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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4523184" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 41: September 1980Part 2/2Bazaar of the Bizarre: Magical doors for your amusement and the players frustration (particularly the intelligent talking ones, which are always a pain in the ass.) plus three interesting (and rather powerful) multipurpose Ed Greenwood items. Simulation corner: The spotlight again turns upon Avalon Hill, and their past, present and future business plans. Which seem to be pretty solid and well organized, if this article is to be believed. They may have found that the things that sell most were not their personal favourites as products, and had to adapt to the changing market. But they have done so, (although it's interesting to note that they are still supporting those less popular lines, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run.) and things seem to be going pretty well. Of course, they would say that, particularly in an official interview, because they want to make more money.  Forgive me if maintain my sense of skepticism. AH meets the computer: Tom Wham comments on the processes of computer gaming, and it's ability to augment regular gaming. (with an optimism that has proved rather unfounded in hindsight, particularly in the speed and degree with which computers would become able to handle complex stuff like RPG's. Even now, the DDI is just about managing it, in the face of considerable amounts of apathy. ) We also get 4 reviews, B1 Nuclear Bombers, Planet Miners, Midway campaign, and Nukewar. These get considerably better quanititative evaluations than the regular reviews, with ratings out of 10 in a range of categories, plus solid info on what computer and memory size is required, loading time, etc.  Which is a very good thing, in my opinion. Solid charted info is much quicker to evaluate, compare and digest than stuff put throughout the review as the author sees fit. It's now fairly standard in computer gaming magazines, but never caught on here. Which is a shame. Yet more reviews: Having done the computer reviews, they now move on to the physical products. Perilous encounters, a mini's gaming system, gets a pretty positive review. Dark nebula, a boardgame gets a slightly more ambivalent one. The company TA-HR gets generalized praise for the quality of their miniatures, and hope that more stores will stock them (and a wink from a magazine's worth a good few sales in the field, isn't it.) And The Golden Horde, a wargame modeling Gengis Khan's sweep across the known world, also gets a mostly positive review. Nothing hugely noteworthy here. Having talked about women and roleplaying, and clergy and roleplaying, they now want teachers to talk about roleplaying, particularly if they have used it in a positive manner as part of their lessons. Who next? (betcha "gamers of color" for 10 dollars) How long before this line of topics starts scraping the bottom of the barrel? As ever, time shall tell. Dastardly Deeds and Devious Devices: Transformation, drowning, one way doors. More fun ways to screw your party over, two impossible to avoid except by very paranoid players, and one literally impossible to deal with, except by luck. And where's the fun in that? I suppose it depends. The electric eye: Three awesome little programs to calculate stuff that would be rather lengthy to do manually. That is, if they work, and you don't spend more time trying to adapt it to your own system than you would making the stuff in the first place. Unfortunately, this is another area where I can't test these things out see how well they work. Still, good to see them supporting weird peripheral stuff like this anyway. Eye of the Dragon: Lots of new miniatures for sale this month. On top of that, there is a silver dragon hidden somewhere in america with a $10,000 prize for finding it. Oh, and Tim Kask is selling an issue of dragon no 1. Read into that what you will. Did he just have a spare? Nothing hugely classic coming soon this time.Guerilla warfare, Napoleonic style: A complete minigame, including an actual play scenario, in just 4 pages. Whoa. Obviously pretty simple, given the size, and very lethal indeed, so games won't last too long. Still, I must say I'm pretty impressed at the writer for managing to condense an entire game in this fashion. It looks like it should handle large scale battles in decent amounts of time. I thoroughly laud this article. Yay! another snits comic. Dragons bestiary: The silkie (more fruit tigra? Muahahahaha! I think you meant selkie) The classic skin shedding seal shapeshifter gets a D&D writeup that does pretty much what you'd expect, albeit with very ...... elaborate implied setting stuff that reminds us that even good faerie creatures aren't always very nice by human standards, as well as being insufferable munchkins. And the Tomb Tapper, another intriguingly alien Ed Greenwood monster, which has a believable set of motivations and proper integration with its ecological neighbours. With a bit of adaption, they would be entirely PCable. Jasmine continues, guess what, the heroine is the chosen one. Fineous fingers starts building up again. 10,000 Chinese peasants! What will he think of next? And finally, we have another full 16 page module, The halls of Beol-Dur. Another instance of ad hoc ability based saving throws appears here. We see a certain amount of plot, adaptive time responsive monsters, and unfortunately, a certain amount of railroading. Which is certainly a development from the first few modules. There's also quite a bit of stuff which'll permanently boost your attributes, which is quite progressive of them. Pretty intriguing. Another jam packed issue full of quality product, plus a certain amount of dross. No huge changes here, but fashion continue to turn, and the encroachment of computers onto every aspect of our life continues. The 70's already seem like a distant memory, as they produce issues both faster and larger. And the decade has still barely started. Oh well, onward we go.</blockquote>

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