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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4607686" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 75: July 1983part 2/2Mutants, men? and machines: A load of gamma world monsters. All have rather silly names. Hydragen are fire breathing snakes. Raydiums are flying telekinetic manta rays. Cycloptrons are metal boned giants which shoot lasers from their eye. Cyber-netters are giant robot spiders. And nitrodjinn are atomic powered weather spirits. Yes, gamma world can be a silly game at times. Funny how you can accept these things in a fantasy world, but as soon as they stick pseudoscience explanations on, it rings false. Not the greatest monster article ever. Beyond the rule book: More Gming advice from Lew Pulsipher. First he gives 10 guidelines that should be good for virtually everyone, whatever the game. Then he gives 10 that are slightly more specific, based upon his own style. While he does have a tendency towards the conservative, these are generally pretty solid too. Once again, he's played his part in making the magazine as good as it is. Can seapoint be saved: Having already served us with a huge special feature, this month's module is only an 8 pager. But it is a pretty neat open-ended one as you figure out a way to protect a town from pirates. Will you wait for them to attack, set some bait, or hunt them down? A scenario that has plenty of opportunities for tactical thinking and roleplaying, its another example of the fun you can have with town and wilderness adventures that dungeoncrawling simply can't do. You need more DM effort to run these scenarios, but it's well worth it. And this gives you a good framework to start from. Even orcish is logical: Another attempt to create a fictional language for D&D. Hmm. What would you say orcish sounds like? Functional, gutteral and ugly, with lots of words for weapons and hurting stuff. Makes sense. The rest of the article gives us a basic grammar and language list for an orcsh language that looks very much like Tolkien's. Well, it's easier to get people to accept it. It certainly shouldn't provoke the controversy that thieves cant did, anyway. All games need names: We've had contributions from Gary, Ed and Lew. Now Katherine Kerr (who it also seems is one of the few writers smart enough to retain their own copyright on their articles.) takes her turn this month. We get more info on the proper construction of your own language, including the sounds you choose to make them up (bi-labial fricatives strike again) and avoiding unpronouncable or silly names in your settings. Gender descriptives, morphemes, agglutinative and fusional languages, and tons of other geeky details. I would enjoy that, but once again I am reminded how crap I am at playing with and within the rules of even one language, let alone other ones. I'll never be a Tolkien. I might be able to work up detailed physics, ethics, psychologies, societies, music, and statistical data for my worlds and stories, but languages? Sorry. I'll leave that to someone else. Figure feature: This month's mini's are humans of all kinds, from medieval to futuristic. Oh, and a grim reaper. Good guys, bad guys, shoot you in the eye guys. Just buy em. Otherwise the companies'll go out of business, and we'll have to stop doing features on them. Reviews: The runequest companion is a grab-bag of stuff for glorantha fans, from a whole load of different writers. Essentially, this replaces having a magazine, and they intend to publish further editions of it later. Which I suppose is one way to go about it. As long as consistency is maintained, and it sells well, there's nothing wrong with a good periodical, under whatever name you choose to call it. The solomani rim is yet another traveller supplement. (the 10th official one) And we finally get to see the homeworld of humanity in the traveller universe. Once again, there is plenty of setting detail, as entire star systems and their histories are filled in. Oh dear. And now we see some more of the D&D backlash. Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, and Hobgoblin by John Coyne are both novels where roleplaying is used as a symptom of an underlying personality problem in the characters. Because no normal, well adjusted person would ever do something as weird as that. Issues are examined, emotional dilemmas are had, and in both cases, they give it up in the end and become happy well adjusted adults. <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:" /> Thank you for that, sensationalist hack writers. UK revisited: games fair 83. Gary's back in the UK. And once again he has a pretty good time, as does his kid. Well, when you're guest of honour, it's relatively likely things'll go smoothly. Lets hope this continues next year. What's new gets superheroic. Featuring gazebo boy! Wormy illustrates one of the more amusing aspects of dimensional travel, as well as the fact that dragons are smarter than cyclopses.Snarfquest! Larry Elmore gets his own comic. Interesting. And this is before thundercats also used the name. Where did it come from? Looks like this is another largely humorous strip. Can snarf get enough treasure over the next year to become leader of his tribe. Will he fail. Will the plot drift until the original reason he left on his adventures becomes completely irrelevant. Keep reading and find out. A very strong issue indeed, with not only the epic centerpiece, but plenty of other really good stuff in there as well. And the great thing is, next issue is almost guaranteed to have a load of stuff of the same quality. Which is reassuring. After all, you never know when things might go south because they're not getting any decent stuff in, or editorial policy changes for the worse. So lets enjoy what is definitely one of the classic runs of the magazine, that would still hold up today.</blockquote>

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