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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4473497" data-attributes="member: 27780">The Dragon Issue 18: September 197836 pages. Despite being smaller than the previous couple, this is a very full issue, with more articles than any previous issue. This fits in with the general feeling that the roleplaying industry is growing rapidly, with talk about the size of origins and the things that happened there. In this issue: Lots of talk about the Origins convention that year, including a list of the awards winners, apologising for the drunken mess the designers caused, and a rundown of the Avalon Hill vs SPI staff softball game. Lots of interesting historical detail here. Traveller! The strategy of survival: Another classic game gets its first mention in Dragon. As many of you know, in classic traveler you could die in the process of character creation. This article gives you a good run through the generation of a lifepath for a sample character, to whet your appetite for the game.  Yeah, this is another big step up for character depth. By making it integral to the chargen process, they make it easy to build characters with depth to their personalities and attachment to the setting around them, and encourage you to do the same with NPC's and the world around. A review for traveller as well: Between the two, we get a good idea of what the game is like, how the rules work, and the kind of game you play with it. And for a brand new game like this, good publicity in its early months is important to its success. More reviews: The emerald tablet, Imperium, Pelic Quest (our first computer game review, which I guess is appropriate to the issue.) , and Cosmic Encounter. More sci-fi stuff of various kinds, which are also pretty favourably received by the reviewer. Insanity! Another weird save based off your ability scores rather than your class & level. As usual, this can be both a real nuisance to players, and an endless source of perverse fun. Unfortunately, the list of insanities isn't that big, and lacks both distinctive quirky insanities, and politically incorrect "insanities" that could make this a classic article. A wasted opportunity. A load of new spells. Most of these are probably Sllllliiiiightly overpowered, and none of them made it into general use in future books. Most notable for the introduction of metamagic spells, which alter the parameters of other spells cast immediately after them. Not sure if future instances of metamagic draw from this or developed it independently, since they were worded quite differently. But I guess this is still a significant article, since it shows the beginning of people treating spells as combinable and customisable building blocks rather than just discrete effects, which would eventually result in spell construction systems like Mage, instead of endless spell lists. Magic governed by laws of theory: Once again we see two related articles put next to each other. We see lots of real world magical principles such as sympathy & contagion, and the balance of the universe talked about. More thoughts on how to build an internally consistent world with reasons behind what happens on it working the way it does. How to design a town in boot hill: More thoughts on building a logical setting for your game. Yep. I guess that world-building has well and truly arrived now, and its just a matter of refining the idea. The chamber of the godgame: Ahh, the old impossible choice. Sacrifice one of the adventurers lives to solve the puzzle and escape. Maybe they won't really die. Maybe the right choice is find your way around the puzzle.  Maybe its on the level, and you're screwed. Yeah, the PC's'll hate you if you use variants on this one repeatedly. Notes on the design of Gamma world. Yet more thoughts on how to design a map and its inhabitants, as well as their relationships to one-another, resources, and so forth. Another so-so article, but it reinforces that this issue is very much about settings. Birth tables for boot hill: See above, only for a different topic. Yet more random tables for determining background stuff like social class and job. Crossover rules for transporting D&D characters to MA, and vice versa. We could have done with this last issue, along with the actual play. You'll still have to wing it quite a bit though, as there are now far too many fiddly bits in both games for a 1 page article to cover. Monk weapons & monk vs monk combat: Yes, its another badly integrated subsystem. Effective use of poison: We see the first use of alphabetical identification of poison types with various effects. Which of course is a lot more preferable than save or instant death. Another thing that would be expanded upon and go on to be a staple of 2nd ed AD&D. Wormy and Fineous fingers continue. A little cartoon takes the piss out of the D&D level titles. The childhood and youth of the grey mouser: Yet another significant article by a prroper author, this gives a good idea of the not exactly kid-friendly childhood of lankhmars famous rogue. Random tables for determining the ego and greed of NPC's in D&D, and the effect this has upon their cost and reliability. Another tool for the GM in a hurry. The super snit revue: A load of entertaining looking new pieces for the snit games. Nice to see them continuing support for this, given its controversial reception. After reading this issue, I feel a little overloaded. So many significant articles, overlapping and supporting one-another. I'll definitely be rereading this one. Catering to a wide set of games, while maintaining a consistent theme for the issue, this is what a good Dragon issue should be like.</blockquote>

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