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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4455353" data-attributes="member: 27780">The Dragon issue 4: December 1976.  Empire of the petal throne special issue. Our first themed issue, this expands to 36 pages. As you may have noticed tekumel's setting detail has shown to be easily the best available in a game (well, it was still a small field) at this time. The people back then noticed it as well, and the editor goes as far as to call it "superior to middle-earth in matters that concern gamers". Which may be hyperbole, but hey. This issue contains:Reports submitted to the petal throne. We see our first case of attempting to integrate peoples campaigns into a larger universe, and the inherent problems that generates with continuity, particularly when some GM's are "overly generous" with advancement. (M.A.R's opinion on this is pretty similar to Gary's, the players should have to work hard for every level they get, and the journey is more interesting than the destination, as high level characters acquire responsibilities with their power that make further adventuring difficult ) He concludes that the simplest solution is to consider all campaigns equally valid parallel universes. From this point we get lots of adventure hooks and setting detail, presented as reports to the petal throne, and the emperor's reaction to these reports. Which is an interesting way of doing it, and makes it easy for GM's to turn them into adventures. Pretty good stuff overall.Metamorphosis Alpha! TSR's first science fiction RPG starts here. Vat grown Androids have inflitrated the human tribes. They could be anyone, including the leaders. Only pink fuzzy balls can detect the interlopers and ensure the freedom of humanity! There's a bit more depth than that, but yes, this is a silly setting. Lets not go there. (cue camelot)  A random encounter table for tekumel. The battle of the temple of Chanis. More dense, information heavy stuff combining setting overview with in character narration to give you an excellent snapshot of an event and the culture that surrounds it. Monsters for Tekumel. The inscrutable, hermaphroditic, shapechanging Mihalli, and the Viragga, which are essentially organic squid/tank hybrids with lots of tentacles. As with other stuff, a lot more attention is placed upon their behaviors and place in the world than contempory D&D monsters. An update on the joke monsters described in SR3. Beware the ring of wedding and Bi-labial fricative. Really. Don't say you weren't warned.Fiction: Roads from Jakalla by Jerry Westergaard. Nice to see some tekumel stuff that isn't by M.A.R, as his distinctive tone does get a bit dull in large quantities. They said Dirt was cancelled for space reasons in the editorial, and yet here it is. Guess there was a bit more room at the last minute than they expected. Wargaming world: Lots of staple low level D&D monsters this time around. A recommended reading by Gary Gygax. Poul Anderson, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Vance, Weinbaum; you ought to know the score by now. Go read them. It'll explain a lot.Finieous fingers & fred & charly continues to entertain. Magical Eyes for Tekumel. The temple of Vimuhla for tekumel. A detailed set of photographs of its construction as a miniatures battleground. This suffers from the poor resolution of the .pdf scans, preventing me from looking as closely as I'd like. I suspect this problem will become more frequent in later issues as the amount of higher quality color artwork increases. Which is a shame. After this issue, I definitely have a decent idea of what the setting of tekumel was like. Which is a lot more than can be said for greyhawk. Whatever happened to it? When and why did it descend into its current state of publishing limbo. Hopefully I'll find out as I read onwards.</blockquote>

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