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[Let's Read] ARES Magazine
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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 7516566" data-attributes="member: 27780"><p><strong><u>Ares 13 - First Contact: Winter 1983 </u></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Muse: The editorial, unsurprisingly, is talking about the changeover. And also not too surprisingly, it's talking complete and utter <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />. 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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite7" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue :p" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":p" /> </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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 <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> 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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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 <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 7516566, member: 27780"] [B][U]Ares 13 - First Contact: Winter 1983 [/U][/B] 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. :p 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. [/QUOTE]
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