Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Is this the first mention of the RPGA in Dragon? I don't remember seeing mention of it in your articles to date.

Not at all. They might not talk about it that much outside of the convention listings, but it's certainly been around. They mentioned that they really need something like it right after the running of the G modules in the 1978 tournaments. But you do have a point. It would have made sense for them to do a big article promoting it, but for some reason they never have.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 88: August 1984

part 3/3

Reviews: Rolemaster and it's supplements get a good looking over this issue. Well, I say supplements, but really, all 5 of these are needed to get the full rules for playing the game. And we complain that 3 books is too many for D&D.
Character law, despite being the most critical for actually playing a game, was the last part of the system produced. Characters start off with a certain level of baseline competence in the stats needed for their class, no matter how badly they rolled. There are a whole bunch of clever little ideas in the rules, some of which are good, some of which are clunky, and many of which have since been stolen and refined by other systems. Many of it's innovations seem obvious in retrospect, as really good inventions often do.
Spell law features spells up to 50th level, neatly arranged in themed spell lists. This gives them loads of room to put everything they can imagine, while making sure that spells for a particular level are fairly balanced. With lots of room for differentiation amongst the low power effects, it doesn't get out of hand as quickly as D&D spells do. There's also plenty of different varieties of spellcasters. As long as you're good at table flipping, it goes surprisingly smoothly. At least, the reviewer thinks so. If you're not keen on crunch, you may disagree with him.
Arms law, aka the big book of really gruesome critical hits, gives you the rules for weapons. Consult a different chart for each one, allowing them a tremendous amount of mechanical differentiation while still being able to resolve each round with a single roll.
Claw law does basically the same thing for animals. It focusses on their weaponry to the exclusion of any fluff. It also provides rules for martial arts, and generally seems like the least essential of the books.
Campaign law provides both plenty of world-building advice, and the start of a sample world, Vog mur. As ever, the economics has holes picked in it, as does the "realism". The density of crunch makes it rather tricky to houserule the game. (oh, you aint seen nothing yet) But still, as a primer on how to build good games, regardless of system, it's pretty helpful. Once again we see how things that seem obvious in retrospect really need to be taught.

Before the dark years: Oooh. Jim ward finally decides to reveal the timeline of gamma world (and metamorphosis alpha, as he decides to officially make them occupy the same universe.) How did we get from the modern world to a postapocalyptic mess. As with a lot of timelines from a few decades ago, it already seems rather dated, as their predictions were wildly out. (Although it'd be rather more surprising and worrying if gamma world of all things did turn out to be prescient, but there you go. ) It also suffers from the "reality is rarely as cool as your imagination" problem. Sometimes the game works better if things are kept mysterious, at least from the players. Just look at dark sun. Are we any happier knowing that the reason Athas is so ed up is because Rajaat was an angsty emo boy that nobody liked, so he had to get revenge on the world. Do not ask, for you may get answers. In other words, not only did we not need this article, but we were probably better off without it. I guess you can't know until its too late. Some things, you can't imagine being without once you know them, others you just wish you'd never seen. Such is life. Not much I can do about it now.

The marvel-phile: Ooh. Now this is a series I remember still being active when I started reading. I guess this means the marvel superheroes game'll be getting consistent coverage for quite a long time. Neat. Hello also to Jeff Grubb, another familiar name who's going to be doing a lot of great stuff in the future. We start off with stats for Thor, Loki and Ulik. Each has their powers packed into a remarkably small and self-explanatory package. Any superhero game has to be able to handle a ridiculous range of power and versatility in it's characters without breaking, and if FASERIP can handle god level creatures as smoothly as this, then that bodes well for it. Like the ecologies, I'm very pleased to see this series arrive, and look forward to seeing how it develops over the years.

The battle at ebony eyes: Star frontiers gets some more love with a new scenario. Fight the sathar around a pair of twin black holes. This means there are serious risks of falling in, and weird space-time distortions which add quite a lot of bookkeeping. So don't use this one unless you're already fairly good with the rules, and need a new challenge to keep you interested.

Yachts and privateers return: And we get another quick add-on for star frontiers in the form of 11 new ships. A single page packed full of easy to insert crunch. That's always welcome.

StarQuestions is passed back to Penny and looks at star frontiers again. Quite the round robin going on here.
How high can ability scores go (100. Higher breaks the system)
I want more info on van neumann machines and their creators. (They're not as good as you think. But as long as they're only facing animals and plants, they don't have to be. )
The planet Gollywog (no kidding) has Waaaaaaaay too much carbon dioxide for humans to survive there. (Oops. Errata time. )
You forgot to paint the outer reach counters properly (Once again, oops. You can paint them like that if you like. )
You also forgot to name the planets inside the sunbursts (So we did. Once again, I apologize profusely, and encourage you to fix the errors we made. )

Talanalan alliterates excessively. Wormy finally gets to do some wargaming. We finally find out what species snarf is.

Yet more signs that the hobby as a whole is changing in this one. So many new people pouring into the hobby, bringing their unique perspectives in with them. For some this is a great thing, while for others, this means gaming is stuck in an eternal september.
I've found this one of the less captivating issues of late. While technically, they're as good as ever, it has had more than it's fair share of seriously irritating articles. I guess that'll happen once in a while when they're covering a wide range of topics. Lets hope next issue's contents are more to my taste.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 89: September 1984

part 1/3

96 pages. There really should be 20 more, but the absence of the creature catalog from the dragon magazine archive is well documented. If anyone could direct me to somewhere I could download the missing pages, I would be very grateful. Still, plenty more stuff I can tackle right now. Lets hope we can sort out these little omissions later.

In this issue:

Out on a limb: Another letter asking for a collection of covers, which they have to sadly deny, for legal reasons.
A letter from Merle Rasmussen talking about Operation Whiteout and the people who won it when it was used as a tournament adventure, plus lots of other cool tidbits.
Some questions on the rakshasa article in issue 84. They're a funny bunch. Not really prime material or outsiders, they're actually able to fit in all over the place.
An letter brutally picking apart the recent dragonquest article. This gets an exceedingly lengthy reply from it's original author defending it. Who do you believe? Are non-spellcasters inferior or not?
A question on how paladins handle dragonhelms. They're perceptive enough to realize they're being ed with.
A letter asking for more scientific detail in the ecologies. Kim reminds them that they have to strike a balance between detail and not overdoing things. Balance balance, always with the balance. Go to the extreme for a change, it's much more interesting.

The forum: Bob Kindel thinks that high level campaigns aren't as much fun, and you ought to slow down advancement to keep players at the manageable stage. Also, anyone using deities powers cleverly ought to be able to beat even really high level characters. Those campaigns where god-killing happens are Doing It Wrong™.
Edgar W Francis IV (Oh, I say, old chap) also has thoughts on how to handle high level games, and transitioning from the old characters to some new ones. Just because you retire individual characters, doesn't mean the saga can't continue.
Katharine Kerr has a tremendously lengthy contribution on the idea of playing evil characters. Group pressure can lead to people doing horrifying things they'd never consider individually. It ends with the conclusion that even fantasizing about committing evil acts is mentally unhealthy. Great, another writer joins the morals brigade. There may have been good things about 2nd ed, but it's already clear who the drivers of the bad points are going to be.
David F Nalle finishes off this month's forum by talking about Ken Rolston, and his reviewing process. The things he calls out as flaws are sometimes intentional design choices, be it for aesthetic or financial reasons. You can't please everyone, I guess.

Survival is a group effort: Another bit of sociological pontification by Stephen Innis. This is pretty cool, going into population growth, and how creatures with short lifespans can out-survive ones with longer lifespans, but also longer times to reach maturity. Immortality is good from an individual perspective, but actually not that good in the long run for for a species. This is why elves and dwarves can wind up dying races against the goblinoids, despite massive individual superiority. He then gets even cooler, tackling the problems inherent in spawning undead and lycanthropes. What logical reason could there be for them not having overrun the game world already? Do they diliberately hold back to make sure they have prey in the future. Are they dumb enough that they prefer to kill rather than infect. Maybe there is none, and these creatures are new additions to the world that you'd better do something about or face extinction in a few generations. One of those cool articles that helps you build your own world better by gently stimulating your brain and directing your imagination. A strong start that definitely goes on my worldbuilder checklist.

Six very special shields: You can probably figure out just from the name that this is one of Ed's Elminster articles, wherein he pontificates on a bunch of magical items from the Realms. Reptar's wall. Thurbrand's protector. Hawkstone's bulwark. Dzance's guardian. Shoon's buckler. Grimjaw. (Guess Ed's theasaurus ran out of synonyms for shield ) All have some surprising special ability beyond just deflecting blows, and most of them have a sting in the tail to their powers that can be inconvenient if you don't know how to operate them properly. (gee, what are the odds if you just find them on a treasure pile or take them from a dead enemy) By now I'm used enough to Ed's style that this doesn't have quite the impact it used too, but this is still a pretty cool article, that makes it's magical items seem properly magical, rather than just extra good utility items. As with the last article, this is showing you the way to build your stuff properly. Idiosyncracies are good. Nothing is identical in real life, and only abstraction and convenience makes it so in games.

Heroes Unlimited! The most comprehensive hero game on the market! By Kevin Siembida! Buy it now! Looks like the war for best superhero game is very much on. Bring it! We can handle it.

 

[Orius]

Katharine Kerr has a tremendously lengthy contribution on the idea of playing evil characters. Group pressure can lead to people doing horrifying things they'd never consider individually. It ends with the conclusion that even fantasizing about committing evil acts is mentally unhealthy. Great, another writer joins the morals brigade. There may have been good things about 2nd ed, but it's already clear who the drivers of the bad points are going to be.

Maybe. In my previous campaigns, I allowed evil PCs, but I'm seriously thinking of reconsidering that position should I DM again. Not from some moral high horse where I think even playing an evil PC is bad, but for more pragmatic reasons. Most of the time the evil characters were either played as Evil Lite, which really didn't come off as much different than neutral and so seemed pointless, or they ended up being the disruptive "screw with everything in sight and anything invisible/etheral/astral as well just to be on the safe side" characters.

It might be a matter of maturity as well. Allowing evil PCs might be something younger players do as a matter of teenage rebellion or something. As one gets older, and more experiened with the game, you start looking at these things from a metagame PoV, and weigh whether or not it's worth running the game that way. On the flip side of the PCs, the disruptive play might be just more adolescene as well.

I'm not saying it should never happen, but I think the DM and players need to be completely on board if an evil campaign's going to be run. I think it just doesn't work as well in a campaign where good and evil characters mix for no reason other than the fact that they met at a bar, particularly if the campaign is one that isn't just a series of dungeon crawls for their own sake.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 89: September 1984

part 2/3

Gods of the suel pantheon: Len continues to provide a channel for Gary to get his material into the magazine during his unwilling exile. This month he's filling in the villainous side of the suel pantheon some more. Not even the sophisticated kind, but the ones that lurk in grotty places in the wilderness and'll get you you serious trouble if you're found worshipping them. Pyremius, Beltar, and Llerg. A fine bunch of reprobates to make your players lives miserable with. They shapeshift. They plot. They rage. They only grant mediocre special abilities to their clerics, including one clever little false benefit that makes suckers out of it's recipients. Once again, they also have to deal with errata. Gods are such a complication. And once again, this fails to enthrall me. So it goes.

Dragonlance, the epic novel trilogy, to tie in with the 12 part adventure series. Hello, Mr railroad, how will you force us to follow you, to get from the beginning to the end, without any choice of routes. Infinite draconians? What a wonderful idea. Where do they come from? Neveryoumind.

The many types of magic: Ah, yes, quibbling over exactly what the different schools of magic mean, and why certain spells are in one and not another. I knew this would come up at some point. And in many cases these are quite valid points. Why the hell is comprehend languages an alteration, or fear an illusion, when common sense would say they're a divination and a charm effect. What was their writer smoking at the time. Why is alteration used as a catchall. Why are there so few invocation effects, and what's the difference between an invocation and an evocation. Why does necromancy affect living things as well as dead ones. Why does magic jar get a category of it's own? Lots of questions are raised, and not nearly as many are answered. Lets hope that someone in the staff is paying attention and takes this stuff into account come next edition. Yet more evidence that despite their initial belief that AD&D was this great and perfect work that would need no change, an overhaul, or at least revision, is increasingly needed. A little cruft shedding never did any harm, and often makes you feel a lot better.

Time life books takes out a rather pretty full colour double page spread. Enter the magical world of myth and legend. Subscribe now! Oh, the cheese.

The role of books: Looks like they've decided to play around with their formats again. Lew is giving us another set of non-fiction reviews to help us in our worldbuilding. This time he's concentrating on the heart of the medieval experience, castles, and fighting. Two things adventurers love. And two things you can definitely do right or wrong, unlike all the fantastical elements. So what's hot and what's not in Pulsipher land?
The art of war in the middle ages by Charles W C Oman is one of the great old books on this subject. Originally published way back in 1898, it has gone through a number of revisions since then. It covers developments over more than a millenium in exhaustive detail, far more than you could ever need. The kind of thing you go to a reference library to look things up from, rather than buy.
Warfare in feudal europe by John Beeler covers a smaller period in less detail, but is far more accessable to the layman reader, with clear organisation, good synopses, and lots of analysis of the facts. If you want to get usable detail for your games without spending days poring over academic minutinae, get this one instead.
Medieval warfare by H W Koch gets a rather poor review. With poor writing and organization, this is one to avoid.
A history of fortification from 3000 BC to AD 1700 by Sydney Toy has tons of floor plans and photographs of various places that you can steal liberally, and adapt for your game, as well as plenty of detail about how they were built, lived in and developed over time. Another one you'll probably have to go to the reference libraries to find, and then photocopy bits from. Some things, the internet still doesn't really provide, at least not for free.
The medieval castle: Life in a fortress in peace and war by Philip Warner also covers castles, burt is focussed more on the people who lived in them, and how they changed their tactics based on new innovations in technology and attack styles. Why things developed the way they did is as important as the simple facts, and this fills that gap admirably.

A reversible hooded cape? Odd thing to advertise in here. Well, I suppose it is nearly halloween. Grim reaper is always a good costume choice.

Halt! Who goes there: Hmm. This is a class I don't remember anyone talking about. The sentinel, guardian of people and places against assassins and thieves. Of course, in D&D, magic can render those abilities redundant with depressing ease. And while they can foil invisibility and stealth, other tricks like ethereality, remote scrying and mind control are still going to bypass them. Still, they have lower XP requirements than fighters, and more special abilities, so their power problems are more those that all the fighting classes face when compared to the spellcasters than actual underpoweredness. Having one of these guys along would certainly be useful as a backup for your thief, not to mention a failsafe for if you can't trust him, and suspect he's conning the rest of the party. I quite like this, as they fill a niche that the regular classes don't, rather than just being a hybrid. There are a few silly OD&Disms, like forced alignment change, but those just add to the flavour of the whole package. This is definitely an underappreciated gem that I'm pleased to have unearthed and would like to put in a future game.

Beefing up the bureaus: Oh noes. Top secret isn't dramatic or cinematic enough. We must fix this. This is one of the most audaciously blatant power-ups I've seen. So much so that I can't really give my usual complaint about power creep, as there's nothing subtle about it. Which is cool, in a way. If your GM allows it, he knows exactly what he's getting himself into. I guess this is the kind of thing that would lead them to completely retool the game in Top Secret SI. In any case, it's a short article that gets right to the point, so I didn't have time to get bored either.

 

[(un)reason]

Maybe. In my previous campaigns, I allowed evil PCs, but I'm seriously thinking of reconsidering that position should I DM again. Not from some moral high horse where I think even playing an evil PC is bad, but for more pragmatic reasons. Most of the time the evil characters were either played as Evil Lite, which really didn't come off as much different than neutral and so seemed pointless, or they ended up being the disruptive "screw with everything in sight and anything invisible/etheral/astral as well just to be on the safe side" characters.

It might be a matter of maturity as well. Allowing evil PCs might be something younger players do as a matter of teenage rebellion or something. As one gets older, and more experiened with the game, you start looking at these things from a metagame PoV, and weigh whether or not it's worth running the game that way. On the flip side of the PCs, the disruptive play might be just more adolescene as well.

I'm not saying it should never happen, but I think the DM and players need to be completely on board if an evil campaign's going to be run. I think it just doesn't work as well in a campaign where good and evil characters mix for no reason other than the fact that they met at a bar, particularly if the campaign is one that isn't just a series of dungeon crawls for their own sake.

I have to say I find people saying they couldn't possibly allow evil characters when the supposed good guys in their game are engaging in mass slaughter and looting a tad self-deceptive and disingenuous. For example, this thread. I find people saying that they can't understand why anyone would allow serial killers as PC's ridiculous when chances are, they already are playing serial killers, only only to creatures dehumanised and proscribed as "the enemy". (particularly since they're WoDites, and so have probably already played creatures of de niiight that hunt ordinary people and suck their blood on a daily basis)

So yeah, It's not so much about good and evil, really, as much as it is being on the same page as the other players, and sticking to the implicit social contract with them. It's when they go into chaotic jackass mode and start treating even the other PC's as just playing pieces that you can mess with without concequences, that the game falls apart.

 

[garyh]

Dragon Issue 89: September 1984

part 2/3

The role of books:

The art of war in the middle ages by Charles W C Oman is one of the great old books on this subject. Originally published way back in 1898, it has gone through a number of revisions since then. It covers developments over more than a millenium in exhaustive detail, far more than you could ever need. The kind of thing you go to a reference library to look things up from, rather than buy.

Warfare in feudal europe by John Beeler covers a smaller period in less detail, but is far more accessable to the layman reader, with clear organisation, good synopses, and lots of analysis of the facts. If you want to get usable detail for your games without spending days poring over academic minutinae, get this one instead.

These intrigued me, so I've requested these books (and Oman's "Castles") from my library. When they get sent to my local branch, I'll check back in. Don't plan to really read them, but I'm curious to at least peruse them. I'll try to report back!

 

[Orius]

So yeah, It's not so much about good and evil, really, as much as it is being on the same page as the other players, and sticking to the implicit social contract with them. It's when they go into chaotic jackass mode and start treating even the other PC's as just playing pieces that you can mess with without concequences, that the game falls apart.

Yeah, and many of the evil PCs I've seen were little more than excuses to go chaotic jackass. Like I said, some of it at least is probably a general lack of maturity. At least I've never seen the trifecta -- a chaotic evil kender anti-paladin. He takes all the party's gear, then kills them for no reason.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 89: September 1984

part 3/3

Learn magic by the month: Dragonquest continues to get a surprising amount of coverage. This time, they cover the topic of learning a new college of magic in play. How do you keep it balanced with other training options, while still allowing for interesting adventuring. The solution is to allow you to break up your training times, and fit them around your adventuring. The rest of the article is comprised of crunch that looks pretty solid to my untrained eye, not making things too easy or hard, and having a number of quirks that emulate the real world education process. Again, I quite approve. It's nice to see they're putting plenty of non-D&D stuff outside the ares section as well.

What is a monster worth: Ho hum. Another attempt to standardize the amount of XP different special powers are worth for monsters. The current rules don't differentiate between things like 5% and 100% magic resistance, and people may disagree about what counts as a significant special power. This needs fixing. How can we do this? For a start, everything not combat related is irrelevant. Hmm. Where will we hear that again? Snark aside, we get to see another bit of behind the scenes work, as they attempt to refine their design technology. One of those things which would definitely pay off in subsequent editions. But not particularly interesting to read about. Lists alone do not a fun article make, particularly when they remind you of what you're missing.

Fiction: Dunkle Zee by Troy Denning: Hey, what's Minnie Driver doing in the artwork. This is way before she got famous. Anyway. Hmm. Looks like another writer who would go on to write plenty of books for D&D makes their first appearance here. This feels like an excerpt from a larger novel, as it refers to lots of terms that it doesn't properly explain, and then cuts itself off in an unsatisfactory way, leaving the plot hanging. I wouldn't mind, but it is well enough written that I really do want more. Which I suppose means he's done his job well. Is this expanded upon anywhere? He has my interest now, and If there is anything, I'd like to read it.

The mighty Mega-Corporations: Star frontiers continues to get plenty of setting detail. The corporation system, and how it first drove galactic expansion, before being torn apart due to corruption, resulting in corporate wars that left the human civilizations vulnerable to the sathar. An all too plausible situation, given the reprehensible behaviour of many big companies in the real world. The pursuit of profit can lead to shocking amounts of misery and death. But it also leads to lots of cool adventure opportunities in a game like this, so that's alright. It ends with a promise to follow up on this next month, talking about the specific megacorps some more. Seems like they're doing that quite frequently in the ares section. I guess with limited page count each month, they need to do this to get the compromise between depth and variety right. I suppose it's making the best of the situation. Works for me, anyway.

Luna, the empire and the stars: Our moon series turns it's eye to the Other Suns game in it's 6th installment. Once again, history has advanced to the point where the timeline in here seems a bit silly. (or depressing, given how many of us thought moonbases would be well established by now. ) Similarly, the long term deadliness of nuclear weapons is much exaggerated, given what we know now. But hey, artistic license is needed to make a good story. Worse things happen on TV.

Of grizzly bears and chimpanzees: Gamma world gets another little expansion this month. Mutant animals as currently written require a lot of GM fiat in determining stats. So here's a little bit of help to get everyone on the same page, at least. We recommend that you not allow characters to select their species after determining what mutations they have, as this makes twinking relatively easy. Despite it's old skoolness, this is another useful little resource for gamma world GM's to keep their players in check with. If that's a good thing or not depends on your opinion. I can't muster a strong one on this either way.

The marvel-phile: The marvel-phile proves itself admirably adept at alliteration. And then turns it's attention on Namor, the sub-mariner, and his enemy, Tiger shark. Some rather beefcakey photos here (Look at those eyebrows, hee. I bet he plucks them.) of our aquatic protagonists, and the usual potted history of their times and trials, divested of all the filler episodes. (of which I'm sure there were many, since this is comics we're talking about) Once again Jeff delivers a solid, noncontroversial entry that doesn't leave me with much to say about it.

A monster crossword. That's a new one for this magazine. Cool. That looks like a good time waster.

Dragonmirth gets limerickal. Talanalan goes all las vegas. Wormy catches a big one. Snarfquest fights the planetary cultural divide, with hilarious results.

Once again, I am left vaguely unsatisfied by this issue, despite there being plenty of good articles in it. Maybe I'm doing this too fast, and need a break. Maybe I'm just jaded. No matter how good things get, humans can adapt to it and wind up taking it for granted. Life is a funny thing. Instead of a conclusion, I'll leave you with a question. How do you think the history of the magazine and D&D would have been different if instead of increasing their page count in 1979, they had instead decided to go fortnightly, and eventually weekly. What effect would producing lots of short issues, instead of long monthly ones have had on their style, and our perspective of the magazine? Would this have been a good or bad thing overall to do.

 

[Arnwyn]

provide a channel for Gary to get his material into the magazine during his unwilling exile.

I've been following along, but I think I missed something. What's happening here?

I have to say I find people saying they couldn't possibly allow evil characters when the supposed good guys in their game are engaging in mass slaughter and looting a tad self-deceptive and disingenuous.

We pretty much don't allow evil characters, and we've never seen this nonsensical "good guys engaging in mass slaughter". I can't comment on such wacky games that do have this as I can't even imagine it - such a premise/argument is pretty much a non-starter for me. Sorry.

(Though I think I know, from this thread, your opinion on evil characters... so we're probably not going to get further than "agree to disagree"... !)