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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8551048" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994part 1/580 pages. What do gargoyles talk about in the long dull hours sitting on their elaborate cathedrals when there's no adventurers around to swoop down on? Anything particularly scintillating, or are they no more cultured than the average orc despite the longer lifespans and better view. Quite possibly complaining about the price of things these days, as they've put it up by 20 cents after many years of stability. Time to see if this issue has any interesting worldbuilding that can be applied to campaigns in general, or just a string of encounters in order with little opportunity for deviation that's not worth it at any price. Battlecards are a whole new breed! We kick off the year with an advert reminding us that collectible trading cards are about to go from just something you collect to things with massive games behind them, fuelling buying sprees as people seek to assemble the most awesome rare cards for their deck. Many companies will jump on the bandwagon, but only a few will survive. Editorial: Roger Moore retired from editing Dragon a few months ago, which also means he's no longer putting secondary input in here either. Now Barbara is the senior member of staff, with Dale putting in some work on here as well as Dragon. This time, she's decided to go for a girl power theme, selecting multiple adventures with strong female characters. Well, Dragon & Polyhedron have both made statements on this, and without adding articles, how else are they supposed to join in? Let's see if the adventures are good enough that they would have got through anyway, or there's some forced tokenism going on. The statement of ownership is particularly interesting this time, as the number of issues being printed is sightly up, but the number actually sold is slightly down. Both only by a few hundred, so they're still improving their relative performance compared to Dragon, but even here, the amount of freebies and waste is creeping upwards as the cracks in the company as a whole start to show. Will they be able to retain loyalty better than the other departments again next year?Letters: First letter thinks people should let go of the real world physics and just play the game. If we spend too much time nitpicking about why things would or wouldn't work the story falls apart. Presuming storytelling was your goal in the first place, as it might be increasingly popular but there's still the other axes of GNS theory to consider.2nd, 3rd and 4th praise Jacob's Well, Lady of the Mists and Ransom respectively. It's important to let them know what you like, as it increases the odds of future adventures by the same writer getting published. 5th is from someone who doesn't play D&D, but still buys the magazine because of the cool ideas. Those are the important things the writers should be focussed on, not the precise details of the mechanics. 6th also thinks the mark of an experienced player is focussing more on the roleplaying over the rules. It does seem to be the current fashion in general. The kind of people who are likely to complain when "system matters" people take over and 3e swings back the other way hard.7th is a contrasting one, sulking that they don't do 1e adventures anymore. They note that the rules aren't that different, all you have to do is change the page references anyway. Just wait until there are several very different old editions they're not catering too anymore, all competing for table space with their respective retroclones. 8th is general praise, thinking the average quality of adventures in here is actually superior to most of TSR's standalone modules. I'm not going to disagree with that, but sometimes you do crave something a little larger than they can fit in here. It might be about time they tried a multi-part adventure again. 9th wonders if they ever plan to go monthly like Dragon. More people are for it than against it, but it's a matter of convincing upper management it would be profitable and not hit diminishing returns or reduce average adventure quality. Any one group can only play so many adventures, after all.</blockquote>

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