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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4482510" data-attributes="member: 27780">The Dragon Issue 24: April 1979Part 2/2Lotsa house rules for Dungeon! Armies of the Renaissance - the Swiss: This is pretty similar to the article a couple of issues back, only a little more general and condensed. Entirely fluff, and not hugely interesting. Narcicistics: Ahh, joke monsters. We never tire of reading of thee. (and then never use you in our games either, I hope, as the stats do not work under the rules) This time, the popular crowd gets to be the butt of the joke. Psionics revisited: A set of modifications for the psionics rules in EW. These make little sense to me, but I gather that those rules weren't the most well constructed anyway, so its all good/bad. Disease: A set of random tables for determining the symptoms and lethality of a random disease. As is often the case for this period, the mechanical ramification of certain symptoms goes unexplained. Still, it is pretty amusing, and hardly useless. Bergenhone '77: Modern war training. The american army gets its ass kicked at tank gun target practice by the canadians. We'll be ready for this years competition, and beat them into the ground. Now that's real life wargaming. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> The return of Conan Maol: A little more distant history, here, as we get a story of another ancient irish hero to use as we see fit. Another so-so article. The ramifications of alignment: Another attempt to make the moral/ethical conflict in D&D make a little more sense. This one works by separating out what the author considers the 6 main manifestations of each alignment (examples:  seeker of knowledge or military discipline for law, the balance must be preserved or personal ambition over principles for neutrality, fertility or destruction of everything for Chaos, and allowing you to focus on one. Something like this would have made the irreconcilability of alignment debates caused by people being unable to agree on what actions actually are lawfull/chaotic/good/evil considerably less of a problem. A good article, (apart from the very bad deity names, which seem to have been spewed from a generic fantasy random syllable generator) and one I wish had been picked up and run with by the game. Speaking of random syllable generators, we get one for naming things in tekumel. The results of the second featured creature competition. It seems that there aren't that many decent artists among dragon's readership, as only the number 1 entry shows any real signs of professionalism. They do recognize that art is the area that they need to improve on the most, and We know they do improve on that front. But how soon? How much longer will scrappy black and white line art be a regular feature of the magazine? Monty haul and the best of Freddie: More silliness, including what would later become serious artifacts the ring of Gax, and the Rod of 7 parts. These are the stories that would later be adapted into Greyhawks epic lejends <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> and characters. Kinda takes the aura of wonder away, doesn't it. The Society for creative anachromism: Now here we see another great advantage of the remerging of the magazines. They cover topics that would previously have been unsuitable for either. Tabletop roleplaying, meet LARPing. (god, 4 years, and this is the first time they've mentioned it here.) I hope you'll be the best of friends, and not look down on each other and go around taking the piss. We're all just gamers, trying to have some fun. Futile hope? Oh well. Hopefully we'll see more on this topic before the magazine turns inward and becomes a D&D house organ again. All in all, its a very full issue, the biggest change in format since the move from SR to dragon. They've definitely put a lot of effort into this one, and I'm pleased to see that they want to expand their scope. If they increase their standards and production values I can see how they can soon reach the golden years that so many people have spoken of nostalgically. The rollercoaster is definitely going up at the moment.</blockquote>

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