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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4629548" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 83: March 1984part 2/2The dancing hut: Baba Yaga! Talking of gonzo crossovers! Now this is a classic module. Breaking the usual 16 page limit, and featuring contributions from lots of TSR regulars, this is one of the most impressive, and also most annoying modules they ever produced. Enter the hut of baba yaga. It may seem small from the outside, but inside is an enormous extradimensional mansion that defies logic, and has enough weird stuff inside it to baffle and challenge the most hardened adventurers. Hack and slashers will have a hard time even into the upper teens, while smart lower level characters will be able to negotiate with the inhabitants and possibly come out ahead. This is the kind of adventure that could become the centrepiece of an entire campaign, especially if the PC's wind up working for Baba Yaga for whatever reason. (cue all kinds of fairy tale weirdness in the quests set.) Not only could you explore it for ages and still get lost easily, it can connect to various other dimensions, and introduce all sorts of interesting crossovers. This is definitely one of Dragon magazine's high points, that they obviously had huge amounts of fun designing and running. While not suitable for every campaign, I'm sure many of you have had scarring experiences with this one as well. As ever, actual play experiences are welcome. How to finish fights faster: Roger gives another contribution in quick succession. Gary admits he's never been satisfied with the unarmed combat rules as presented in the DMG. So here's a quicker and easier version, which goes some way to making unarmed attacks more accessable, without sacrificing too many options. It's still pretty useless when up against anyone with real weapons and armour, but that's to be expected, really. At least now you can get into a bar brawl without it taking longer to resolve and involving more page flipping than a climactic boss battle. They are definitely producing more stuff that I could see myself using lately. Yet more evidence that properly patched AD&D v1.5 was quite a different beast to running the core rulebooks as written, and probably more fun, given the number of arcane oddities you needed to cut around. A look at AOK's, old and new: Our token non-D&D article this month is another teaser for the Top Secret companion. And once again, they haven't chosen a very interesting way to present it. Five new areas of knowledge are introduced, bringing the total up to 42 (!) That's rather a lot of skills. Many designers these days actively avoid massive lists like that, as experience has shown that they are frequently actively detrimental to the fun factor of a game. And here they are engaging in lengthy pontification on exactly what you can do with each of them at different levels of skill as if that's something that will stoke people's enthusiasm for the game. Given the benefit of hindsight, I am forced to sigh and shake my head at this. Poor naive game designers, thinking that more is always better. Roger's realized this, but it'll take a while to catch on, and some people'll never get it. Ho hum. Reviews: The James Bond, 007 rpg and it's current supplements get the spotlight on them this issue. The basic book swiftly explains how the game works in the first few pages, and then gives you plenty of specifics. It seems we have an early occurance of a universal resolution mechanic, as virtually everything is done by determining the difficulty, and then rolling on the same table to see how well you did. This of course makes it much easier to learn than D&D with it's tons of exceptions. On the negative side, that does mean you have to narratively define exactly what your degree of success or failure in an action means, which may take some getting used too. Still, given the fairly freewheeling nature of the source material, that seems entirely appropriate. It certainly contrasts pleasantly with the high crunch approach taken by Top Secret in the preceding article. The Q manual is of course the gadget supplement. It keeps up the fairly rules light approach of the corebook, but describes the various devices with a level of dry wit that not only makes for good reading, but should help spark your imagination for the unorthodox uses each can be adapted to. After all, you can't carry everything without spoiling the line of your suit, so sometimes you'll just have to use your laser pen to clean out a clogged drain. And of course, you can steal and adapt these gadgets to other games as "magical items" So it's all good. The gamesmaster pack gives you a chunky chart full GM screen and lots of other little tactile aids which should help you represent action sequences and stuff.  The kind of thing that you can take or leave, but certainly doesn't hurt. And on top of that we already have several modules, with more supplements to come. Looks like they're doing pretty well at the moment. Dragonmirth is a bit lopsided. Talanalan has a computer in his car. This is not as easy or useful as it would be these days. Wormy is wary of long-jawed mudsuckers, with good reason. What's new doesn't do sex in D&D because Phil wants to sleep. Typical. Snarfquest gets the treasure and the girl. Don't worry, things'll get complicated again for him soon. A tricky issue to comment upon. One one hand, most of the articles in this issue are of very high quality, even the ones that aren't particularly to my taste. On the other hand, they seem to be going through one of their periods of advertising expansion, so the ratio of articles to adverts is not great, and I feel a bit unfulfilled, as if it was over too quickly. Then again, I still have hundreds of issues to go, so I guess I should be grateful that some of them are easy ones. And since from next month the average size will be increasing quite a bit, I expect there'll be quite a few ones that are a struggle to get through before we finish. So lets press onwards, see what strange new worlds ARES will bring to my attention. Once again 1984 is proving to be a very interesting and varied year for the people of TSR.</blockquote>

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