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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4646985" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 88: August 1984part 3/3Reviews: Rolemaster and it's supplements get a good looking over this issue. Well, I say supplements, but really, all 5 of these are needed to get the full rules for playing the game. And we complain that 3 books is too many for D&D. Character law, despite being the most critical for actually playing a game, was the last part of the system produced. Characters start off with a certain level of baseline competence in the stats needed for their class, no matter how badly they rolled. There are a whole bunch of clever little ideas in the rules, some of which are good, some of which are clunky, and many of which have since been stolen and refined by other systems. Many of it's innovations seem obvious in retrospect, as really good inventions often do. Spell law features spells up to 50th level, neatly arranged in themed spell lists. This gives them loads of room to put everything they can imagine, while making sure that spells for a particular level are fairly balanced. With lots of room for differentiation amongst the low power effects, it doesn't get out of hand as quickly as D&D spells do. There's also plenty of different varieties of spellcasters. As long as you're good at table flipping, it goes surprisingly smoothly. At least, the reviewer thinks so. If you're not keen on crunch, you may disagree with him. Arms law, aka the big book of really gruesome critical hits, gives you the rules for weapons. Consult a different chart for each one, allowing them a tremendous amount of mechanical differentiation while still being able to resolve each round with a single roll. Claw law does basically the same thing for animals. It focusses on their weaponry to the exclusion of any fluff. It also provides rules for martial arts, and generally seems like the least essential of the books. Campaign law provides both plenty of world-building advice, and the start of a sample world, Vog mur. As ever, the economics has holes picked in it, as does the "realism".  The density of crunch makes it rather tricky to houserule the game. (oh, you aint seen nothing yet) But still, as a primer on how to build good games, regardless of system, it's pretty helpful. Once again we see how things that seem obvious in retrospect really need to be taught. Before the dark years: Oooh. Jim ward finally decides to reveal the timeline of gamma world (and metamorphosis alpha, as he decides to officially make them occupy the same universe.) How did we get from the modern world to a postapocalyptic mess. As with a lot of timelines from a few decades ago, it already seems rather dated, as their predictions were wildly out. (Although it'd be rather more surprising and worrying if gamma world of all things did turn out to be prescient, but there you go. ) It also suffers from the "reality is rarely as cool as your imagination" problem. Sometimes the game works better if things are kept mysterious, at least from the players. Just look at dark sun. Are we any happier knowing that the reason Athas is so <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ed up is because Rajaat was an angsty emo boy that nobody liked, so he had to get revenge on the world. Do not ask, for you may get answers. In other words, not only did we not need this article, but we were probably better off without it. I guess you can't know until its too late. Some things, you can't imagine being without once you know them, others you just wish you'd never seen. Such is life. Not much I can do about it now. The marvel-phile: Ooh. Now this is a series I remember still being active when I started reading. I guess this means the marvel superheroes game'll be getting consistent coverage for quite a long time. Neat. Hello also to Jeff Grubb, another familiar name who's going to be doing a lot of great stuff in the future. We start off with stats for Thor, Loki and Ulik. Each has their powers packed into a remarkably small and self-explanatory package. Any superhero game has to be able to handle a ridiculous range of power and versatility in it's characters without breaking, and if FASERIP can handle god level creatures as smoothly as this, then that bodes well for it. Like the ecologies, I'm very pleased to see this series arrive, and look forward to seeing how it develops over the years. The battle at ebony eyes: Star frontiers gets some more love with a new scenario. Fight the sathar around a pair of twin black holes. This means there are serious risks of falling in, and weird space-time distortions which add quite a lot of bookkeeping. So don't use this one unless you're already fairly good with the rules, and need a new challenge to keep you interested. Yachts and privateers return: And we get another quick add-on for star frontiers in the form of 11 new ships. A single page packed full of easy to insert crunch. That's always welcome. StarQuestions is passed back to Penny and looks at star frontiers again. Quite the round robin going on here.How high can ability scores go (100. Higher breaks the system)I want more info on van neumann machines and their creators. (They're not as good as you think. But as long as they're only facing animals and plants, they don't have to be. ) The planet Gollywog (no kidding) has Waaaaaaaay too much carbon dioxide for humans to survive there. (Oops. Errata time. )You forgot to paint the outer reach counters properly (Once again, oops. You can paint them like that if you like. )You also forgot to name the planets inside the sunbursts (So we did. Once again, I apologize profusely, and encourage you to fix the errors we made. ) Talanalan alliterates excessively. Wormy finally gets to do some wargaming. We finally find out what species snarf is. Yet more signs that the hobby as a whole is changing in this one. So many new people pouring into the hobby, bringing their unique perspectives in with them. For some this is a great thing, while for others, this means gaming is stuck in an eternal september. I've found this one of the less captivating issues of late. While technically, they're as good as ever, it has had more than it's fair share of seriously irritating articles. I guess that'll happen once in a while when they're covering a wide range of topics. Lets hope next issue's contents are more to my taste.</blockquote>

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