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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4703475" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 101: September 1985part 3/3Coming attractions gets a double page spread for the first time. Guess they're really gearing up to sell sell sell in bulk this holiday season. AD&D gets T 1-4, the temple of elemental evil. Belated for six bloody years since the first installment, we finally get the remaining three all at once, long after any first time round players would have given up and gone on to other adventures. Was it worth the wait? If it can be judged by the number of remakes and references it's got, the answer is very definitely yes. It also gets DL9: Dragons of deceit. Our intrepid heroes have to sneak into the city of Sanctuary to find the secret to defeating the draconians. Speaking of dragonlance, the first novel trilogy is coming to an end with Dragons of Spring dawning. However, a cash cow like this cannot go unwrung, so there's going to be a second trilogy following it up next year. Will they be able to maintain the magic? Dragonlance also branches out to their Super EndlessQuest gameline with The Soulforge. Play Raistlin's test of high sorcery. Will it turn out like the official fiction? Only you can know for sure. D&D gets XS2: thunderdelve mountain. A solo adventure starring a dwarf? Okay then. It also gets AC7, the player masters screen. Tired of your DM geting to hide all their stuff from you. Turnaround is fair play, and you get lots of helpfull charts at your disposal as well to reduce page flipping. And in another case of accesorising, we have The art of the D&D game. Your basic coffee table book, I suspect many of the magazine's better cover pics will make their way into there. Much mehness. Top secret's companion finally comes out after having been teasered in the magazine for some time. Lots of new rules, plus an adventure, this ought to freshen up your game a bit. The Marvel superheroes RPG gets MHAC7: Concrete jungle, and MH8: Faultline. A book full of characters and another adventure. Amazing Stories branches out from the magazine to sell full-on novels. The 4D funhouse and Jaguar! are our first two offerings. Anyone read these? How were they?Conan gets CN2: Conan the mercenary. Our mighty thewed friend winds up having to save the world, because he's being paid too. He's a hero anyway. Where will his wanderings take him next?Indiana jones gets IJ6: The 4th nail. Search for the titular nail from the cross and hope Ben ali Aloob doesn't beat you too it. Their current love of fold-up cardboard figures continues, with a whole bunch included. Our solo adventure book series include one on one gamebook 3: Revenge of the red dragon. Endless quest book 29: Tower of darkness. And Crimson crystal book 4: Stop that witch! If you can't find a gaming group, that should tide you over to next month. We also have another gaming related book. The game buyers price guide shows how much you can expect all your old out-of print stuff to sell for. If you have a mint copy of the 1st printing OD&D boxed set, you can get quite a bit for it. One for the historian and speculator. And finally, we have a cancellation. Seems like there wasn't enough demand for Proton Fire, so they've pulled it. After going all the way through the development process? That's gotta waste quite a bit of money. I smell the ugly hand of politics behind this. Anyone have any more info on this odd little turnup for the books. Fiction: And adventuring To ... by Brenda Gates Spielman. Adventuring is like being  a musician. Sure there may be disgustingly rich, famous and talented people at the top, but for a low level adventurer, things are pretty unglamorous, and you risk your life daily for rewards that really don't seem worth it. A story that feels very much like a low level D&D game, with clearly visible classes, spells and defined monsters. Not sure if that's a good thing or not. Guess I'll have to file this one under filler, as it's neither particularly good or bad. The Ares section has a particularly good cover this issue. If they play their cards right, they might get a Sci-fi art coffee table book as well. Roger is rather chipper in the editorial as well. Seems promising.  Starships and star soldiers: Seems like they're continuing their push to get wargaming back on the map. Having produced the Battlesystem for D&D, now they want to try and give sci-fi wargaming properties a boost. This article lists a bunch of current systems that may do the job, and encourages us, the readers, to write in if we want to see TSR and the magazine do more mini's stuff and wargaming in general. Yeah, no agenda at all here. Unfortunately, your wish is not going to be granted. So sad to see a hobby on life-support, and people trying to resuscitate it. How long are they going to keep trying? I guess this is another thing I'll discover as we go along.  Sorry, wrong dimension: Ah, interdimensional travel. Not a very different topic to the alternate timelines one they had fairly recently. Thankfully this takes a quite different tack, giving us a quick way to easily quantify how each alternate dimension differs from earth, using a few random rolls, or not, if you already have a good idea in mind. One of those cases where I've already seen several variants on the topic, and it's interesting to see how different people do it differently.  You could definitely go into a lot more detail on this one. The marvel-phile: Beta ray bill! Sif. (no, she doesn't deserve an exclamation mark. )  We return to Thor's extended family. Another pair of rather badass characters get stats and histories. Definitely another case where there is no way this could have happened in backstory. Jeff also takes the time to congratulate Roger on becoming a dad and make a ludicrous naming suggestion for the kid. Just a normal day at the office, exchanging a bit of banter, doing a bit of work. Funny to think that kid's an adult now. How time passes. Out of the sun: Gamma world's article this month is on the empire of the sun, aka oriental gamma world, and their giant mechas. <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:" /> Why am I not surprised in the slightest. Just another bit of goofiness to throw into the melting pot. Also another reminder that OA is immanent, and general interest in that area is on the rise. Once again Jim is trying to expand the scope of his his game, with mixed success. This may or may not be a crossover too far, depending on if your want Gundam in your postapocalyptic game or not. Whether you object to the premise and power creep (300d8 HD? Ouch. Not so much creep as quantum leap.) or not, it's still a pretty entertaining and well written piece, with nice fiction. Another thing that I probably wouldn't put in my game, but have no objection to them covering. The stellar Diocese: Clergy character paths for Traveller? Is there no end to the number of career paths they can give us? I guess not. Like new classes, there'll always be demand for this, even if mechanically they're not that different from current options. And lets face it, spreading the Word is a great excuse to travel to new places, meet weird and wonderful aliens, and meddle in their affairs. Like the criminal career path they had recently, you can definitely see the plot potential in having one of these guys along. This also gives a bunch of sample religions for you to follow. Once again they've provided stuff that is both amusing and easily insertable into your game. Traveller has certainly built up a lot of options over the years. Now all they need is a wizard career path and they'll have the full D&D party covered. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Teenage mutant ninja turtles! Heroes in a half-shell, Turtle power! Official palladium RPG! My god, was it really that early? This is years before the cartoon. Were the original creators gamers, because they certainly seem to have taken plenty of personal interest in this. Fascinating to discover. Wormy reminds us storm giants are absolute badasses virtually every monster should be afraid of, even dragons. Snarfquest gives a so far minor character a serious upgrade. Dragonmirth gives us lots of giant stuff in various scenarios. While certainly not as spectacular as their recent celebratory issues, this has still proven quite an interesting issue. Somehow, once again, it's wound up with me breaking my own record for size of review, despite the smaller page count. Guess having lots of subdivisions within the larger articles'll do that for you. Lots of stuff that you can put easily in an existing game as well. Well, since most people will be established players by now, you don't want to have to start a whole new game every time someone comes in with a cool new idea. Just how much more diverse can D&D's melting pot get? Quite a lot, I'm wagering. The real question is, how quickly.</blockquote>

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