Dragon Magazine Issue 133: May 1988
part 3/5
The role of books: Aria takes off by Michel Wayland is a graphic novel from france. Stylisticly, it differs quite a bit from the current american comic book trends, with soft, rounded art, and a not particularly epic plot. Overall, it doesn't really impress the reviewer. Maybe it doesn't translate well, since it certainly seems to be doing pretty well over there, with over 30 volumes in the series now.
The dragonlance saga book 1 by Roy Thomas and Thomas Yeates is the graphic novel adaption of the first book in the series. It manages to convert the story fairly faithfully, even if the visuals and sound effects are sometimes a bit garish and overdone for the reviewers taste. If you liked the original, this is an entirely worthwhile purchase. If you didn't, you probably won't be converted.
The serpent's egg by Caroline Stevermer is a fun little tale of fantasy intrigue. Light on the supernatural Macguffins, and heavy on wit and plot twists, it manages to stand out both in tone and world-building.
Napoleon disentimed by Hayford Peirce gets a fairly negative review. Too many gimmicks, too much fast universe switching to get a good sense of the rules of the various realities, not enough tying together of the various elements. This is why you need to edit and split up your ideas to get the most out of them.
Soulstring by Midori Snyder is a classic fairy story with a twist, as told from the perspective of the rescued princess. A tyrannical wizard-king, a curse transforming the hero into a stag, it's romantic without being fluffy, and has plenty of stealable ideas for your game.
The burning realm by Michael Reaves is the long awaited sequel to The Shattered world. Not content with earth being reduced to a bunch of floating islands in space, now demons want to destroy the whole shebang. At least, some of them do, and they're as prone to making devious alliances to achieve their goals as demons in many other realities. The human characters are just as well developed and diverse in motivation, and the many elements are weaved together properly to build up to an epic finale. See. This is how you do it.
Greenbriar queen by Sheila Gilluly is another book that gets a mediocre review. It began life as a D&D game, and while it's not that the story is bad, it was probably a lot more fun, and made more sense when you were playing in it. Such is the nature of trying to get stuff from your head onto the page.
Wards against evil: Our Oriental Adventures article for this month is a little sumpin sumpin for the shukenja, if you know what I mean. The writer wants to boost their power a bit by making their power against spirits more akin to western clerics turning. Since this is a no cost power up, I somewhat disapprove. Even the editor doesn't seem too keen on the idea, pointing out that it doesn't appear in the literature, so not only does it makes them less differentiated, it does not help with emulation either. Which is no good at all. Guess this is an example of them providing explicitly optional material that they don't expect most of us to use. I'll definitely be leaving this one out.
The game wizards: More info on the upcoming D&D computer games this month. The dread hand of trilogyitus reaches even here, with not one, not two, but three Forgotten Realms computer games in development. They must be awfully confident they're going to be profitable. They also have two Dragonlance games, and two generic programs in the works. Quite an impressive list. I'll be even more impressed if they all actually come out in a timely fashion.
This of course requires a whole bunch of development teams, and Jim talks about the various companies these projects have been farmed out too. He seems rather pleased with this development, currently having a good relationship with the companies responsible. Another optimistic entry in this column that is probably genuine. After all, they're trying something new, and it seems to be coming along nicely. It'll definitely be interesting to see what our game reviewers think about this stuff when it comes out.
The role of computers: Quarterstaff is another game which takes advantage of the burgeoning processing power of computers to create creatures with artificial intelligence. This means you have a rather better chance of making them friendly than in most games. Rather than having to figure out what vocabulary the parser has, you select options from a drop-down menu, and the instruction manual will help if you do need to describe more complex actions. Once again technology has brought computers closer to emulating the tabletop gaming experience and they give this 5 stars.
Dragon's Lair is of course a conversion of the classic arcade game. It has very good visuals for the era, but manages this by being exceedingly linear, with many of the rooms requiring a single exact sequence of actions to complete, and nothing else working. This makes it very tricky indeed to do, but once you've finished it there's no point going back, nothing new to discover. Still, now you can do it without burning away ridiculous amounts of money at the arcade. The reviewers give the impression they enjoyed playing it more than I did.
Not a huge amount of microreviews this month. However, they do have lots of news on the goings on at various companies. Moves, projects, new licenses, the computer industry continues it's meteoric rise to something that will rival TV, music and books as a economic force.
) the differences between tournament and regular campaign play, and plenty of other stuff that makes it look like this is going to be another strong selection of reviews. 
