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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4535624" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 47: March 1981part 2/2The merry month of mirtul? The Forgotten Realms gets it's first proper named mention as Ed Greenwood talks about the calendar in his own game. He also talks about tailoring the setting in general to be more suitable for creating opportunity for adventures, by making the weather more extreme than on earth, with periods of rapid growth, technological/magical advancement and prosperity, regularly interrupted by freezing winters that cut off any large scale communication or travel for several months a year, and frequent (not so) natural disasters that kill off entire towns or even civilisations, leaving plenty of ruins to investigate. Looks like something close to points of light was part of the Realm's original design. So much for that being a new idea. Now this is a very interesting article, both in its own right and from a historical point of view. And it shows that despite becoming a full setting later, FR had a considerably longer history in the pages of the magazine than dragonlance did. We'll be seeing considerably more on this in the future. The rasmussen files: Multiclass characters and their titles and positions in a group. Get levels in all 4 roles, and you can become an Administrator, and start setting missions for other groups. As this offers advice on how to design and run a team of characters as a proper team, this is another article that feels fairly familiar in light of recent events. Crimefighters: A complete game by David Cook, this is based upon pulp comics and novels, with a particular emphasis on detective stuff. A rather fast and loose system, as you would expect given the theme and space available, with some big rules holes. But still, it's more suited to being bent to various situations than Ringside and Food Fight. At 21 pages, counting the introductory adventure, this is another pretty cool special feature, taking up more than a quarter of the magazine. I suspect we may see a few complaints about this, but I have to applaud them for pushing the envelope again. The pulps - Paper heroes: Bryce Knorr defends the often shallow and two dimensional characterization in pulp magazines. They may have been mass produced, primarily commercial products, that imitated one another quite a lot, but they still managed to produce lots of cool stuff along the way. And there are substantial cultural parallels betwen the 1930's, and the start of the 80's. Which may explain Indiana Jones' success. A bit of an anticlimax after the last article. Sage advice: Can paladins associate with neutral goods? (yes, they have good in the description, don't they, ya twit) How does the range of stuff in inches translate to real distances (1 inch = 10 foot inside or 10 yards outside. But spell areas of effect should stay the same inside or out.) Is everything in the monster manual a monster, and therefore you can't use speak to animals on it. (No. But giant versions of animals don't count as normal. ) Do PC gnomes get the poison resistance mentioned in the MM? (yes) I don't understand how shields interact with the armor/to hit table (headdesk headdesk headdesk. How do these people remember to breathe?!) Can PC's be grey elves or drow? (if your DM allows it. ) Is torture ok for chaotic good characters? (No. If you've got a good reason, (such as if they killed the pheonix <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> damn deities and their double standards) you might get away with it once or twice, but doing so with any regularity will stop you being good pretty damn quick. )Reviews: The tendency to put more emphasis on each individual review continues. Robots! is a game of resource management and combat set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of earth, and gets a pretty positive review. Fast attack boats is a game of er, the 1973 arab-israli naval war, and gets a rather less positive review, with the reviewer critisizing it's dull counters and small play field. Starfire gets a new edition, which builds nicely on the previous one. Across the bright face and mission on mithril are a paired set of traveller adventures, set in the spinward marches. One is a planet based trek, while the other is a scout ship based mission. Which gives you a nice set of choices for directions to take your game in. Research station gamma is another traveller supplement. (they did seem to be releasing quite a lot of them at this point) It's basically a location based module, as was common in this era. Of course, a space station is somewhat different from a dungeon, but I'm sure the overall experience won't be that different. Figuratively speaking: A new column covering miniatures to replace the fantasysmiths workshop, with more emphasis on reviews, and less on customisation. Unfortunately, the bad contrast on the scanning makes most of  the photos virtually illegible, which sucks. This month, we get some stuff from Martian metals, a whole load of arthurian models, some dungeon walls, and an evil wizard carried on a litter. Afraid I can't really comment more than that. Hopefully they'll move to colour soon, so I can get decent looks in. Simulation corner: More on the history of SPI. This focusses on the managerial changes they went through in the past year, and the changes in direction that resulted from that. As in previous articles, they try their best to put a positive spin on everything. Yes, they've cut the number of products they're making in half, but they intend to develop and playtest each one more thoroughly. Whatever you say. I'll be here in pessimist land, because I know you haven't survived to the present day. It's just a question of when you go under. And I won't spoil myself on that just yet. Squad leader: The 1945 scenarios continue on from last issue, as the russians rape and pillage berlin. Pull out the stops and invoke a whole bunch of special rules, because this is gonna be an epic one. Yet it still fits on half a page. Which is nice for the editors when they need a little something to complete the issue. The electric eye: This month, they focus on sports video games. Real time joystick controlled games, and strategic simulations both get examined, and several specific examples and companies get mentioned. Not my personal cup of tea, but still quite a well written article. I don't have a problem with this. Pinsom and jasmine continue to develop. Wormy returns after quite a bit with a fantasy sequence thing unconnected to the main storyline. A particularly cool back cover this month from Martian Metals, a mini's company, disguised as a newspaper cover. I am quite amused. This one's pretty good, although not in the articles I was expecting. Funny that, the ones I most enjoyed were the ones they didn't hype so much. Likes and dislikes are subjective things, and obviously I'm not entirely in tune with Kim's mind. But would you want that, anyway? Probably not. If I didn't have my own opinions, this would be a duller series.</blockquote>

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