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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4506161" data-attributes="member: 27780">The Dragon Issue 34: February 1980Part 2/2From the fantasysmiths notebook: Creading our own custom foam padding to protect your miniatures in transit, so they don't get all dented and bent from jostling against one-another. Which is neat. Plus the article has some amusing illustrations, so I give it high marks for both usefulness and creativity. D-day, A more accurate variation: House rules for the wargame. Entirely crunch, and so I can't really comment on how good or bad they might be. Dastardly deeds and devious devices lives up to its name, with 4 nasty variations on blades and pit traps that'll have your players screaming in the aisles as their characters are hit on the head, hamstringed, and then split off from one another so the healbot/cleric can't fix them. Muahahahahaha. A general knowledge quiz for tekumel. Please do not write on the magazine, whatever they suggest in the article. You'll ruin the fun for everyone else reading it later. Bolotomus' Revenge: Lotsa neat houserules for the game from issue 11, mostly revolving around making each organ more individual. Nice to see people are still playing it, more than 2 years later. Whats in a name? Random generation of those pretentious descriptive fantasy names based off elements, animals, weather etc. They're silly enough anyway. When you string two or three descriptive words together by random roll, the potential for ludicrity gets pretty high. Taking the sting out of scoring: Standardising scoring for tournament play by using a formula for determining the points awarded. Encourages the avoidance of GM fiat wherever possible, by making the categories as specific as possible, so that different groups can be scored fairly, and you can thus get a good benchmark of how good your team was compared to others playing the same module across the world. Which all makes sense, when playing from that kind of viewpoint. I can't fault their logic.Beware of quirks and curses: Cursed magic items are no fun because players will immediately do anything in their power to get rid of them. Far more interesting are items that have useful abilities, but also have a price or drawback (which can also  sometimes be turned into an advantage in its own right) as well, such as making animals afraid of you, or compulsive gambling. That way, it becomes a real choice deciding if they're worth the hassle. Another cool idea that would later be used to great effect in Iron Heroes, and one I thoroughly recommend trying in your games. Frederick Macknight continues his conversion notes, this time going back the other way. What started out fascinating is rapidly growing very dull. Virtually everyone is interested in gossip about people. Very few are interested in minutinae of rules. Leomunds tiny hut: Variant combat rules taking greater account of AD&D's system of breaking rounds into segments. As is frequently the case for precision systems like this, it adds huge amounts of extra work keeping track of things. Which as you ought to know by now, is one of my least favourite types of add-on. People forget things, and you have to keep going back to get it right, or just skip over the details, so they don't get used properly anyway. Bazaar of the Bizarre: Magic fountains. Another one of the classic random screwage items. Do you dare to drink. Are you so thirsty after weeks of dungeoneering that you don't really have a choice. Will the DM even lock you in until someone takes a drink, a tactic they recommend against overcautious players.  And you can't even take it with you and use it when better prepared, unlike the bag of beans. Well, as long as everyone has fun, why not use it anyway. Yay, we finally have actual classified ads coming through. Reviews: Bushido, a roleplaying game. Hammers Slammers, a book. The Wolfen, A book. The spacefarers guide to alien monsters, a cross-system roleplaying supplement. This issue has a greater amount of criticism of the reviewed products than usual, including one that is completely panned. Which is something I thoroughly approve of. We know that over 90% of everything is crap, but it's your job to tell us what is so we can avoid wasting our money. Only printing positive reviews does not help in that.  Dragons bestiary: the Vilkonnar. A bunch of energy sucking humanoids that make a decent mid range challenge, while not being as annoying as level drainers. Dragonmirth isn't just a bunch of pics this issue, it also includes an amusing article on degrees of disasters based upon the exclamation used upon encountering them. Which is dreadfully bowdlerised, as they are trying to be a family friendly magazine. <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" /> Life is strange. Wormy is here this month. Fineous fingers is not. Aaand finally, the big tournament module, DOOMKEEP! Fear the cliched name, Ahahahaha!!!!! As this is a tournament module, it is full of horribly tricky puzzles, inventive monsters I've never seen before and killer encounters, including double fakeouts that'll have your players screaming bloody murder. It also gives a proper scoring system, so if people survive you can calculate the winner, and lists the rankings from the convention it was originally played in. A very full issue, as not only is it the biggest I've faced yet, but it has lots of little articles in addition to the very big one at the end. They continue their policy of having lots of wargaming articles as well as the RPG stuff. I guess there's still quite a bit of demand for that stuff. As ever, there are some bits which are rather dull, but there's still plenty of interesting stuff to discover, particularly in sage advice, which is rapidly becoming very useful to me.</blockquote>

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