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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 7953979" data-attributes="member: 27780">TSR RPGA Volume 1, No. 1: Summer 1981Part 4/4Science Fantasy - A Role Playing Game With A Difference: We've covered dungeoncrawling, shootouts, dogfights and espionage. Now It's Jim Ward's turn to try and sell his baby to us. Gamma World May not have matched D&D, but it certainly outlasted all these others in longevity and number of supplements over the years. Despite being a very silly game in some ways, it's also ahead of D&D in terms of giving characters factions to identify their character with and reasons to have more complex roleplaying interactions, as they try to balance their personal goals, the party's ones and their long-term ideological ones. He also gives advice about starting equipment, and how characters should relate to remnants of ancient (ie, present day) technology. So this isn't just self-promotion like the last two, but actually has plenty of interesting advice that you can use in your game, showing he's thought about this in more depth than made it to the books and most people's actual play. I approve. Rocksnoz: Tom Wham's style of drawing may not be the most sophisticated, but it still has plenty of charm. A trio of adventurers in a strange and savage land attempt to hunt their food, and fail in embarrassing fashion. In a curiously ahead of it's time touch, they're divided into Warrior, Spellcaster and Expert a-la True20 rather than the 4 D&D classes. Clerics eh, did anyone really like them? They always seem to be the first thing to get cut in a party whenever people reexamine the assumptions behind D&D and set out to make their own variant. So while this is just a simple gag strip, it still gives us something to think about in hindsight. How else could we rearrange the party roles in interesting ways to reflect different genres of game?A bit of a slow start, as they struggle to come up with enough material despite the small size of the newsletter and pad it out with basic articles introducing their games, which won't be much use to the hardcore gamers that are their target audience. Although there's nothing here that had the future influence of the stuff in the first Strategic Review, there's still several interesting articles amidst the self-promotion, and the presence of plenty of big names leaves me hopeful that they'll contribute a few hidden gems in the future. Let's see how enthusiastic a response their requests for material get in the next issue. Will they be hitting the accelerator, or still stuck in first gear?</blockquote>

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