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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4529716" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 44: December 1980 Part 2/2Giants in the earth: Your christmas twinkies this year are reepicheep, (surely I don't need to remind you where he comes from) a mouse with 18/01 strength; and Professor Challenger. Leomunds tiny hut: The strength's of lots of monsters, and some talk of exactly where they come from, if they use weaponry, how likely they are to grapple you, and other things that add more depth to dealing with them. This is useful stuff, since it forces you to think more about creatures actions in battle, and what it really would be like fighting them. But it does involve some rather long and tedious tables, as it covers lots of creatures. File under mediocre, as it's neither as good as the planar stuff or as dull as the combat timing pontifications. Simulation corner: Another article that throws into relief how much harder doing research was before the internet, as they talk about the difficulties involved in getting a good large scale picture of the history of wargaming, and how rules design has developed through the years. Which is ironic for a genre so devoted to historical recreations. How can the hobby advance and learn from it's mistakes if it doesn't know it's own history? A very good point really. Someone ought to write a book on it. Tell me, did they? Food Fight! Another complete game occupying both the centre and the end of the magazine. This comes in basic and advanced versions. Like Ringside, this is primarily a bit of light entertainment. but has the potential for slipping some roleplaying in. A very customisable game, and therefore with plenty of replay potential. Plus some pretty good and amusing artwork. I think this works pretty well as our primary christmas present, and is obviously where most of the extra pages went. Their ambition on this front is definitely growing as well. The reviews this month concentrate on judges guild products.  Once again, we see a degree of joined-up thinking lacking in D&D, as they explicitly tie most of their products for a line into a single larger setting. They also talk about the history of the company as a whole, their magazines (as ever, anyone willing to tackle the archive of these would be given a warm welcome) and their relationships with other companies, that allow them to produce officially licensed products for them. Which include:Modron: Nothing to do with the exemplars of law from mechanus, this is a town in the wilderlands near to tegel manor, and has lots of colorful NPC's.Escape from Astigar's lair: A tournament module designed for a druid and ranger. Which makes a nice change from the usual fighter/mage/cleric/thief + hirelings team, but might make it a bit tricky to incorporate into a regular game without being too easy for the party. The treasure vaults of lindoran is most notable for having the first mention of Kevin Siembida (on artwork) in the magazine. Yeah, we'll be seeing a lot more of him in the future. Inferno is module set in a hell based on Dante's vision of it. This is obviously a very high level module, but also has lots of artifact level items to reward those of you who are up to the challenge. Sounds like my kind of game.Portals of Torsh provides an entire planethopping setup for your adventuring fun, with an entire continent detailed. Without the 32 page limitation TSR set for themselves, they can really go to town with their settings. Spies of lightelf and wilderlands of the fantastic reaches further build upon their main D&D setting with more places, plots, and maps. Duck tower ..... Yeah. You know the drill. Abandoned city previously occupied by anthropomorphic ducks. Treasure and troubles aplenty for your players to explore. City of Lei Tabor is another runequest module. Does a bad oriental analogue really have a place in glorantha. I don't remember seeing it in Heroquest. Did it get "Gregged"?Minarian legends: The Black Knight. Yeah, you know you're reaching the end of the series, because they've finished off the countries, and moved on to the independent guys who have the potential to shift the balance of power in the game. The immortal tragedy of the black knight, geased to be unable to die until he completes a virtually impossible quest. Only it's not as tragic as you'd think as he tricked the high priests into giving him immortality in the first place. Which is a pretty cool spin on the trope. The high standard of most of this series is maintained. What will it's creators do next? Its getting pretty obvious they need to move on to new grounds sometime soon. The electric eye: Three reviews in this column this issue, plus some miscalanea. Which includes errata for a program they gave us in a previous issue. Because patching computer games is a lot more urgent than fixing RPG's, where people can work around the problems themselves. Bah. Dungeon of Death: Yeah, its a dungeon crawl. Get experience, penetrate the lower levels and find the holy grail. Seriously limited compared to what real RPG's are capable of. Android Nim: A quick little multiplayer puzzle game. But at least it has sound, which most games of this era don't.  Time Traveller: An adventure game involving ..... guess what. As this is a beta copy, it has some serious bugs. But it still involves a pretty big set of adventures as you try and  recover the 14 rings of whatever. As ever, there are complaints about the price of stuff. Dragon's bestiary: This months monsters have an arctic theme, for some reason. (let it snow, let it snow, let it snow <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=";)" /> )The Koodjanuk, Cryoserpents and Ice golems all prefer colder climates, but are otherwise pretty different, in both personalities and roles. If you're characters are traveling up north, at least one of them should be useful. Nothing but the Ho-ho-ho Truth: What exactly is Santa claus in D&D terms. Now there's a character who's not suitable for shoehorning into the roles and abilities PC's have. Their rough answer is that he's an exceedingly high level elf/halfling hybrid magic user/cleric with tons of followers. Which of course beaks several rules, but hey, that's standard for characters printed in the magazine. Has the feel of something put in at the last moment to make up page count. Well, they did have a lot of pages to fill this time. I guess it was inevitable that there would be some filler material. Wormy and Jasmine are here. ZOMG implied raep. Oh noes. Fineous fingers and the rest of dragonmirth is not. An advert for next years calendar. Well, they have been talking it up since the start of the year. It'd be just dumb if they were late releasing it. This is what a christmas issue should be. A massive pushing of the envelope in size and ideas, hopefully giving us at least one thing that we'll continue to use well into the future. The decade seems to be going pretty well so far. Lets see what next year holds.</blockquote>

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