Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 105: January 1986

part 3/3

Profiles: Kim Mohan is our first interviewee. He would like to reiterate once again that he is NOT a girl. This is one of our least interesting profiles yet, mostly because we saw most of this stuff recently in issue 100. Apart from the revelation that he isn't really much of a gamer, and some stuff on his most recent projects, this all feels very familiar. Patrick Lucien Price, on the other hand is one of those names that you see on the credits, but knew nothing about. He helps to edit all TSR's magazines, and takes his job seriously. He encourages you to learn your trade properly and do likewise. After all, the better your submissions, the less work he has to do.

Fiction: On the rocks at slab's by John Gregory Betancourt. Oooh. It's the start of this series. Another one I remember seeing a sequel to when I was reading first time round. How interesting. Uleander the barkeep is trapped between a rock and a hard place, having to deal with the impossible demands of the people in charge of the city, and the equally impossible mischief of Slab, the ghostly former owner, and all his ghostly friends. A lot of the time, it seems all he can do is try and hang on for the ride. Entertaining, but fairly inconsequential in it's own right, I already get the impression that this gets more amusing as it goes along, and the little bits of mythology gradually get built up. See you around then.

Rites of passage: Hee. Initiation rites. An excuse to force the newbies to dress stupidly and humiliate themselves to prove they're the right stuff for your little club. They come in many forms, particularly in gamma world, where the people themselves come in pretty diverse shapes. This gives you plenty of amusing advice on this matter, interspersing a load of nanofiction with the OOC stuff. Expect unfairness on their part while you still have to play by the rules. It's almost enough to make you say these guys, I'm starting my own club. But given the harsh conditions, you may have to swallow your pride and take what allies you can get. Oh, compromises, compromises. The thing good dramatic conflict is made of. So a quite decent article, overall.

The marvel-phile: An unusually high number of characters in this month's marvel-phile, as Jeff adds 5 new characters to the Serpent Society. (as shown on the cover of this month's Ares section. ) Cottonmouth. Asp. Bushmaster. ( Is he also a cunning linguist ) Diamondback. Rattler. They really ought to sue Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, this is an easy and iconic theme, that you can add more and more members too. They work as a villains union, allowing bigger masterminds to hire groups of villains more easily, and also providing protection from said masterminds inevitable betrayal, making sure they get properly paid, etc etc. That is a remarkably clever and realistic idea for a superheroic world. I rather approve.
We also get told that after much demand, Advanced Marvel Superheroes is on it's way. So that's what they were hinting about last month. Jeff will be teasering us extensively before it's release. All rather pleasing stuff here. I'm looking forward to reporting on this. Over and out for now.

Villains and variants: Villains and Vigilantes gets a bunch of optional rules here. Essentially the writers personal house-rules, this is pretty pure crunch that leaves me unable to comment on it, other than to say that it seems designed to make things slightly more lethal for mooks, and slightly less so for PC's. Which is certainly an understandable preference. Guess I'll have to leave an open verdict on this one.

The big guns: Guess superhero stuff really is taking over from harder sci-fi in here. And we have another attempt at increasing the realism here. In comics, whenever the army tries to go up against supervillains or giant monsters, they normally get chewed up with comical ease. This is not the case here, as the writer gives us pretty realistic stats for tanks, fighter jets, warships and submarines. If you want your monsters to be able to trounce them, you'll have to do it the expensive way, and you'd better make sure your heroes are up to the task of beating them, because otherwise, there's going to be a lot of civilian casualties. Ah, reconciling simulationist and narrativist play. Such a tricky business, sometimes. I'm pretty ambivilant on this one. It's not a bad article on it's own terms, but doesn't really mesh with the way I would prefer to handle a game like this.

Expanding the frontier: Back to the sci-fi with a star frontiers article. Exploring new planets might be part of the name of the game, but that doesn't mean it should be easy. Here's a couple of pages talking about the process, methods and obstacles. Which doesn't really say anything new to me. This is the kind of topic that could fill an entire sourcebook, and here feels like it was just tacked on to make up space. Once again, my overfamiliarity with the tropes makes this less enjoyable for me than it would for a newcomer to the magazine.

Wormy demonstrates Irvings, er, charisma. Yeah, that's the ticket. Snarf returns to sanity. Dragonmirth is as trope-aware as ever.

West end games takers out a nice full page colour ad with all of their big games in it.

Hmm. Overall, not a great issue. Starting off with a downer that heavy meant it never really picked up much momentum. Although it does still have some cool articles, their overall quality control still seems to be sliding, with lots of bits that are just way too predictable to sustain my interest. The Ares section continues to drift away from it's original remit as well. It's pretty clear it's days are numbered. Another shift in style is needed, before the magazine gets stuck in a rut.

 

[(un)reason]

Ed does come up with some good stuff. But what I want to know is how well do these tables mesh the 1e DMG's random prostitute tables?

Not very well. Since those already presuppose the economic class of said prostitute, you'd have to roll repeatedly, ignoring any results that made no sense in light of previous information.

You know, I went to the RPG.net thread to see if anyone else made a similar comment, and no one did. I'm rather disappointed in them.

It's been quiet lately. People seem to be running low on random comments on both sites.

Ah, What's New. An appropriate response to my comment. Was that a scan of one of the classic strips from Dragon?

It's from sex in D&D, of course. I really should have only posted the last panel, but I couldn't be bothered with screencapping, cropping and uploading again for one appropriate cheap shot.

 

[amysrevenge]

I'm surprised at the lasting influence of the SF games in the magazine. I didn't really start reading it in any regular way until the mid-late 100s (the only access I had to earlier stuff were some article photocopies of races and classes and such), and I don't remember all that much SF content.

But then, I never played any SF games until long after I was reading these, so I would likely not have even remembered if they were in there.

 

[The Green Adam]

I started reading Dragon off and on in the early 80's but it was the Ares stuff in the mid to late 80's that kept me there and made it one of my favorite magazines.

I was always more of a SF gamer (still am) and most of the D&D stuff was already feeling like rehashes of earlier issues or things we had already houseruled ourselves. If it wasn't for Ares and the general appearance of SciFi and Superhero articles I would've dropped Dragon around the same time it became my go-to publication.

On a related note, I never liked Dungeon. I found it completely useless. It wasn't until the 2000s and the inclusion of Polyhedra that I started buying it and loving every issue. Real creativity appeared just in time to be dumped and the magazine cancelled. Way to set the bar Paizo/WotC.

AD

 

[(un)reason]

I'm surprised at the lasting influence of the SF games in the magazine. I didn't really start reading it in any regular way until the mid-late 100s (the only access I had to earlier stuff were some article photocopies of races and classes and such), and I don't remember all that much SF content.

But then, I never played any SF games until long after I was reading these, so I would likely not have even remembered if they were in there.

It's one of my pleasures in doing this that I'll get to do statistical analyses of trends like this. From my rough eyeballing, we have two cycles of decline and resurgence before the magazine becomes all D&D, all the time.

 

[Orius]

Not very well. Since those already presuppose the economic class of said prostitute, you'd have to roll repeatedly, ignoring any results that made no sense in light of previous information.

Ah well, I suppose it doesn't matter. After all, the natural progressing in D&D is killing things, taking their stuff and then blowing it on ale and whores. Robbing the whore kind of throws that out of whack.

It's been quiet lately. People seem to be running low on random comments on both sites.

Sometimes I just don't have anything really witty to say about the issue, and it's still over 100 issues to my entry point to the mag. Once we hit that, there'll be more for me to say, since I'm actually familiar with the content. The only old issue that I really knew much about was #39.

It's from sex in D&D, of course. I really should have only posted the last panel, but I couldn't be bothered with screencapping, cropping and uploading again for one appropriate cheap shot.

It's okay. I thought the whole "mating dance of the fairies" bit was a rather accurate and biting comment on human sexuality.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 106: February 1986

part 1/3

100 pages. We see the ultimate blonde bimbo adventuress on the cover. The price increase also catches up with us. Neither of which is very pleasing. On the other hand, they're working on using their space more efficiently, which is good. After all, we want to get our moneys worth, and they probably never have enough space for everything they want to include. Will this be an improvement, or is it going to make things worse as they include more crap. Guess I'll just have to keep reading and see.

In this issue:

Letters: A letter asking where the maps for the adventure in issue 104 are. Buy our other marvel modules! Gotta collect em all.
A question about a missing armor class. Ho hum.
Some questions about an illegal class combination. Dear oh dear. Are you looking to us to tie together all the disparate articles in our magazine again. It is not going to happen. Please do not ask.
Some dumb population demographics questions. You can fit a lot of gnomes in a little mountain. That's the advantage of three-dimensional living.

The forum: Bob Kindel is back again, with a whole bunch of comments. He is very much in favour of proper characterization, and has no objection to solo adventures. Hey ho.
Charles Ryan ( The same one who would later become one of the head writers for 3rd ed?! Inquiring minds want to know. ) thinks that properly immersing yourself in your character does not come at the expense of action. If you do it right, everything they do will be informed by their experiences, likes and personal tricks, including combat and dungeon-crawling. Not everyone plays metagaming power-maxed monsters, and you wouldn't want them to.
Adam Griffith thinks that gods shouldn't be given stats, so players can't beat them. If they can be beaten, they're not a proper god. Simple enough, I guess.
Thomas J Todd believes the game can be fixed by conservative giving out of treasure. Pooooooosibly, for a certain value of conservative.
Lawrence Lerner thinks that the amount of time it takes for high level spellcasters to fill up their slots is ridiculous. It could take days! This needs fixing. Only if you see it as a problem. And considering it's one of their big balancing factors, that might not be such a good idea.

The laws of magic: How does magic work? Why does it work? Where does the energy to power it come from? Here's a theory. Not a particularly brilliant theory, but a theory nonetheless, and one that allows you to still treat nonmagical things as if they work in this universe. It examines why wizardry, clerical magic and psionics work in different ways, and why different spells are different level for different classes. This is one of those cases where I'm not very enthralled because I've seen plenty of game and book universes with better developed and more interesting rules for why and how magic works. Still, maybe it inspired some of you to develop a better set of magical rules for your own game. If so, then it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Casting spells for cash: Ahh yes, one of the most broken parts of D&D's utterly broken economic system. This glosses over that, particularly as there isn't a standardized cost for spellcasting yet, and concentrates more on the way spells can be useful for a place's infrastructure, enabling pseudotechnological advances that move the milieu beyond the medieval. Ho hum. Most of you should already know most of these tricks. If you're going to do this stuff seriously, then magic-users ought to start off in huge amounts of debt, to represent their tuition and spellbook costs. And that may be a bit too much realism for most people. It does introduce a pricing system, but it's ridiculously high, placing wizards for hire out of the range of everyone but really rich nobles. Once again we see that D&D really needs a unionbreaker, so the laws of supply and demand can rebalance everything to a sane set of prices. I am seriously tempted to make that one of the primary conflicts in my campaign world. An irritating article.

The ecology of the maedar: One of the stranger bits of AD&D mythology, the male medusa, gets the spotlight on it. They take the inherent tragedy of the medusas life, and make it bearable, compensating for their weakness and providing easy meals and understanding company. Rather sweet, really. (I assume the stupid thing where they only have a 1 in 400 chance of producing another maedar was a 2nd ed addition, as it isn't mentioned here at all) One of the shorter ecology articles, and once again, Ed makes it almost as much about Elminster as it's actual subject, but still an entertaining one. It has some sound tactical advice, and feels like the kind of thing that could actually happen in an actual play. Monsters may be monsters, but they still have feelings and lives when adventurers aren't killing them. And often, they aren't very happy ones. Looks like Ed is on his usual form this month.

Money isn't everything: As long as you have enough of it, that is. Which first level characters definitely do not. Looks like it's another economic advice article. If you rolled so badly that you can't even afford what are considered the essentials for your class, what do you do? You can go anyway, hoping and praying you won't die on your first adventure, after which you should have a haul good enough to fill in the gaps (as well as a better idea of what exactly a dungeoneer needs) Or you could get a loan. Wizards need little compared to other classes, so they often have money to spare. Or you could start out in debt to a loan shark, which gives you lots of incentive to get out there and make your fortune fast or die trying, for a kneecapping often offends. You could even take out insurance policies. After all, NPC clerics are expensive, and you don't get to raise dead yourself for quite some time. Having the party all chip in to help each other will massively increase their collective odds of surviving and prospering. As would not getting drunk and frittering your money away on the high life whenever you're back in town, but that's a whole different story) This is definitely some advice that will increase your characters survivability, if possibly at the expense of some of the games flavour. If you enjoy economic manipulation, that may be a good thing. If you'd prefer not to play characters who think in a slightly metagame manner and want to keep things medieval, or would rather gloss over technical details like this which slow the game down, this may not be so pleasing. Still, it does raise some very valid points that are worth considering, to see if you want to apply them to your game. It's certainly a thought-provoking article that points out, then punctures a whole bunch of the games base assumptions, making it easier for you to change them if you don't like them.

Battletech gets a very attention grabbing full page ad. Roxxor.

 

[Orius]

We see the ultimate blonde bimbo adventuress on the cover. The price increase also catches up with us. Neither of which is very pleasing.

Ugh, the eyes totally ruin it for me. Maybe it's a bad scan and the original quality was ruined, I can't say, because I haven't seen this one reused (perhaps that isn't surprising). Then again, this IS the mid 80's so maybe the model was wearing waaaay too much eye shadow. Yuck.

Some questions about an illegal class combination. Dear oh dear. Are you looking to us to tie together all the disparate articles in our magazine again. It is not going to happen. Please do not ask.

Yup, that's the DM's job, should he be insane enough to take it.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 106: February 1986

part 2/3

Open them, if you dare: Having covered swords, shields, rings, armour, and lots of spellbooks; Ed manages to wheedle from Elminster (with the aid of copious amounts of mountain dew) information on a whole load of magical doors of the Realms. 12 different types, each with their own tricksy (and often amusing) means of inconveniencing people trying to get through them. And without even getting into the cheesy old standby of talking doorknockers either. (Beware the area of David Bowie.) That should not only be useful for your own games, but spark your imagination for ways that you can screw your own players over and keep them properly paranoid. After all, any object could be enchanted to do virtually anything. If you get stuck in a rut, your players'll get bored as well. What items will he turn his diabolical mind too next? Will he ever run out. Hopefully not for a good few years.

The ranger redefined: Wilderness lore is a big topic. While rangers as written in the corebook do have some nature related skills, it certainly doesn't adjudicate how they deal with various environmental threats in enough detail for many people. This article gives them a whole new set of skills to make up for that, largely percentile ones that increase by your level by a fixed amount. This is an increase in the classes power, but the author does try and balance this out by requiring additional training times for each extra skill they choose to increase. This will significantly increase the downtime between adventures for you, which may annoy the players of the other PC's, so as a balancing mechanism, I'm not sure it works. This is another case where the game screams for a more standardised skill system and number of slots to devote to various categories, so you have plenty of choices without one character being massively better than another for no reason. OA has recently introduced the idea of nonweapon proficiencies, but they're still using the same slot base as the weapon ones, creating an awkward competition for resources in such a combat focussed game. Still, the survival guides are out later this year, which will substantially improve on this. The system is definitely developing. Anyway, this is a good idea for an article, but not brilliantly implemented. So it goes.

More range for rangers: We had this for fighters recently, in issue 99. Now it's rangers turn to get their list of followers expanded. What are the odds similar articles for the other classes will show up soon. This reduces the variability in the number of followers to make things fairer, smoothes out a number of kinks in the original table, and adds newer creatures from the fiend folio and MMII. It clearly explains why the writer made all the changes he did, which means if you don't agree with the specifics, you have lots of help in changing it further. Now that's definitely something I approve of, like DVD commentary and behind the scenes documentaries. Another one to bookmark and pull out when you reach the appropriate level.

The way we really play: Or The story of how I used to be a Monty Haul DM, but grew out of it. The problem is, even once you do, you still have to deal with your current group, who are still twinked out to the nines and used to the game world working like that. If you don't want to throw everything away and start a whole new campaign, how do you fix this? Talk things through, in a sensible and rational way of course. There may be a few complaints, but they'll probably understand, particularly if you do it right and the game does wind up more fun afterwards. An annoying subject, mitigated by the interesting actual play reports, leaving me with mixed feelings about the whole thing. Oh well, we'll see this subject again in various forms. I guess I should be grateful that I'm not hating it every time it comes up.

Bad idea, good game?: Ahh, badwrongfun. Was there ever such a tempting thing? This article covers that very tendency, for things that seem implausible or tasteless to actually turn out to be fun precisely because of those quirks. When you break the rules of design, break them good, and find a niche no-one's thought of, and your odds of success are actually better than if you try and compete directly with and established company by copying their formula. After all, they have both an established fanbase, and are more experienced, so even if they didn't do things perfectly on the way up, it's damn hard to unseat them. A lesson you can see again and again, from evolution, to economics, to social dynamics. Learn it well, because it's virtually an axiom of reality. Of course, you may make quite a few mistakes along the way. That's also an inevitable problem with experimenting. But you shouldn't let it stop you. Paranoia, Toon, All my children. All break out from the traditional roleplaying mold, and get looked at here, along with some intriguing supplements from more traditional games. So this is sorta a review piece as well as an article, making you aware of games you might not have been, and what they do. And most importantly, saying to game designers, ok, we don't need another fantasy heartbreaker. What other cool stuff can we do with roleplaying. Just how far can we take this and still make fun games. Which is definitely an attitude I can get behind.

A plethora of paladins: Yay! 7 classes in a single go. I do believe that's a new record. And these guys are considerably better done than the set way back in issue 3. They've already covered paladins and anti-paladins. Now the other alignments get their own quirky set of exemplars. Myrikhan (NG) Garath (CG) Lyan (LN) Paramander (N) Fantra (CN) Illrigger (LE) and Arrikhan (NE) They are a fairly varied bunch, with ultra-tanks, versatile gish spellcasters, and sneaky backstabbers amongst them, but being warriors is always their primary focus. Most of them are pretty powerful, but their XP costs are also rather high. If this will keep them perfectly balanced in actual play I very much doubt, but introducing them, be it as PC's or NPC's, will certainly spice things up, introducing new shades of colour into our moral dilemmas. I'd certainly be interested in hearing from anyone who used these at any point, and should I get to play in a pre-3rd ed game again, would definitely consider trying them. (Although to try them all, we'd have to skip the regular classes. How do you suppose that would turn out, a party comprised of a bounty hunter, an incantrix, a sentinel, the revised monk and bard, a witch, and a myrikhan. )

 

[amysrevenge]

A plethora of paladins: Yay! 7 classes in a single go. I do believe that's a new record. And these guys are considerably better done than the set way back in issue 3. They've already covered paladins and anti-paladins. Now the other alignments get their own quirky set of exemplars. Myrikhan (NG) Garath (CG) Lyan (LN) Paramander (N) Fantra (CN) Illrigger (LE) and Arrikhan (NE) They are a fairly varied bunch, with ultra-tanks, versatile gish spellcasters, and sneaky backstabbers amongst them, but being warriors is always their primary focus. Most of them are pretty powerful, but their XP costs are also rather high. If this will keep them perfectly balanced in actual play I very much doubt, but introducing them, be it as PC's or NPC's, will certainly spice things up, introducing new shades of colour into our moral dilemmas. I'd certainly be interested in hearing from anyone who used these at any point, and should I get to play in a pre-3rd ed game again, would definitely consider trying them. (Although to try them all, we'd have to skip the regular classes. How do you suppose that would turn out, a party comprised of a bounty hunter, an incantrix, a sentinel, the revised monk and bard, a witch, and a myrikhan. )

I didn't realize these were so far back. This is another one where we had a photocopy of the article. They got used pretty heavily, especially the Illrigger. We were super-munchkins back then, so they must have been pretty brutal (although I don't really remember any details).