Dragon Magazine Issue 147: July 1989
part 5/5
The role of computers: J R R Tolkien's War in Middle-earth has had almost as lengthy a gestation period as the book it's based upon. It only gets 3 stars, but the text seems rather more positive than that, painting a picture of an epic game requiring you to juggle multiple characters to achieve the objectives from the book and get used to flipping between the macro and character level perspectives. Hmm. Seems like people do try and put their best feet forward when tackling this property.
Hillsfar is the second of our computer based AD&D adventures. Explore said area of the forgotten realms, fight in the arena, deal with the tyranical ruler and his lackeys, and generally play in the sandbox. Fun, but not a hugely deep game, and marred slightly by saving being rather limited and no pausing. A bit of a filler game between the previous and upcoming epics.
Abrams battle tank is a high crunch simulation of driving said bit of heavy military ordinance. You have to flick between controlling the 4 different stations, drive, load, target and fire. And try and actually get some battle missions done. Sounds like a lot of keypress memorization required.
Sim City Terrain editor takes the still fledgeling program mentioned in passing last issue, and makes it into the supremely customizable timewaster we know and love. Now there's a nostalgia hit for me. Sim city was included on my first PC, and I spent ages playing around in it. The number of familiar names should increase quite considerably in the near future.
The role of books: The eight by Katherine Nevile is a playful espionage novel interleaving stories set in 1973 and the french revolution. It avoids the danger of involving the famous historical characters too closely, and develops it's own quirky cast and plot twists. The reviewer rather enjoys it.
Gamearth by Kevin J Anderson is an interestingly meta story which alternates between the viewpoint of a fantasy world, and the gaming group that plays those characters, as they try and stop the GM from ending the world. You know, you can just stop and walk away. It's not as if your players will chain you to the chair to force you to keep playing. Anyway, the question of whether the game universe is real or not, and it's relation to earth is left hanging, as is the final fate of the game, which frustrates the reviewer, but may be the point the author was trying to make. How very tricky to make a judgement on.
Starfarers by Vonda N McIntyre sees a would be space exploration ship under attack from global politicking. Lots of subplots delve into the lives of various crewmembers, and how they got to be in their current position, keeping the high concept from becoming too overbearing.
Lord of cragsclaw by Bill Fawcett and Neil Randall is a well built shared world story. It features anthropomorphic felines, but don't let that put you off. It definitely looks like there's plenty more room for worldbuilding and stories here.
The earth lords by Gordon R Dickinson gets a moderately negative review. The plotting and worldbuilding don't hang together brilliantly, and he isn't sure if it's fantasy or science fiction. Either way, he's produced better books.
Burning water by Mercedes Lackey has one of those omnicompetent protagonists who would be annoying if they weren't so likable. It runs the gamut of occult traditions in the course of it's plot, treating them all with respect and a decent amount of research. It looks like the start of another book series.
Who's afraid of beowulf by Tom Halt puts ancient characters in a modern day situation, and lets the humour flow naturally from there. The characters react logically to the strange situations, and it still manages to be a fairly dramatic story.
Dragonmith gets lost again. Yamara is saved by the debt collection. It's so hard to be a world threatening villain and stay under budget.
Three monstrous compendia planned already? Why not just release one big book. That would be far more convenient.
A fairly interesting issue, and one that I got through quite quickly. As second edition finally starts to hit the magazine, even topics that they've covered before become fresh again, to be tackled from a different angle, with new rules. We're really getting somewhere now, and things are going to become more familiar, once again. Now the main thing they have to do is survive the controversies, and convert people over to the new way of doing things. Will they lose people in the process? Lets hope if they do, they'll at least send in vitriolic letters to say why they're leaving.
) Few things are more feared than a wizard wielding one. You never know what's going to happen. At least, untill they've used it a few hundred times. Then you might start to see a pattern. Which is what these alternate tables are good for. The larger the selection you have to roll in, the more truly wondrous your wand will be. And the more utterly twinked a wild mage with one will become. Muahahaha. I do rather enjoy these, but it does seem a bit odd that they give us 4 different tables, each with 19 results, many of which require you to roll again for subresults. Surely combining them into one big table, possibly using a d1000, would be a more elegant way of handling this kind of thing. Silly chaos mages. Not terrible, but certainly not the best example of random screwage fun. 
