(un)reason
Legend
Indeed.
The reason I slowed down on this issue is because I'm still scrambling frantically to edit my own issue 200 special features. They may be slightly delayed, but hopefully it'll be worth it.
Let's read the entire run
- Thread starter (un)reason
- Start date
Indeed.
The reason I slowed down on this issue is because I'm still scrambling frantically to edit my own issue 200 special features. They may be slightly delayed, but hopefully it'll be worth it.
(un)reason
Legend
Dragon Magazine Issue 199: November 1993
part 8/8
TSR Previews: As is often the case, christmas is a big one. The forgotten realms gets a full 3 products this month. Volo's guide to the north revisits another area they covered a few years ago from a different, more flavourful perspective. PG2: The player's guide to the forgotten realms also rehashes things in a crunch free, newbie friendly fashion with lots of IC moments. I think they're starting to go round in circles here. The Harpers series also fills up, with book 7, Soldiers of ice. Flawed heroes find redemption? Good for them.
Dark sun sees gulg and nibenay still locked in persistent grinding conflict, in DSM3: Marauders of Nibenay. And the PC's are once again stuck in the middle, trying to make the best of things. How are you gonna profit from this one? Meanwhile, a fairly famous name joins the novel team. Simon Hawke! I remember when he was Nicholas Yermakov, and get a short story published in issue 94. He's kept at it and come quite a way with us. Anyway. Outcast is part one of the Tribe of one trilogy. Starring a half-elf/half halfling. Great. Now everyone'll want to play one. Brooding loners do tend to do well in these stories.
Ravenloft gets a second Monstrous compendium appendix, MC16. This one is focussed on individual named creatures with full histories, just to make things more personal. Not every monster is a mook or a darklord. There's plenty of middle ground, and the creatures in that do quite a bit of ironically appropriate suffering as well. Put them out of their misery, one way or another.
Dragonlance looks at Ariakus, our third villain to get the spotlight. This egotistical twat thinks he can take Takhisis' place as supreme lord of evil. That's not going to end well. Still, could be fun finding out how.
The 1993 collector cards get a special limited edition factory set. See, if you just bide your time for a bit, you can get them all far more efficiently. Like a cobra, you should be silent, swift and deadly. Snipe like a veteran ebayer for great profit.
D&D updates the setting to reflect that another year has passed in AC1011, the second poor wizards almanac. 240 pages of mystaraey goodness. Well, they haven't been doing much of that lately. Good to see it get a little more love, rather than patronising disconnected intro products.
Buck Rogers High adventure cliffhangers gets it's only supplement. War against the Han. Good to see them being a little more cautious this time around. But it's still a big boxed set that possibly cost more to produce than they sold it for. They really are starting to lose touch on what the market wants.
Course, standalone books are always a gamble, but you've gotta keep trying them, or you're definitely doomed to eventual obsolescence. Green Fire by Louise Titchener features war combined with sexual tension between a king and a water goddess. Although probably without the actual sex, given their current company policies.
As this is the 4th issue in a row in which they lose a regular member of staff/column, there is the very real feel that the magazine is fragmenting at this point. We lost most of the old guard in 86, now the second wave are largely replaced as well. And it feels like they're actively burning through the last of their basic D&D articles before they dump that as well. As with last issue, they manage some pretty cool articles, but it almost feels in spite of the organisation rather than because of it. They're too busy gearing up for the next issue, which is now going to be even more of an effort with the management changes. Let's hope they can pull off something at least as spectacular as issue 100, hopefully even better.
part 8/8
TSR Previews: As is often the case, christmas is a big one. The forgotten realms gets a full 3 products this month. Volo's guide to the north revisits another area they covered a few years ago from a different, more flavourful perspective. PG2: The player's guide to the forgotten realms also rehashes things in a crunch free, newbie friendly fashion with lots of IC moments. I think they're starting to go round in circles here. The Harpers series also fills up, with book 7, Soldiers of ice. Flawed heroes find redemption? Good for them.
Dark sun sees gulg and nibenay still locked in persistent grinding conflict, in DSM3: Marauders of Nibenay. And the PC's are once again stuck in the middle, trying to make the best of things. How are you gonna profit from this one? Meanwhile, a fairly famous name joins the novel team. Simon Hawke! I remember when he was Nicholas Yermakov, and get a short story published in issue 94. He's kept at it and come quite a way with us. Anyway. Outcast is part one of the Tribe of one trilogy. Starring a half-elf/half halfling. Great. Now everyone'll want to play one. Brooding loners do tend to do well in these stories.
Ravenloft gets a second Monstrous compendium appendix, MC16. This one is focussed on individual named creatures with full histories, just to make things more personal. Not every monster is a mook or a darklord. There's plenty of middle ground, and the creatures in that do quite a bit of ironically appropriate suffering as well. Put them out of their misery, one way or another.
Dragonlance looks at Ariakus, our third villain to get the spotlight. This egotistical twat thinks he can take Takhisis' place as supreme lord of evil. That's not going to end well. Still, could be fun finding out how.
The 1993 collector cards get a special limited edition factory set. See, if you just bide your time for a bit, you can get them all far more efficiently. Like a cobra, you should be silent, swift and deadly. Snipe like a veteran ebayer for great profit.
D&D updates the setting to reflect that another year has passed in AC1011, the second poor wizards almanac. 240 pages of mystaraey goodness. Well, they haven't been doing much of that lately. Good to see it get a little more love, rather than patronising disconnected intro products.
Buck Rogers High adventure cliffhangers gets it's only supplement. War against the Han. Good to see them being a little more cautious this time around. But it's still a big boxed set that possibly cost more to produce than they sold it for. They really are starting to lose touch on what the market wants.
Course, standalone books are always a gamble, but you've gotta keep trying them, or you're definitely doomed to eventual obsolescence. Green Fire by Louise Titchener features war combined with sexual tension between a king and a water goddess. Although probably without the actual sex, given their current company policies.
As this is the 4th issue in a row in which they lose a regular member of staff/column, there is the very real feel that the magazine is fragmenting at this point. We lost most of the old guard in 86, now the second wave are largely replaced as well. And it feels like they're actively burning through the last of their basic D&D articles before they dump that as well. As with last issue, they manage some pretty cool articles, but it almost feels in spite of the organisation rather than because of it. They're too busy gearing up for the next issue, which is now going to be even more of an effort with the management changes. Let's hope they can pull off something at least as spectacular as issue 100, hopefully even better.
Orius
Unrepentant DM Supremacist
We've been having a big discussion on that here over the last week or so.
I'd say it's another issue for a cover scan, that is if the scan can do it justice.
(un)reason
Legend
Dragon Magazine Issue 200: December 1993
172 pages. Oh boy. This issue is both a christmas one and a centennial. Not often you get a conjunction like that. And as a result, they really go to town, with the largest issue in the entirety of the magazine's history by a large margin. Plus the quintessential symbol of early 90's excess, a holographic foil cover. That's gonna push up the production costs. So I've decided to do something a little special for this issue as well. I've been rather enjoying the works of channel awesome in recent months, so I decided to see if I could do stuff like that, since I have the equipment, and I'm no stranger to audio editing. And a good month of frantic writing, filming and editing later, (video recording and editing is waaay more hassles than music) here we are. I've filmed video sections for many of the articles, in which I elaborate on details, take different tangents to my print reviews, or simply goof around. So get ready to enjoy what is almost certainly going to be the longest, most elaborate review in this series. I seriously hope you like it, and it was worth all the effort.
172 pages. Oh boy. This issue is both a christmas one and a centennial. Not often you get a conjunction like that. And as a result, they really go to town, with the largest issue in the entirety of the magazine's history by a large margin. Plus the quintessential symbol of early 90's excess, a holographic foil cover. That's gonna push up the production costs. So I've decided to do something a little special for this issue as well. I've been rather enjoying the works of channel awesome in recent months, so I decided to see if I could do stuff like that, since I have the equipment, and I'm no stranger to audio editing. And a good month of frantic writing, filming and editing later, (video recording and editing is waaay more hassles than music) here we are. I've filmed video sections for many of the articles, in which I elaborate on details, take different tangents to my print reviews, or simply goof around. So get ready to enjoy what is almost certainly going to be the longest, most elaborate review in this series. I seriously hope you like it, and it was worth all the effort.
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(un)reason
Legend
Our statement of ownership occupies a fairly prominent place on the contents page. It shows this hasn't been a great year for them, numbers-wise. With an average of 86k, but a last issue result just over 80k, they've shed readers about as badly as they did in 86-87, with a higher proportion of losses being from the newsstands than the subscriptions. This means that despite the big celebrations this issue, they're probably actually running on a tighter budget than they used to. Oh well, got to speculate to accumulate. I suspect they're hoping this'll win some people back, and maybe even draw in a few new readers with it's spiffy attention grabbing cover. Good luck to them.
Letters: A complaint about Allen Varney's reviews in issue 197. It became a little too much soapboxing about wider issues, and not enough about the product at hand. This is a very interesting topic indeed. A review cannot help but have aspects of the reviewer's personality bleed through into it. (I'm sure you could figure out a good deal about me through proper analysis of this writing, and even more from the video stuff, since so much of communication is tone as well as actual words.) Indeed, to completely do otherwise would negate the opinion part that makes a review valuable. Similarly, products don't just spring into existence from a vaccum. Knowledge of the people producing them, the fashions of the time and place they were made, these are important in making an informed judgement about a product. Likewise, knowledge of a reviewer will help you know if their opinions are likely to be in accord with yours, so you can make an informed purchase. Nevertheless, Allen concludes that he might have gone a bit too far, and he'll try to avoid repeating that mistake.
A letter from someone who's uncovered their old character sheet, and wants to know what their old magic items do. However, they can't seem to find descriptions of them in any official products. This is because your DM was liberally stealing from mythology, giving you overpowered literary items that haven't got official incarnations yet. Monty haulism like this is perfectly normal in young games.
Speaking of young games, our next letter is from someone who has recently had two tweenage girls join the group, with the real possibility of a third coming along soon. This has seriously cramped the style of the older people in the group. Oh suck it up and get to teaching them to roleplay properly. The sooner you do, the sooner they'll cease to be a problem. We were all amateurs at some point.
A letter by someone interested in getting into PbM due to their recent article. A move approximately akin to getting into britpop in 1997 fashion-wise. Oh well, I'm sure someone, somewhere is still doing it the old fashioned snail mail way.
Letters: A complaint about Allen Varney's reviews in issue 197. It became a little too much soapboxing about wider issues, and not enough about the product at hand. This is a very interesting topic indeed. A review cannot help but have aspects of the reviewer's personality bleed through into it. (I'm sure you could figure out a good deal about me through proper analysis of this writing, and even more from the video stuff, since so much of communication is tone as well as actual words.) Indeed, to completely do otherwise would negate the opinion part that makes a review valuable. Similarly, products don't just spring into existence from a vaccum. Knowledge of the people producing them, the fashions of the time and place they were made, these are important in making an informed judgement about a product. Likewise, knowledge of a reviewer will help you know if their opinions are likely to be in accord with yours, so you can make an informed purchase. Nevertheless, Allen concludes that he might have gone a bit too far, and he'll try to avoid repeating that mistake.
A letter from someone who's uncovered their old character sheet, and wants to know what their old magic items do. However, they can't seem to find descriptions of them in any official products. This is because your DM was liberally stealing from mythology, giving you overpowered literary items that haven't got official incarnations yet. Monty haulism like this is perfectly normal in young games.
Speaking of young games, our next letter is from someone who has recently had two tweenage girls join the group, with the real possibility of a third coming along soon. This has seriously cramped the style of the older people in the group. Oh suck it up and get to teaching them to roleplay properly. The sooner you do, the sooner they'll cease to be a problem. We were all amateurs at some point.
A letter by someone interested in getting into PbM due to their recent article. A move approximately akin to getting into britpop in 1997 fashion-wise. Oh well, I'm sure someone, somewhere is still doing it the old fashioned snail mail way.
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(un)reason
Legend
Editorial this month is done by Kim, Roger and Dale working in concert. It wouldn't be a century celebration without a good look back at the story so far. Again, the fact that this is a quite well co-ordinated changeover compared with Kim's abrupt departure in 86 is made pretty clear. Everyone is still in touch with each other, and working in the same buildings, even if they're doing different jobs now. All the acrimony can remain focussed on the accountancy people. (who probably aren't happy at this issue being bigger without having a corresponding price increase to gouge the rubes.
) Kim is full of nostalgia about his early years at the magazine. Really, he was tremendously lucky to get on board the magazine just as it started to really rocket upwards, and that he was one of the few people applying who was primarily an editor rather than a gamer. That's not to downplay his contribution at all, as it was that experience that played a big role in pushing the magazine up to a new level of professionalism. In return, he got to enjoy the experience of working on stuff a lot more interesting and varied than newspaper journalism, and get the experience of being a celebrity for a few days a year, just enough time to really enjoy it without getting a bloated ego. It really is a very good life for him. He should feel very lucky he got not just one, but two chances to do this.
Roger's reminiscences are less personal, and more concerned with the great articles he's got to preside over during his tenure. There really are rather a lot, particularly from the early years. Just as with Kim, he got to be around when they tried out a lot of new things. But even more than Kim, he had to work ridiculously hard, as he became editor of two magazines just as the magazine's readership was starting to shrink again. He managed to turn that around for a while, but he must admit it's worn him down over the past few years, and he's glad for the change of scenery. It can never really be as special as the first time, can it.
Dale's section is relatively short, as he is still the junior member by comparison. Most of it is actually comprised of his side of the hiring process, and thanking the rest of the staff, with little information actually about him. He's still very much just one of the crew, no time to grow an ego. And with the top layers of the company still young enough that they won't be retiring any time soon, he'll also have to work very hard and be quite patient to advance further. The company is ossifying a bit, isn't it.
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(un)reason
Legend
Double post
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(un)reason
Legend
Triple post, actually. Stupid forum glitches
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(un)reason
Legend
We started off this year with some african stuff and new kits, and it looks like we're going to end it that way as well. Technically, this lot are all wizard kits. However, the strict distinction between arcane, divine and psionic power sources isn't really source material appropriate, so a lot of them have limited access to cleric spells amongst their special benefits. Which definitely alters their focus, without having to deal with the massive XP penalties multiclassing inflicts.
Baule Diviners get access to the elemental sphere, and lots of social respect for absolutely no penalty beyond all their initial proficiency slots being chosen for them. Bit of a no brainer, providing you have the wis to specialise as a diviner in the first place. But then, people do frequently neglect the humble diviner and their puzzle solving powers. Knowing they can also flame strike their way through problems goes some way to making them more glamorous.
Bokor are one of the most interesting kits I've seen in a while. Both benefits and hinderances are pretty significant. Bigger Hit dice. Access to the chaos sphere. Automatically getting to become undead after death. Uncontrolled shapeshifting. And being pariahs in most places for being weird and satanic. They aren't going to get to live a normal life anytime soon, at least until they have enough spells to be able to polymorph themselves back on a daily basis. (and even then, the wild surges'll keep things from being too safe. ) One could certainly be a valued member of a party, but you couldn't really rely on them. Their powers will be troublesome sooner or later.
Houngan are ye old african voodoo stylee wizards. Which means lots of dealing with the spirits. This means they get access to the clerical Necromancy sphere to supplement their wizardly necromantic specialisation. Since this puts stuff like remove paralysis, neutralize poison and resurrection in their grasp, that takes quite a bit of the pressure off clerics to hold back and play support, for the party isn't so totally screwed if they're lost.
Mambo are the feminine form of spirit-talker. They get the same extra necromantic access, plus a moderately stereotypical charming power that'll do a bit to compensate for the schools restricted by their specialisation. Their advantages seem to well outweigh their hinderance.
Zande Witch Women are the african inquisition, rooting out Bokor and other spiritual nasties wherever they may be. As with our own inquisition, they look pretty scary, and often go too far, making them not hugely popular amongst the public. But with cursing, access to the Combat sphere (which again goes some way to compensating for their forbidden schools) and the ability to have a human bonded "familiar", their bonuses once again significantly outweigh their downsides. Aside from being very stingy with bonus proficiencies, these are a pretty badass lot, quite possibly capable of outshining less interesting character builds. Allow into your game with only with caution and an appropriate backstory.
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(un)reason
Legend
The wizards three
It's only the 4th instalment, and this is now cemented as one of the most eagerly awaited parts of the magazine. No surprise that it's appearing here, in this epic special issue. This time, they get down to business relatively quickly, trading more spells than they've managed before in a single sitting. 9 of them are new, and I'll examine them in more detail in a minute, while one is a bit of cross-promotion for their supplements. (gotta collect 'em all!) Not that it's devoid of drama. Mordenkainen is revealed to be fully aware of Ed's presence, the Simbul makes a guest appearance, and Dalamar gets taken down a peg by the others yet again. He just can't catch a break, can he.
No matter how powerful you get, there's always a few people even better out there. The spells are as useful as ever. Shadow bolt inflicts minor damage, plus various penalties on their actions due to pain. Since there is a shortage of good offensive 2nd level spells, this might just be the one to fill that slot.
Slowspell is an interesting little metamagic effect that delays when spells take place. This can inconvenience enemies, and be used tactically to benefit your own spellcasting if you plan ahead.
Acid Bolts are another basic blasty effect. Aside from the greater damage and different type, they're just a variant on magic missile, with no special effects to mark them out from the crowd.
Mordenkainen's involuntary wizardry sees him dip into his personal library and once again get metamagical. Make them waste a random spell. Way to ruin the careful plans of your adversaries.
Bonebind gives you another method for incapacitating undead, with the potential for comical applications as well. Just the thing for players who still hold a grudge about being aged or level drained.
Bloodstars give a wizard 7 orbiting orbs that let them kick the asses of a whole party like a fully powered up ship in R-type or Gradius. Just the thing for a villain about to face a climactic battle who doesn't have any minions near to split party fire.
Lightning Storm is pretty weak for it's level, with the only real selling point being the fact that it leaves you unscathed. Really, any combat spell more than twice the level of fireball should be substantially bigger or more damaging. Someone didn't roll well on their spell research attempt.
Alamanther's return lets you play mimic, casting any wizard spell you've ever seen, but don't know personally. Fill all your 9th level slots with this, and you could almost be a spontaneous spellcaster, eschewing study for mischievous improvisation. If you've made it that far, you deserve a little relaxation.
Tempestcone is a more offensive variant on Ed's own Spell Engine from issue 100. How very appropriate a callback. Instead of turning them into harmless light, it absorbs any magic energy cast at you and turns it into magic missiles. Truly a godspell, letting you change the whole nature of a fight in one fell swoop. Beware fighters though, since you can't cast out of it any more than people can cast in.
Looks like Ed has brought the awesome here, just as he has many times before. There may be a few balance issues, but that's standard with experimental magic, and it seems they're as often overpowered as under. Just exercise the usual caution and make sure they have to actively hunt down the rare and powerful spells on an individual basis. I wonder if he'll have anything to contribute to issue 300. Certainly seems like there's no end to his popularity at the moment, but we know how quickly that can change. Good luck.
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