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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4699122" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 100: August 1985part 3/3Champions Plus!: New powers. You'll always need those for a superhero game. At least until you've been around a few decades, and your corebook is a bullet-stopping monstrosity that contains an elaborate, rigorously playtested point buy system. And even then, you'll need advice on how to properly apply them to a mileu. As you may guess, this article is for Champions. It contains 11 new powers, from Bouncing to Vertigo. A decidedly imaginative and quirky bunch of abilities that patch in holes in the current ruleset. Plenty of fun to be had in this short but sweet article. The D&D Master set out now! The BD&D series is now almost complete. Are you ready to ascend to immortality? Leave your domains behind and take on the greatest adventures ever. Charisma counts!: Oh dear. Using the Charisma system in villains and vigilantes as written doesn't work the way it should. This needs fixing, otherwise the plots will not emulate the genre correctly. What do we need?! More crunch!! When do we need it?! Right now!! Despite it having a very valid point, and solid ideas, I find myself inclined to dislike this article. Curious, as I can't really pinpoint why. Must be a writing style thing. Defenders of the future: Marvel super heroes gets a second article. We zoom into the future to say hi to the defenders of the galaxy. Vance Astro. Charlie-27. Martinex. Yondu. Starhawk. And Nikki. (Talk about a dull name by comparison with everyone else. ) All ridiculously popular in their home time, to a degree modern superheroes can only dream of. I guess when you don't have your own series, you don't have to worry so much about everyday dramas which take the mystique from your character. They don't have to worry about that secret identity crap either. Life seems pretty good for them. At least, until some timeline fluctuation or writer whim, retcons them from existence. What are they up to these days, as I've never heard of them before. The marvel-phile: And finally we have Jeff being his usual reliable yet witty self. By an amazing coincidence, this month he fills in the stats for the missing present day Defenders. Man, that's a lot of ™'s. Gargoyle (Oh woe, for I have lost my mortal body), Cloud (ZOMG gender switching to avert lesbianism! What's all that about then?) and Valkyrie (they have tables entitled Hack-and-slash and Slugfest. Genius.) The usual grab bag of disparate origins and weird powers you'll find on a superhero team, particularly one with a fluid roster. And once again I find myself learning more about something I've only ever had a casual interest in before now. My knowledge of Marvel canon will definitely be hugely expanded by the time this series finishes. The chance of a lifetime: So now both D&D and AD&D have mass combat systems (albeit very different, largely unrelated ones) You know what this calls for? Author commentary! Let's hear it for Doug Niles on da microphone. I said, Douglas Niles on da Microphone! Booyakasha. Respec. [/Ali G] As this is AD&D, and they were devoting an entire book to it, they decided to go for a rather more complex and zoomed in system than the D&D one, with all the spells and special abilities from the regular game drectly convertable,  and one-on one battles playing a part as well. The project seems to have had a rather chequered development history, with lots of writers contributing and sometimes pulling it in different directions. The results definitely seem more suited to skirmish level combat involving a few hundred creatures at most than truly massive armies. You can use this as an alternate combat system for variety in your AD&D games, or you can run an entire campaign focussing on it, with it's own advancement system. Well, that's their hope, anyway. I guess we'll see if this gets supported for the next few years, or dies an ignomious death like so many of their experiments. From first draft to last gasp: The battlesystem commentary continues, with Michael Dobson the editor taking the reins. He discusses how this got tied into their new cardboard fold-up figures gimmick, and quite a bit of playtesting annoyance took place. They've taken care to involve the entire team in this, with modules for both AD&D and D&D planned. He also talks about how the Battlesystem and War Machine rules can co-exist in the same campaign, with War Machine used to fight really big battles involving your domain (Once again we see that BD&D handles the really epic stuff better) and stuff where you're not present and just want a quick resolution. He then encourages you to throw all sorts of wacky and epic stuff at the system. It will handle it, honest. You can have Nazi's Vs Slaadi Vs Gamma world mutants Vs Drow if you like. I must say, I'm tempted to take them up on their offer. Anyone have any opinions and experiences to contribute on this topic? Wormy finally gets back to the giants. And once again we see how much Tramp's skills have improved, as we get some truly epic horror visuals. Snarfquest takes stock of what they've lost and what they still have. Having been expanding the range of RPG's that they cover recently, this is another big leap outward in scope. They haven't tackled topics with this kind of diversity since 1981. And it's interesting that Gary is one of the primary forces behind this experimentation. He's evidently not happy with all the directions the magazine has taken, and would like to see more things on his other interests. However, it's also notable that despite their attempts to revitalize it with the Battlesystem, wargaming is pretty much dead by this point. If they want to expand the topics they cover, they'll have to do more books, PbM's, computer games and other such things instead. Are they up to the task? Or will this issue be an exception rather than a pointer for their future direction. Either way, as a celebratory issue, it's quite the success, breaking out of their rut and showing that there are plenty more things they can do to avoid getting repetitive and formulaic.  Here's to the next hundred issues full of surprises and misadventures.</blockquote>

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