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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4622640" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 81: January 1984part 1/2100 pages. Your module design sucks. You always go over the limit, even the good entries. We're sick of the colossal editing and rewriting jobs needed to squeeze them into our self-imposed 16 page limit. So we're not going to publish any more of your amateur attempts. Sorry about that. Now try and avoid splurging over next time. I know it's hard, but you gotta stick closer to the format. Or go to judges guild. Oh, wait. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" /> Anyway, happy new year. Hope you enjoy the mid 80's as much or more than you did the early part. Lets get cracking. In this issue:Out on a limb: A letter complaining at them for putting the Wacko world module off-centre, and with adverts in it. They apologize and say they hope they won't have to do it again. Commercial considerations, last minute changes, excuses excuses. Two more letters asking for out of stock or unreleased stuff. As ever, they have to politely turn them down, for the sake of their own sanities. A correction to the psionic stuff in issue 78, that on further examination, is wrong in itself. (as far as we can tell, given how badly written the original psionics rules were. ) Sorry reader, you're the one in error this time. A letter snarking in a rather pretentious manner at those people niggling about realism, quoting Moorcock extensively. Frankly, you're making yourself look dumb, Mr Douglas. Even if we choose not to make our games realistic, it's important to know how they deviate from reality. Awareness is the first step to being able to manipulate things in an informed and predictable way. A letter complaining about the crappy new paper the last few issues were printed on, as well as the general downslide in quality. Kim gets fairly heated in his rebuttal to this. He certainly doesn't think the magazine is poor quality, or bad value for money. But then, he would say that, even if he didn't really feel it. A letter asking why most of the articles are for AD&D rather than basic D&D. They reply that OD&D is out of print, so of course they aren't publishing stuff for that, and the new basic sets are being ignored because they want to keep that game simple and not rigidly defined. They may seem like the same game, but they aren't, and we don't reccomend you mix them. Some rules questions for king of the tabletop. A letter on psionics, xanth, and more reprint stuff. This gets a very lengthy and considered reply, in which the company line is trotted out again for another lap round the block. A (possibly joke ) letter from a DM who refuses to let his players read the magazine.  They give him a reproving reply, saying any DM who nicks all their ideas from the magazine and modules without any adaption doesn't deserve to be called such. So stop cutting into our profits, dagnammit. Taking the sting out of poison: Another nerfing article? Noooooo! Oh, I speak too soon. This is actually an attempt to de-nerf things after the last one on this topic went way too far that direction, in the opinion of the writer. A high detail article from someone who has obviously read all the previous articles on the subject, and then did quite a lot of thinking about how to fix the issue. Costs, onset times, social issues, harvesting from monsters, antidotes, all get looked at. If you're running a high crunch game, this looks like a pretty solid expansion to keep poisons useful, but not overpowered, and if you want to run a poison-centric game (Playing a group of adventurer who make harvesting poisons from monsters and selling them one of their primary goals would be an interesting game. ) should be pretty helpful. The level of dryness keeps this from being a classic article, but It's still a solid above average, and if I get the chance I intend to apply the lessons learned here. Fiction: In the cleft of queens by Esther M Lieper. A quite distinctively written little tale of outwitting a dragon. Sometimes, the tongue is indeed mightier than the sword. But remember, they've been around longer than you, and they're possibly smarter than you as well. That does not mean losing is inevitable. You've just gotta have style. As they say in Nobilis. The smart man and the strong man may never match up to the god, but the passionate man may impress them. Same principle here. Eh oop. Looks like the flow of letters has reached a point where they feel the need to split them up. So they're introducing the forum, where the longer debates can take place without direct editorial interference while the straight questioning letters stay at the front. Once again the magazine takes a step towards the format I remember. So lets see what the first batch of comments and complaints are. Mike Mrozek disapproves of Lew's level of gaming paranoia in issue 79. Ahhh, the military wargamer vs people who prefer freewheeling dramatic fun argument. Already in force as new people stream into the hobby.David Hutton talks about the horrors of characters who take a single level in fighter, and then dual-class to another one straight away. Er, did you not read the sage advices which made it abundantly clear that you suffer the restrictions of both classes and lose the benefits of exceptional Str and Con if you change classes. Silly person. While the rules are breakable, this isn't one of those cases. And you'd need to be using one of the twinky ability generation methods to do that reliably, anyway. You can easily restrict that. William L Collins, Ed Zmitravich, Rodney L Barnes, Joseph Wilkinson and Andrew Briggs have pontification about the psionics system, and how to fix it to be more balanced and sensible. These are not all in agreement, of course. David Carl Argall talks about the beholder ecology, picking holes in their presented hunting strategy and how it interacts with their powers. Remember, beholders are deadly, but slow. Open air environments where their enemies can keep their distance and wear them down are a bad idea. You wanna use disintegrate and telekinesis to build yourself a good dungeon to trap your prey in. Stupid mating habits are a little more excusable, because we know how many dumb and impractical things humans will do in pursuit of sex despite supposedly being intelligent creatures. But we can play around with those as well in our own games. And finally, Elizabeth Parry weighs in on the sexism found in the magazine. The automatic assumption of masculinity in some articles galls rather to her. Unless there is good reason, the articles should be written from an unbiased perspective. So there we have it. In a few months, they'll start to get letters diliberately aimed at getting in the forum, and then it'll start building it's own conventions. What debates will we see in future years. Who will become a regular in these pages. How long before the internet makes this feature redundant. Keep tuning in to find out. The ecology of the basilisk: Ed Greenwood ploughs onward through the monster manual. Nictating membranes. Such a wonderful phrase. Nictating membranes. Aint no passing craze. It means no eye grit, for the rest of your days. Anyway. Let's not filk that again, no matter how easy it is. Before you know it, we'll have vagina dentata, and then we <a href="http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20040121.html" target="_blank">really won't be able to talk about this stuff in front of the kids.  </a>So, Basilisks. Thankfully, like hedgehogs, their exceedingly effective natural defenses mean they have no need for intelligence, and are rather stupid and sluggish as a result. We get plenty of detail on their mating and social habits (like the catoblepas, they need to be rather careful around each other if they don't want to die accidentally. ) personality traits, and of course, how much you can get for selling one. So plenty of stuff that's exploitable in actual play, as well as fluffy stuff. Also notable it the first mention of baldurs gate that I've spotted. We'll be seeing a lot more of that in the future. Overall, another strong article from the master of worldbuilding. The british are coming! Games workshop starts a big push to make an impact on the international market. Buy their stuff, blah blah blah.</blockquote>

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