels like it's completed the transition from SPI to TSR material as well, both in topic and format, as this article is exactly like the ones in Dragon's ARES section. A new race for the Traveler system, the profoundly stupidly named Sydymites. No, their planet doesn't have any tendency towards rains of fire or pillars of salt, as far as I can tell, nor are their mating habits even mentioned in this family friendly magazine. Instead they're low gravity adapted human variants, tall, thin and bald, with definite tendencies towards xenophobia and militarism. They enjoy superior strength and endurance, but pay for it long term with back and knee problems, which is realistic, as tall people do tend to suffer from those more; the human frame just get beyond a certain size before becoming unable to support it's own bulk. The rest of their setting detail is decently developed too, giving plenty of information on their history and the way they fit into the surrounding galaxy. So it's a competently done bit of writing, ruined by giving them a name that would be impossible to use at the table without people sniggering. What were they thinking?! Banish them on a one-way trip to uranus.




Swords and Stars: A third article tied into the issue's theme here, as Roger Moore gives us Traveler lifepath options for barbarian (which in this case means anyone from a non spacefaring culture) characters. Which is basically a method to convert your D&D characters to Traveller and take them on a spacefaring adventure pre-spelljammer, complete with various D&D class features and equipment, and psionics as magic. So as with the special feature, this confirms the TSR guys are now fully in command, and can't resist putting in references to their other properties. The line between fantasy and sci-fi is a pretty fuzzy one anyway, but they're not helping keep them separate with stuff like this. Maybe splitting them up wasn't such a good idea in the first place, especially as we already know it wasn't economically viable in the long run. Let people be creative without slicing it up into precise categorisations, you'll get more interesting stuff that way.




Books: Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. McAvoy gives me flashbacks to the first issue of this magazine, as it features a shapeshifted dragon blending into human society. Magical realist hijinks ensue as it learns computer programming. The reviewer approves, and wishes it was being marketed better. Oh, the woes of being put in the genre ghetto.

The Rainbow Cadenza by J.Neil Schulman is a sci fi tale about what happens when foetal sex selection results in the male/female ratio skewing way male. An ugly mix of conscription and mandatory prostitution keeps the incels from getting out of hand, and makes for interesting individual human dramas within the society. Sounds like it'd be just as relevant if converted into film/TV today, a la the Handmaid's Tale.

A Century of Progress by Fred Saberhagen gets a mostly negative review. Cool ideas, but poor implementation. Since the basic conflict is the same as GURPS infinite worlds, just go play that instead. Sorted.




Games: The Star Trek RPG gets a long and fairly positive review. The mechanics are competently done, with a definite Traveller influence, and it draws well on the details given in the show to give you plenty of options as both a player and GM. Ironically, their big complaints are where it's a little too faithful, with a distinct lack of large scale worldbuilding and glacial character advancement to reflect the largely episodic nature of the source material. Plus the frequent issue with licensed games where they make the original characters way more powerful than any PC you could ever create. It'd be a looooong journey working your way up the ranks from ensign under this system. Oh well, at least that means your campaign won't be killed by the PC's becoming able to steamroller all opposition, especially with the surfeit of godlike entities Trek has. You'll always need to use your brain if the GM is doing their job right here.

Star Trek 15mm Deck plans are their first supplements, letting you view the enterprise and a klingon vehicle in larger scale. Unless you're running a tactical minis based fight through the decks, a decidedly nonessential purchase, and so they only get a short perfunctory going over. Meh.




Film: Krull gets a decidedly mediocre review. One fantasy movie is a hit, and next thing you know, there's dozens of bandwagon jumpers trying to imitate it without understanding what made it good. Boring and not worth your time or money. I remember seeing complaints like this after the LotR movies too.

Superman III, on the other hand, gets a genuinely angry review because it has higher expectations to disappoint. The combination of cost-cutting on the effects, comedy that isn't funny and terrible writing undercuts all the things that made the first one great and the ideals Superman is supposed to represent as a character. Why is it so hard for some people to accept that you need a straight man, a shining hero, even if the world they inhabit is imperfect, to create contrast and allow the darks to seem darker as well. Not everyone needs to be dark and brooding or full of snarky one-liners for every situation. It's just a shame that this magazine won't last long enough to devote even greater rage to the depths they descend too in the fourth one.




Media: This column turns it's cynical eye on the idea of novelisations of movies. This is a very asymmetrical business, due to the fact that books are much cheaper and easier to make than movies. A movie adaption of a book is normally made years after and changed substantially to fit the medium, while novelisations of movies are churned out quickly and cheaply to be released simultaneously as tie-ins, so any changes are either scenes and lore that was developed but cut for time in the actual film, or the kind of weirdness you get when no-one really cares about the product they're creating and time is limited, so the writer just comes up with stuff that they know is crap and it gets past the filters because no-one higher up the chain is paying attention. The result is a lot of mediocre product, with a few entertainingly awful ones that just baffle as to how they were created. Yeah, this all seems pretty familiar 30+ years later. There may be more transmedia properties where movies, TV series, books and computer games are all tied together and producing co-ordinated complementary works rather than straight adaptions, but there's still plenty of cheap shovelware too. The internet has made it easier to do research, keep track of setting lore and co-ordinate writers, so certain kinds of basic mistakes get made less frequently, but people still have the same amount of creative energy overall, and capitalism still pushes the same perverse incentives. So this is a return to form for this column, educating as well as entertaining. Let's hope it does the same next issue.




Ringshipper sets us up with a text heavy bit of everyday life before ending on a dramatic cliffhanger.




Feedback: Having already cut out the most significant part of the feedback form last issue, they cut the number of questions in half again this issue, increasing the size of the font to compensate. Now the backlog is burnt through and the TSR staff are fully in the driving seat, it's obvious they don't really get why this was here in the first place, so they're not putting in the effort to keep it running and updated with the changes in surrounding products. Looking ahead, it's no great surprise that this is it's last appearance in the magazine. Another of those things that goes out as a damp squib, with most people at the time not realising the significance of what happened and it's long term implications.




As I noted repeatedly in individual articles, this definitely feels like the issue in which TSR has used up all the old SPI material, and everything is now stuff they wrote or commissioned and edited themselves. I guess that shows how obvious the distinction between the two is in tone. Even when covering the same kinds of games, their approach is quite different, apart from the reviewers, who retain their strongly acerbic edge. I do have to say I find the TSR approach much more accessible, and I suspect that's not just because I've already ploughed through 30+ years of their writing style. They survived where SPI didn't because they were better at writing in a way that sparks the imagination, even if they don't have as much technical rigor. That's what gets people excited enough to buy, and I'm not immune to that either. So I guess I'd better enjoy the return to familiar ground after a surprisingly slow slog for such a short magazine run. What will they fill the next special edition with now it's all their own work?